Blood Brothers

by Rick Acker

  “You didn’t like socializing that much?”

  “Oh no, I loved it. I felt that Gunnar and I had truly arrived, that we were part of the glamorous and successful crowd. That was a wonderful feeling, but I eventually discovered that I couldn’t stop. There were board and committee events, of course, but there were also invitations to dinners and parties from our friends and Gunnar’s business partners, and we had to throw parties and host dinners in return. And then one day it dawned on me that this was the life I had created for myself, and I was powerless to change it.” She paused and took a sip of her coffee. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘chasing after wind’? Well, sometimes you catch it—or it catches you. I suppose there’s not much difference.”

  Kim Young sat in a conference room at Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals with Dr. Tina Corrigan’s team. Dr. Corrigan was a severe-looking woman of about sixty with sharp features, no makeup, and hair pulled back so tight that Kim thought it must hurt. Her appearance had intimidated Kim at first, but she soon found Dr. Corrigan to be warm and friendly. Her two lieutenants, Drs. Tim Black and Daruka Reddy, were also friendly—Dr. Reddy a little too much so at times. He was a tall Indian man in his late thirties with a habit of standing very close to attractive women when he talked to them.

  Kim listened as Dr. Corrigan and two senior members of the clinical trials group picked participants for the Neurostim trial. Despite the relatively low compensation—only $1,000—offered in its ads, Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals had received more than three hundred applications for the thirty-five participant slots available for the Phase I trial. Dr. Corrigan had asked her newly acquired intern to put all the applications in a database for easier review by Drs. Black and Reddy, who winnowed the group down to one hundred. To Kim’s dismay, David’s application didn’t make it into the pool of finalists.

  The purpose of the meeting was for Dr. Corrigan and her team to pick the thirty-five study subjects from the hundred names on their list. “Okay, we’ve got seven slots left,” announced Dr. Corrigan. “Who’s left?”

  “How about number eighty-four?” suggested Dr. Black, a gray-haired man of about forty-five with an incongruously boyish face.

  “Another Caucasian in the age-thirty-five-to-fifty cohort,” responded Dr. Reddy. “We’ve got all we need of those. Besides, this guy is a cop, and we’ve got five of them already. What about seventy-two?”

  “Good call,” said Dr. Black. “Twenty-three-year-old Asian computer-game tester. If we get any delta in reflexes and problem solving, this guy will notice.”

  “All right, seventy-two is in,” said Dr. Corrigan as she highlighted him on her list. “What do you think of fourteen and nineteen? One is an African American firefighter in his thirties, the other is a white personal trainer.”

  “Both in,” agreed Dr. Black. Dr. Reddy nodded.

  “Four to go,” commented Dr. Corrigan. “Suggestions?”

  “Forty-six,” said Dr. Reddy. “He’s a twenty-one-year-old white varsity athlete at a Division I-A school. He’ll also notice any performance change.”

  Dr. Corrigan paused and frowned. “We’ve got a lot of athletic types already. Also, have we checked on whether including him would violate any NCAA rules? Let’s nix this one. Remember, we can afford to be picky for this study.”

  “We don’t have a lot of other options,” said Dr. Black. “Everyone else on the list is either a Caucasian between thirty-five and fifty or an athlete.”

  “How about a med-school student?” asked Kim. “Twenty-three-year-old Asian. I checked and he meets all the subject-qualification criteria.”

  The other three looked at her. “Um, sure, let’s take a look at him,” said Dr. Corrigan as she skimmed her list. “Which number is he?”

  “He’s not on the list,” explained Kim. “While you were talking, I pulled up the full database and started flipping through the applications. I found this one and thought it might interest you. Should I print out copies?”

  “Please,” said Dr. Corrigan.

  Five minutes later, Dr. Black said, “I like this guy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Reddy. “There’s a reason he didn’t make our one-hundred-name list: he doesn’t fit our ideal subject model at all. He’s not in a position that requires quick reflexes, strength, or instant problemsolving.”

  “So what?” responded Dr. Black. “We’ve got that covered in twenty other people. This one needs to solve problems every day under high pressure in his classes. You were in med school; you remember. Plus, he’s got some medical training, so he’ll probably do a better job reporting the drug’s effects than a cop or a jock.”

  “Okay, you’ve convinced me,” said Dr. Corrigan. “Add David Lee to our participant pool. Nice job, Kim. Why don’t you spend some time going through the database to see if you can find some other names that might be good fits?”

  The phone on Sergei’s desk rang. He stopped cleaning up the piles of papers that had accumulated around his office while he’d helped Ben prepare for trial, and picked up the receiver. “Sergei, it’s Dan Munoz.”

  “Hello, Dan. What’s up? Any news?”

  “Sort of. I’ve done some more digging into Kathy Chatterton’s death, but I still didn’t find anything suspicious.”

  “Did you check her phone records and pull any e-mail accounts?” Sergei asked.

  “I did. She was a very social young woman, so there was a lot to go through. None of it indicated that she had been threatened. I also talked to her mother and her boyfriend. She didn’t report to either of them that she’d been threatened, and neither of them knew of anyone who would want to harm her.”

  “Okay, did you interview her boss, Dr. Kleinbaum? He’s the closest thing I had to a suspect.”

  “I interviewed both him and his wife; she’s his alibi for that night. They both say he was at home in bed when the crash occurred.”

  “Did you give them polygraphs?” Sergei pursued.

  “No, and I’m not going to,” replied Munoz, his voice rising a fraction. “They’re not suspects or persons of interest. They’re not even witnesses. And this isn’t a homicide investigation. This is me doing some informal looking around because you asked me to and you’ve usually got good instincts.”

  “Sorry, Dan. I didn’t mean to start interrogating you. I appreciate what you’ve been doing.”

  “Don’t worry about it. But you know what, buddy? Not all hunches play out. Maybe Kathy Chatterton was so focused on delivering that stuff to Bjornsen that she drove too fast and didn’t pay attention to the road. That kind of thing happens on the tollways and interstates. In fact, it happens a lot.” He paused. “No offense, but maybe you were wrong on this one.”

  It hit Ben the next morning as he and Noelle were driving into the office. “Mmmm!” he said as he took a sip of his caramel macchiato at a stoplight. He swallowed the hot coffee too fast and stifled a cough. “Nuts!”

  Noelle turned to him. “You okay? What is it?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to Norway after all.”

  “How come?”

  “Bert Siwell. Maybe I can disappear for a few days, but if I’m suddenly gone for a week or two, he’ll get suspicious. There’s a good chance he’ll figure out where I am. He’ll know I’m not going on a real vacation six weeks before a trial, and he’ll either guess where I am or use that PI he hired to track me down. Either way, he’ll figure out where I am, and once he does, he won’t have much trouble figuring out why I’m there.”

  “And then he’ll probably figure out that Gunnar is still president of Bjornsen Norge.”

  Ben nodded. “Either that or he’ll file an emergency motion to bar me from looking at Norge’s documents or talking to its employees without him in the room. Then I’ll have to explain everything to him and the judge. Either way, our chance to surprise Karl in front of the jury is gone and Gunnar is out as Norge’s president. Oh well, a couple of days over there won’t be enough, but it’ll be better than nothing.”
<
br />   “I could go by myself,” offered Noelle.

  “That’s okay. I wouldn’t send my pregnant wife on a four-thousand-mile flight by herself to spend two weeks alone in a foreign conference room looking at documents.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, but maybe your pregnant wife might volunteer to go anyway. Seriously, going to Norway won’t be a big hardship. If I go, all I’ll be doing is sitting on a plane and sitting in a conference room. And I cleared my schedule for this case. So if I stay here, all I’ll be doing is sitting in this car or sitting in my office.”

  Ben snapped his fingers. “How about inviting Elena? She told you she could use a vacation, and I’d feel a lot better if you were with someone . . . Especially someone who can handle an emergency.” His eyes slid to his wife’s expanding belly. “We could offer to pay for her ticket, and I could join you for a few days to check everything over.”

  “That really isn’t necessary,” said Noelle.

  “It’s not necessary,” agreed Ben, “but I’d like to do it anyway. And it’s not just for my own peace of mind. Traveling alone sucks; wouldn’t you rather go with a friend?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s just that it seems kind of extravagant to pay a couple thousand dollars to send someone to Norway just to keep me company.”

  Ben smiled. “We can afford it, and sometimes I like to be extravagant with you. Now stop arguing or I’ll have to send you both first class.”

  Later that afternoon, Karl stood in the doorway to the greenhouse that projected from the north side of the lab building. The air was cool and humid, approximating an ancient summer high in Norway’s mountains. A misty rain fell from sprinklers near the greenhouse ceiling, dampening Karl’s hair and shoulders and the report he held in his hands. He ignored the chilly water and looked pensively at the rows of plants in front of him. “How did you do it, Gunnar?”

  Myrica norvegicus was a large bush or a small tree, depending on one’s point of view. Karl liked to call it a tree, because he felt that sounded more impressive. The tallest plant in the building was just over two meters tall and showed no signs of growing further, though Dr. Gustav Grundaum, the botanist Bjornsen Pharmaceuticals had retained as a consultant, cautioned that it was still too early to tell whether the plant had reached its full growth. Gunnar had once commented that he thought the trees would reach maturity quickly but would have an extremely long lifespan in which they probably changed little. Karl had later asked Dr. Grundaum about this; he’d agreed that such a life cycle would not be unusual for an Arctic plant, but said that it was impossible to tell how long they would live. After all, the oldest plant in the greenhouse was less than two years old.

  Karl stepped up to one of the trees and regarded it thoughtfully. It had small, round, dark-green leaves and a scattering of tiny white flowers, though most of these had dropped off, leaving behind growing seedpods. He leaned forwarded and gently lifted one ripening pod for closer inspection. An extraordinarily valuable secret was locked inside there, one that had stumped him and everyone else at the company for the past year. The seeds would not grow. The lab staff had tried different types of soils, different moisture levels, different temperature levels, and every fertilizer they could find. One researcher had even tried playing Mozart for the seeds every day. Nothing worked.

  In desperation, they’d hired Dr. Grundaum, the world’s leading expert on Arctic plants. Twice a month, they flew him in from Canada, where he spent most of his time doing research. He would spend two or three days dispensing instructions and working on the trees. He had designed the greenhouse that now housed them and had managed to keep all forty-two specimens alive and healthy. But he’d had no better luck at getting the seeds to sprout than anyone else had. He had tried heating them to simulate forest fires, freezing them to well below zero to mimic a Norwegian winter, soaking them in water, and dozens of other techniques. His current theory was that there was something wrong with the lab’s pollination technique. They had first used cotton swabs to move pollen from flower to flower and more recently had tried honeybees. Dr. Grundaum suspected that they needed to find the insect that had pollinated these plants millennia ago in Norway, and he had gone off to Scandinavia to research insects and talk to botanists there.

  Yet Gunnar had somehow managed to get the seeds to grow. And he had done it without a million-dollar greenhouse or a world-class researcher for a consultant. Each of the forty-two trees in the greenhouse had started life in a pot on the windowsill in Gunnar’s office. After Gunnar left the company, the lab staff had, of course, tried putting seeds in the same pots on the same windowsill using the same dirt, but without success.

  When he’d forced Gunnar out, Karl had gambled that the company’s researchers would be able to replicate his brother’s work in creating Neurostim. When Gunnar stormed out of his office for the last time, he left behind a hodgepodge of handwritten notes, spreadsheets, and charts. Whether intentionally or not, he also left numerous gaps in his records, which made re-creating his research extremely difficult.

  Frank Chow and his research team from new-drug development had worked hard and had managed to fill in most of the gaps. They now knew how to extract the active compounds from the leaves and seeds of the plants and turn them into useful medicine. In fact, they did better. In his hands, Karl held a now-damp report on the process developed by Dr. Chow’s team; their products were purer and stronger than the extracts created by Gunnar, and they managed to squeeze twenty percent more doses from the same amount of plant material. But without more trees, they could only make enough Neurostim to supply the company’s clinical trials, if they were lucky.

  “So how did you do it?” Karl repeated. He stared at the seedpod for several seconds, as if hoping it might answer him. Then he sighed and walked away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HENRIK HAUGELAND

  Elena had just finished a major investigation and was delighted to take some time off and fly to Norway with Noelle. Six days after Noelle’s invitation, the two of them sat on a bench on Aker Brygge, a wharf in downtown Oslo that had been renovated into a boardwalk edged on one side by fashionable shops and restaurants. On the other side lay the deep-blue waters of the Oslofjord, the long fjord that led from Oslo’s waterfront to the North Sea. A bright July sun rode high in a cloudless sky, despite the fact that it was nearly seven o’clock in the evening. Thousands of Norwegians and tourists were taking advantage of the long day and good weather—eating, drinking, boating, walking, fishing, shopping, or just sitting in the sun.

  The two women had arrived that afternoon. Noelle was lethargic and didn’t feel like doing much except lying in her hotel room and killing time until the evening, when they were scheduled to meet with Gunnar’s accountant contact, a man named Henrik Haugeland. But Elena, who had traveled to Europe often enough to know that the best way to combat jet lag was to go do something vigorous, had persuaded her friend to get out. They’d spent a couple of hours wandering around the Vigeland sculpture garden in Frognerparken and then headed to Aker Brygge for a seafood dinner at Lekter’n, an open-air restaurant on a converted barge that was permanently moored to the dock. The food had been good—the shrimp in particular were better than anything either of them had tasted in America. Now they relaxed at the small blue-and-white lighthouse where they had agreed to meet Haugeland. Ferries, tour boats, and pleasure craft maneuvered around each other in the dark azure waters of the busy harbor. The ancient Akershus Castle looked down on them from a strategic seaside bluff on the other side of the water. Noelle still felt tired, but that wasn’t a bad feeling to have while relaxing by the sea after a good meal.

  A man of about seventy approached them. He matched the description Gunnar had given them: medium height and build, well-trimmed gray beard, very tan, bright-blue eyes hiding behind old-fashioned round glasses, and an enormous nose. “Hello, I’m Henrik Haugeland,” he said in accented but clear English. “Am I correct in guessing that you’re Elena and Noelle?”

  “You are. I
’m Noelle.”

  “And I’m Elena. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” said Haugeland. “Gunnar told me only a little about why you are here. You are accountants who have come to audit Bjornsen Norge’s books in secret for a lawsuit?”

  “Sort of,” answered Noelle. “I’m here as an accountant; Elena is mostly here as a tourist. I’d like to do some auditing work on the company’s customer accounts, and you’re right that it should be kept confidential and that it has to do with a lawsuit.”

  He stroked his beard. “Our office is not large, so you’ll be noticed and will be the subject of much gossip and speculation. If you want to do your audit confidentially, you should visit after business hours or on the weekend.”

  Noelle nodded. “That’s what I thought. That’s fine; it will give me plenty of time to play tourist with Elena.”

  Haugeland smiled warmly. “No trip to Norway would be complete without a trip to a real Norwegian farm. Would you be interested in visiting mine for a good dinner after you’re done looking at documents on Saturday?”

  “I’d love to,” said Noelle.

  “Me too,” added Elena.

  As it turned out, Noelle didn’t get a chance to look at the documents until Saturday anyway. Bjornsen Norge’s accounting team was at the office until late in the evening every day that week, calculating their second-quarter numbers. It bothered Noelle to lose time, but at least the files were up-to-date and in good order by the time she finally did get to them.

  On Saturday morning, Haugeland picked up Noelle and Elena at their hotel and drove them to Bjornsen Norge’s facility. Sitting in the front seat with him was a boy who looked to be about twelve, whom Haugeland introduced as his son, Einar. “Some of the records you may want to see are in stacks of boxes,” Haugeland explained. “I hurt my back on the farm last week, so Einar has volunteered to help you move boxes and find what you are looking for.”