Blood Loss

was being pulled up, and taken in someone’s arms and passed into someone else’s and she was standing in the hallway with two Denver PD detectives as Glenn Buddy and two more were handcuffing Cameron Temple in front of her.

Ren ran for the bathroom and threw up. There was nothing in her stomach except a bright green energy drink with a sugary stench that made her throw up again. Her head exploded in stars.

And everything went black.

64

Ren woke up in her pink frilly bed in the arms of Ben Rader. It was five a.m. He had arrived at eight the evening before, as soon as she was back from her doctor. Janine was not far behind him.

Ren had talked to them about her memories of Annie’s house, how she and her brothers used to play here, all the little hiding places in the house, and all of Annie’s old dolls, and trinkets, and Janine and Ben had let her talk until her eyes closed and Ben had nodded across to Janine, and Janine had given him a sad smile, and he had led Ren into her bedroom, where he helped her into her pajamas.

She crumpled into a ball on the bed. Ben held her close until she cried herself to sleep. He didn’t speak, but every now and then, he kissed her head or wiped teary strands of hair from her face. She knew by his eyes when he came out of the bathroom earlier that he had shed some tears too. She could hear him breathing beside her, and she wanted to cry she liked him so much. He was a good man to the core. She rolled over and buried her head into his chest, and he stirred awake and kissed her.

‘Are you OK?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ren. Because you’re here.

They got up for breakfast at ten. Ben took a package out of his bag.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘This came for you this morning.’

He handed it to her.

‘What do you mean it came for me?’ said Ren. ‘To where?’

‘To my apartment.’

‘But … it’s a rental apartment. And … how would anyone know? I mean, no-one knows about us yet.’

Her heart started to pound. She opened the package and pulled out a letter with a note on the front that said: ‘Early Christmas present. It was good to meet you. Keep fighting the good fight.’

There was a separate package addressed to Taber Grace and postmarked Breckenridge. It was mailed on Monday, November 16.

‘Oh my God, Ben,’ said Ren. ‘I’ve just been sent a package that was mailed by Mark Whaley on the day he went missing.’

Ren opened her letter first:

Dear Ren,

Yes — you were correct. Mark Whaley was about to blow the whistle on MeesterBrandt, but he started to worry that they were on to him. He hired me to find that out. I did. The night he went to Breckenridge, he was supposed to be meeting me. He must have gotten cold feet or decided it could wait until after the weekend. That same night I heard that Shep Collier was about to offer his resignation because of a scandal — it hadn’t been announced yet what that was. But I knew right away that this was not good. Especially after what I had discovered about MeesterBrandt. Mark had a second cell phone for us to communicate on, I tried to get a hold of him on that, but I couldn’t. You know the rest.

The people hired by Nolan Carr to destroy Shep Collier and Mark Whaley (and probably more) are, effectively, private investigators whose specialty is smear campaigns. Tina Bowers identified one of them from a photograph. And it’s not just rummaging around your garbage that these people do. It is the total destruction of everything — their target’s family life, career, everything. And they will stop at nothing. They employ ex-law enforcement, ex-military, ex-disgruntled anyone, mercenaries to carry out their dirty work. And they will only take on jobs if they have the license to do whatever they want. If they can’t find anything on their target, unlikely as that is, they will go after spouses, siblings, children. And that is the hornet’s nest that Mark Whaley took a stick to. They did some of their finest work on Mark Whaley. And some poor little Breckenridge babysitter got caught up in it all.

Here’s what I got — do your worst.

TG.

Ren opened the package that Mark Whaley had sent to Taber Grace.

Holy shit.

She spent the next hour reading through all the evidence that Mark Whaley had gathered that would bring down MeesterBrandt and Nolan Carr.

There were memos from the late 1990s on Lang Pharmaceuticals headed notepaper, signed by Nolan Carr, detailing Lang’s marketing campaigns, with directives to pay physicians for prescribing Cerxus to children, and for a range of conditions it wasn’t approved for. There were emails to the lab directing them to re-word or bury negative findings. There were reports about suicides in the children who took Cerxus, and it was clear that Nolan Carr had known all along. There were emails between Nolan Carr and one of his lobbyists in Washington about the rumors that Shep Collier was talking to the action group trying to introduce tighter regulation of the pharmaceutical industry.

There was one final set of documents.

‘Jesus,’ said Ren, spreading out more papers. ‘Taber Grace hacked Bradley Temple’s patient files.’

He is better than Grabien.

There were print-outs of Temple’s files. Ren scanned through the list. She came to details of an Ellerol trial from two years previously.

Her anger spiked again.

There were eight drop-outs during the trial — no reason was documented. There was a second note from Taber Grace saying that five of Dr Temple’s patients died during the time frame of the trial, although there was no evidence linking the deaths to the trial. Yet, all of the patients were teens/young adults who had been treated at one point for schizophrenia.

Then there was the most recent trial: a combination drug trial for Cerxus/Ellerol.

Then there were the two patients whose names she knew.

Cameron Temple. And Joshua Merritt.

65

Cathy Merritt broke down when Ren confronted her about Joshua and the clinical trial.

‘It’s too late, Dale,’ said Cathy. ‘It’s too late. I cannot lie any more.’

‘I told Jonathan about Joshua’s behavioral problems,’ said Cathy. ‘They were causing huge issues in my relationship with Dale, and with Laurie. The tension in the house …’ She took a breath. ‘Jonathan told me that they’d started trialing Ellerol and Cerxus together for use in teens to treat a first psychotic episode … and he suggested that Joshua try it.’

‘And when did Joshua have this first psychotic episode?’ said Ren.

‘After the incident at Mrs Ronson’s house …’ said Cathy, ‘what we grounded him for …’

‘That he denied doing,’ said Ren.

‘Well, yes, he would,’ said Cathy.

‘But, accepting that he had done it, who diagnosed it as a psychotic episode?’

‘Dr Temple,’ said Cathy.

‘Joshua didn’t see a psychiatrist?’ said Ren.

‘No,’ said Cathy.