An Invisible Client Read online

  The most unique thing about the company was what they termed their “Pharma Future” program, a division of the R&D department that hired the top minds graduating from pharmacy schools and chemistry programs around the world, and dumped money on them to come up with new drugs. One article I looked at estimated that, because of the drugs being worked on in Pharma Future, the company would triple in value over the next five years. All the profit tax-free.

  “Working man really does get screwed. He busts his ass for thirty grand a year and pays twenty percent in taxes, and a company that’s making hundreds of millions a year pays zero in taxes.”

  Olivia, whose hands were turning white from gripping my steering wheel so hard, said, “It’s not their fault.”

  “Whose, the working man’s?”

  “No, the company. Everyone would pay less in taxes if they could. It’s the government’s fault.”

  “And who do you think sent attack-dog lobbyists to Washington to get their taxes so low?” I scrolled through a portion of another article. “Don’t tell me you’re a libertarian?”

  “Sort of. Are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m all for state-of-nature, dog-eat-dog philosophy, but you struck me as the bleeding-heart liberal type.”

  “I’m some of that, too.”

  Pharma-K’s headquarters were in a section of Davis County known as North Salt Lake City, though the area was actually a completely separate city from Salt Lake itself. North Salt Lake had been founded by the owners of a mining company who thought they could get more hours from their workers if the miners didn’t have to drive back to a different city at the end of the day. The town consisted almost entirely of factories, warehouses, and manufacturing plants, with a few fast-food restaurants thrown in for good measure. A constant haze of thick, soupy smog hung over the surrounding county. It sometimes blew over the rest of the valley and made the air nearly unbreathable. I had once walked around wearing a surgical mask, and when I took it off at the end of the day, the mask was brown.

  “Right here,” I said.

  “Pharma-K? Is this about the Pharma Killer case?”

  “It is.”

  “Whoa.”

  “And by the way, as an employee of Byron, Val & Keller, anything you see and hear is confidential. Don’t tell anyone about anything you see on the job that could be confidential, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  We parked in front of a modern-looking business park, all steel and glass, with a courtyard in between three identical buildings. The grass was well kept. I always looked at the grass in front of buildings. When a property was struggling, they cut the landscaping budget first.

  Pharma-K took up the top half of the first office building, floors three through six. Their manufacturing plant occupied a separate building. Inside the polished chrome elevator, I watched Olivia take a hit from an inhaler. We got off on the sixth floor and walked into the vestibule ahead of us.

  A woman who looked like a model sat behind the large desk, smiling widely. “Hi, guys, how can I help you?”

  “I have a meeting with Darren Rucker.”

  “Okay, hang tight one sec. Okay?”

  She remained quiet, the smile still on her face, and I realized she actually wanted a response. “Sure, we’ll wait.”

  We sat down on the orange leather chairs. This didn’t look like any drug company I’d ever seen. Electronic music played over the speakers, and quotes from people like Nikola Tesla decorated the walls.

  A man came out of an office down the hall. He wore jeans and a sports coat and sunglasses pushed up into his hair. He smiled and shook my hand. “Darren, COO of Pharma-K. You must be Noah.”

  “I am. This is my associate, Olivia.”

  “Oh, very nice to meet you.” He kissed the back of her hand. She blushed.

  He looked back at me. “Everyone’s in the conference room.”

  “Everyone? I thought this was just a chat between us.”

  “Just a few people. Nothing big.”

  We followed him down the hall. The office walls were primarily glass, and one large space was crammed with cubicles. We passed a break room that held a Ping-Pong table and an arcade video game I didn’t recognize. Off to the side was a massive conference room.

  An oblong crimson table, with at least thirty yellow high-backed chairs around it, took up the room. About ten of those chairs were filled.

  Darren said, “These are our lawyers. I think you know Bob there.”

  I knew Bob. He was senior partner at Walcott, Smoot, Bagley & Hockett, one of the biggest law firms in Utah and Nevada. They catered exclusively to corporations with gross revenues higher than fifty million, and billed at an hourly rate of five hundred dollars, an obscene amount for the Mountain West.

  Bob was in his sixties and had once been the Utah State Bar president. An eye patch disguised his allegedly blind left eye. The gossip, which no one had been able to verify, was that he didn’t need the eye patch and had himself started the rumor about being blind. Supposedly, he just thought the eye patch made him more intimidating.

  His deposition tactics had put him on the radar of every plaintiffs’ personal injury firm. During depositions, he would excuse himself to the bathroom, leaving the plaintiff’s attorney alone with his or her client. Upon returning, Bob would demand to know everything said between the attorney and the client while he was in the bathroom. Opposing counsel would protest that their conversation was covered by attorney-client privilege. Bob, a smirk on his face, would then point to the stenographer in the corner. The presence of a third party negated attorney-client privilege, and everyone always forgot the stenographer was there.

  I’d encountered Bob on my first big personal injury case and fell for his trick.

  “I heard you got a nice settlement from Bethany Chicken.”

  “No complaints,” I said, sitting down. This was clearly an ambush. In addition to Bob, there were at least four other lawyers in the room. “So I thought this was just going to be a friendly chat with your COO here. I didn’t realize the troops were marching.”

  “Oh, it is friendly,” Bob said with a grin. “I’m always friendly.”

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  “So,” Bob said, “what should we talk about?”

  “I’d like to talk about cyanide, Bob. Namely, how it got into your client’s cough medicine.”

  The room fell silent. A few of the lawyers exchanged glances. They were scared of something. They seemed to have been hoping I’d come about something else.

  “Tragedy,” Bob said. “Thank goodness nobody was killed.”

  “I got a visit from a little boy’s mother yesterday. She thinks he might not make it.”

  Bob shook his head. “Damn shame. What’s this world coming to when lunatics go around poisoning children’s medicine, for heaven’s sake? My clients just can’t believe it happened. They’re doing everything in their power to help the families of the victims and working with law enforcement to bring that sick bastard to justice.”

  “Seems weird, though, doesn’t it? I mean, if I were a sick maniac—and I’m not, but if I were—I’d want to poison different types of cough syrup. Not just one brand from one company, in one geographic location. That’s too easy to take off the shelf.”

  The lawyers glanced at each other again, but Darren Rucker just stared at me.

  “Listen,” Bob said, “you’ve been doing this, what? Ten years? I’ve been defending companies for thirty-six years, son. And I can tell you, this company has done everything in its power to help the victims of this tragic situation. We set up an emergency board that met every day until the emergency was taken care of. We donated money to the county so they could devote more police officers to finding the man who did this; we issued a recall on the product; we—”

  “Why a man?”

&nbs
p; “What?”

  “You said ‘finding the man who did this.’ Why a man? Why not a woman? What makes you think it’s a man?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech, son.” He grinned. “See,” he said to everyone in the room while still looking at me, “Noah here is a little insecure. When I was at Harvard, we got a lot of that. People who just didn’t make it and carry chips on their shoulders. I think you went to school somewhere in the Midwest, didn’t you?”

  “University of Kansas.”

  He nodded. “So you still have a little bit of that Ivy League chip on your shoulder, don’t you?”

  I had to swallow to keep my anger in check. “We both have the same law license, Bob. I paid twenty grand for mine. You paid ten times that for yours. Who’s the sucker?”

  Bob ran his tongue along his upper lip, like a predator that had just seen prey. “Someone decides to get medicine down off the shelf and poison it. That is not my client’s fault, and you’re wasting our time.”

  “Bullshit!” Olivia blurted.

  Everyone in the room, including me, stared at her. Instantly, her eyes went wide, and her cheeks flushed red.

  Bob said, “Looks like your associates still need to be housebroken.”

  “My associates can speak their minds. Go ahead, Olivia. What do you mean?”

  She swallowed, and her lower lip quivered. I thought she might pass out. “I was . . . I was watching Ellen and . . .”

  “Excuse me,” Bob said, “did you say Ellen?”

  “Yeah. And they had a pharmacist on. One of the families bought the cough syrup from a pharmacy.”

  “So?” Bob said.

  “So the pharmacy buys it directly from the manufacturer, already sealed. Then they stock it near the front at that pharmacy. There’s cameras there. No one could’ve tampered with it without someone seeing them. It had to come from the manufacturer with the cyanide already in it.”

  I stared at Bob, who looked over at Darren.

  “Well, Bob? Response?”

  Bob rose. “Let’s talk in private.”

  He put his arm around me and walked me out into the hall, away from earshot of the others.

  “Listen, I know where you’re going with this. I know all about it. But it’s a dog case. Do you know what Pharma-K’s revenue will be this year? Four hundred million dollars. More than double what it was last year. This is a company that’s on the rise, and they will do anything to protect their reputation, spend any amount of money. You’re getting into a war you can’t win.”

  My tie was slightly askew. He adjusted it and said, “Go back to the playground. You’re not ready for the big boys, counselor.”

  As he walked away from me, I said, “There’s blood.”

  “What?”

  “There’s blood in the water, Bob. If I had shown up and talked with Rucker for a few minutes, I would’ve left and told that woman there wasn’t a case here. But you brought out an army. There’s blood in the water and I can smell it from a mile away. You made a mistake. It’ll be interesting to learn what’s got you so spooked.”

  I stepped away from him and poked my head into the conference room. “Let’s go, Olivia. We’re done here.”

  8

  We pulled out of the lot and got onto I-15 heading back to Salt Lake. Neither of us spoke until we were getting off the freeway downtown.

  “That was weird,” she said. “They were totally scared.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean we can prove anything. They might just be scared about the bad press a lawsuit would bring. It was weird how quickly the wagons circled, though.” I exhaled loudly. “How is it you’ve never had a job?”

  She glanced at me. “My mother is really ill. Schizophrenia. She’s been sick for as long as I can remember. I needed to stay home and take care of her when I wasn’t at school, so jobs and friends and stuff were never really an option.”

  “How’d you guys survive?”

  “I got her on disability, and I would knit stuff at home, caps and scarves, and sell them on Etsy. That would make ends meet, usually.”

  “How’d you pay for law school?”

  “Knitted a lotta fucking scarves.”

  I laughed. She laughed, too, a soft, pleasant sound.

  “We got one more stop before heading back to the office.”

  The hospital wasn’t far from my house. It sat up on the side of the easternmost mountains in the valley, surrounded by shrubbery and trees. We parked near emergency parking. I guessed that Joel Whiting would probably be in the ICU, so we headed there.

  The receptionist directed us to a room at the far end of the corridor. I saw Rebecca in the corridor, heading into the room, and when she saw me, her face lit up.

  “Mr. Byron. You came.”

  “Noah is fine, Rebecca. Hope we’re not here at a bad time.”

  “Not at all. One second.” She tapped on the glass window of the door, then whistled, two loud whistles. She waited a second, and two whistles responded from inside the room. I gave her a quizzical look. She smiled. “When Joel would get lost at a park or something, that’s how we’d find each other. So we use it now to let each other know where we are. It’s silly.”

  We sat down on the chairs against the wall.

  “Tell me what happened that day,” I said.

  She stared off into space. “I was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, and Joel came in from playing baseball. That’s his favorite sport. He came in and threw his glove onto the table, and I told him to move it. He started coughing. He’d had a cough for a couple of days, but I knew he didn’t like doctors, so I didn’t take him in. It was just a cough.” She bit her lower lip. “So I got the cough medicine down from the kitchen cupboard that I’d bought earlier. It was in a little purple bottle. He argued, like all boys do, but he did as I asked. I gave him two capfuls, the recommended dose, and he seemed fine. He got a juice out of the fridge, went into the living room to watch television . . .” She was silent for a long time.

  I said, “What happened next, Rebecca?”

  She bit her lip again. “He, um . . . I didn’t hear anything. So I went into the living room to see what was going on . . . and I found him on the floor. He was just flat on his stomach, like he couldn’t move. I ran over to him, and I was shaking him and screaming his name, but the only time he moved was when he vomited.” She wiped the tears away from her cheeks. “I called 911, and then I just held him. I didn’t know what else to do. I just held him.”

  I waited until she was ready to speak again.

  “Anyway,” she said, “the ambulance came, and they took him to the hospital. They thought he’d had a stroke. And then they told us they thought he’d had a heart attack. They didn’t know what to look for. And then a nurse said she’d heard of another little boy across the valley who had gotten sick after taking this cough medicine that had cyanide in it. So the hospital tested the medicine, which they were nice enough to go to my house and get so I could stay with Joel, and it came back as having cyanide in it. But not a lot. Just enough to hurt a child.”

  Tears started flowing again, and she took a few crumpled tissues out of her pocket and dried her eyes.

  “We’ve been here ever since. His kidneys are failing. The cyanide wasn’t enough to kill him. But it did a lot of damage. They won’t give him a transplant. I’ve tried everything to convince them, even called the governor’s office, but they won’t do it.”

  “Is there a chance he’ll recover?”

  “I pray for that every day. But according to the doctors, no. He’s getting worse every second.”

  I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t get him a transplant. Several of my clients had received transplants, even alcoholics and drug addicts who would get clean just long enough to test and qualify for the organ. It didn’t make sense that they wouldn’t give a kidney to
a little boy who’d done nothing wrong.

  “So,” she said, “did you talk to them?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  I chose my words carefully. “It was . . . odd. If the COO had just met me, apologized, and said he was doing everything he could to make the situation better, that probably would’ve been the end of it. But they had a team of lawyers there. It was like they were trying to scare me away.”

  “I knew it! I knew they were hiding something.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re hiding anything. They could just be frightened of the bad press from a lawsuit.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Mothers know these things, Noah. They did this to my boy, and they’re trying to get away with it.”

  “Where did you buy the medication?”

  “At a grocery store, Greens. It’s by our house. A little store just in the neighborhood.”

  “Did you check the tamper-resistant seal?”

  “Of course. It was sealed. No one had tampered with that bottle. I’m sure of it.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Do they still have the bottle, in case we want to retest it ourselves?”

  “I guess the police would. They came and took it.” She stole a quick glance through the glass on the door. “So, are you going to help us?”

  I looked at Olivia. She wore the same pleading expression that Rebecca did.

  I couldn’t take the case yet; liability wasn’t clear and I didn’t want to jump in until I knew for certain something was there. But it wouldn’t hurt to look. “I’m not officially taking the case, but I’m going to look into it a little more. Maybe send out our investigator and see what he can turn up.”

  She smiled and put her arms around me in a hug. Surprised, I didn’t move. Though Rebecca didn’t look much like Tia, something about them was similar. Just a scent, maybe, or the way their touch felt. It sent a jolt through me. When she pulled away, I stood and said, “I’ll be in touch for some more information tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you want to meet him?”