by Jerold Last
"I have a bad feeling that this killing is going to go into the police files as just another Hispanic killed in a drug deal that went bad. If that happens, there's no way it's going to be solved. That is, unless we solve it. Do you have some time to investigate, Roger? Bruce and I can help."
"I liked Eugenio and shouldn't be all that busy for the next week or so. Vincent can cover for me if any new cases come calling. Sure, count me in."
I volunteered to cover the Plantacur angle tomorrow, and also to see whether Eugenio's name cropped up in a quick computer search of recent patents on potential new drugs. Suzanne would talk to people in her Biochemistry Department to find out if anyone had seen or heard anything unusual the previous night. Bruce would look after Robert and serve as the reserves if needed.
Chapter 2. The next day
I made an appointment to visit the Scientific Director at Plantacur for 11 AM, after introducing myself over the phone as a patent attorney, which I actually was before becoming a P.I., and dropping Suzanne's name. She was a scientific leader in Plantacur's field. As a faculty member at UCLA, hers would be a familiar name to any scientist at the company, which had its small corporate headquarters and research facility in an industrial area near the airport. That left me over an hour to search the US and international patent literature, all neatly computerized and indexed on-line if you knew where to look.
It took less than 15 minutes to find and print out three international inventions patented by Eugenio Vasquez and various colleagues from Bolivia. All three were for the use of specific native Bolivian plant species as sources of novel drugs to treat a litany of possible diseases, ranging from cancer to male impotence. I skimmed all three, which were pretty much the same. The only real difference was the specific plant, and the genus and species it came from, differed from patent to patent. By then it was time to go.
I had also looked up Plantacur. The company was a start-up biotechnology firm funded by venture capital, which had been in operation for three years now. They were trying to commercialize a new anti-cancer drug isolated from a tropical plant. In three years they had isolated the active drug from the plant, scaled up production, and initiated pre-clinical toxicity testing. Their corporate goal was to get through toxicity testing successfully and get the drug into Phase I clinical trials. To get funding for more extensive clinical trials after that they would have to either be bought out by a large pharmaceutical company or go public and become a corporation listed somewhere to trade its stock to the public.
Plantacur rented an entire one-story medium-sized dirty beige stucco building with a flat roof in an industrial park just off Airport Avenue. I parked in their small lot and walked into the building unchallenged. The receptionist looked up from the paperback bodice ripper she'd been reading to ask who I wanted to see.
"Dr. James Shantz, the Scientific Director. I have an appointment."
The receptionist picked up a phone, dialed a number, mumbled a few words, and directed me to his office.
"Down the hall to the left, third door on your right."
A tall thin gentleman of about 40 with a mustache, wearing a clean white lab coat, greeted me with an enthusiastic handshake and an offer of coffee, which I shook and took.
We sat and looked at each other across his large, cluttered desk.
"So, what brings you to Plantacur today, Mr. Bowman?"
I had decided how to play this in the car on the way over, thanks to my morning's patent research and my equally firm belief in avoiding the truth when interviewing suspects.
"I represent a scientist from Bolivia named Eugenio Vasquez. He holds several patents on drugs he might be willing to license to your company for development if the price were right. Are you familiar with his work, Dr. Schantz?"
"Call me Jim. Now let me see. You said Vasquez, from Bolivia, didn't you? No, I don't think I've ever been to Santa Cruz. I have no idea who you're talking about."
Santa Cruz is the largest city in Bolivia, but not the only one. Most people in the U.S. would think of La Paz before Santa Cruz. Obviously he was lying or he wouldn't have known where Eugenio worked. But why would he lie about that?
"Let's see what happens if I stir the pot a little bit more," I thought to myself.
"He's authorized me to arrange for licensing one or more of these drugs with you, based on discussions he had back in Bolivia with someone from your company. I don't have the name. Perhaps you can take a quick look at his patents and refresh your memory."
I pulled copies of the printouts from this morning from my briefcase and handed them to him. He skimmed the forms and frowned.
"Sorry, I don't know anything about these drugs, and we're a one-product company until our new drug gets into Phase II clinical trials. That's all we can afford to do with our resources. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting scheduled in five minutes. Good-bye, Mr. Bowman."
I drove back to the office and spent a few hours learning all there was to learn about Plantacur. As a privately owned company, there wasn't a lot of financial information they were required to reveal publicly, so I started with routine credit checks and the company website. The website told me that the CEO was named Robert Schantz, almost certainly a relative of Jim's. I Googled him and sure enough, they were brothers. The drug they were built around looked promising in cell culture studies, but so did a lot of other drugs that were too toxic or ineffective in humans that never made it to the marketplace.
From my perspective the company should have jumped at the chance to buy a few more drugs that they owned the rights to for a reasonable price. An additional new compound or two in the pipeline would be a valuable asset to a small startup company. Jim Schantz had said all of the wrong things to me this morning. Something smelled very wrong at Plantacur. I put this stuff aside to discuss the science with Suzanne tonight.
At dinner that night Suzanne shared her findings.
"Nobody I spoke to saw Eugenio yesterday, and nobody had ever heard of him. A couple of colleagues who left late and had cars in the parking structure thought they may have heard an argument as they got into their cars, but nobody heard anything specific and nobody wanted to get involved. Nobody was questioned by the police, who don't seem to be doing very much I can see to try to solve this murder. I hope you learned more than I did, Roger."
"Something's rotten at Plantacur."
I told Suzanne and Bruce everything I had found out today. Then I handed copies of the patents to Suzanne to read over.
"Do you think there might be anything worth killing for in those patents, Suzanne? That's the only thing that makes any sense to me if this isn't just a random killing of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"I'm not sure you're asking the right question. It probably should be phrased as whether there's anything somebody might think is worth killing for in those patents. And if you ask it that way the answer has to be yes, simply because at this stage of the game any of those three drugs could turn out to be valuable if they work. And if I owned a lot of shares in a company with only one product, and things didn't look too good in the chronic toxicity tests, a new compound or two that I could own and develop just in case would be very attractive. It's a theory we could follow up on. And our list of suspects would be just about everybody in the company with substantial holdings of its stock."
Bruce had a suggestion.
"Is there any way to get somebody into Plantacur undercover who could sniff around a bit and get some ideas whether anyone there seems to be pessimistic about the current compound's long term fate as a cancer drug?"
Suzanne checked the company website.
"They have a position open immediately for a biochemist with a Master's degree and experience in purification and characterization of natural products from plants. Does that sound like anyone we know? He can apply on line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
"I'll call Vincent right now. He's got the right degree, he's a US citizen who's been a professor in Chile a
ll these years doing research in the right area, and he just returned to the USA so could plausibly be looking for a job. He can get the application started immediately, and it will take weeks before they can expect to get letters of reference back from Iquique. If they really need someone they'll probably hire him tomorrow if he seems to know his stuff and let the paperwork come in later."
Ten minutes later I had called him, Vincent had been briefed on what we knew, and he was on-line filling out a job application. The references were all in Iquique. Vincent had met Eugenio in Lima the same time we did and had liked him, so was well motivated to jump into this case.
Chapter 3. The following day
Vincent's interview the next morning went well, and he spent the afternoon with HR people signing paperwork and getting employed, effective immediately. They cut him loose from the paper party at 3 PM, with a brand new company ID, an assigned parking slot, and an appointment at 4:30 to get his work assignment from his new boss, Dr. Poras. In the meantime he was free to wander around and meet the scientific staff he'd be working with. At the postgraduate degree level, there were less than a dozen scientists. They were all colleagues at work and socialized together after work, he was told.
Vincent took advantage of the opportunity and stuck his head into each of the three populated laboratories to say hello and ask what they were working on. In the modern fashion they worked in teams, so there tended to be one or two Ph.D.s and two masters degree level scientists in each laboratory, with as many as half a dozen B.S. degree technicians assisting them. As soon as he demonstrated that he understood the science and the jargon, everyone offered coffee and was eager to talk about their projects. Three meetings later he had met everybody doing anything scientific at Plantacur, and had talked about their research in laboratory-sized groups with five Ph.D.s, including Dr. Poras, and six M.S. degree holders. By then it was 4:30 and time for his one-on-one meeting with his new boss.
Vincent got debriefed that night over dinner at our house.
"My direct report, Linda Poras, is a doll. She's older than you are Suzanne, but can give you a run for the money on which of you is the more beautiful. She has red hair, blue eyes, and all the right curves in all the right places. It's almost enough to make me forget that I'm happily married. I think I'm really going to enjoy this assignment. Anyway, she leads the group that is trying to increase the yield of the drug from the crude plant extract, which mean a lot of analytical chemistry and a lot of tweaking the protocol to try to optimize a multi-step and complicated purification protocol. There's not a lot of creativity there, but just a systematic approach to increasing product yield and purity at each step of the process. My first job is to optimize a chromatography step they use midway through the separation scheme for purifying the drug, which is an unusual peptide, and then scaling it up from milligram to kilogram scale. Dr. Arthur Fleet heads up the analytical chemistry section of our group, and two other Masters level chemists, John Farber and Eloise Gordon, have the same sort of responsibilities I do for different steps in the purification protocol.
"Another laboratory, directed by a plant geneticist Dr. Lorraine Evans, is more into biology. She and two M.S. botanists, Ernest Obregon and Viola Adams, are trying to breed new higher yielding strains of the tropical plant they extract the drug from. If the plant starts out with more of the drug it's cheaper to extract it.
"The third laboratory under Dr. James Schantz, the Scientific Director, and Dr. Emil Proctor is responsible for what they call product stewardship. That means they oversee all of the toxicity testing and preclinical trials all the way through the Phase I clinical trial. They, and two more MS scientists, are responsible for running a lot of the routine acute toxicity tests, contracting out the more complicated stuff like the chronic toxicity tests, and filing all of the required paperwork with the FDA and the other government agencies who eventually have to approve the drug for human use."
"Have you had a chance to get any impressions of anyone yet? Do you have any suspects?" Bruce asked.
"Everybody."
"Good job so far, Vincent," I said. "Please type all this up and e-mail it to me tonight so I have the correct spellings on everyone's names. I'll do background checks on all the scientists tomorrow. I also want to try to make nice with the detectives on this case and see if they have any leads. See if you can start making friends and find some drinking buddies in between chromatography experiments, and see what you can learn at the source. I take it you think we can rule out all the technicians without an advanced degree or large amounts of stock in the company."
"I think we should start out that way. It makes the list a more manageable size. And none of the technicians get stock options or any other kind of equity holdings in Plantacur. They just work for their salaries. Don't forget to do background checks on all of the executives too. I wouldn't rule any of those out yet. But based on your interview with him, Jim Schantz belongs at the top of our list of suspects at this point."
Bruce had been listening carefully to our exchange. Now he spoke up.
"Did you get any sense of Schantz's gender preference in your 10 minutes with him?"
"Funny that you should ask, Bruce. Or did you pick up on something here? I'd say gay and out."
"Maybe I should try picking him up and seeing if we can make beautiful music together, as they say. Vincent, could you find out where he grabs a drink after work or eats his dinner? Call me with that information as soon as you can find out, please. We might get an insight into the executives through him, don't you think?"
That was all we would get done today.
Chapter 4. The fourth day
My day started early with credit checks and criminal record examinations for each of eleven scientists and five executives at Plantacur. I took a break at ten to drive over to my appointment with the officer in charge of the Vasquez case, a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective named Brown. While UCLA had its own police force, major crimes were usually turned over to the LAPD, which had better resources and the trained personnel to handle complex investigations. Detective Brown offered coffee and a seat at a table in an interrogation room with the door left open. He began by interrogating me:
"You're a licensed P.I., right?"
"Yeah, I am."
"And you used to be a homicide detective with the LAPD, right?"
"Yeah, I was."
"Do you ever regret the change?"
"No, not really."
"I checked you out with a few of the long timers who knew you when you were still a cop. They all said some version of you could be a wiseass, but you were an excellent cop. That's enough for me. What can I do to help you today?"
"I'm trying to follow up a few leads on the Eugenio Vasquez murder case. My wife found the body. I was hoping that we could share some information and help each other out."
"Some of our stuff is confidential, and has to stay that way. I'll be glad to share the rest of our information with you. Quite frankly, we're looking at this killing as a random drug deal that went bad. Unless we get real lucky, we're not going to solve it. My partner and I have a current caseload of almost thirty homicides. We have to prioritize where the effort goes. If you think you can help, welcome aboard; we can use any free assistance we can get, especially from a retired pro.
"OK, you show me yours and I'll show you mine."
"My wife and I recognized the victim. We met Eugenio a year ago in Lima at a scientific meeting Suzanne had been invited to, and spent some time sightseeing with him and his cousin. She asked me to check things out like what he might have been doing here in Westwood. I checked on patents, and sure enough he has three on possible new drugs from plants that grow in Bolivia.
"If he wanted to make any money from these patents he needed to license one or more of the drugs to a company in a developed country that could afford all the research and testing it would take to make his drug profitable. So we're trying to follow up on whether he had any contact with local drug co
mpanies or biotech firms that might be in the market for a new pharmaceutical drug. If he did, we figure that someone could have gotten greedy and there might be a motive for murder there."
Here's where I was going to get a clue whether Detective Brown was a prospective ally or was going to blow me off. From his perspective there wasn't any way I could know about Pharmacur.
"I think the LAPD is going to stay with the drug deal gone bad theory officially, at least for now. Unofficially, you might want to check out a local biotech firm over by the airport named Pharmacur. Vasquez had that name written on a piece of paper he was carrying around with him. The only other information I've got that I can show you are the technical report from the CSI crew and the coroner's report. No copies allowed, no taking anything out of this room. You've got 15 minutes to look the file over. Knock yourself out."
This was a lot more than I expected. I scanned the contents of the folder quickly, then read a few of the pages a lot more carefully. Eugenio had been shot five times from very close up in the chest and torso with a .32 caliber semi-automatic. Death would have been quick, within a minute or two of the shot that went through his descending aorta. That was a pretty small gun for a big drug dealer, but it was also an easily concealed weapon that could be deadly in the hands of a good shot. He had plenty of cash in his wallet, so robbery can be ruled out. The wallet also contained I.D. and a packet of condoms. He had a Bolivian passport in another pocket. There were no drugs found on or around the body, or in his bloodstream.