“But I have no way of finding out how many deaths Myrabin caused besides Tom’s.”
“You need to go see Dr. Richard Peyton. He is Hugh’s medical expert whenever Hugh tries a drug case. He mostly works for Hugh, but to keep himself looking unbiased he sometimes crosses over to the defense side. I’ve actually used him in a couple of my cases. Smart guy. I’ll call him and introduce you. Then make an appointment to go see him. Tell him about Tom. I’m pretty sure Rick will get you in to see Hugh. But fair warning, Kathryn. You won’t like Hugh Mahoney. He’s the nastiest, meanest plaintiff’s attorney on earth with an ego that defies description. But if he takes your case, he’ll fight for Tom and for you like a rabid pit bull.”
CHAPTER TWO
Friday, January 17, 2014, Scripps Clinic, Rancho Bernardo
A week later, a nurse in purple scrubs printed with kittens holding balloons ushered Kathryn into Dr. Richard Peyton’s plush office in the ultra modern Scripps Clinic Building in Rancho Bernardo at two p.m. Kathryn took one of the leather chairs in front of Peyton’s long, marble-slab desk and stared out at the pine trees level with the windows. Irrationally, she resented a medical professional dressed to suggest that the business of treating disease was playful. If a nurse in kitten scrubs had come into Tom’s room during those last, long, agonizing days, she would have strangled her.
The door stirred, and the great man himself appeared in a business-like white lab coat. He was six feet tall, but stooped a bit as if to hide his height. He had a long narrow face and very dark eyes that took in everything around him. A shock of black hair streaked with gray flopped messily over his left eye. He wore large, dark-rimmed glasses that seemed to suggest he really was an expert on any subject he cared to claim. She guessed he was in his early fifties.
“Richard Peyton, so nice to meet you.” He smiled and extended his hand.
She returned the gesture. “Kathryn Andrews. We spoke on the phone about Myrabin.”
“Of course. I remember. Have a seat. Sorry to make you wait. I still see patients as an internist, and sometimes they need immediate attention. Would you like my assistant to fetch you a drink? Tea? Water? Coffee?”
“No, thank you. I’ve come to talk about my husband’s death.” Those words were almost impossible to utter because hearing them destroyed her precious fiction that somehow Tom would return to her.
“So sorry for your loss. Paul told me you think his hypertension medication caused his liver to fail. Why do you think Myrabin played a role in his death?”
“Because Tom’s cardiologist thought so.”
“And who was treating him?”
“Bruce Myers here at Scripps.”
“Good man, Bruce. But were there any other possible factors? Genetic disease, alcohol, hepatitis?”
“No.” Kathryn used her courtroom voice designed to put a stop to any and all time-wasting tactics.
“But how can you be so sure?”
“Obviously Tom and I shared the same house and the same bed. And we even shared the same job. We were public defenders. I passed his office twenty times a day until the day he was too sick to show up for work.”
“And when was that?”
“The end of May 2012.”
“How long before he died?”
“Four weeks.”
“No transplant?”
She shook her head. “He was too sick for the surgery.”
“But what led Dr. Myers to point the finger at Myrabin? I suppose he told you it is one of the most widely prescribed drugs in this country for hypertension.”
“Yes.”
“When did your husband develop high blood pressure?”
“In February 2012. He was only forty. It didn’t make sense because he was athletic and in great shape.”
“Hypertension is still not well understood,” Dr. Peyton observed. “So how did Bruce Myers decide on Myrabin as the cause of his liver failure?”
“Tom started on Myrabin in February. It was the only medication he was taking. He got sick about ninety days after he started taking it. Dr. Myers said the timing of Tom’s illness led him to suspect Myrabin. He researched the drug and found it was originally developed in 1991 by Laboratories Suchet, a French company headquartered in Paris. Suchet abandoned work on it in 1993, but Wycliffe Pharmaceutical bought the rights in 1994 and got approval from the FDA to market it in 2007.”
“It was hailed as the wonder drug for hypertension,” Dr. Peyton observed.
“But Dr. Myers found a reference in the literature to a researcher at Suchet who had concluded it attacked the liver in rats. He thought that was why Suchet stopped working on it. He tried to run down the name of the scientist to get a copy of his research, but no luck.”
“So you think a lawsuit will uncover this lost research?”
“It must be at Suchet somewhere.”
Rick Peyton nodded. “But what if Wycliffe bought the rights to the drug without knowing about the problem?”
“I highly doubt that.”
“I think Hugh Mahoney will be interested in this.”
* * *
Kathryn didn’t feel like going back to work after her meeting with Rick Peyton. Instead she drove home to Pacific Beach, pulling into her driveway at three-thirty. She sat in her white, five-year-old Mini Cooper and studied the tiny blue cottage with white shutters surrounded by the white picket fence at 1845 Ocean Place that she had shared with Tom. The iceberg climbing roses over the front door that they had planted together a month after the house became theirs, swayed softly in the light, briny breeze. Although their little house had barely twelve hundred square feet, all property in proximity to a beach was pricey. With an under-the-table loan from Tom’s parents that the mortgage company could not detect, they had scraped together the down payment; and it had become theirs a year after they joined the public defender’s office. Tom had wanted to live in the neighborhood where he grew up, close to the ocean, so he could get in some early morning surfing before going to work. Most days he went with Steve, who also lived close by, because Paul’s Big-Firm Lawyer Schedule left him little time for anything but work. She studied the little house in the late afternoon sun with its cheerful window boxes full of red geraniums and purple statice and the white roses surrounding the red front door, and remembered all the days she had watched Steve and Tom ride away on their bicycles, their boards somehow balanced under their arms. Tears stung her eyes.
She didn’t want any more tears. To hold her emotions in check, she resolutely gathered up her briefcase and went inside. She hurried down the narrow hall to the kitchen at the back of the house, her heels clattering on the tile floor, and dropped her purse and briefcase onto a chair. She took a wine glass out of the cabinet and poured herself a glass of chilled white Two-Buck Chuck. Granted it was close to four o’clock and she had a rule about drinking alone before five-thirty, but the meeting with Dr. Peyton had unnerved her. Talking about Tom’s death was never easy.
She considered sitting at the tiny white shabby chic table in the little breakfast nook, but the memory of Tom, Paul, and Steve sitting in the green, red, and black chairs that she had painted, drinking beer and laughing together, was too strong. Instead she wandered back down the hall to their small living room and threw herself on the dark blue, slip-covered Ikea sofa. But there were memories here, too. Cuddling with Tom on crisp fall nights, a fire in their small white-washed brick fire place. Super Bowl parties with Paul and Carolyn and Steve and one of his string of girlfriends. Kathryn could hear the laughter, see the chips and beer bottles on the scuffed pine coffee table, and smell the garlic in Tom’s special chili at their last Super Bowl party, a few weeks before the shadow of Myrabin crossed their lives.
Kathryn looked over at the antique glass-front cabinet under one of the windows that faced the street. It had come to them from Tom’s parents’ house after his mother passed away. It held all of the trophies and medals Tom had earned in surf competitions in high school and college. By law s
chool, Tom had given up competing, so she had never shared that part of his life. But she knew how much those gleaming symbols of athletic prowess had meant to him, and now to her, because they were something tangible she could hold on to, not like the sound of his voice which she struggled to remember.
Her eyes went from the trophies to their wedding picture on the mantel. According to Dr. Nina, it should be out of sight by now, an admission that her life with Tom was irretrievably lost. But she couldn’t yet bring herself to hide it away. She smiled at the image of Tom. His hair was blonder than hers because of all his time on the waves in the sun. The fresh smell of sea and wind always clung to him. He was most alive when he was gliding across the water. “I’m a simple man,” he told Kathryn not long after they met. “I love the ocean, and surfing, and the law. And now you.”
She swallowed the last of the cheap wine, put her head down on one of the sofa pillows, and sobbed.
CHAPTER THREE
Friday, January 31, 2014, The Penthouse, Emerald Shapery Center, San Diego
Goldstein, Miller, Mahoney & Fitzgerald occupied the penthouse of the 30-story Emerald Shapery office tower, well above Warrick, Thompson’s offices on the twenty-sixth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-fourth floors. It took Kathryn two weeks after winning Rick Peyton’s approval to gain access to Hugh Mahoney. Finally, at four o’clock on Friday, January 31, she stepped into the pale gray and blue marble lobby, ready to announce herself to the receptionist, only to find the receptionist’s chair empty.
She heard the sound of champagne corks and ragged laughter and looked across the deserted reception area to find a party underway in the conference room that opened off the lobby. People were milling around the long table, loaded with food, in the center of the room. A bar with an attendant in a white jacket was off to the right. A loud cheer went up as additional corks popped, followed by drunken mirth. Apparently this party had been underway for some time.
Her heart sank. She’d had a feeling all along that Hugh Mahoney wouldn’t help her. She’d endured the wait to see him and had cancelled all her late afternoon court appointments and jailhouse visits for nothing. She sighed and turned back toward the elevators.
“Wait! Where are you going? Come join the party!” Kathryn was looking into mild gray eyes, a wide smile, and an expressive face with a lock of light brown hair flopping toward his right eye. He looked to be about her age. His expensive gray pants said there had once been a gray suit coat over his starched white shirt. But the coat was long gone and his conservative maroon tie was loosened.
“I’m Mark Kelly.” He stepped toward her with an outstretched hand. Professional courtesy kicked in automatically, and she gave him her firm, no-nonsense handshake.
“Kathryn Andrews.” She realized she should have worn her one and only Calvin Klein suit that she’d paid fifty dollars for at Ross Dress For Less. She had forgotten she’d be moving in expensive circles at Goldstein, Miller.
“And you’re one of my plaintiffs, and you got the email to come celebrate with us! Come on in and have a drink!”
“One of your plaintiffs?”
“I just won a forty-three million dollar jury verdict this morning in Besser versus Capital Energy Development. The firm sent out an email inviting any plaintiffs in town to come down and celebrate this afternoon.” He kept smiling as if he were the most affable human on earth rather than a tiger of an attorney who had just brought a major corporation to its financial knees.
“I gather that was a class action lawsuit?”
He nodded. “The firm’s specialty. Come on in and celebrate.”
Kathryn tried to imagine what forty-three million dollars looked like. Her convicted murder clients freaked out when the judge ordered them to pay a one-hundred-dollar restitution fine, a sum which didn’t even begin to cover the burial costs of their victims.
“No, thanks. I can’t. I had an appointment to see Hugh Mahoney at four, but this doesn’t seem to be a good time.”
Mark Kelly’s eyes remained affable, but he now seemed to be appraising her. “Are you a client of Hugh’s?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Potential client.”
“Ah, I see. Well, he’s inside. Come with me, and I’ll introduce you. I’m sure he wants to talk to you. There’s nothing Hugh loves more than a new client and a new lawsuit. Want something to drink first?”
“No, thank you.” She was suddenly miserably nervous as she followed Mark into the crowded room. Judging from the looks of the partiers, none were clients. They were all expensive lawyers in various stages of coats on and off, ties tied and not, and hair slicked back in buns and lose, flowing like the champagne. Why should she be intimidated, she asked herself. She’d gone to school with people just like this. Paul, her best friend, was one of them. Why was she suddenly miserably conscious of her cheap suit jacket from Forever 21 and her unpolished black flats, a DSW bargain at fifteen bucks?
Mark threaded his way through the high-priced legal talent toward an ungainly man, six feet-four, if an inch, in the corner of the room, with a glass of champagne in one hand and an arm draped over the shoulders of a twenty-something blonde in a breathtakingly expensive red suit.
“Hugh, you’ve got an appointment with this lady at four!” Kathryn was embarrassed when eyes turned to appraise her, but the most penetrating of all belonged to Hugh Sean Mahoney.
His dark eyes, walled-up behind small coke-bottle glasses, studied every detail of her face and clothes. Kathryn couldn’t help staring back at this mountain of a man in a rumpled white shirt that had once been crisp with starch and expensive suit pants that, like Mark’s attire, were missing the polish their jacket had offered. She guessed his loafers, as bright as mirrors, were the kind of Gucci’s that high powered criminal defense attorneys wore. He had short, wiry gray hair that defied taming.
“Hugh Mahoney.” He undraped his arm from the blonde, who looked disappointed, and offered her his hand.
“Kathryn Andrews.”
“Oh, that’s right. Rick sent you.”
“If it’s a bad time–” But she knew she wouldn’t be back. This whole episode had been a mistake. Tom wouldn’t have wanted her here among the sharks who fed on the injuries of little people to line their expensive pockets.
“No, of course not. We have an appointment. Come this way to my office where we can talk. Want some champagne?”
“No, thanks.” Kathryn followed him down the winding halls where she could glimpse expensive, empty offices through open doors. I’m not here to celebrate she wanted to say. I’m here because Big Drug killed my husband, and I want you to do something about it.
Predictably, Hugh had an office as big as a small apartment that overlooked the city on one side and San Diego Bay on the other. A glass door gave him access to the roof of the thirty-story building.
He folded his large body into the chair behind his pristine cherry-red mahogany desk that glowed like a jewel in the late afternoon light and got out a yellow legal pad. Kathryn thought of her chipped oak counterpart, loaded with thirty-five case files, at the Office of the Public Defender just six blocks away.
“Rick said you are thinking about a wrongful death suit.”
“Yes, my husband Tom died a year and a half ago. Liver failure. He was only forty.”
“Okay, so why wrongful death?”
“Tom’s hypertension was diagnosed in February 2012, and he was given Myrabin to lower his blood pressure. By Memorial Day, his liver had failed. He died on June 18. His cardiologist believes Myrabin destroyed his liver.”
The big man’s ears, which protruded from his head like an elephant’s, seemed to perk up. “Who makes Myrabin?”
“Wycliffe Pharmaceutical. They are based in Seattle.”
“Right.” Hugh nodded as he made notes on his legal pad. “Rick told me about Myrabin. Tell me more about your husband. Excessive alcohol consumption? Risky sex?”
Kathryn tried to control her irritation. “Of course not. We met at Harvard wh
en we were One L’s. We got married a month after we graduated. We were married for fifteen years.”
“You went to Harvard?” His dark brown eyes studied her carefully. She could see he was trying to reconcile her cheap clothes with her expensive legal pedigree.
“I did.”
“Who do you work for?”
“I’m a Senior Deputy Public Defender. Tom was, too.”
Hugh sat back in his chair and frowned. “What were the two of you doing over there? Your classmates are all over here working for me or downstairs at Alan Warrick’s.”
“It was Tom’s idea. We clerked for big Wall Street firms when we were in school, but a lifetime of pushing paper for corporate giants seemed so empty. We wanted to do something to make a difference.”
“And the public defender’s office allows you to do that?” His voice dripped with skepticism.
“You already know the answer to that. My clients don’t care if I went to Harvard or the YMCA Night Law School. They all think I’m trying to sell them down the river because the best I can do is negotiate a plea deal for them. I can’t do magic and get guilty people off. I can’t make what they’ve done go away. My clients resent me because I can’t pull out a wand and send them home as if nothing ever happened. They all think I can ‘beat the case’ for them. The word ‘grateful’ is not in their vocabulary.”
“So why stay in the public defender’s office with a background like yours and your husband’s?”
“I stayed because Tom stayed. He still thought we were doing some good with our high-powered degrees.”
“And now?”
“And now my entire life is up for grabs. The only thing I know for sure is I want Wycliffe to squirm in front of a jury for what they did to Tom!”
The Death of Distant Stars, A Legal Thriller Page 2