The irony was not lost on me.
Dr. Bill Pritchard was a gentleman. He proved this when he agreed to see me when I showed-up, unannounced, at the offices of Global Devices. Determined to get to the bottom of what had happened, I impulsively had Lou drive me to their offices located on East 29th Street in the area of the NYU Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital. The receptionist called Dr. Pritchard’s office for me, even though I admitted that I didn’t have an appointment.
I paced nervously and watched the receptionist pack up her desk for the day. The reception area was windowless and was furnished like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Sparsely and without too much thought of comfort. I was secretly glad to see that these folks didn’t spend good money on trying to look like they had money. Like big law firms and the head offices of banks. So much money spent on furnishings that looked good and screamed look at how much money we make.
Dr. Pritchard was a small man, with a head full of white hair. I put him in his late seventies. He carried himself erect and although he must have been extremely pissed with Phoenix and myself, he did hold his hand out for a gentlemanly shake.
“Thank you so much for seeing me,” I told him.
He stood in front of me with his hands clasped behind his back. I was hoping for an invitation into his office but we remained in the reception area.
“What can I do for you Miss Monahan? I do believe I told you that we here at Global Devices didn’t want anything to do with Phoenix Technologies. Ever. I don’t believe there’s anything you can do to change our mind on that.”
He sounded pretty adamant. For a small man, Dr. Pritchard had quite a presence and he made me feel uncertain. I stumbled over my words and suddenly felt out of my league.
“Well, Dr. Pritchard, I can’t say that I blame you, however, I’m not clear on the why. I don’t know why you terminated our contracts. I’m new to all of this, and I’m just trying to find my way.” And then I felt tears stinging the back of my eyes. Oh God. I took a deep breath and willed the water in my eyes to go away. Dr. Pritchard must have noticed.
“Come with me, Miss Monahan. Let’s go back to my office and have a talk.” He turned and I followed. Like a good little girl.
We sat across from each other at a small working table in his office. The top of the table was the only clear space in the office. Massive stacks of papers, magazines, books, newspapers, files and God knows what else were piled around the room. On the floor, on top of what I think was his desk, on top of bursting bookcases. I looked around the room and felt just a wee bit righteous, thinking about how I used to let my filing get away from me. It was never this bad though.
Dr. Pritchard watched me looking around his office and told me, “I can’t bear to get rid of anything. My wife calls it my sickness. And on top of that, she won’t let me bring papers home, so it’s all here. Over fifty years of medical records and research.”
“But what would you do if there was ever a fire, or something got spilled on something important? Do you have copies of everything?” I was sounding like a worried secretary.
“Oh, it’s not a problem,” he assured me. “I’ve had the best secretary for the last forty years and she has copies of everything.” He smiled and I realized he was a very nice gentleman. I was worried about the conversation we were about to have. I felt like a child about to tell my father something that I knew would disappoint him.
“Thank you again Dr. Pritchard for seeing me. After we talked this morning, I spoke with several of the staff at Phoenix. The cancellation of your contracts was news to me, and so far I haven’t received any satisfactory answers as to why Global pulled the plug. This is dreadful news for us and I have to get to the bottom of it.” I smiled weakly at him. “I’ve only been in this job for a few days, and I’m still feeling my way around. It’s quite a shock to the system to find yourself promoted to president of a company.”
Dr. Pritchard smiled at me. “I think I know what you’re talking about. I was a practicing physician for many, many years before I joined the corporate world. It was like moving to another country where the culture was totally different and they spoke another language. I think it took me several years to acclimatize.”
I nodded in agreement. Several years? Yikes. I was hoping that the culture shock would wear off in a couple of weeks.
“Where was your medical practice?” I was interested to hear how he had made the change from the medical to the corporate world.
“I was a surgeon at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. It’s been called the Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 1980. In the early nineties, there was a push for the development of artificial organs, and I was recruited to head up Global Devices. There were some venture capitalists out there who had some money to invest and I made the jump at that time.” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “These hands weren’t getting any younger. Plus there was a history of arthritis in my family. Hands are a surgeon’s life blood you know.”
“How long has Global Devices had a relationship with Phoenix Technologies?” I asked him.
“Probably six or seven years,” he told me. “We do business with many high tech companies. There’s lots of talent out there that complements the medical talent here at Global. We spread the work around. But,” he said but with a lot of emphasis, “we are ethical in all aspects of our work. Ethics are something we demand of our partners.”
I had a feeling I was about to find out why we had been fired.
“When it was revealed that Phoenix Technologies had falsified test results which were submitted to the FDA, I immediately terminated all contracts. This type of behaviour is simply reprehensible.” He was sitting up straight in his chair and I could feel his indignation across the table. “Falsifying test results for life saving medical devices is not quite the same as a small lie on your income tax return. Lives are at stake in this business, Miss, and we cannot, and will not, tolerate falsification of records. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get approvals from the Office of Device Evaluation? Years! And in the case of our artificial kidney, with Phoenix having falsified records, we have been set back at least two years in our research and our approvals.”
I felt extremely sick to my stomach and craved a cigarette. Dr. Pritchard had stopped talking at this point, and it was probably time for me to say something.
“Dr. Pritchard, this is the first I have heard of these accusations,” I started.
“Accusations?” he interrupted me. “These are not accusations. These are facts.”
“Sorry, Dr. Pritchard. Like I said, this is the first I have heard of these, um, facts.” My legal background screamed for me to at least say allegations, but I wasn’t taking a chance on getting a further reprimand from this man.
“Can you start at the beginning and fill me in, please?”
When he was finished, I wished I had never asked the question.
chapter thirty-four
Lou was standing beside the town car when I finally came out of the Global offices an hour later. Traffic was light and for once, Lou didn’t seem to be illegally parked.
“Message for you ma’am,” Lou said and he handed me a slip of paper. Although I had a company-issued cell phone in my purse, I rarely had it turned on and Carrie knew she could always get a message to me through Lou.
Lou’s handwritten note said that Cleve Johnston was arriving at La Guardia on an Air Canada flight from Toronto at 7:30 p.m. I checked my watch. It was 6:30.
“How long will it take us to get to the airport?” I asked Lou.
“At this time of day, anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. We’ve got lots of time,” Lou said knowingly. He opened the back door of the car for me. Before he closed it though, he leaned down and told me that he had to make a quick call to his dispatcher, to cancel the other car that had been ordered by Carrie to pick up Cleve.
La Guardia Airport looks like every other godforsaken airport in North America. Steel and sterile. Ai
rports are the loneliest places in the world in my view and my stomach cramped every time I got near one. Since the tragic events at the Twin Towers, airports are now the worst places on the earth. If you’re dropping off a passenger, you barely have time to stop the car and unload them before the traffic cops are on your ass. Inside the airports, it’s hell on earth thanks to Mr. Osama Bin Laden and his band of heartless murderers. So before we arrived at the airport, I told Lou that he could drop me at the arrivals area, and I would go in and meet Cleve. Lou could keep circling until we came back out.
Lou’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror and I could tell he was not happy with this plan.
“Can’t we just circle and wait until he comes out? You can call him on his cell and tell him we’re out here,” he suggested.
“Lou, it’s okay. Seriously. I will not get into any trouble inside the airport. I’ll just go to the baggage area and wait for Mr. Johnston.” I wanted to tell him not to be so over-protective, but that’d be like telling Joan Rivers to stop visiting the plastic surgeon.
“Okay Miss. Here. Take another one of my cards. You call me on the car phone as soon as he arrives and I’ll pull up as quick as I can.”
Surprisingly, the Air Canada flight was on time and it wasn’t long before I saw Cleve in the surging crowd coming down the escalator to the baggage area. It wasn’t hard to miss all six and a half feet of him, towering over everyone. He spotted me standing by the baggage carousel and winked. My heart melted just a little. Do we ever get over our crushes?
He was by my side in about six strides once he stepped off the escalator. He put his briefcase down and engulfed me in a huge bear hug. I hugged him back, my arms around his waist. There was no way I could reach his shoulders without a step stool.
“Good to see you Kate,” he said. “It’s a nice surprise to see you here.”
“Well, I had nothing better to do,” I lied. Truth be told I was desperate to talk with him. “If you’re not too tired, I was hoping we could have dinner. I’m anxious to talk about all this crap.”
“Sure, that’s not a problem,” he agreed. “Any place in particular that you want to eat?”
In the end, we had dinner at a steakhouse around the corner from his hotel. Cleve was booked into the New York Palace, the same hotel I had been staying at before I moved into Tommy’s apartment.
The concierge at the hotel had assured me that we would have privacy at the restaurant when he made the reservation for us and I wasn’t disappointed when the maitre d’ led us to our table. The lighting was subdued and all of the settings were banquettes. The restaurant wasn’t overly busy.
We pushed ourselves into the banquette, both of us struggling with the seating because of our body types. Once our drink order had been given to the waiter, Cleve put his large hands in front of him on the table and said, “Okay Kate. Let’s have it. What in the heck is going on?”
“I wish I knew, Cleve. Seriously. We are in deep shit and if we don’t get some answers pretty soon, I’m not sure we’ll recover from the potential disaster that’s waiting for us.” I was deadly serious, especially after my talk with Dr. Pritchard.
I brought Cleve up to speed on what had been going on. Told him about Tommy’s computer and the hidey-hole in the apartment. Told him about the contents of the safety deposit box. Told him about how Jay had discovered the anomalies between the files from the office and the files in Tommy’s office. Told him about the lovely Natalie Scott and her team. Gave him a very graphic description of how Belinda Moffat had shed buckets of body fluid during her crying jag. And ended by relating what Dr. Pritchard had told me that afternoon. During the course of my storytelling, our drinks had arrived, we ordered dinner, ate our meals and were now having coffee.
“Dr. Pritchard, bless his soul, is truly an amazing man. He told me that he had been a member of the team that had carried out the first successful kidney transplant in Boston in 1954. The doctor who was the head of that team, Dr. Joseph Murray, went on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1990.” I was getting off track. “Anyway, to put it mildly, Dr. Pritchard is some pissed with us.”
“Can’t blame him,” Cleve said, “Assuming it’s true what he says.”
“He was pretty adamant that it was true. Kept insisting that what he had were facts, not allegations. I didn’t argue with the man. He says that his man in charge of this project, Dr. Jordan Francis is no longer with Global Devices.”
“Was he fired because of this mess?” Cleve asked.
“No, at least that’s what Pritchard says. He said that he received Dr. Francis’ resignation letter a few weeks ago and hasn’t heard from him since. The resignation letter appeared on his desk a few days after they found out about the test results.”
“What were the tests specifically for?” Cleve asked.
“They were clinical trials of the device that were carried out on a pig. They implanted the artificial kidney in the pig and our device, PISTON, the remote signaling piece, was monitored to make sure it was giving all the proper signals and data. The data that was gathered was not the data that was given to the FDA. I’m not entirely clear on how that was found out, or who discovered it, but Global Devices now have a black mark against them. Apparently, it’s not considered kosher to fake results in medical tests,” I said with just a tad of sarcasm.
“Dr. Pritchard said at first they were overjoyed that the tests had gone so well, that they were able to submit the devices for approval to the FDA. He said he was somewhat surprised, considering that they had run a bunch of these tests earlier and they had come up against several different problems every time. But suddenly, boom, everything’s a go and everybody’s happy, and the thing goes in for approval. The first Pritchard heard about this was a letter from the FDA. Addressed to Dr. Francis but it ended up on Pritchard’s desk because Dr. Francis had already resigned.”
“Did Pritchard say what Dr. Francis’s explanation of all this was?” Cleve asked.
“He told me that he hasn’t been able to talk to Dr. Francis. He’s incommunicado so to speak. Pritchard said that a copy of an email between Dr. Francis and Tommy was found in one of Global’s files dated a few days before Dr. Francis resigned. The email was vague but Dr. Pritchard said he was pretty certain that Tommy and Dr. Francis both knew what was going on.”
“Does he think that Tommy was involved in this? The falsifying of records?” Cleve was indignant. He was very protective of his good friend.
“He implied as much,” I told him. “The whole guilt by association. Tommy, and all of Phoenix by implication, are guilty in his mind, and hence he will not ever, ever do business with us again.”
I sipped my coffee and craved a cigarette but we were in a non-smoking restaurant.
“But this doesn’t explain how Natalie Scott knew and why no else found out,” Cleve reminded me.
“Natalie Scott is involved with this somehow. Big time. She’s responsible for research and development, and she’s responsible for whatever transpired with Global. I hardly know her, but her name is stamped all over this God awful shit-pile. Her ass is so fired,” I said.
“Who was the head of the team on this project?” Cleve asked.
“Nat Scott. This project was her baby, as everyone reminded me. She has every one of her team leaders shaking in their boots, afraid for their jobs. When she got the letter from Global, she threatened them all that if they mentioned it, they’d lose their jobs. That was a couple of weeks ago. Our dilemma is damage control. What do we do now Cleve?”
The stalker watched the restaurant, hidden in the shadows of a brick encased, arched doorway. Across the street from where the bitch was having dinner. Going about her life with no worries. No problems. The bitch was getting in the way but the stalker would not let her stop the progress. Things that got in the way of progress were dealt with. The stalker’s breathing was in control now because control was what it was going to take. Control over mind and over body. Control to see the project through to
the end.
chapter thirty-five
While we waited for the waiter to bring our bill, Cleve and I made a list of things that needed our focus. We agreed that he would deal with damage control with the lawyers, the regulators and the resultant press releases. I was tasked with getting in touch with the two detectives who were investigating Tommy’s murder. The more we talked, the more we were convinced that Tommy’s death was because of the Global Devices project. The detectives needed to be brought up to speed as soon as possible. It was two weeks to the day since Tommy was murdered and as far as I was concerned, there had been no progress on finding Tommy’s killer.
“I called the detectives yesterday and left a message,” I told Cleve. “I haven’t heard back from them. This case clearly isn’t their top priority. I’ll get to them first thing tomorrow.”
Which proved easier said than done. I was completely exasperated after leaving two voice messages each on the detectives’ phones the next morning. So I put the phone wizard on the case. She reported back in about fifteen minutes.
“I called over to the 20th Precinct,” Carrie told me. “No one was willing to give me any information on the whereabouts of either detective. So I called my dad, to get the phone number of his friend who plays first base on their softball team, who’s a police officer in Brooklyn. He called the 20th Precinct for me and found out that Detective Bartlett is in the hospital with back problems. She has two herniated disks. Detective Shipley has been handling their case load on her own, and is out of town, upstate, investigating a tip they got on a three year old case.” Carrie read all this information from her steno pad and when she finished she looked eagerly at me. “What else?”
“Well,” I said, duly impressed with Carrie’s information gathering talents. “Unless there’s someone else handling Tommy’s murder case, make sure that Shipley has my message to call. Say it’s urgent, okay?”
Next on my list of things to do was to track down Natalie Scott and get some answers, direct from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. The interoffice telephone directory gave me her phone number but when I dialed it there was no answer. No surprise there. She probably knew it was me calling and she was likely avoiding me. I decided to take the bull by the horns, and pay a visit to the research and development department.
Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions Page 19