As part of a clinical trial that the FDA had no record of, because according to their records, the Clifton Clinic wasn’t conducting any clinical trials or approved to do so.
Mimi . . .
Had I even known her? I guess not, guess we shared nothing other than card games and an occasional meal. I considered her a friend, a close one even, and I could never have suspected any of this about her.
“I don’t like that look, Mrs. Fletcher,” Mort said sternly.
“What look?”
“The one that makes me warn you to stay away from Charles Clifton and the Clifton Clinic.”
“Oh, that look . . .”
“I’m serious, Jessica.”
“You made your point, Mort.”
“Doesn’t mean I won’t lock you up to prevent you from becoming an accessory to murder.”
“And to just whose murder would I be an accessory?”
“Your own.”
Chapter Twenty
“You forget to tell the good sheriff something, my dear?” Harry asked me, after Mort had taken his leave to get, he claimed, some real work done.
“Did I?”
“I saw your face light up when I mentioned LGX Pharmaceuticals, girl.”
“Girl?”
“Figure of speech.”
“Oh, is that what it is?”
“Don’t change the subject, and spill the beans.”
“My friend George Sutherland . . .”
“Ah, yes, the chap from Scotland Yard,” Harry said, in the worst British accent I’d ever heard.
“He’s here being treated for a rare form of cancer.”
“Don’t tell me: at the Clifton Clinic.”
I nodded.
“As part of another clinical trial that doesn’t exist.”
I nodded again.
“LGX Pharmaceuticals is based in Rhode Island, Jessica,” Harry said, checking his watch. “Too late to drive there now. What say I stay overnight and we set out fresh in the morning?”
I stood up and Harry rose stiffly in my wake. “Where to now?”
“I think I’ll take a walk, Harry, while you see if Hill House has any rooms available.”
“I already checked in. Got the last room. Want to make sure I’m good and rested for our drive to Providence tomorrow.”
“You were using Uber last time when I was in New York.”
“I rented a car for the occasion,” Harry told me. “Good thing I’m getting free miles.”
“Hope you wrangled an upgrade.”
“Hey, it’s your dime.”
“Good,” I said, “then you can give me a lift to the Clifton Clinic.”
Harry scowled at me. “Bad idea, in case I didn’t make that clear.”
“George Sutherland started treatment today. I just want to see how he’s doing.”
* * *
• • •
Harry agreed, on the condition he got to wait for me in the car. My head was swimming, as I was having difficulty keeping hold of all I had learned. I thought I might have been pursuing two separate investigations, but now I believed they were intrinsically connected, with the Clifton Clinic being the key.
“You can’t park here,” I warned him after he’d parked in a tow zone flush against the entrance.
“What’s the worst they can do?”
“Tow you.”
“But I’m not leaving the car.”
“Tow it with you still inside, then.”
“Do that and they’ll be facing the wrath of a truly higher power.”
“The Almighty?”
“No, Hertz. You don’t want to mess with them.”
A polite receptionist greeted me inside and looked up George Sutherland’s info on her computer. Then she handed me a pass and summoned a uniformed security guard to escort me up to the fourth floor, where George currently was.
One thing for sure was that Charles Clifton had spared no expense in constructing the flagship facility of Clifton Care Partners. All the furnishings were clearly top-of-the-line and state-of-the-art, as upscale as any medical facility I’d ever seen.
I was issued not a physical ID card but an electronic chip containing all the information the receptionist had entered. The chip was fitted inside a black housing I wore dangling from my neck.
The fourth floor contained a slew of what could only be individual treatment rooms or suites in which patients received their drugs amid an assortment of luxury furnishings, which included a flat-screen television and a sitting area constructed to make their friends or family members as comfortable as possible while they endured however long the treatment procedure took. Most of the doors on the hall were open, the closed ones likely indicating that treatment was under way at this time.
The security guard stopped before one of these closed doors and knocked before waving his key card before a colored grid, which flashed from red to green as the door clicked open. He opened it slowly, poking his head in.
“Mr. Sutherland, I have Mrs. Fletcher here to see you.”
“Well, send her in,” I heard George’s voice call.
I entered and closed the door behind me.
“How nice of you to stop by, Jessica,” George said to me.
He was seated in a plush leather reclining chair, facing a television tuned to the BBC America, no drugs, IV poles, or anything of the sort anywhere in evidence.
George read my mind. “Came down with a fever. Probably just a touch of the flu or something, and they can’t start treatment until I’m back to normal.”
“The guard addressed you as ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘Chief Inspector.’”
“Because in America, ‘Mr.’ is all I am, my dear lady.”
“You’ve solved more than your share of crimes in Cabot Cove, George.”
“But we’re not in Cabot Cove, are we. Not technically anyway.”
“I suppose not.”
I’d fully intended to stop in just to check on George’s well-being. But now that I was here, and there was really no well-being to check up on, I couldn’t help myself.
“Would you mind terribly if I reverted to form for a moment?” I asked him.
He flashed a smile identical to the one that had left me smitten in our first meeting back at author Marjorie Ainsworth’s English manor house. “Since when are you not in form, Jessica? I’ve only known you to have a single mode.”
“And right now that mode begs the question, how much do you know about the Clifton Clinic?”
“That it can save my life.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s enough,” he said tersely.
“Thanks to a clinical trial for this drug that’s already being prescribed to treat several other cancers.”
George nodded. “Where are you going with this?”
“According to the Food and Drug Administration, there is no clinical trial—not for Torimlisib or any other, including the one I have strong reason to believe Mimi Van Dorn was receiving.”
George regarded me disdainfully. “Now I see what you meant about reverting to form. I guess I should have said I did mind, because I do. I do mind you making me a part of your latest investigation.”
“I didn’t make you a part of it; you already were. And there’s something else I wanted to tell you. Tripp Van Dorn is dead.”
“The young man we met the other day, the one in the wheelchair?”
“The very same.”
The expression he showed next wasn’t unlike Harry McGraw’s trademark scowl. “And—don’t tell me—you’re convinced he was murdered.”
“Because he was.”
“I don’t suppose we can discuss this later.”
“I’m worried about you now.”
“My fever?”
&
nbsp; “Your treatment. If you could postpone it until I can learn more from the FDA . . .”
He smiled thinly, ironically. “In my current condition, I don’t believe that’s wise.”
“I think Mimi Van Dorn’s murder may be connected to the trial drug she was receiving here.”
“Was she as desperate as I am, Jessica?”
“Entirely different circumstances. And the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the drug she was receiving is the very same one that made the drug you soon will be.”
George pushed his recliner farther back. “Would you be terribly disappointed if I told you I can’t let myself be bothered with such things right now?”
“There’s something wrong with this place,” I said, trying not to sound as if I was pleading.
“Perhaps, but there’s also something wrong with me.”
“There must be other options,” I groped.
“I’ve done the research, my dear lady. There aren’t. This is it, all that stands between me and—”
I felt my throat constrict. “Don’t say it, George.”
“I don’t believe I need to.”
“You need to trust me.”
He rocked his chair all the way forward, leaning close enough to reach out and take my hand. “And you need to trust me.”
I had trouble swallowing, finally managing to gulp down some air. His eyes wouldn’t let go of mine, like in one of those paintings where no matter where you’re standing, the subject seems to be staring at you.
“Perhaps this fever is a blessing,” I said finally. “I should have at least until it passes.”
“To do what?”
I remained silent.
“Jessica,” George started to say, but a series of three beeps followed by a chime stopped him.
I looked toward an LED readout on the wall over his chair, hadn’t even noticed before that the recliner must contain some built-in sensors that monitored his vital signs, currently displayed in large red numbers, including his temperature:
It was 98.6.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Normally when I’m doing research for a book,” I said to Jeffrey Archibald late the next morning, “it’s not the company’s CEO who gives me the guided tour.”
“Well, when I told my wife J. B. Fletcher was stopping by for a visit, it was all I could do to stop her from showing you around our facility herself.”
“I’d love to meet her, all the same.”
Archibald breathed a genuine sigh of relief. “You have no idea how much that means to me, Mrs. Fletcher. You see, I took the liberty of inviting her to stop by my office later, allotting plenty of time for you to get a leg up on that research for your next book, which centers around pharmaceuticals. Have you a chosen a title yet?”
His question made me feel like a fourth grader who’d been caught in a lie, having given no thought at all to what was a complete fabrication in the first place. “I’m thinking,” I started, “of Cold White Death. Think your wife might like it?”
“Especially if she gets to tell her book-club friends that she heard it from you firsthand.”
“Then we’ll make sure she feels free to do so, even more when it goes up for sale on Amazon.”
Archibald’s smile reminded me of a fourth grader’s, too. He was somewhere in his late forties, but looked a good decade younger than that. There was nothing about the frequent smile he flashed that looked fake or forced. In short, the kind of person you get to know, and like, in remarkably short order.
“You just got me off the hook for having to cancel our last vacation,” Archibald told me, flashing another smile.
“It’s a pleasure to be able to return the favor of your seeing me on such short notice.”
I’d phoned LGX Pharmaceuticals—in Lincoln, just outside Providence, Rhode Island—from Harry’s rental car after leaving George Sutherland. Fortunately, it had been too late in the day to start his treatment, giving me a bit more time to gather the evidence I needed to convince him of what I believed to be the corrupt, and even deadly, dealings of the Clifton Clinic. Of course, my determination was tempered to a large degree by mixed feelings over the single-minded resolve I could never get past. After all, if this drug really was George’s only chance at survival, did I want to risk taking that away from him? Would it be worth my looking the other way, for the first time ever, if it meant a man of whom I was fonder than any besides my husband, Frank, got to live beyond the time stamp cancer had left him?
When Harry McGraw and I set out for LGX Pharmaceuticals early this morning, I honestly hadn’t settled on a decision yet. Perhaps I’d learn nothing at their corporate headquarters to further my investigation into what was really going on at the Clifton Clinic, and this would all be moot. I have to say this was the first time I’d ever pursued an investigation in which a good part of me wanted to fail, wanted to have fallen victim to no more than a writer’s imagination.
The CEO of LGX checked his watch.
“How are we on time, Mr. Archibald?”
“Fine, and even if we weren’t, I couldn’t let you leave without giving you a glimpse of the most advanced assembly line anywhere in the industry.”
“Right here in Rhode Island?”
“Right here in Rhode Island.” Archibald nodded, clearly proud of, and eager to show off, his company’s crowning jewel.
That crowning jewel, it turned out, was housed behind thick glass on an assembly line twice the length, and four times the width, of a football field. Automated assembly lines were hardly anything new; car factories had been using robots to perform menial line tasks for decades. The difference here was that LGX Pharmaceuticals had taken that principle several steps further.
Instead of being moored or anchored to a fixed slot, a number of the “bots,” as Archibald called them, moved independently about the line, performing quality-control checks. Kind of like giant, man-sized, sophisticated versions of the robotic vacuum cleaners capable of memorizing room layouts and intuitively deciphering how to avoid getting trapped in a corner or against a piece of furniture.
He stopped his narration for us to watch four of the wheeled, eight-foot-tall contraptions rolling about the various stations of the line below that molded, stamped, cut, apportioned, packaged, boxed, and labeled the dozen drugs manufactured at this facility. Exposed cables ran from their narrow torsos up to their steel shoulders, looking like muscular, rubbery sinews. Their legs were combined into a single base, and their arms were capable of full articulation to the point, Archibald claimed, they could retrieve a single pill that had spilled off the line with their pincers without crushing it. The robots whisked about, stopping at every juncture where a red light garnered their attention to signal something awry. We watched as they removed the snares, snarls, and clogs of cardboard or stuck foil wrapping, moving on to reboot dispensing systems that had shut themselves down to avoid overheating.
“I can’t help noticing, Mr. Archibald,” I noted, unable to keep my vow to not become confrontational until I absolutely had to, “that something seems to be missing down there on your assembly line.”
“People,” he conceded.
“It does occur to me that robots can’t lobby to join a union, don’t complain about working conditions, and never barter over overtime. They also require no medical benefits.” I did my best to look amiable when I resumed. “You seem committed to removing people from the equation here, Mr. Archibald.”
“Believe it or not, Mrs. Fletcher, I lost sleep over that notion. Would you like to know how I got it back?”
“Very much.”
Archibald turned his gaze toward the line, our reflections captured side by side in the glass, looking almost translucent. “It would seem on the surface to be a measure to reduce our costs, thereby increasing our profits.”
“Isn’t that what this is?”<
br />
“Not when you consider that saving so much money and time in the manufacturing process has allowed us to hire that many more salesmen, R & D techs, and scientists, not to mention increase our research budget fivefold. I’d venture to say that the jobs we’ve lost down there on the line have been replaced in even greater numbers by employees we’ve been able to place in equally vital areas, to the delight of our workforce as well as our shareholders and investors.”
“What about the men and women who used to stand at those stations? What happened to them?”
“We retrained and retasked as many as we could. But I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs. Fletcher—we did have to let quite a few go, and I’m sure the generous severance packages we provided were small consolation.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“The simple, undeniable, and at times regrettable thing about business is that all companies, in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond, operate based on the principle of the zero-sum game.”
“Somebody wins and somebody loses,” I elaborated.
“In this case, far more winners than losers across the board, not to downplay the reality of those who came out on the wrong end. Still, numbers don’t lie, and since we’ve replaced three hundred workers with a pile of diodes, microchips, rubber, and steel, not only has our productivity increased, but our safety record has also improved.”
“Of course, since there aren’t any humans about to get injured anymore.”
“I was speaking more of contamination and the potential risk of a dangerous drug reaching drugstore shelves. On their best days, human workers can’t even begin to replicate the pace and efficiency of machines. And machines don’t carry germs, infections, or environmental toxins capable of ruining entire manufacturing lots.”
Something changed in Jeffrey Archibald’s expression. It seemed he’d tired of either the tour or defending his actions. Both, most likely.
“Let’s adjourn to my office, Mrs. Fletcher, so I can make sure you leave here with all the information you need.”
* * *
Murder, She Wrote--Murder in Red Page 15