An Invisible Client Page 13

  A few times a week, I went to the hospital to see Joel. I started buying DVDs of movies he wanted to see that they didn’t have at the hospital. We would watch them until he fell asleep, then I would sneak out and head home. Most nights, I couldn’t sleep, so I worked on the questions I wanted to ask in the depositions.

  The first deposition was on a Friday. We got through two of them that day. The next Monday, I got through two more, then another four on Tuesday and Wednesday.

  Most of the witnesses were people who knew almost nothing about Pharma-K: the lower-level employees who didn’t even realize Pharma-K’s product was involved in the scandal. I got exactly zero relevant information from them. Until Wednesday, when I deposed a factory worker named Dan Atkin.

  We conducted the depositions in my firm’s conference room this time, and Bob was there with three other attorneys. Defense litigation firms that represented corporations and insurance companies billed by the hour for each attorney. I estimated Walcott was making about twelve hundred dollars per hour from the depositions. That was one of the reasons Bob hadn’t fought me or gone to the judge when I’d subpoenaed every employee. He wanted us to have hundreds of hours of depositions: we lost money, and he made money. In hindsight, I could see that Marty had a point.

  Dan Atkin wore a denim jacket and looked about as nervous as someone could look. Olivia, a paralegal, and I sat on one side of the conference table, and Bob and his crew sat on the other. KGB was also there, billing at two hundred fifty per hour. We also had a videographer and a court reporter who swore people in and acted as a stenographer. The true cost of all this suddenly hit me, and I didn’t know if I had set all this in motion because I’d thought it would give us something or if I’d just been angry in that moment with Walcott.

  “Name, please,” I said.

  “Daniel Atkin.”

  “You live here in Utah, Mr. Atkin?”

  “Yessir, down in Pleasant Grove.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “I dunno, twenty-some-odd years.”

  “How long have you worked for Pharma-K?”

  “Three years.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  He swallowed and looked at Bob as though he would be giving away too much information by answering that question. “I, um, load the trucks.”

  “What do you load onto the trucks?”

  “When the products are ready to ship, I’m one of the loaders. I load up the trucks, and they go out to the pharmacies and stores here in Utah. We do our own shipments to save money so we don’t have to hire no one. We do that in every state with a plant.”

  “Were you at work on April sixth of this year? It was a Wednesday.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do you remember loading Herba-Cough Max children’s medicine?”

  “Yessir, I believe we did. I only remember because when this whole thing happened, I thought back about it.”

  “And some of those shipments went to Greens Groceries, up there on 1300 East?”

  “That is one of the places we deliver to, yes.”

  “Who had access to that medicine before it was delivered?”

  He made a puffing sound. “Shoot. Everybody, I guess. Anyone in the plant.”

  “In the plant? So no one outside the plant could’ve had access to that medicine?”

  He looked at Bob again, and Bob didn’t say anything. Atkin’s cheeks flushed red.

  “Well,” Atkin said, “I don’t know. I’m not there all the time. I just come load the trucks and then drive ’em. I’m rarely at the plant.”

  “You just said anyone in the plant would have access to the medicine. You implied that someone outside of the plant wouldn’t. Right?”

  “Well, like I said, I don’t know.”

  “If someone outside the plant wanted access to the medicine before packaging, how would they get it?”

  “I . . . guess they’d wait for the bottles before they were sealed. Wait for it there.”

  “How would they get inside the plant?”

  Atkin was clearly flustered now. He kept wringing his hands and looking to Bob for help. Because the exchange was being videotaped, Bob couldn’t help. He knew I might play this tape for the jury down the line. But Bob glared at Atkin with squinted eyes, a look that let him know he’d better tread carefully in what he told me.

  “Well, um . . . I don’t know. We got security guards that check our badges and scan ’em, and no one but the designated employees are allowed on the floor. Even our lawyers aren’t allowed on the floor. Just the people that work there.”

  “So it’d be almost impossible for someone who wanted to get into the plant from the outside and tamper with the medicine to do so?”

  “I don’t think anything’s impossible, but it’d be hard. He’d have to forge an ID and then make sure it scanned right into the computer. I don’t see how someone could do that.”

  That was all good information—nothing dispositive, but good information. None of it did anything to help the primary theory Pharma-K was putting forth, that someone had poisoned the medicine at the stores. But I had guessed it would be tough for someone to get into the plant. That meant the cough syrup had to have been poisoned by someone at the plant or while it was at the store or on the way to the store.

  I asked Atkin another hundred questions, all meant to lull him into repetitive boredom: Where did you go to school? How did you get hired at Pharma-K? Who’s your boss? How did he or she get hired? How long has he or she been there? Are you married? Did you go to college? What did you study? What medications are you on?

  I wanted him to be bored. People lower their defenses when they’re bored.

  After a little more than a hundred useless questions, I asked the one question I really wanted to ask Dan Atkin—the one I could’ve asked and ended the deposition with from the beginning.

  “Any cyanide in the plant that you know of?”

  Dan opened his mouth and was about to answer when Bob snapped out of his near sleep and said, “I’m objecting to that.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “On the grounds that it’s irrelevant.”

  I chuckled. “Whether the poison found in your medicine is in the area where you make the medicine is irrelevant?”

  “It will paint a picture for the jury that is entirely unfairly prejudicial. Don’t answer that, Mr. Atkin.”

  “He can answer that, or we can get the judge on the line.”

  “So get him.”

  I exhaled. “Jessica, please get Judge Gills on the line.”

  A few minutes later, the judge was on speakerphone.

  “Morning, Your Honor,” I said. “We have a little dispute during one of the depositions that I was hoping you could help with.”

  “What is it?”

  I could hear the aggravation in his voice. We were adults, and judges expected us to work through our own problems until trial. Considering this was an adversarial process where neither side trusted the other, I never knew why judges thought that would be the case.

  I explained the situation, and the judge said, “Mr. Walcott, what did I say about assholes in my courtroom? That applies in depositions, as well.”

  Bob’s cheeks flushed red. “Your Honor, that question is loaded specifically to—”

  “Holy shit, can you two not agree on anything? Mr. Atkin, please answer the question. Your lawyers may object to its introduction at trial, but you have to answer it during this deposition.”

  Atkin said, “What was the question?” before taking a sip of water. He was stalling.

  I said, “Is there any cyanide at the plant, or was there any cyanide at the plant at any time?”

  He looked at Bob, who narrowed his eyes.

  “I, um . . . yes.”

  My guts felt as tho
ugh they’d been dipped in ice water. I looked at Olivia, then back at Dan Atkin. He was staring down at the table, unable to bring his eyes up to mine.

  “Where is the cyanide?”

  “We don’t . . . there isn’t any there anymore.”

  “What was it used for?”

  He mumbled something.

  “Mr. Atkin, you are under oath, with a judge listening to your answer. What was the cyanide used for?”

  “Rodents. We had mice or rats or something. We used a treatment.”

  “What kind of treatment?”

  “Pills and a liquid. Capsules, I think. They were laid out in the corners of the plant.”

  “Are they still there?”

  “No.”

  “When were they removed?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I came in, and they were gone.”

  I looked at Bob, and he was just staring at Atkin.

  “Was the rat poison there before April sixth?”

  “Yes.”

  “How soon before?”

  “I don’t know. A week, maybe.”

  “What brand?”

  “It was called X-Zero One. It’s a rat and mice killer.”

  “And how do you know it contains cyanide?”

  “I was the one that bought it.”

  I stared at him quietly. “Who told you to buy it?”

  “One of my supervisors, Karen. She said to go out and get some and then provide the receipt to her for repayment. Then she had us put it all around the plant.”

  “Did you tell the police this? That there was cyanide in the plant?”

  He shook his head. “No, the police never interviewed me.”

  It was true. The investigation on this case had been atrocious. If the local police weren’t competent enough to handle it, they should have called in the FBI sooner, but that call hadn’t been placed until Joel was already in the hospital. I didn’t have access to the FBI reports yet, but it was increasingly important that I get them.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked. “You saw the news stories, right? Why didn’t you tell anyone that you knew your company had rat poison lying around in the same plant the medicine was manufactured in?”

  His gaze seemed to drop lower, and he shrugged.

  25

  After the judge got off the line, I grilled Dan Atkin harder than he had ever been grilled in his life. We were there until midnight, then we came back the next day and didn’t finish until eight at night. I went through every possible thing that could’ve gone wrong at Pharma-K with the rat poison: who knew about it, who had handled it or might have handled it accidentally, where he purchased it, who removed it, and where it had gone once it was removed. I grilled him about rats. Was it possible a dead rat with cyanide in its blood could’ve gotten into the medicine? I even asked him to draw a map showing where he’d placed the poison and where he’d seen dead or dying rats.

  I was dragging the information out of him until about the eighth or ninth straight hour. By then, he was so exhausted that he just gave me what I wanted, hoping I would stop.

  At the end of the second day, none of us had our suit coats on. A lot of bottled waters and sandwich wrappers cluttered the tables. Our sleeves were rolled up and ties loosened. I asked Atkin questions until my throat dried and burned. Bob objected dozens of times, and several times, we had to call Judge Gills. One time, I thought I heard his wife in the background say, “Come back to bed, you idiot. We’re not done.”

  When the deposition was over, we had recorded nineteen hours of Dan Atkin’s testimony. Those nineteen hours would have to be pored over and analyzed, then transcribed and analyzed again. Atkin looked as though he had run a marathon. He didn’t have the strength to do anything afterward but leave without talking to anyone.

  Bob waited until everyone had cleared out but him and me. He rose and went over to the windows.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “I knew I’d be up here one day. In the towers looking down on everyone else. I knew even then there were people who went about their lives in blissful ignorance, holding to ideals and principles as if they would somehow save them. As if ideals mattered. But I also knew that there were other types of people. People who saw the war we had engaged in from the minute we became self-aware. They did what had to be done. Abraham Lincoln gutted the constitution of this country worse than almost any other president, but he’s revered as the greatest American who ever lived. He’s revered because he did what he had to do for the greater good.”

  He turned and faced me.

  “Pharma-K is the greater good. They’re the Google of start-up pharma companies. All the top young minds in the field want to work for them. Billions of people will benefit from their innovations. Billions. That’s why I do what has to be done to protect them. They are the greater good, and you are the blissful ignorant.”

  I leaned my head back on the chair. “Every dictator in history has made that same speech, Bob. Hitler thought he was fighting for the greater good, too. Isn’t it odd that the most defenseless always need to be the ones sacrificed for the greater good?”

  He leaned on the conference table. “What if you’re wrong? What if you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent investigating and catching the psychopath responsible for poisoning that medicine? What if more children get sick because Pharma-K was defending this lawsuit and its public image rather than investigating what happened?”

  “If there is such a man, the FBI’s gonna find him. Not you.”

  “The FBI can’t put a dump truck full of money out there to find someone. We can.”

  I didn’t reply. What he said was true. They could put out a reward of a million dollars for information leading to the man responsible—if there was such a man. But because of pending litigation, it would be wiser for them not to take any action. Everything they did at this point would be scrutinized by a jury, and I could paint their attempts to find the killer in whatever light I wanted.

  I saw a helicopter fly around a building and over the valley, and I watched its blinking lights for a few moments.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “You don’t know if you’re wrong. You don’t fully buy your own bullshit. Take the million dollars, Counselor. Take the million and have your client never talk about this again. It’s the best she’s gonna get.”

  He walked out of the conference room, leaving me alone, staring out at the night sky.

  The next night, I found myself at the stop sign again. Every muscle in me screamed for sleep, but I knew I couldn’t. I had to be at the hospital. I drove up there and parked before heading down to the cafeteria, where I bought an energy drink. I guzzled half of it to keep me up, then sipped at the other half as I walked to Joel’s room.

  The videographer was already there. He was setting up the equipment while Rebecca spoke to someone on her phone.

  Joel had lost even more weight. His hair looked thin and greasy, and strands of it had fallen out over his pillow. I sat down next to him. His breathing was labored and raspy.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He grinned, but it was slow and weak, as if he couldn’t muster the strength for a full smile. “Hi.” He motioned toward the nightstand. “Look what I had my mom bring.”

  I glanced over. Select Works of Lord Byron. The book was thick and still had the glossy cover of a new copy.

  “Wow,” I said, picking it up. “I haven’t seen this for a while.” I flipped through a few of the pages. “Do you understand it?”

  “Not really. Some of them don’t make sense.”

  “That’s the beauty of poetry,” I said. “That language is inadequate to describe life. So poetry just tries to bring up emotions. Just read it and see how you feel. If you feel something, then the poem worked.”

  The videographer, the same one who had done the depositi
ons, said, “We’re ready.”

  I looked at Joel a moment. “You ready to talk?”

  He nodded.

  The video began to record. Joel swallowed and had so little body fat on him I could see the full movement of his throat. He opened his hand. I stared at it, then I reached up and held it.

  “My name,” he rasped, “is Joel Whiting . . .”

  26

  I had trouble sleeping for the next couple of weeks. The video, just under ten minutes long, kept replaying in my head. Joel looked sicker every time I saw him. He was on dialysis every day now, and the whites of his eyes had tinted a light yellow from the jaundice: his liver was failing, too.

  I also interviewed the nurse who had initially admitted Joel, the one who’d run to his house to get the medicine. She was an older lady, Bettie Thyfault, but one with a happy disposition that likely came from loving what she did for a career.

  “I knew right away what it was,” she told me in her deposition. “I’d read the story that morning about one of the other boys, and I just knew there’d be more. The mother was hysterical, so I got her keys and went to the house. I brought the cough medicine back to our lab and had it tested.” She shook her head. “That poor boy. Lightning has to strike somewhere, though, doesn’t it?”

  “This wasn’t an act of God, Ms. Thyfault,” I said, staring right at Bob. “What happened to Joel didn’t need to happen.” I finished the deposition and let her know I might call her to testify at trial, and then spent the rest of that day reading transcripts from depositions I’d already conducted.

  I turned to the clock: a little past midnight. We had made it through only 197 depositions, and the 12(b)(6) hearing was tomorrow. Every scrap of information we could pull together had been attached to our reply on the motion. It brought our reply up to 137 pages. Gills, I figured, would lose focus after about fifty pages or, worse, only read the headings, subheadings, and conclusions, completely ignoring the evidentiary facts we’d managed to scrounge up.