Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4)

by Miller, Melissa F.

“I told her that. I also told her to get in here tomorrow and start doing them herself. I reminded her that the government doesn’t play around with security on its contracts and that she doesn’t want to be the one who loses this one for us. Trust me, she got it,” Grace said.

  Connelly nodded his approval.

  Grace continued. “So, Ben picked up the phone and started calling around. None of her references check out. Either the telephone number is bad, no one answers, or the person who picks up the phone has never heard of Celia Gerig.”

  Connelly considered this news. “That’s not good.”

  “It gets worse. Ben called her number she’d listed as her home phone and got a recorded message that the number had been disconnected. Then he got really worried, so he drove over to the address she’d provided as her residence. He said if she ever lived there, she’s cleared out. It looks abandoned. He peeked in the front window, and there’s no furniture. There’s a realtor’s sign stuck in the lawn saying the place is for rent or sale. He called the realtor, but she hasn’t gotten back to him yet. Celia Gerig’s gone.”

  “Is anything missing?”

  “Nothing obvious, according to Ben. He’s still at the office, going through all the files, looking for something out of place, but, so far, he hasn’t found anything. He had a weekend shift scheduled to come in tomorrow anyway, so he’s going to go back in the morning and take another look with fresh eyes.” Grace’s grim voice matched her expression.

  Connelly and Grace fell silent.

  “And you’re convinced a competitor is behind this? ViraGene?” Sasha asked.

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s them. Who else would it be?” Grace said, echoing what Tate had said.

  Connelly nodded. “Almost certainly. Okay, call Ben and tell him Sasha and I will be there first thing in the morning.”

  “You don’t want me to come?” Grace’s disappointment was splashed across her face.

  “I need you here to ride herd over the Human Resources folks.”

  Connelly gave Grace one of his most heartwarming smiles. It started at the right corner of his mouth and tugged his lips into a grin. It seemed to ease the sting, and Grace smiled back.

  CHAPTER 5

  Michel was dying. He could tell by the foamy, red bubbles of blood that escaped from his lips with each breath he managed. The stranger had punctured his left lung.

  The stabbing had been swift and impersonal. A heavy knock at the thick, wooden door. Then, when Michel had opened the door, in a flash, the man had forced him backward and into the kitchen of the old stone farmhouse. Once inside, the attacker had produced from his pocket a curved hunting knife and plunged it into Michel’s chest with no comment, no fuss. Then he’d wiped his knife on the checkered tea towel hanging near the sink and had walked out, pulling the door closed behind him.

  Sweating and gasping, as pain seared through his chest, Michel collapsed into a chair at the table where he’d eaten breakfast just hours ago and considered his options. He was hours from the nearest modern medical facility. He would die before he reached care.

  He supposed he could stumble down the hill to the village below and either die on the rocky path or, if he was very lucky, on the couch in Docteur Bonnet’s parlor.

  Mais non, Michel decided, exhaling and spraying blood across the table, he would die here, in the farmhouse where his grandfather had been born.

  His breaths were coming faster now and with greater effort. He wished he had time to uncork a bottle of Cabernet from Monsieur Girard’s vineyard, but he would have to settle for turning his chair slightly, so he could see the cold, white sky through the window. He paused to fix in his mind an image of the fields as they looked during the summer, when the rows of sunflowers turned their faces upward to the golden sun like a class full of schoolchildren watching their teacher at the chalkboard.

  As his pulse thudded toward the finish line, Michel shivered. He stared out the window and considered the actions that had brought him to this point. Although he didn’t know the man who had stabbed him, he knew for a certainty why he’d been attacked and left for dead: the Doomsday virus.

  But, he had known from the beginning that he was taking a risk by selling the virus to the American. The potential rewards had made the risk worth taking. He could no sooner undo what he’d done than will the sunflowers up from the frozen ground.

  And now he would die without bouncing his Malia on his knee one last time. Without feeling her warm arms wrapped around his neck as she snuggled in for a hug, smelling of crayons, and milk, and sunshine.

  Regret is just wasted energy, he told himself, drawing a last, shaky breath as the sun and the dormant fields faded, first to gray, then to black.

  Saturday

  CHAPTER 6

  Leo glanced across the front seat of the Passat at Sasha. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, and her eyes were fixed on the stretch of Route 28 that unrolled in front of them. She wore sunglasses to combat the early morning glare of the sun off the snow banked along the sides of the highway. But he knew that, behind the lenses, her eyes would be dull and tired.

  He was worried about her. After their meeting with Grace, they’d driven back to the lake house just long enough to pack up, shut off the water, and pick up her car. Then, they’d caravanned to Pittsburgh, gliding into the city on quiet streets in the dead of night.

  By the time they fell into bed it was nearly three o’clock.

  Leo hadn’t spent the night at Sasha’s condo in over a month, and he’d been surprised how out of place he’d felt there.

  He’d had trouble falling asleep, and Sasha’s restlessness hadn’t helped. For most of the night, she’d flailed, tossing and turning, and mumbled about killers and killer flus in her sleep.

  If he hadn’t been worried she’d misinterpret his action, he’d have gone out and slept on the couch. But, he didn’t want to introduce any more distance between them.

  I shouldn’t have convinced her to take the case, he chastised himself.

  But it was too late now.

  Earlier, over bowls of baked oatmeal with dried fruit, he’d tried to suggest they find a labor and employment lawyer to handle the investigation into Celia Gerig’s background. She’d waved him off and changed the subject to the recipe for her oatmeal, proudly gesturing to the slow cooker where the steel-cut oats had cooked while they’d slept—or tried to, at any rate.

  Leo knew one thing for sure: if Sasha was changing the subject to her cooking, she was uncomfortable with the topic at hand.

  He’d been selfish to ask her to take the case. So what if Tate were inconvenienced? Shouldn’t Sasha’s happiness come before some random corporate big shot’s?

  He cleared his throat. “So, what’s in this town? Old boyfriend?”

  Sasha had insisted on driving to their meeting in New Kensington, saying she was familiar with the town.

  She took her eyes from the road to look at him, and he smiled to let her know he was kidding.

  “Hardly,” she said, smiling back at him for a moment.

  Her smile stirred a feeling of tenderness, a lump in his throat.

  “Then what’s the connection?”

  She turned her attention back to the road and said, “During law school, I did a clinical placement with a community economic development organization, helping small businesses incorporate in depressed former steel towns. I had clients in New Ken, Oil City, Montour, all over. I spent a lot of time driving this stretch of road a decade ago.”

  “New Kensington’s depressed?”

  “It was back then, but there were lots of local micro-businesses getting off the ground,” she said.

  “And now?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest.” She signaled a turn and took the exit ramp. “I guess we’ll find out. So, tell me about ViraGene. Why is Grace so sure they’re spying on you?”

  Leo took in the homes on the edge of t
own. Tired-looking brick ranchers sat next to small aluminum cottages with metal awnings that had once been white but were now streaked with black grime. A lopsided chain link fence ran along a cracked sidewalk. Someone had strung a row of large Christmas lights across the top in a halfhearted attempt at making it festive for the holiday. Tall weeds poked up between the cracks.

  “Your economic development project doesn’t look like it stuck,” he commented.

  Sasha glanced out the window herself then repeated her question.

  “ViraGene, Leo?”

  “Right, sorry. We have a history with ViraGene. Well, let me back up. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole is highly competitive and secretive. If you can find out what another company’s working on, you might be able to beat them to market with a drug. If you can hire away their sales reps, you can gain access to their client lists, price lists, all that stuff. So, it’s not unusual for companies to try hard to hire away one another’s employees. Most employees have to sign noncompetes, but I don’t have to tell you that those are often ignored.”

  “Sure,” Sasha agreed.

  “So, we’ve had multiple instances, even just in the short time I’ve been here, of ViraGene hiring our employees, and those employees trying to walk out the door with client lists, price lists, you name it. Mainly, they were hiring sales representatives, but we heard rumblings that they were talking to the scientists, which made the board nervous.”

  “Did you go after them?”

  “Oh, yeah. Tate got fed up with the nonsense and started firing off temporary restraining orders left and right. That’s one of the reasons the legal budget is frozen.”

  “Yeah, I imagine litigating a bunch of TROs got expensive pretty quickly,” Sasha commented.

  “Apparently. So, after Tate’s legal offensive, ViraGene got creative. One of our security guards noticed a guy on the cleaning crew walking out of the building at one in the morning with papers stuffed inside his shirt. He detained the guy and called me. Grace and I interviewed him. He said he’d been approached by a man outside the building who called him over and said he’d pay five hundred dollars for any paperwork he found in the wastebaskets. He was supposed to meet the guy at a deli in Takoma Park, right across the border in the District. We took him down to the deli to identify the guy, but he said he didn’t see him. The guy probably got spooked.” Leo shrugged.

  “But, that wasn’t necessarily ViraGene,” Sasha said.

  Ever the lawyer, Leo thought, suppressing a chuckle. She was right that they couldn’t prove ViraGene had been behind it, but he knew in his bones that they had been—just as Oliver and Grace were likely right that they were behind Celia Gerig and her fake references. The pharmaceutical industry was cutthroat, and no one played dirtier than ViraGene.

  “That’s true, but the timing suggests it probably was. We had just signed the contract to supply the government with the vaccine. The cleaning guy incident happened the day after the deal was made public,” he explained.

  “What happened to the cleaning guy?”

  “He was probably fired, but I can’t say for sure. We terminated the contract with the company and hired a new outfit,” Leo answered.

  A green traffic light marked the first major intersection they’d encountered since leaving the highway. Sasha accelerated, and they entered a commercial strip that showed no signs of commerce: an abandoned car dealership; a hair salon that sat in a small Cape Cod building, its sign hanging askew and several letters missing; and a Chinese restaurant with a “For Sale” sign hanging in the front window.

  “Let’s assume it was ViraGene. What could they possibly have expected to find in the trash—a copy of the signed contract?” Sasha said, turning right just past an appliance repair shop that had an “Open” sign hanging in the door but no cars in the snow-covered parking lot.

  “It’s a desperate move,” he agreed.

  As they left the town’s pitiful business section behind, the road grew increasingly uneven and bumpy.

  “Do they have a competing vaccine?”

  Sasha crossed a set of railroad tracks, and the paved surface ended entirely, replaced by snow-covered gravel.

  Leo grabbed the dashboard with his right hand to brace himself as they jostled along.

  “No, that’s one reason they were trying to hire away our researchers—they lack the knowledge base to create a vaccine. We’ve been very good at recruiting away junior academic researchers, and they have had less success with that. They do claim to have created an effective antiviral, though,” he said.

  “An antiviral treats flu symptoms and a vaccine prevents you from catching it in the first place, right? I mean, basically?”

  “Basically. A scientist would cringe, but, yeah, that’s pretty much it. But we’re careful to always say a vaccination will either provide immunity to a specific strain of the flu or lessen the severity and duration of the flu if the immunized person is infected. It depends on the individual,” he said.

  “Yeah. My brothers had all their kids vaccinated for chicken pox, but Siobhan managed to catch it at preschool, anyway. Ryan said she was mildly itchy on one thigh and ran a low fever for a day, but that was it,” Sasha said.

  “That’s actually pretty amazing, if you think about it. I mean, I had the chickenpox when I was a kid. I was a miserable, itchy mess. It was a rotten week stuck at home and taking baths in that pink stuff,” Leo said. He had to resist the urge to scratch just remembering it.

  “Oh, definitely,” she agreed, glancing over and giving him a quick smile, then she was all business again. “If ViraGene has an antiviral now, why would they still care so much about your vaccine? The stockpile won’t have anywhere near enough doses to immunize everyone if the flu does hit. Won’t everyone else be begging for the antiviral?”

  “Sure, people probably would, but that’s not how ViraGene views it. We have a guaranteed contract for millions of doses. They have nothing, unless the virus actually hits. And the government has already come out and said they aren’t going to stockpile the antiviral. Meanwhile, ViraGene has just spent a lot of money developing this drug. I’m sure they’d love to find out that our vaccine doesn’t work as well as we claim, or has some sort of horrible side effect, or that our production schedule is backed up—anything they could take to the government to try to convince them to switch horses.”

  ViraGene’s increasing desperation made perfect sense to Leo. In the short time he’d worked in the private sector, he’d come to realize that shareholder confidence and the markets were the altars at which corporations worshipped. They’d do just about anything to appease those twin gods.

  “I suppose,” Sasha murmured.

  The gravel ended. A heavy metal gate marked the beginning of Serumceutical’s property. The gate hung open, and the parking lot had been cleared of snow. Sasha bumped the car up onto the paved lot and headed across it to the nondescript, low-slung rectangular building that sat at the far end.

  As they neared the gunmetal gray building, Leo spotted Ben Davenport, the collar of his coat turned up against the cold, pacing back and forth in front of the glass-doored entrance. Ben raised a hand in greeting, and Leo saw the worry etched on his face even from a distance. Leo tensed.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said more to himself than to Sasha as she eased the car into a parking spot and killed the engine.

  She looked at him with bemusement in her glittering green eyes. “What?”

  “Never mind,” he said. They’d find out soon enough if his feeling was right.

  Ben walked over to the car to greet them.

  “Leo, Ms. McCandless. Hope the drive wasn’t too bad,” he said with a smile and an extended hand.

  Leo shook the warehouse manager’s hand and searched his eyes. “Piece of cake; the roads are dry. How are you, Ben?”

  “Good. Not used to the cold anymore, though,” he said, barking out a laugh. “Let’s get inside.”

  Ben turned to Sasha and explained, “Af
ter Serumceutical shuttered this place when it ‘right-sized’ operations back in the 90s, I took advantage of the early retirement package and moved down to Clearwater with the Missus. She was none too happy when they dragged me back from Florida to reopen this place as a consultant.”

  Sasha laughed and shook his outstretched hand. “If I were her, I think I would have held down the fort in Florida,” she said with a laugh.

  Leo had to smile as he watched her utterly charm the anxious older man.

  “Don’t you give her any ideas if you run into her, Ms. McCandless,” Ben said, guiding Sasha toward the door with a hand on her back. “Watch your step now. I shoveled the walk, but I might have missed a patch or two.”

  “I’ll be careful. And, please, call me Sasha,” she said.

  Leo trailed behind them, wondering why Ben hadn’t had someone else do the shoveling. He knew that the distribution center was staffed by a skeleton crew, but surely Ben could have found an extra pair of hands to wield a shovel.

  A blast of hot air hit the trio as they entered the foyer, a small square that sat between the outer door and the inner, locked door. Ben fumbled with a key card that hung around his neck on a lanyard and held it up to the reader.

  “How many people are there on the weekend shift now?” Leo asked as the card reader beeped its approval and the door unlocked.

  “Well, we’ve got an even dozen scheduled,” Ben said, holding the door and ushering them in ahead of him. “But, we’re kind of scrambling this morning. We’ve got a situation. I was just getting ready to call you, actually. It’s all hands on deck over in the storage area. Including my secretary, who doubles as the receptionist. So, I’ll apologize in advance for the quality of the coffee and the lack of pastries. Maggie would be spitting nails if she knew what a bad host I’m being.”

  He led them past an empty reception desk to a small, square office. Faint Christmas carols were just audible through the static on an old black radio. The back wall was lined with metal filing cabinets. In front of it, sat a small metal desk that housed a computer, a metal in-box, and three Styrofoam coffee cups. Two fabric-covered metal chairs were jammed between the desk and the open door.