by Brad Parks
Herb turned and ran. The kidnapper shot him in the back. It was probably enough to kill him, but the kidnapper had wanted to make real sure. That’s what the head shot was for.
Then the body had been dragged here, to the approximate middle of the ten-acre wooded patch that separates our house from the road.
The kidnapper had quickly butchered the remains, in case someone stumbled across it. But, really, the hope was that forest critters would find the corpse and dispose of it first.
I continued digging until my soft judge’s hands were getting blisters on the palms and my body was drenched in sweat. Once I deemed the effort good enough, I used the shovel as a lever to roll the body toward the ditch I had created. I got it settled in the bottom of the depression, facedown, then covered it back over with dirt.
Then I scattered leaves over the dirt, leaving little trace that Herb Thrift had ever been there.
Before I left, I said a prayer. For his soul. And, selfishly, for mine.
FIFTY-TWO
Alison and I took turns keeping Sam distracted all weekend, trading him back and forth every few hours—basically, every time one of us reached the limit of our ability to feign serenity.
Otherwise, there was a kind of gloom that settled over us, layering itself on top of the pall that had already been there. Death was creeping closer.
Herb Thrift’s mangled body was on the backs of my eyelids every time I closed my eyes. So was the smell of him. I took a shower when I returned to the house, then another a few hours later when I felt like the odor hadn’t fully left me. But it was like a few molecules of his essence had crawled up my nose and were refusing to depart.
The impact on Alison was more profound. She had not seen the torture video, nor did she know about the finger. For her, this was the first piece of definitive proof of just how violent these men could be. She seemed to sink into a fatigue even deeper than before, creaking around the house. All the energy and vitality she had shown early during this ordeal were now gone. There was no more wood chopping, no more dashing around trying to solve everything. Every time she’d hand off Sam to me, she’d sag as soon as she knew our boy couldn’t see her.
Saturday night, unsurprisingly, I had a nightmare of gothic proportions. I was running through our woods with my shovel in hand and the knowledge that Emma was somewhere in the woods. They were our woods, except they looked different—more sinister, more foreign.
The first part of the dream consisted of my tripping on roots, bushes, and vines, all of them impossibly thick and thorny. They would appear, seemingly out of nowhere, to impede my frantic search for Emma. At times, I knew exactly where I was on the property, only to get lost again a moment later.
In the second part of the dream, I had found Emma, but she was buried alive. I could hear her screams from underground. When I tried to dig, my shovel would break. And then it would regenerate, only to break again. Or I would think it was a shovel and I would look down to see I was actually holding a garden hose. I finally started digging furiously with my hands, but the soil had become impenetrable, the forest floor baked into hardpan. Emma’s screams grew weaker and I knew I was running out of time.
Alison woke me because, in addition to my shouts, I was clawing at the bed.
The dream was so vivid it stayed with me through much of the day. It was probably still lingering—somewhere in my chest, it felt like—late Sunday afternoon when my cell phone rang.
I didn’t recognize the number. It came from the 917 area code, which meant a New York area cell phone. I might not have answered it, but Sam was elsewhere, and I couldn’t rule out that it was one of the kidnappers.
So I brought the phone to my ear and offered it a tentative: “Hello?”
“Judge Sampson?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, this is Steve Politi from HedgeofReason.”
I was so taken aback, I couldn’t even speak. He added, “We’re a website that serves the financial community.”
“I know who you are,” I blurted, once I found my voice. “You’ve been calling my office for weeks now. How did you get this number?”
“I’ve got a source,” he said, like it was no big deal, like calling a federal judge was something he did every other day.
It told me something about his source: It was real. My cell phone number is not exactly a state secret—it’s listed on everything from the parents’ directory at my kids’ school to the emergency staff contact list at the courthouse—but it’s still not something that Steve Politi could conjure from his imagination. He knew someone in my life.
“Look, I know you can’t comment on the record,” he said. “So this is strictly off the record. I just want us to be able to talk a little bit.”
“Absolutely not. It’s totally inappropriate for me to have any kind of conversation with you. I should hang up right now.”
“Yeah, but you’re not going to, because I know your secret.”
My entire body seized up. This was what I had been fearing for weeks now, ever since Michael Jacobs had first started yammering from that podium: that some reporter would learn about Emma and expose everything.
Then I thought it through a little more. If any journalist were to figure it out, it wouldn’t be Politi. He was in New York and trafficked in financial gossip. This was not his kind of scoop. He was just posturing, wasn’t he?
“And what . . . and what secret is that?” I stammered.
“I have a source that says this case has already basically been decided, that you already know how you’re going to rule.”
Oh God.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Who told you that?”
“Can’t say.”
“How am I supposed to refute something when you won’t even tell me where it’s coming from?”
“So you’re denying you know how you’re going to rule?”
“I’m not . . . I’m not even having this conversation.”
“Of course you’re not,” he said. “But tell me something. That motion to recuse. What was the deal with that? Because I’ve been following this case pretty closely and you’ve been a plaintiff’s dream. Why would Roland Hemans want a different judge?”
I actually chuckled, even though I didn’t find any of this funny. The guy was playing me. Or, rather, I was allowing myself to be played.
“Uh-uh, no way,” I said. “I’m not talking with you.”
“Yes, you are. Because I know things about this case that you don’t know.”
It was both a challenge and a tease, and I couldn’t help myself. He dangled that hook with that big, fat, juicy worm wrapped around it, and I chomped down hard. “Oh really? Like what?”
“Did you know that Denny Palgraff is in talks to take his patent to another pharmaceutical company?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know anything about Denny Palgraff—not even, at the moment, where he was. Was that why Palgraff disappeared? He was negotiating with other companies?
“Yeah,” Politi continued. “My source says Palgraff has gotten so pissed at ApotheGen in general and Barnaby Roberts in particular, he’s planning on taking his patent to Merck or Pfizer. He’s going to start a bidding war between the two of them and leave ApotheGen out of it.”
“Is that what your source says, huh?”
“Why? Is it not true?”
“No comment,” I said. What I really could have said, of course, was: No clue.
“Well, I’m posting it pretty much as soon as I get off the phone.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“All right, now it’s your turn. What’s the deal with Hemans? Why does he want to get rid of you?”
“I’m hanging up now,” I said.
“I know your secret,” he said again.
“You don’t know anything,” I said.
Which had
to be true. If he really knew my secret, he would have already outed me.
Still, I stored Steve Politi’s number in my phone. The fact was, he did seem to know things about my case that I didn’t know. And that, at some point, could be valuable.
* * *
Not being possessed of a tremendous amount of investing savvy, I didn’t really understand the full implications of what Politi had told me about until Monday morning. I was driving to work, listening to WHRV, the local National Public Radio affiliate, when suddenly the announcer was teasing a segment about ApotheGen.
“Coming up next: What happens when a pharmaceutical giant pins everything on a blockbuster drug—only to potentially lose it to one of its competitors? We’ll talk about the fallout of this morning’s rumors regarding ApotheGen Pharmaceuticals.”
Then another voice said: “It’s the most devastating thing you can imagine. There’s no silver lining here.”
I turned it off. I really didn’t need to hear more about how bad things were for ApotheGen. I had more pressing matters, starting with Denny Palgraff still being unaccounted for.
When I got into my chambers, I looked for Jeremy, who hadn’t arrived. I asked Mrs. Smith to have him visit me when he got in. Not knowing what else to do with myself while I waited for him, I went into my office and clicked on HedgeofReason.com, just to get a firsthand look at the piece that was right now creating financial carnage.
The item was brief and snarky, playing up HedgeofReason’s “exclusive source,” who had been “dead accurate on the details of this lawsuit from the beginning.”
At the end, there were several UPDATE! items that had been appended.
The first was: “UPDATE!: Steve Politi is going to make an appearance on Fox Business this morning at 7:45.”
That one was followed by a YouTube link of Steve Politi. I had assumed Politi was an aggressive, just-out-of-college kid looking to make a mark. But the screen grab showed a middle-aged man with a round head and no hair. He looked like an aging Charlie Brown.
The next was: “UPDATE!!: HedgeofReason credited with breaking this news on MSNBC!”
The picture below that was a close-up of MSNBC’s crawl, which led with, “HedgeofReason reports ApotheGen may lose blockbuster next-generation statin.”
Finally, there was one more UPDATE!!! This one had been posted mere minutes earlier.
“The Street is not yet convinced about Merck or Pfizer but ApoG is getting slammed, down a whopping $14.37 on heavy, heavy trading! For those keeping score at home, that’s $27.84 off its 52-week high, a thirty percent drop. We might see a dead cat bounce later this afternoon. But unless you’re planning to hang on to your ApoG until sometime next century, run don’t walk to your local broker or online trading account, kids! It only gets worse from here once this news is confirmed.”
There were 935 comments, a number that astounded me because I knew what it represented. For every person who had commented, there were at least a thousand who had read it without commenting. It was a huge audience for one post.
I could imagine how well this was playing out at ApotheGen headquarters, where Barnaby Roberts was hearing from an army of irate shareholders who were ready to stage an insurrection. Had he called Paul Dresser to make sure things were still under control?
There was no way Roberts would survive with his job if Denny Palgraff carried through on his apparent threat. His board of directors might be able to tolerate having to share the golden goose. Having Palgraff sell the goose to the farm next door was unforgiveable.
But that was only, of course, if Palgraff had a patent he could sell. Meaning Palgraff vs. ApotheGen was now a winner-take-all affair for both sides.
What that meant for Emma I could no longer even guess. It was so hard to differentiate the signal from the noise.
All I could really do was keep my eye on the one thing I could control: the Markman hearing, which was still set for Friday. I assumed I would get my orders that day. I would carry them out. And then we would get Emma back.
I allowed myself to briefly daydream on that thought: Emma running to my arms, squealing, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”; Alison back to her normal self, smiling real smiles again, smothering her daughter in hugs and kisses; me no longer having to suspect my wife of trying to destroy us; Sam getting his best friend and other half back; our family, whole again, going on picnics, doing Hats and Dancing, returning to the simple joy of Swim With Dad.
It was enough that, when Jeremy Freeland knocked on my door, I had to wipe tears from my eyes and compose myself before I said, “Come in.”
He entered with a steely air of attempted indifference, like he wasn’t still angry with me.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked in an inflectionless voice.
“Yeah. Has Hemans heard from Palgraff?”
“They finally spoke on Saturday. He’s giving his deposition tomorrow.”
“Oh. That’s good news.”
Jeremy offered nothing in response.
“Do we know what caused him to hightail it out in the first place?” I asked. “Was it because he was negotiating a deal with Pfizer or something?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at Jeremy, clearly wanting more. “Didn’t you ask?”
“I did,” Jeremy replied. “Roland said the less I knew, the better.”
“That’s probably true.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
He turned around and left without another word.
FIFTY-THREE
The scream jolted the younger brother out of the midmorning semislumber he had fallen into.
It was coming from the little girl’s room.
The older brother was out, getting groceries, leaving only the younger brother to investigate. He rose from his easy chair and went over to her door. There was no other sound. He was going to leave it alone when she screamed again.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“It’s a spider,” she shrieked.
“So kill it.”
“I caaaan’t. It’s too scary.”
“Use some toilet paper.”
“I can’t reach it. It’s too high.”
The younger brother rolled his eyes. He performed a quick analysis—which course of action would result in the least amount of bother?—and decided it was easier to spend thirty seconds killing a spider than to listen to the girl carry on for the next few hours.
He twisted the handle of the door. The lock made its pinging sound.
The little girl backed away as he entered the room, cowering like she had ever since he burned her with the cigarette. He should have done that earlier. She was more manageable when she feared him.
He closed the door behind himself. But, of course, he couldn’t lock it. Not without locking himself in.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“There,” she said, pointing in the bathroom. “Above the toilet.”
He moved across the room and into the bathroom, where there was a little wisp of a spider in the corner. He unrolled a length of toilet paper, then stepped on the toilet lid and took aim.
Except as he reached for it, he heard the rasping of the door handle being turned. He leapt down and scrambled into the bedroom, now empty.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Hey, come back here!”
He ran out into the hallway. There was no sign of her. The younger brother cursed. The alarm was armed, and it had not sounded. So he knew she was still in the house somewhere. But where?
“Come back here!” he bellowed. “Come back or you’re going to be in big trouble.”
FIFTY-FOUR
That afternoon I was supposed to be engaged in the relatively mindless work that was moving documents to their next bureaucratic station, trying to bury myself in the task. What this turned in
to was me staring out the window at the skyline, searching it for answers that wouldn’t come.
The case was now just a muddle in my mind. I had already ruled out anyone on the plaintiff’s side as being responsible for Emma. But if it was the defense, why not simply order me to dismiss the complaint and be done with it? If you were Barnaby Roberts, with Paul Dresser doing your dirty work, why allow ApotheGen stock to continue this precipitous plunge?
Beyond that, there was the constant ache from being without Emma, and the constant terror of thinking about what might be happening to her at any given moment—both of which were incapacitating, when I gave myself over to them.
So I can’t say I was being interrupted midway through the afternoon when there came a knock at my door. It wasn’t a Jeremy Freeland knock or a Joan Smith knock. I hadn’t said a word in reply when my door was already opening.
From behind it, there came a familiar little blond head.
“Hey, buddy!” I cheered.
With permission to enter granted, Sam shouted, “Daddy!” Then he charged across the large expanse of carpet between the door and my desk and buried himself in my waiting arms like he hadn’t seen me in months. Six-year-olds’ imperfect sense of the passage of time has its benefits.
I enjoyed the hug for the brief moment it lasted; then he wrestled himself free.
“Good to see you, pal,” I said, mussing his hair a little.
Alison had entered my chambers as well, closing the door behind her. “Hey,” I said when I saw her.
“We were just down here, hitting the zoo again,” she said. “Before we went home, we were thinking maybe we could run some stairs.”
The courthouse has this old stairwell, replete with marble steps and cast-aluminum railings. For reasons perhaps only a six-year-old could understand, Sam loved to run up and down them.
“Can I, Dad, can I?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said, eager to have the distraction. “Let’s go.”