“Surreal. That’s it. Is that the right word?” he asked. I nodded my head, still silent.
“This whole thing is surreal,” he continued. “Really, to think that Jordan could be involved with falsifying records. What happened to him?” Another question which I didn’t believe I was expected to answer.
Dr. Pritchard hung his head and slowly shook it back and forth.
I felt horrible for Dr. Pritchard. “Had you known Dr. Francis long?” I asked him.
He raised his head and looked at me. “Known him? We had worked together for the last twenty-seven years. We were surgeons together and then moved to Global Devices together.” He sighed. “I thought I knew him. But really, how much do we really understand and know each other? When something like this happens, all notion of your understanding of another human being goes out the window.”
Dr. Pritchard looked around the tavern, held up his empty glass when he caught the waitress’ eye and motioned for another one. He shook the ice around in the bottom of his glass and looked at me.
“You know, when I got Jordan’s resignation letter I thought it was some sort of joke. When I realized it wasn’t a joke, I was confused. But when I found out later on the reason for his resignation, it felt like I had been hammered in the stomach by a battering ram. I literally felt faint and like I had the wind knocked out of me.”
The waitress arrived and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. He grabbed it and drank half of it, fortifying himself.
“I’m over the shock now. Meeting with you last night gave me renewed strength to get to the bottom of this.” He put his glass down sharply on the table.
“I found this,” he pointed at the envelope, “in Jordan’s office last night. Taped to the underside of one of the drawers in his desk.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen these documents,” I told him. “The exact same letters were in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box. Except, the love letters,” I mimed quotes in the air when I said love, “were the originals.” Dr. Pritchard looked a little surprised at this news.
“You’ve described this as surreal,” I went on. “And I agree. I’ve known Tom Connaught for years and when I first arrived in New York two weeks ago after he was killed, someone told me that he and this Natalie Scott were a couple. I could hardly believe it, based on the few times I met her. She wasn’t his type. When I found the letters in the safety deposit box it got me thinking that maybe they weren’t meant for Tom. There is no way that Tom Connaught would be in a relationship with the person who wrote those letters. They’re not addressed to anyone. Do you think they were meant for Dr. Francis?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Jordan has been a bachelor all these years. Never married, never had a serious girlfriend. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. The tone of the letters don’t sound like the Miss Scott I’ve met and worked with. But you should know that I carefully went through all the letters to and from the FDA. I matched them to our files. And I’m almost certain some of the ones supposedly originating from Global Devices are forged. Those ones do not appear in our files.”
My stomach sank at this news.
“Along with falsifying data, apparently your people felt it was okay to forge signatures on our letterhead.” Dr. Pritchard’s voice was slightly raised and I was surprised. Up until now he had been the picture-perfect gentleman.
My insides started boiling and I felt myself getting angrier by the minute. I gathered the papers sitting in front me, re-clipped them together, slid them back into the envelope and held the package in my hands.
“Dr. Pritchard, I will get to the bottom of this,” I promised him. “Whatever is going on is affecting both of our companies.” I pushed the envelope across the table towards him and stood up. “Thanks for the Diet Coke.” I left him staring into the bottom of his glass.
Kelly Northland answered his cell phone before the first ring finished.
“Northland,” he answered.
“It’s Kate. Where are you?”
“At the office. What do you need?”
“I need to punch someone but that won’t solve my problems. Can we meet? In an hour or so? At my apartment?”
“On my way,” he said.
I told Lou to take me home. It had been a long fucking day and I was sure the evening wasn’t going to be much better.
Dinner was on the stove, the fish were fed and there was a stack of clean laundry sitting on the end of the bed. Life on the home-front was blissful. Too bad I couldn’t say it was the same at the office.
Jay was coming out of the shower as I was stripping off my office clothes, my gut wrenching control top pantyhose and cross your heart bra. Jesus, Mary and Joseph it was fucking uncomfortable being dressed for work. It felt almost sinful to put on an oversized pair of Jay’s sweat socks, my sweat pants, and an extra large T-shirt. In fact, I felt practically naked with hardly a piece of polyester or cotton touching my skin.
I stuck my head in the open door of the ensuite bathroom and watched Jay towel dry his hair.
“We’re having company,” I told him. “Did you make enough dinner for an extra person?”
He dropped his towel and grabbed me in a tight bear hug. “Hello Kathleen,” he said. “How was your day?” I slapped his bare ass and pushed him away, laughing. “I’ll tell you all about my day as soon as you get dressed.”
In the kitchen I checked our stock of beer in the fridge. Kelly Northland struck me as a beer drinker. There were several bottles of Canadian beer on the top shelf and I smiled, thinking about Americans drinking Canadian beer, and commenting that it tasted ‘thick’. I remembered the old joke: what do making love in a canoe and American beer have in common? They’re both fucking close to water.
Canadians can be a little snobbish about our beer - not that I ever drank the stuff.
chapter forty-one
Kelly was a good sport and having Jay around while we talked business didn’t faze him in the least. Of course, as I suspected, the Canadian beer helped. Kelly allowed himself one while we ate dinner at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. I had the feeling that he was a very controlled person, which you probably had to be if you had been a tight-ass Marine for twenty years.
After we finished eating, I got right down to business.
“Are your staff working on the background checks?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re still at the office, doing a lot of phone work and digging deep. I’ll have a report for you first thing in the morning on anything we might have dug up.”
“Okay, I’ve got something I need you to do.”
Kelly whipped out a pen and a small pad of paper from the inside breast pocket of his sports jacket. Ready to take notes like a good Staff Sergeant. I put my hand over the pad and pushed it away. “No notes,” I told him. He clicked his pen shut and laid it neatly on the counter beside the pad.
“I want you to find Dr. Jordan Francis. He’s the doctor who was involved with the artificial kidney project at Global. I think I told you that he had resigned his position and no one has heard from him since. I met with Dr. Pritchard today and he showed me an envelope full of documents that he found taped to the underside of a drawer in Dr. Francis’ office.”
I looked at Jay who was standing on the other side of the breakfast bar loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher.
“Guess what was in the envelope?” I challenged Jay.
“Oh that’s an easy one,” Jay said. He reached over the counter to take away my dirty plate and Kelly’s. “The same thing that was in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box.”
“Right you are Mr. Harmon. The envelope had copies of the letters from Nat Scott, which by the way I am no longer referring to as love letters. From now on they will be called stalker letters.” Jay smiled at me. “The envelope also had copies of the letters from the FDA, denying Global Devices the pre-market applications. Dr. Pritchard told me that he had compared that stack of letters to his files and several appear to be
forged. They don’t exist in his files. So now we’re not only accused of falsifying test data, we’re forgers too.” I turned to Kelly. “Dr. Francis resigned over four weeks ago and no one has heard from him. His apartment is over on West 97th Street.” I gave him the address. “Although in his resignation letter he said he was moving. I think we need to do a little checking on him. Do you have someone who can find him?”
“Let me make a call.” He walked out of the kitchen into the living area.
“I think I might like him,” I told Jay. “Although I wasn’t too sure this morning when I met him. I had my dad check him out.”
“Oh yeah? And what did he have to say?” Jay asked.
“Kelly checks out. Apparently a good guy. My dad said his sources gave him the thumbs up. I’m more comfortable with him now. Though he strikes me as a bit of a tight-ass.”
Kelly picked that moment to walk back in the kitchen and I wondered if he’d overheard us. Before I could find out though, his cell phone started ringing. Kelly quickly grabbed it from where it was clipped on his belt. Kind of like a little gun. He flipped it open and answered it in one movement. “Northland.” He listened for a moment and turned and walked back out of the kitchen into the living area.
“What’s his military background?” Jay asked.
“He was a marine staff sergeant who retired a few years back. He was military police and spent some time at NCIS.” Jay’s eyebrows rose in a question mark so I clarified it for him. “Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Kelly was an investigator for them.”
Kelly was sliding his cell phone into its holster when he came back into the kitchen.
“That was one of my guys who’s been doing the background checks. Apparently there’s more to the story on Ben Tucker than we thought.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“My guys have been going through the background histories of the people in R and D and checking the facts themselves. We’re not relying on the facts in the INTELLI-Guide background information. He’s come up against a few walls as he’s been checking out Mr. Tucker’s story. The first time he thought it was just a fluke. But the second, third and fourth time the facts didn’t check out, the red flags were wavin’. So far, his education and work history are lies. He apparently had several previous jobs listed and none of them are true.”
“How can that be?” I demanded. “How much do we pay this company to do background checks? Has anyone checked their background? Did your guys find discrepancies in any of the other files?”
“Not that I’ve heard so far,” Kelly said. “I’ll give INTELL-Guide the benefit of the doubt here, but if we find any more discrepancies, I have a feeling we’ll be using another company after this to do our background checking.”
“You’re fucking right we will be.”
“So my guy has stopped checking what Mr. Tucker put down on the file, and we’re now starting a trace on him with other sources. It shouldn’t be too long before we find out Mr. Tucker’s true identity. Apparently his social security number is fake too.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I fumed. Kelly’s cell phone rang again and he disappeared into the living room to answer it.
“Well, he seems to be getting things done,” Jay observed. He closed the dishwasher door and started wiping down the counters. I didn’t understand how he could appear so calm. My insides were roiling and I was royally pissed. I grabbed my cigarettes and headed for the balcony. Mr. Chisel Jaw, Drop Dead Gorgeous Tucker was a phony and I couldn’t even begin to fathom why he was employed at Phoenix. I wondered who had hired him and how much damage he had done since he’d been with the company.
Kelly joined me on the balcony before I was halfway through my cigarette. He referred to his notebook and told me, “His real name is Donald McLean. He spent time in one of the state prisons in Arizona. And he’s a registered sex offender.”
In spite of the humid evening air, I felt a little chilled, pacing up and back on the balcony. I cupped my hands against the windows and peered inside, where Kelly was sitting at the dining room table, at the far end of the apartment. The chandelier above the dining room table was the only light coming from that end of the apartment and straight ahead of where I was on the balcony, the apartment was in darkness except for a soft glow coming from inside the cubby-hole in the wall, where Jay was working on the computer. Even though I lived on one of the main streets of Manhattan, there was little sound coming from Fifth Avenue below me.
Kelly had been working the phones ever since he broke the news to me about Donald McLean, a.k.a. Ben Tucker. Jay was somehow helping out and doing some digging on different computer databases. Me, I felt useless, so I stayed out of the way, and chain-smoked on the balcony.
Things were spinning out of control as far as I was concerned. Nat Scott had vacated the premises, left her job and the company without a word to anyone. She might as well have sent a one-word email to everyone in the company: GUILTY. But just exactly what is she guilty of, I wondered. Tucker, one of our senior people in R and D turns out to be a felon. Was he involved with Nat Scott? Jordan Francis disappears. What did he do that was so bad he had to resign his position? Was he falsifying records? Was Natalie Scott guilty of the same thing? Did Ben Tucker - or Donald McLean, dammit - help Nat Scott? Did they kill Tommy because he figured it all out?
I was suddenly very conscious of the fact that Natalie Scott lived in the same apartment building. Was she not worried about running into me, seeing me in the lobby? She left Phoenix without so much as an email, a phone call or a kiss-my-ass. One could surmise that she had no desire to have any contact with anyone from Phoenix. Too fucking bad, I thought, as I stormed into the apartment and headed for the elevator. The front door to the apartment closed quietly behind me and I punched the button on the wall to call for the elevator.
The ride to go up six floors took less than a minute, hardly enough time for me to figure out what I was going to do or say when I confronted Nat. I was surprised when the elevator doors opened to see four apartment doors, each with a solid brass plaque mounted on the door with the apartment number. All the floors in the building were apparently not like mine, containing only one apartment. I stood and stared at the four doors and tried my Amazing Kreskin routine, trying to conjure up Nat Scott’s image behind one of the doors. When that didn’t work, I did the next best thing. I knocked on the door closest to me. And waited. When there was no response to my knock, I went to the door next to it and rapped.
I didn’t have to wait long before the door opened a crack and I heard a voice.
“Hello?” The voice was elderly.
“Hello,” I answered back. “I’m Kate Monahan, from the fourteenth floor.” The door opened another half inch or so but I still couldn’t see who was there.
“You don’t live on the fourteenth floor, Miss, and I’m calling building security right now. Mr. Connaught lives on that floor.”
“Oh, please, don’t call security,” I quickly pleaded with her. “Mr. Connaught is my ex-husband. I’m living in the apartment now.”
The door opened about six inches and a little white head peered out. The little white head was on a tiny body, one that was actually shorter than me. She was stooped over, and held onto a cane with both hands.
“Tom never spoke of an ex-wife,” she told me. I wasn’t surprised at this and told her so.
“Kathleen Monahan, ma’am.” I held out my hand and she offered hers. It was delicate and her skin felt like silk. “Constance Everwood,” she said.
“Pleased to meet you Miss Everwood.”
“Allow me to say how sorry I am about the loss of Tom Connaught. He was a good man, a solid man. And a gentleman. There aren’t many of those around these days,” she said. I agreed with her. “What can I do for you tonight, Miss Monahan?”
“I’m looking for Natalie Scott’s apartment,” I told her.
“Well, why didn’t you just ask at the Front Desk?” she asked.
“I came straight up on the elevator. I just thought all floors had one apartment, like mine.”
“Ha,” she half-laughed. “Yours and the nineteenth floor are the only ones with single apartments. The rest of us live four apartments to the floor.” She made it sound like she was living in a tenement building when in fact she was living at a very exclusive, Fifth Avenue address.
“Yes, that’s too bad. Can you tell me which apartment Miss Scott lives in?”
Miss Everwood pointed at the apartment two doors over from hers. “Whatever business would you have with that one?” she asked.
“Oh, we work together,” I told her, making it sound like we were girlfriends who were getting together to paint our toenails.
“Well, she’s turned out as sour as that mother of hers. Do you work at Tom’s company? You must, because she,” Miss Everwood poked her nose in the direction of Natalie Scott’s apartment, “works there too. Tom told me.”
“Did you see Tom often?” I asked her.
“Often enough. At least once a week,” she told me. “In the lobby. We’d ride the elevator together. He’d help me with my packages. Such a nice man. Have they found out what happened to him?”
I shook my head. “Thanks Miss Everwood.” I took a step back, letting her know I needed to move on. “I hope to see you in the lobby or the elevator,” I told her.
“Don’t waste your time going to her apartment,” she nodded again in the direction of the Scott’s door. “No one answers the door after eight o’clock at night. Been that way since they moved in. You can bang on that door, you can yell that you’re with the police. No one will come.”
Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions Page 23