An Invisible Client Page 16

  We rented a car and got on the freeway. KGB chewed on a toothpick and stared straight ahead.

  “You hungry, Anto?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t talk much, do you?”

  “No.”

  Those were the only words we exchanged during the entire drive to Santa Monica. The drive took a long time with traffic, and I turned on a Pandora station to fill the silence.

  I loved Santa Monica, and I kept stealing glances at the beach as we drove toward Debbie Ochoa’s condo. The sky was clear and blue. We parked in front of her duplex and I knocked on the door and waited. According to Anto, Debbie shouldn’t be working right now. That made sense, considering that she had probably received a nice severance package from Pharma-K.

  The door opened, and a Hispanic woman in a yoga outfit stood there. She looked from one of us to the other and said, “Yeah?”

  “Debbie Ochoa?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m an attorney, Noah Byron. I represent Joel Whiting. He’s an . . . he was a boy that had taken Herba-Cough Max.”

  “Was?”

  I nodded. “Joel died last night.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  She tried to shut the door. I placed my foot in front of it and pulled out my phone. I brought up the photo of Joel making a silly face and showed it to her. “This was Joel. He was twelve. He went through about as much pain as a human being can go through before he died.” I put my phone away. “Please. I just need some information.”

  She looked away, then opened her door wider. “Come in.”

  We entered the condo. Debbie sat us down on a couch with a plastic cover, and she sat across from us. The television was tuned to a Spanish soap opera. She muted it and stared at us.

  “They knew, didn’t they?” I said.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “You told Rebecca Whiting that Pharma-K made up the story about the serial killer to cover themselves. You felt something for her then. Can you even imagine what she’s going through today?”

  Debbie swallowed. “I lost my baby, too. He had meningitis, and the doctors couldn’t save him.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How old was he?”

  “He was four. Eric. I was with him at the hospital every day. Rebecca told me about how she would sit and cry herself to sleep in the hospital room, but she had to do it quietly so her boy wouldn’t wake up. I did the same thing.”

  I leaned toward her. “I’m so sorry you lost your son. I can’t imagine what that feels like. But I can imagine that if someone was responsible, you wouldn’t quit until they paid for what they did. I can help Rebecca do that, if you help me.” It sounded like begging, and ultimately, I was.

  “I can’t testify. And you can’t record this. If they find out I told you, they’ll take everything I have. I signed contracts.”

  “Anto, please wait outside.”

  He rose without a second’s hesitation and went outside. I turned back to Debbie. “I’m not recording anything. No one will ever know we talked if you don’t want them to. Just help me find evidence I can use.”

  She took a deep breath. “One night, I was working late. I heard people talking in Mr. Rucker’s office. Him and the lawyer with the eye patch—we called him Pirate Bob.”

  I grinned.

  “Even Mr. Rucker called him that, but never to his face. But they were in there, and I heard them talking. They said they needed to take control of the situation. That they had to release a statement saying that their medicine had been tampered with. It would be easier to deal with.”

  “What would be?”

  She hesitated. “They knew. The workers there didn’t know, but management did. Maybe the board did, too. They knew something was wrong with the medicine, and they made up the Pharma Killer story to cover themselves.”

  “How did they know? Was it after the boys got sick?”

  She nodded. “But that wasn’t the first time.”

  My heart sank. “When was the first time?”

  “There were lots of complaints about Herba-Cough Max. Rucker and Pirate Bob buried them. The complaints were never sent to quality control. They just hid them because Herba-Cough was such a big seller. People would call and say the medicine made their kids sick or they thought it had been tampered with or something. We didn’t do nothing about it.”

  “Did they ever mention anything about rat poison?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t know nothing about that. I saw something in the newspaper about it, but I had never heard anything about that. But I know we had hundreds of complaints before they ever put the rat poison out.”

  “There were hundreds of complaints?”

  She nodded. “And that was just in the four years I worked there.”

  I leaned back into the couch. That was why they had sent me two hundred thousand documents. They weren’t trying to hide emails about rat poison; they were hiding all the complaints about Herba-Cough Max. If they’d sent them over at all.

  “Debbie, what you signed is known as a contract void from inception. They did something illegal and then had you sign a contract saying you wouldn’t tell anybody. That contract is unenforceable, meaning they can’t file a suit against you or take any retaliatory action. If they even try, I give you my word that I will take your case, and we will file a counterclaim so huge you will never have to work again. But for now, I need your help.”

  She looked away, unable to keep eye contact for long.

  “They’ll do it again, Debbie. If you don’t help me, they’ll get away with this. They will do it again. You don’t strike me as the type of person who’s just going to sit by and watch that happen.”

  She chewed on her lower lip. “What would I have to do?”

  “First, I need you to write something, and then we have to get it notarized.”

  34

  I flew back to Salt Lake with Anto, who fell asleep on the plane ride. He didn’t even ask a single question about what Debbie Ochoa and I had talked about or why we had driven her to a bank. The only words we exchanged were when we got to the airport.

  He said, “I will send you a bill for my plane ticket.”

  Debbie Ochoa’s affidavit, which was like sworn testimony in writing, had been notarized at the local bank near her house. I held it in a manila envelope. It was too valuable to put in my luggage.

  Now, I had to withdraw the lawsuit in state court and refile it in federal court. I would advise Rebecca Whiting to refuse the settlement, regardless of what Marty said. I wanted to shake Pharma-K to its foundations.

  Under Utah law, punitive damages were capped at two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Those were the damages meant to punish a company for unethical behavior. So if a corporation killed someone on purpose and buried the body, the most they could be fined in Utah was two hundred fifty thousand. It was no wonder that corporations were moving here in droves.

  Luckily, federal courts had no such cap on punitive damages. I had started a damages calculation on the plane: I would be asking for a helluva lot more than we would’ve gotten in state court. Because Joel had passed, the case had become a wrongful death suit.

  First, I had to get Rebecca’s approval.

  I drove to the hospital, but a nurse told me she had gone home. I called Jessica for the address. Rebecca lived in a section of the city known as Rose Park, in a small white house with a rusted fence. I sat in the driveway for a second, staring at a mitt and baseball bats on the front lawn.

  She answered her door right away. Didn’t say anything, just hugged me, and led me to the dining table. She seemed different somehow, and I guessed someone at the hospital had given her a sedative. An older woman who vaguely resembled Rebecca nodded to me from the living room, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I woke
up this morning, and I checked his room,” she said. “A part of me thought he would be there.”

  I reached across the table and held her hand. “They’ve offered two point four million dollars. Our firm is not going to take a cut. I’ll convince my partners it’s the right thing to do. I’ll forward the full amount to you, if you want it.”

  She swallowed. “Would you take it?”

  I hesitated. “No. I would want to make sure this never happened to another kid again. But two million is a lot of money. You could have a completely new life.”

  “I don’t care about my life. They took my life from me. No, I don’t want to take anything. I want to make sure no mother has to go through this again because of them.”

  I nodded and hugged her again. Then I left the house and headed to the law firm.

  Marty was sitting at his desk when I walked in. I shut the door and stood in front of him, my arms folded.

  “We’re not taking the money. I talked to Rebecca. She wants a trial.”

  Marty shook his head. “Are you an idiot? We could lose a trial. Then where will she be? Huh? She gonna go back to work the next day and be normal?”

  “She wants a chance. That’s all.”

  “A chance at what? That’s what you don’t seem to be understanding: People die all the time. Accidents happen. Cover-ups happen. It fucking happens!”

  “It has to be fought.”

  “We’re not Crusaders taking back the Holy Land, Noah. We’re personal injury lawyers. We get money for people who are hurt. Joel was hurt, Rebecca was hurt, and we’re going to get money for them. That’s it. That’s all we do.”

  “That’s such bullshit,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re scared of losing the money we put in.”

  “Yes, I’m scared. And I’m scared of the cases we’re gonna have to turn down while you and half the lawyers here battle this out in court. And by the way, bucko, you were the one who established these rules. I was a divorce lawyer before this firm. You were the one who taught me to never take risks on a case, to always focus on the money and never get attached. These are your rules, and you don’t get to break them just because you feel like it!”

  “You’re a coward. That’s the problem.”

  “Up yours, asshole! I’ve let you do everything you wanted to do. Have I ever told you not to take a case? Even when I thought it was a dog case, I let you take it, because partners trust each other. But there’s no room for trust in Noah Byron’s world. He’s always right. Whatever he wants, he gets. This one time you didn’t get to take a case your way, and you come in here and call me a coward? Up. Yours.”

  I took a deep breath and sat down in one of the chairs across from him. A headache crept up, and I rubbed my forehead. “They murdered this boy, Marty. What the hell did we go to law school for if we won’t even fight people like this?”

  Marty put his elbows on the desk. He shook his head, then mumbled something under his breath. It sounded like “Shit.”

  “Okay,” he finally said. “Assuming, just for a second, I go along with you, what would you want us to do?”

  “KGB found Debbie Ochoa. She said Bob and Rucker came up with this Pharma Killer thing on their own and leaked it to the press. That they were covering up for medicine that’s been causing customer complaints for years. She said she heard them herself, and she’s going to testify.”

  Marty leaned back in the seat. “Holy shit.”

  “Exactly. Now there’s something we gotta do as fast as possible.”

  35

  Every employee of the firm came down to the storage unit. We had sent subpoenas for everything Pharma-K had on complaints about Herba-Cough Max, and subpoenas to their Internet service providers, their website developers, and hosting company. Even if Bob and Rucker had deleted the emails from their end, there’d still be records of them from the ISPs.

  Between all of them, they had sent over an additional hundred thousand documents.

  We hired a couple of temps to answer phone calls. Everyone else came down in jeans, T-shirts, and shorts. We carried the boxes back to the conference rooms and began sorting through them. Boxes filled both conference rooms, then our offices. Then we had to stack them in the hallways of the firm and the lobby. We all went through them—page by page, line by line. I found an email from Rucker calling me a prick.

  By afternoon, I had personally read something like five hundred pages. My eyes hurt. We ordered in sandwiches and coffee to keep us awake. Raimi was a machine. He scanned each document with a glance, then moved on to the next one. He easily reviewed triple the pages I did.

  “You all right?” I said to him.

  He leaned back in the chair of the conference room, blinking a few times to wet his eyes. “I’m fine. I’m surprised Marty went along with this.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “With Debbie Ochoa’s testimony, and if we actually find hundreds of complaints like she said . . . I don’t know. Too close to call.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re helping.”

  “Remember that if we lose and we have to go back to sharing a single office.”

  We called it a night around one a.m. Olivia and I took three boxes and went to her house. We drank energy drinks and kept going. By four in the morning, we had gone through one of the boxes before we passed out. I slept on her couch and woke up to her mom draping a quilt over me.

  “She really likes you, you know,” she whispered. “She doesn’t normally fall this hard.”

  I watched her leave the room and looked around to find Olivia on the love seat, snoring. I grinned as I turned away and fell back to sleep.

  The next day, sometime around two in the afternoon, Raimi found the first complaint from a customer. A mother had emailed to complain that her six-year-old had started vomiting after taking Herba-Cough Max. From there, the complaints kept coming. Bob’s lackeys had spread the complaints over several boxes rather than stacking them with each other, no doubt hoping we wouldn’t see how many there really were.

  By six in the afternoon, 254 complaints lay on one of the conference tables. All from parents, all delineating the same symptoms: confusion, vomiting, sleepiness, fatigue, inability to expend energy, migraines, and blood in the stool or vomit. All of them had received the same reply email:

  We’re sorry you’re unhappy with your product. Please return the unused portion to us, and a full refund will be issued.

  Pharma-K wanted the unused portion returned—it couldn’t be tested that way.

  I couldn’t help but wonder why no one had died in the four years the complaints had been racking up. Of the hundreds of children made sick by this medicine, why did Joel die and everyone else live?

  “Raimi,” I said calmly, staring at the documents, “will you please draft a new complaint for federal court? I want one million in actual damages, and a hundred fifty million in punitive damages for the death of Joel Whiting.”

  36

  I had never met another attorney who was as good at document drafting as Raimi was. He drafted the new complaint in one day, and we withdrew the suit in state court. We sent the new complaint to Bob, who called me, swearing and screaming before the phone was even up to my ear. The call only ended when he threw his phone, and it must’ve broken.

  Federal court was a different ball game than state court, though the rules were similar. Juries received better instructions; the judges were smarter and didn’t tolerate any nonsense. Any frivolous tactic would receive a verbal reprimand, and if it happened again, sanctions would follow.

  At the first hearing, Bob handed me a revised 12(b)(6) motion. I gave it to Raimi, who had the reply ready in two days. This time, we attached Debbie Ochoa’s affidavit and the 254 complaints. The judge didn’t even hold a hearing. He denied the defense’s motion and set a trial date.

  More deposit
ions followed, along with more requests for documents and more interrogatories. These weren’t the blanket depositions I’d ordered earlier: we chose only those employees who would know about the Herba-Cough complaints and why they hadn’t been acted upon. Debbie helped us narrow down the list to twenty people.

  The federal courts weren’t nearly as busy as the state courts were, so the case moved along swiftly.

  This case was what was called a “battle of the experts.” On our side, we had two pharmacists, two chemists, and two toxicologists. They had all agreed on the theory that cyanide poisoning, which had damaged his kidneys and liver beyond repair, had caused Joel Whiting’s death, and that the poison was contained in Pharma-K’s product, which—after a court order to the police department and the Utah State Crime Lab—we had independently tested twice. Both tests confirmed the presence not of cyanide itself but of acetonitrile. If swallowed, acetonitrile metabolized to cyanide in the body.

  I had sent KGB out to talk to every former employee we could find. We located a former Pharma-K chemist who’d worked in their labs. KGB found him in New Jersey, working for a different company. He was going to come testify that the company had manufactured nail polish remover that contained acetonitrile. Our expert affirmed that the Utah location was the only plant that had produced the polish remover. He suspected that the acetonitrile had gotten into the Herba-Cough Max in small doses.

  “You’re sure about that?” I asked him on the phone.

  “Not to a certainty, no. The rat poison brand that was used contained acetonitrile and could certainly cause death, but it’s highly doubtful. The complaints go back four years, so it seems unlikely that rat poison would be getting into the medicine for that long. I suspect it’s the nail polish remover.”

  “They seemed pretty concerned about the rat poison.”

  “They probably don’t know how the poison got into their medicine and were scared. If I were a betting man, though, it’s the nail polish remover.”