On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  This was clearly a three-hour round-trip ride and meeting that was a complete waste of time, plus I was exposing Marie to more danger by having her meet with me.

  “Has anything unusual happened since we talked last?’

  “No,” she said, “but by Friday it won’t matter anyway.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That’s our last day. There’s a cocktail party Friday afternoon, and we’re going to get our bonuses. This is one time I won’t mind being unemployed; I’m glad it’s over.”

  “Marie, is there anyone else I can talk to, someone you trust, who also works there? Maybe works in the other room … the lab?”

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t know … maybe Dr. Costello … but I don’t know.…”

  “Who is Dr. Costello?”

  “He’s a surgeon. He’s not there all the time, maybe once a week, if that. I don’t really know him, other than to say hello.”

  “So why should I talk to him?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure that you should. But he got into an argument with Dr. Gates the other day; he was yelling pretty loud. I think he’s upset with some things that are happening there.”

  “Do you know what he’s upset about?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of surgeon is he?”

  “He’s a neurosurgeon; he operated on my cousin last year for a tumor. It was benign, thank God. She’s doing really well, just has a numb area on the side of her face, and her speech is a little bit slurred. You can hardly notice.”

  “This tumor was in her brain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Costello is a brain surgeon?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell is a brain surgeon doing in the annex building?” I asked, but Marie didn’t know the answer.

  It was just possible that I did.

  Sean Lassiter could not believe what he was reading.

  A messenger had just delivered the package he had been waiting almost a year for, the results of the stage-two study of Amlyzine. The results that were going to make Lassiter almost unimaginably rich.

  But that was not what he was reading.

  What he was reading was a four-hundred-page report, the summary page of which said that Amlyzine performed barely better in the study group than a placebo did in a comparable group. What that summary page said, in so many words, was that the drug was a failure and not worth pursuing. And certainly not deserving of getting to stage three.

  Lassiter dug into the backup data, poring through it quickly but thoroughly, with a practiced eye. He was hoping, even expecting, to find evidence that the summary page was some kind of bizarre accident, perhaps a mistake by some confused staffer.

  But that was not what he found at all. The data supported the conclusion completely, and was perhaps even more devastating than that summary.

  Amlyzine was a failure.

  Lassiter was under no illusions about the drug’s powers; he knew better than anyone that it was ineffective in dealing with Alzheimer’s. But that was not what the report was supposed to show. It was supposed to be a ringing endorsement of Amlyzine’s value, so dramatic that it would send the stock in Lassiter’s company soaring.

  This actual report, with the results it was reporting, was going to wipe out what little value the stock currently had. Which was to say that it would destroy him, sending him down a financial hole from which he could never dig out.

  If this report were to stand, his last chance was gone.

  But still, it had to somehow be a mistake. Gates was in on it; in fact, it had mostly been his idea. He was going to get rich as well; Lassiter had promised him as much. There was no way Gates would have signed off on this report.

  Lassiter called Gates at the hospital, but was told he was out. He then called on his cell phone, but got no answer. He kept calling at both places, leaving the repeated message that it was urgent that Gates return the call, a matter of life and death.

  Finally, at three o’clock, Gates called back, and sounded calm and unworried. “Sean, sounds like you’ve been trying to reach me.”

  Lassiter was somewhat less calm. “You’re goddamn right I was trying to reach you! Have you seen this report?”

  “Of course I saw it; I signed off on it. It’s unfortunate it didn’t turn out the way you had hoped.”

  Lassiter was so confused and enraged that he thought he might be in some kind of parallel universe; he simply could not believe what he was hearing.

  “The way I hoped? The way I hoped? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know goddamn well we had an arrangement. The drug was supposed to pass with flying goddamn colors!”

  “Sean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re obviously upset, but maybe with more research the drug can be salvaged.”

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Lassiter sensed that maybe Gates was talking this way for some other reason; perhaps he feared that the line was tapped. But the front of his mind was so angry that there was no room for this word of caution to reach his mouth.

  “You’re not going to get away with this, Gates. I swear to God, I will tear you apart.”

  “Sean, I don’t appreciate being threatened like that.”

  “You are a dead man, Gates. You got that? If this isn’t fixed before it goes to the FDA, you are a dead man!”

  Lassiter slammed down the phone in frustration and anger, his mind racing for a way to deal with this disaster.

  Gates put down his phone and laughed.

  “There must be a God. I’m still richer than Lassiter.”

  That’s how Robby Devine started our phone conversation at nine o’clock in the morning. My connection to the riches of Wall Street reached me on my cell phone in a doctor’s waiting room. There were four signs in the room forbidding cell phone use, almost as many as there were insisting that copayments be made at the time of the visit.

  I stepped out into the hall and took the call. “What does that mean?”

  “It means the drug test was el floppo. No chance to make it to stage three.”

  “That can’t be,” I said.

  “Oh, it be. It definitely be.”

  “It was announced?”

  “Announced?” he asked, as if wounded. “Who am I, John Q. Public? I am not without connections.”

  “And you’re positive? Because this makes absolutely no sense,” I said, still trying to understand how this was possible. Lassiter’s manipulation of the trial to send his company’s stock up was the one thing I was positive about, and now that theory had just been shown to be totally wrong.

  “Richard, Lassiter’s stock certificates aren’t worth the paper you wipe your ass with. Whoever gave you your information is not someone you should be relying on for your future investments.”

  I thanked him and went back into the waiting room, just as I was being called. That, of course, didn’t mean I was going to be seeing the doctor anytime soon; it just meant I had made it to stage two of waiting-room hell.

  I had never actually bothered to get a regular New York doctor, so I was seeing Dr. Stacy Fairbanks on a recommendation from my across-the-hall neighbor. I had always been slightly uncomfortable with the idea of going to a female doctor, but this time it didn’t bother me. My pants weren’t coming down, and I wasn’t even putting on a paper robe.

  It was twenty-five minutes before Dr. Fairbanks came in, smiling and offering her hand in introduction. After maybe twelve seconds of chitchat, she asked what seemed to be my problem.

  “Were I to answer that, I’d be here all month,” I said. “So I’d like to limit this visit to one specific problem area.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My head.”

  I showed her the area just at the edge of my scalp. “You can see the scar. I cut my head in an auto accident. It bled some, but not that much.”

  She looked at it, and confirmed that she could see it. “It’s healed quite well. Is it bothering you?”

 
“No, not at all. I just want to know if you can tell if it’s a wound consistent with an auto accident.”

  She pulled back, puzzled by my statement. “I don’t understand. You just told me you were cut in the accident, and now you’re asking if that’s possible?’

  “I think it might have happened another way, but I need you to tell me if I’m right.”

  “What other way?”

  “Surgery. And then possibly the cut was reopened sometime after that and made to look like it happened in the accident.”

  She looked like she had about a hundred more questions, but didn’t ask them. Maybe she was thinking about all the other rooms filled with patients she had to see, patients with real, normal problems. No doubt by now she thought I certainly had a problem with my head, but it was not on the surface.

  Instead of asking more questions, she just moved forward and checked out my head again, feeling the scar gently with her fingers as she looked.

  “If I had to guess, I would lean towards surgical incision, but that is just a guess. It could have happened either way.”

  “How can I find out for sure?”

  “That depends. What kind of surgery might you have had?”

  “Brain surgery.”

  “Mr. Kilmer, I’m sorry, but this is not making any sense.”

  I explained that it was a police matter, and I gave her Kentris’s number if she wanted to contact him. I also assured her that I would be willing to pay for whatever was required to answer my question.

  “A CAT scan would probably do the trick,” she finally said. “It would at least show the presence of scar tissue, which would be present after surgery of that kind.”

  “Could you set it up and read it?”

  “I can certainly set it up,” she said. “Between the radiologist and I we could read it, as long as what you’re describing is all you want to know.”

  “That’s it.”

  I hassled her until she made a phone call that set up the procedure at three o’clock in the afternoon, in the radiology lab of the hospital she was affiliated with. She said I could come in or call her for the preliminary results at five o’clock.

  That gave me a couple of hours to obsess and worry about the still-missing Allie, and I did exactly that.

  I showed up at the lab at two forty-five, filled out the paperwork, and was called in right away. The scan itself took less than a half hour, and was less uncomfortable than I had expected. I was reminded of the joke that my father used to tell when I was little, that claustrophobia was the fear of Santa. I never thought it was particularly funny back then either.

  Instead of waiting, I immediately went back to Dr. Fairbanks’s office. The results weren’t there yet, and the receptionist told me they would be transmitted by computer. I was offered a seat in the dreaded waiting room, and told that the doctor would call me when she had the results and had gone over them.

  It wasn’t until five-fifteen that I was called in, and it wasn’t by the receptionist or nurse. Dr. Fairbanks herself came out to get me, asking me to come into her office.

  When we got to her office, she walked me over to the computer, which had an image on it that I assumed was the inside of my brain. “Mr. Kilmer, you are not aware of ever having had brain surgery?” She seemed incredulous at the prospect, and I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  “By your question, I take it that I’ve had the surgery?”

  “You absolutely have.” She took her pen and pointed to an area on the left of the screen. “You can see the scar tissue here.”

  “And there can’t be any other explanation?” I asked.

  “I’m not a neurosurgeon, but I would certainly say no. And my reason for saying that is more than just the scar tissue.”

  “What else is there?”

  She pointed again, a little higher up on the screen, at what looked like a small dark area. “Can you see this?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  She looked away from the screen and directly at me. “It’s a foreign object lodged in your brain.”

  “Based on your previous interest, I thought you were the person to call,” Gates said. “I appreciate your coming over so quickly.”

  “What have you got?” Kentris asked.

  “Well, we’ve just concluded the drug trial for Mr. Lassiter’s company, the one you asked about. You had gone over the data.”

  “I know which one you’re talking about. How did it come out?”

  Gates hesitated. “It’s been turned over to the FDA and will be announced publicly soon. So I would ask that you keep what I am about to say confidential until that announcement is made.”

  “I’ll do my best. How did it come out?”

  “By any standard, it was a failure. The drug demonstrated no efficacy at all.”

  Kentris didn’t know what “efficacy” meant, but by the context in the sentence, efficacy sounded like a bad thing for drugs not to have. “Did that surprise you?”

  “I try and shy away from predictions, but in general terms, a failed trial is not a surprise. The majority of them end in this fashion, as evidenced by the fact that cures for intractable diseases are so rarely found. But Mr. Lassiter was certainly surprised.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s industry courtesy for the submitting company to get an advance copy of the report, and that was done in this case. I was out the morning Mr. Lassiter received his, and he left me a series of near-hysterical messages. I’ve saved the tapes, which I can play for you.”

  “I would have expected him to be upset. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Upset and professional, yes, but that’s not how he sounded. In any event, when I returned to the office, I called him. Because of his tone on the messages, out of an abundance of caution I recorded the call. If I may, I’d like to play a portion of it for you now.”

  “Go ahead,” Kentris said.

  Gates moved the mouse on his computer to “play” and clicked it once. A part of the conversation between him and Lassiter came through the speakers.

  Gates:

  Of course I saw it; I signed off on it. It’s unfortunate it didn’t turn out the way you had hoped.

  Lassiter:

  The way I hoped? The way I hoped? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know goddamn well we had an arrangement. The drug was supposed to pass with flying goddamn colors!

  Gates:

  Sean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re obviously upset, but maybe with more research the drug can be salvaged.

  Lassiter:

  You’re not going to get away with this, Gates. I swear to God, I will tear you apart.

  Gates:

  Sean, I don’t appreciate being threatened like that.

  Lassiter:

  You are a dead man, Gates. You got that? If this isn’t fixed before it goes to the FDA, you are a dead man!

  The conversation ended with the sound of Lassiter slamming down the phone, after which Gates turned to Kentris.

  “I don’t know if the threat itself is actionable, but it is certainly worrisome.”

  “Did you know him prior to this?” Kentris asked. “Is this reaction at all typical?”

  Gates shook his head. “We’ve seen each other at business functions, but that’s about it. I certainly never oversaw a test of one of his drugs before.” He smiled. “And never will again. I’ve heard stories about him being volatile, but nothing that would have led me to expect this.”

  “What are you asking me to do?” Kentris asked.

  “I don’t know, but at the very least I would appreciate any advice you can offer. I’m sure you have more familiarity with this kind of thing than I.”

  “You can file charges, though that should be with your local police. It may be necessary, but it may just prolong the incident. He might have been blowing off steam, and that would be the end of it. If you file charges, it will be something for you to deal with for a very long time. Having said that, I am not in
a position to advise you either way.”

  Gates nodded and thought about it for a few moments. “I think I’ll hold off for now. But may I forward copies of this tape to you?”

  “For what purpose?”

  Gates shrugged. “I don’t know.… I’d just like you to have it.”

  Kentris said that it would be fine, and then left. On the way back to the station, he took time to reflect on his certainty that Gates was lying, and why that might be.

  He believed that the test was a failure and that the phone conversation was real. But that was all he believed. He did not see Gates as an innocent; Lassiter’s reaction was such that he probably had good reason to believe the fix was in on the study, and that Gates had not lived up to his end of the bargain.

  But that wasn’t all he didn’t believe. There was no way that Gates chose Kentris to confide in because he was seeking advice, or because of Kentris’s previous interest in the case. If Gates were really worried, he would have gone to the local cops, the people he knew would be empowered to take action that could help and protect him.

  And either way, as the head of a large company, by now he would have surrounded himself with security guards.

  The most logical explanation was that Gates was setting Lassiter up for something, and was using Kentris to facilitate it.

  He didn’t know what Gates was setting Lassiter up for, but it scared the hell out of him.

  There are a number of advantages to an Ivy League education. One that most people don’t focus on is that it provides one with a group of friends, often lifelong friends, who are usually smart, accomplished, wealthy people.

  I hadn’t remained close with too many college friends, though the emergence of e-mail had rectified that somewhat. But I had been in a fraternity, and I felt that even though I had not seen or heard from many of them over the years, they would be there for me if I needed them.

  I needed at least one of them now, though I didn’t know which one.