A Breck Death (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist Series Book 3)

by Peche, Alec

  “I was also thinking of implying that there was something wrong with Broomfield’s manufacturing just to throw him off the trail.”

  “I don’t like telling lies,” said Angela “and what if that came back to haunt us in terms of stimulating these crooks to do something foolish.”

  “Good points. We’ll just stick with our script.”

  Soon they were at the second company, meeting with the CEO and going through the routine questions of what he knew about Joseph, what were their companies collaborating on, who was the main point of contact between the two companies. Soon they were wrapping up the interview and back in the sedan with their escorts.

  Angela asked Jill, “So what did you think of our interviewee?”

  “He was lying through his teeth.”

  “Yeah, I would have to agree with your assessment. When he never asked us why we were asking the questions we were, it said to me that he was just blowing us off waiting for the interview to end with no real intention of helping us solve this crime. What I really want to know is if he was already on the phone to Mr. Brown.”

  “I think we have to assume he was and just let it go. Why don’t you call Peter and let him know we are on our way to pick him up.”

  Jill dialed the number, Peter had given her. The phone went to voicemail, which Jill saw as a problem. She leaned forward to the front seat and asked that they hurry in their return to Broomfield. She called the main number and asked to be transferred to the company’s security department.

  “Hello, is this the security department?” asked Jill.

  “Yes ma’am, how may I help you?”

  Jill felt like she was overreacting but oh well, “I had a meeting with your CEO about an hour ago. My name is Dr. Jill Quint. He had some security concerns and indicated that he was going to call and request security come to his office. I just tried reaching him on the phone number he gave me and it went to his voicemail. Can you check on him?”

  “Yes ma’am, I was in this office when he called asking for help. I’m going to put you on hold while I try and contact the officer that went to his office.”

  They heard silence as their car got closer to Broomfield’s headquarters. Then the security guard got back on the line.

  “I am unable to reach either the guard or Mr. Garrett.” He indicated he would be ending their call and heading up to the CEO’s office.

  “We’re on our way back to your building, can you have someone let us inside the gates?” requested Jill.

  “Ma’am, I hope nothing is wrong here. I’ll notify the front gate guard to give you entry. See you soon,” said the guard as he disconnected the phone.

  Unfortunately they hit a snag in traffic and it took ten minutes instead of five to reach the front gates of Broomfield. Jill had not received a call from Peter - probably not a good sign.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They parked and entered the building and the security guard approached them.

  “Ma'am, sir, I'm sorry but this building is closed, you need to leave.”

  “I spoke with security a few minutes ago - I'm Dr. Jill Quint. I had a meeting earlier today with Mr. Garrett. Were you able to contact him?”

  "Hi Dr. Quint I spoke with you earlier on the phone. We haven't located Mr. Garrett yet and my guard is missing. I don't have any other manpower to help me conduct the search. I need to protect this building and so I would like you to leave and return to your car so I can lock the doors and keep any strangers out."

  “These two men with me are with the FBI.” Gesturing at Angela, Jill added “We are private investigators. Can we help you with the search?”

  "FBI? We didn't call you here to this building."

  "Sir, we are here providing protection for Dr. Quint and Ms. Weber. We are not here for any business purpose with this company. We could split up into two groups, an agent with each woman and that will give you three people including yourself conducting the search. Are you interested in our help with the search?"

  "Yes, unfortunately you don't have keys to this building and so it really won't do much good to split up into three groups since you can't get through locked doors. I have not unlocked Mr. Garrett’s door yet and I would appreciate some company when I do that.”

  “Let’s go. We will follow you."

  They rode the same elevator that they had earlier and returned to the suite that they had sat in less than two hours ago. The security guard knocked on the door. There was no answer. He pulled out a ring of keys searching for one particular style and inserted the key into the lock. He swung the door open and the room was empty. This was where the assistant had sat earlier. Jill looked at her escort and noticed they had both pulled their guns out of their holsters and were holding them against their leg. The assistant’s office was empty. The guard repeated the knocking procedure on the door to Mr. Garrett's private office. Again, silence. Using a key from that large collection of keys on the ring, he opened Mr. Garrett's door. The agents had made sure that Jill and Angela were behind them and so they couldn't see what was in the office when the door swung open.

  They heard the security guard rush forward and say, "Mr. Garrett, are you okay?"

  Jill and Angela's view was blocked by the agents and so when they heard the guard's words, they were hopeful that the question meant that Peter Garrett was in a position to answer it. Once the agents stepped into Peter's office, they knew Peter would never again answer another question. Like Joseph had been, Peter was laying on the floor arm outstretched with a pained look on his face. Between the bloodless color of his skin, the eyes fixed and seeing nothing, they thought it very likely that he was dead.

  Jill approached his body and checked his pulse. As she had suspected he had none. She felt the skin temperature and tested the rigidity of his fingers. Her superficial examination suggested that starting CPR would be an exercise in futility. Peter had likely been dead at least an hour. His body was cool and his fingers had some rigidity in them already.

  Angela performed the sign of the cross and offered a silent prayer for the recently departed Mr. Garrett.

  "He has been dead for a while. I would suggest you call the police and request their assistance. While on the surface his body has no marks of violence about it, I'm guessing that the medical examiner will find curare poisoning in his system."

  The guard went over to the phone and made the call to the police. They arrived at the company in less than five minutes. The scene was complicated by the presence of the two FBI agents. Homicide detectives arrived as well and each of the five witnesses were individually interviewed by at least two different officers or detectives.

  They noted the absence of the security guard that had been sent to guard Mr. Garrett. A detective returned with the security guard to his office so he could pull the training file on the second security guard. A search of the premises failed to locate the missing guard. The police issued a bulletin to be on the lookout for the missing security guard.

  Eventually Jill and Angela were allowed to leave the scene with their escorts. Adding another law enforcement agency into the mix was going to make this case even more complicated. These detectives were smart and interested in understanding the big picture. Jill thought that there would likely be a joint meeting of DPD and the FBI.

  It was cold and dark when they reached their hotel. Jake had been briefed by his agents as well as the DPD about Peter. He had also informed the rest of Jill's team, as well as David.

  Nathan knowing his woman, had dinner ready for them shortly after they arrived. From her years as the medical examiner seeing a dead body never destroyed her appetite. Angela, always a light eater, might have had her appetite destroyed by Peter's death. Having said a few prayers over his body she seemed at peace with the situation and dug in to Nathan's delicious dinner.

  Jill wanted to update her murder board and refocus everyone on RMCT. She was convinced that they had created massively false clinical data for the trials they conducted. She also wondere
d about their influence with the approval committee at the FDA. Over the last two decades, huge strides had been made to keep committee members ethical and objective about decision-making for drug and device approval, but there were occasional ethical failures.

  After dinner and with a glass of wine, they all gathered at the suite’s dining table to discuss theories. Jo and Morgan had compared RMCT Corporation to other clinical trials companies. Many smaller companies were not traded on a stock exchange. RMCT had gone public several years ago and its initial public offering generated $56M. Since that IPO, the company had a growth rate of over one hundred percent every year.

  “Have you found another company with this same growth trajectory?” asked Angela.

  “We haven’t even found a company that had sustained growth over multiple years of twenty percent let alone one hundred percent. So this is so unusual it should be sounding warning bells everywhere,” remarked Jo.

  “Did the management narratives add any new information? As I recall you said these are usually the most valuable part of any report,” Marie asked. “Have they had the same management team in place this entire time?”

  “The reports are interesting,” Jo commented. “I wish I could have seen a similar report before they went public. They have had the same management team in place this entire time and unlike many similar companies, upper leadership doesn’t have an advanced degree in science, medicine, or even business. Only their requisite clinical employees have degrees. They had replaced their chief medical officer about four years ago. The previous physician died from a drug overdose.”

  Marie queried, “What kind of drug?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t look that far, but perhaps you could find that on the social media side. If we think that this company has totally falsified data, then they had to have the clinical employees on board for that falsification, right? I don’t know the FDA rules for drug testing, but it seems like you would have to conduct some tests under the supervision of a physician and nurse. I would bet that reports submitted to the FDA would require their signature. So how would you go about hiring clinical employees that are willing to falsify data? How would you test for that during the interview without giving the game away?”

  “From my point of view, I would study them on social media first. I might purposely look for drug addicts as long as the firm wasn’t involved in testing narcotics or other drugs of addiction. ”Marie predicted, “You would be amazed at what you can tell about someone - drunken antics or huge tirades and pictures forever capturing their personality. Many addicts have financial problems as it takes money to feed the habit. If you’re trying to care for patients with your nursing or medical license while addicted, then you’re already breaking the Hippocratic Oath, so that is a vulnerability to exploit. Once you worked for the company, they could control you by threatening to report you to a board that might cause you to lose your license for a while or forever. If you paid them a good wage - slightly above average, then your only worry would be an employee overdosing and killing themselves. Their death would result in paperwork for the company, but really RMCT would likely just move on and find another employee.”

  “Yikes, that is a cynical point of view,” said Angela.

  “Just trying to think like a criminal and how you go about exploiting people, which is what you would want to do to gain their silence and acceptance for an illegal operation.”

  “Jo, what else did you find in the management reports?” asked Jill. “Do they spend much of the report speaking to their drug regulatory approval consultancy? Can you tell what portion of their revenue is due to this division of the company?”

  “It seems like there are three pots of money: clinical trials, regulatory approval assistance, and ongoing drug royalties post approval. The first two sources account for perhaps twenty percent of revenues, the ongoing royalties is by far their biggest revenue source.”

  “It feels like there is a neat little package here,” Jill speculated. “The clinical trials company falsifies data, uses its influence to gain FDA approval, than sits back and enjoys the royalties for years to come. If they are a one billion dollar company then roughly eight-hundred million of it is due to ongoing revenues. How many total employees are there? It must be in the thousands for a company this size. I would think at least half would know the results of the clinical trials. That has to be a lot of employees to be judged lacking ethics. Do we have a sense of how well employees were paid? Is that in any of the annual reports or in company gossip? What is the relation of Sundin, and Fisher to the RMCT Company? Is there any relationship or are they just hired guns of Brown? Finally, who was the security guard sent to protect Peter? These are the unanswered questions for me.”

  “Jake, what have your people found in Joseph’s electronics?” asked Marie.

  All eyes moved over to Jake, leaning against the wall while he had been listening to Jill’s team discuss motives and approaches. He straightened up and said, “As was noted earlier, someone turned off his account before his murder was discovered. David Gomez was modest in describing his computer talents as good. He can run circles around my guys and we should all be grateful that he has never turned his skills in an illegal direction as I bet he would be successful. He was able to find all emails and other files deleted from Joseph’s accounts. In those emails are a series of communications between him and RMCT. They were seeing problems in terms of efficacy with a new treatment that had been on the market for two years. Patients were dying of their cancers at far higher rates than the published studies. Joseph initially thought he had a problem in manufacturing, so he evaluated that first. However he began receiving test results from cancer patients - a cancer marker. He could see from these patients that the therapy failed to impact the cancer antigen. Then he pulled up the test results generated by the RMCT trials and the antigen went to zero in several test patients, who died of diseases other than cancers.”

  “That is highly unlikely,” stated Jill. “Cancer rarely behaves in that manner. Tell me more about patients dying from other causes; explain what you mean - what other causes?”

  “There were a lot of accidents. This was attributed to the harsh side effects of cancer drugs. Some patients were accidentally hit by cars, fell off of cliffs, a few overdoses, falls in their homes resulting in brain bleeds, etc.”

  “I would like to look at that data,” directed Jill. “During my career, I participated in several research studies. Usually I would be looking for pathological changes resulting from different therapies. I may have been involved in say thirty to fifty studies, so it was significant. I can’t recall in any of those studies accidental deaths being a part of the equation. People undergoing chemo, generally that are weak enough to fall, are not out hiking paths with cliffs. I’ll give David a call and see if he’ll move over to this suite now. I want to study the data with him. Even though it is getting late in the evening, I would like to look at that now.”

  Jill made a call to the lobby to see if there was additional space on the hotel floor for another guest. They were again happy to accommodate as the hotel floor was filling up fast with people connected to Jill. She then called David and explained her questions and the hotel room availability. He agreed and the agents made quick arrangements to move him and his technology. More chairs were added to the suite along with another table. It was becoming quite the busy hub of the investigation.

  After David and his fellow nerds were set up in the space, he took another look at the updates on the murder board.

  “I knew Peter for at least fifteen years including his wife and kids. This killer has got to be stopped so that we bring justice to Joseph, Peter and perhaps even patients from some of the drugs that Broomfield Pharmaceuticals created. The deaths weren’t their fault rather it was RMCT Corporation. I understand why you don’t want to announce that you are on the trail of these killers, but we need to stop Broomfield from appointing another CEO and putting his or her life at risk. We may also n
eed to recall some of the drugs manufactured by Broomfield.”

  “David, based on my experience of how these cases go, I think we may have it solved in the next twenty-four hours and at the latest forty-eight hours,” Jill predicted. “It’s then up to the FBI to find these suspects and arrest them. Broomfield will have to name an interim CEO for regulatory reasons. Angela and I will not interview them so I think they will be safe for the time being. As to the patients, it is unlikely that forty-eight hours more of ineffective therapy will make a clinical difference. If there are dangerous side effects demonstrated in those clinical trials or that have happened since by the data in Joseph’s computer, let’s find it tonight and then we will assess our risk with patients. Does that sound like a plan?”

  “Yes, I really want these bastards that have killed Joseph and now Peter.”

  Nathan offered everyone a late night sugar boost in the form of a triple layer chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. It was much appreciated by all and everyone got back to work building the case for the FBI. Jake had his own people working as well, but he secretly thought that Jill’s team would win the race on this investigation. They really had sharp and unique skills. His team did not include a physician or a social media guru like were in this room. He could offer a profiler, but that wouldn’t likely solve the case any faster. They thought they had their man and motive. They just needed a few more pieces of evidence to lay it out for an arrest warrant. Jake knew he could arrest Jason Brown simply because he was on the Most Wanted list, but he wanted to send him to jail for the rest of his life based on the criminal activities he had been involved with over the last decade. Since Mr. Brown seemed to have a lock on following the four women, if they could gather enough evidence tonight he would need to use them as decoys in the morning the flush out Brown and Associates.

  With David’s help, Jill poured through the data that Joseph had saved on his computer. Joseph had been reviewing clinical trials data going back six years. Broomfield pharmaceuticals had many drugs on the market. Only about a quarter of them had been tested by RMCT Corporation. That went a long way to reducing David's anxiety about getting drugs off the market.