by Emery Hayes
“All but the one who owned Nueva Vida.”
“Esparza’s lying,” Lars said. “About several things.” And he began to list them. “He has documentation.”
“Or he would have been taken off the board already.”
“Exactly. There’s a reason they kept him alive.”
And Nicole thought about Esparza’s single text message to his daughter: Cooperate. Maybe she hadn’t. There were rules in every game played, and maybe Beatrice hadn’t followed them.
“And King is more than we think,” Lars continued. “He’s more than an interested party, more than a father who took a step off the deep end.”
“Whatever the game is, it crushed him.”
“You heard him,” Lars said. “He lamented Beatrice’s compassion. It broke him up that she had died on the board.”
“Almost as much as it disturbed him that his own daughter wouldn’t know a cure for her disease.”
“I got that feeling, too. He was counting on Beatrice.”
“And he was grateful.”
“And saddened. He’d lost hope for his daughter, for Beatrice, and something else.”
Nicole nodded. “And that something else was the breaking point. Guilt of some kind,” Nicole posed. “But not about Nueva Vida. He felt good about what they were doing, but not how they were doing it.”
“Maybe it caught up with him. The ethics. Desperation twists a person beyond recognition sometimes.”
28
Montana had never been on their list. In the past, vacations had been all about getting outside and breathing in nature. Here, skiing was okay, but there were better places for it. The resort was rustic and one of the better places they’d ever stayed, in Joaquin’s opinion, but he knew his mother and father both felt that it was less than they’d expected. This was not a hot-spot destination. Hard to even find on a map.
They were in Blue Mesa for one thing. And it had failed them. Failed Nueva Vida.
Now Montana would always be stained with losing Beatrice. It would be about mistakes, bad decisions, and greed.
“Sometimes, Joaquin, the desire to live life to the fullest clouds our vision.” His father had admitted that he had been blinded by the need for more.
His father was remorseful. He’d cried for Bea. He’d sobbed, his shoulders shaking and his nose running, and in that moment he hadn’t cared what the world thought of him. And it was in that moment that Joaquin realized that he loved his father, even though he despised his weaknesses. It was possible to feel both ways at the same time.
The thick carpeting absorbed his footsteps, and so he arrived at the second-floor conference room unannounced. His father sat in a chair facing the windows. Night was early and pressed against the panes. His laptop and cell phone sat in the chair next to him. His head was down and his hands were folded in his lap, but Joaquin could see that he was thinking. Small lines deepened around his eyes and his lips were pursed.
He looked up and caught Joaquin’s reflection beside his in the window. And he smiled. It was soft and slow and it reached his eyes, and he opened his hands and invited,
“Come here, Joaquin. Come sit next to me.”
He walked around the chairs and stood in front of his father, and he took the hand his father offered, not knowing what was going to happen next. His father was not a physically affectionate guy. He didn’t demonstrate emotion.
“I know this is a fine time to say such things, but better too little too late than nothing at all,” he said. He turned their hands so that Joaquin’s was over his, larger, younger, stronger. “You are at a crossroads. Great things are expected of you, and you will make big decisions too soon. You will choose wisely, learning from my mistakes. That’s the way these things happen. And I will be proud of you. You will respond from your heart. That is the biggest thing about you, Joaquin. Your heart. There is beauty in your care for others and in your sense of right and wrong. And as you grow, you will become less rigid in that. You will bend as the boughs of a tree, but you will not break. Because there is strength in there too.”
Joaquin felt his hand tremble in his fathers. He sat down beside him, and he turned his hand so that he could grip his father’s. It sounded like his dad was saying good-bye. His father sensed his emotions and spoke to them.
“I’ve had another call,” he told Joaquin. “Geneva Sanders, Callon Pharmaceuticals. She wants to meet with me and I’m going.”
“You’re going to give them Nueva Vida?”
“Never. We will meet where Beatrice died because I want them to know the true reason we are together. They will expect the final notes on Nueva Vida. They will expect me to arrive, suitcase in hand, ready to roll with them. Instead, they will receive devastating news. An end to many dreams.”
“You’ve destroyed Nueva Vida?”
“No. Beatrice would not have wanted that. But I am giving it away. As she asked me to do.”
He nodded toward his laptop, closed and silent now.
“I’ve downloaded it on the laptop,” he said. “I’ve attached it to an email that I sent to a small pharm company with a big reputation for integrity. I’ve given all to them, except the final sequence in the code that opens all possibility. I’ve written a second email to a different pharmaceutical company. They will have to work together. They will have each other for checks and balances.”
He opened his hand. A small SD media card rested in the center of his palm, and lines radiated out from it. Long life, as Beatrice had never had.
“If I give this to you for safekeeping, they will come for you too.”
“They’ll never know.”
But his father shook his head. “If they think it’s possible, they’ll come.”
Joaquin felt a heaviness lean against his throat. “I’ll take that chance.”
But his father shook his head. “If I destroy this, than there is no reservoir of knowledge. Nothing to go back to. The puzzle is incomplete. Scientists are good at chasing leads, but I wonder, have I left enough clues?”
He looked up at Joaquin, conflicted, and said, “Your sister can’t have died for nothing.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Joaquin said. “You can answer their questions. Guide them through it.”
There was a long silence that grew heavy and made the air thin, and before he even said his next words, Joaquin knew what they would be.
“Today I will die, Joaquin,” he said. “I don’t want you to be surprised by that. You will need to keep your mind clear, your actions precise. I am counting on you.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“They will stop at nothing else.” He lifted his hands, palms up, and gazed at them as though watching the highlight reel of his life. “I played the game. The stakes were high. I knew that going in, but was distracted by the payout. It would have been huge. Not just financially, but Enrique Esparza, he would be remembered by many here and many to come as the maker of miracles. I wanted everyone to know that. That I did it. That I rose to a position of power, that I was giving the world what no one else could—new life.”
This Joaquin understood. Finally. And not because his father said the words, but because he’d given up the dream. “Don’t meet with them. Tell them you gave it away.”
“They won’t wait. If I didn’t agree, they would come for me. They would be here right now. They don’t like liability, and they are big on canceling debts.”
“With the knowledge public, they would have no reason to kill you. You said so yourself.”
“I was wrong. All loose threads must be tied off.”
“Fight this.”
“I am fighting for Beatrice now,” he said. “She will not have died for nothing, and that is the most important thing.” He looked at Joaquin. “You will live your life, and you will have mountains and valleys, and you will be tested and true. I have no doubt about that. Look forward,” he said. “That was my biggest problem, I was always looking over my shoulder. And the past was alway
s gaining on me. Don’t let that happen to you, Joaquin.”
He opened his hand again, and the media card, a tiny piece of plastic and metal, rested in his palm.
“I’m giving this to you, Joaquin, not to keep but to carry. They are my notes, all my failures and triumphs on my way to Nueva Vida. Twelve years of work. Put it in your pocket as a piece of lint, but remember it when you get to the police. Sheriff Cobain—I like her, Joaquin. She is smart, determined. When you give her this, tell her what it is. Tell her it is not so much evidence as it is life.”
29
Nicole returned from the Huntington for another pass at the evidence. She’d gotten nothing from the family. Dr. Esparza had accepted the court order from Lars and then had shut the door on Nicole’s questions.
“Not now,” he’d said. “Soon you will have it all, but right now it is time for family.”
His tone had been somber. Fitting for such a time, but there was something else as well. A finality beyond the death of his daughter, maybe. It bothered Nicole, but she had respected their privacy. She’d had no other choice.
A secured manila envelope was waiting on Nicole’s desk. It had a forensics stamp on it. Nicole sat down and used her finger to break open the seal. She pulled out a stack of neatly typed pages.
Lars knocked, then stuck his head through her door. “We have something,” he said, and there was a beat to his tone that told her it was something solid.
“What?”
She noticed he had his coat in hand, so she gathered the pages she’d just emptied from the envelope. She’d have to read en route.
“Where are we going?”
“We found Geneva Sanders, CEO of Callon Pharma,” he told her. “The woman in the picture with our victim.”
Nicole pulled on her coat and followed him out of her office.
“That from the victim’s locked file?” He nodded toward the envelope in her hand.
“Yeah. Her digital diary,” she told him.
Would she find the tender words of a girl desperately trying to find her way? Or the agony that came with offering herself as a test subject, putting her father’s ambition before her own? Maybe both.
“You drive,” she said. “I’ll read.”
There were thirty or forty pages, and she skimmed through them. Each carried densely typed words; some pages bore doodles in fluorescent colors. There were photographs, and Nicole paused over these.
“Look at this.” She caught Lars’s attention before he climbed into the driver’s seat.
It was an image of an incision, puckered and pink and still bearing the blue sutures used to close the skin. Beside it, another similar wound was beginning to fade.
“Why keep this one under lock and key?” Lars wondered. There had been several such photos in her open cache.
“Don’t know.” Yet. Nicole leafed through a few more pages and stopped, her hands clenching around the margins of the paper. “Damn.”
Another photo, the same shot, only—Nicole searched for the entry date—a week later.
She heard a sharp intake of breath and a virulent swear slip past Lars’s lips. It matched Nicole’s sentiments for Dr. Esparza and his overreaching handiwork.
The incision was distorted. Swollen and bruised and leaking a yellow. Where the skin had been pink before, it was now a blistering red.
“Looks infected.”
“Yeah, and we just found the reason our victim would take the Augmentin.”
She skimmed for more photos but found only one. It was of Violet King and had been added to the victim’s diary Christmas night, just hours before her death. Violet was wearing a puffy lavender dress with lace embroidery and her hair had been curled and pinned into an updo. The girl was smiling beautifully. There were no words with the entry, but a line of teardrops and hourglasses were stamped across the bottom of the photo.
Nicole climbed into the passenger seat and continued reading. Lars had already turned onto the Lake Road, headed toward the resorts, when she shared the next bit.
“She was tormented by her father’s narrow-minded approach to medicine, but King’s too. She has a whole entry here reflecting on King’s use of his position and money that extended Violet’s life. And she wondered if King’s friendship with her family was based solely on their ability to help his daughter.”
“A reasonable deduction.”
She scanned through the remaining pages and realized several things at once. The vic had clearly defined boundaries. Sports were confined to the journal Joaquin had handed her and Nicole had read through earlier that day, like a log book. Hopes, dreams, and the obstacles to each were recorded in her digital diary. She’d written about her father and her hopes that he would come to see his patients as people. She felt it was the first step to seeing the world’s population as deserving of an equal level of care. Some entries despaired that her father would ever reach that depth of compassion. She’d written about her mother. By far, they were the thorniest entries in the collection. More love than resentment, but barely. Her mother cared too much about material things. Things that would waste away. Beatrice had acknowledged at one point that her mother loved her enough to poke around in her business, although it was clear the victim had had more respect for her father, who didn’t see much beyond his work, and when he did emerge from that, however briefly, his vision was blurry at best. Her siblings received little notice in the diary, perhaps because those relationships had been good, noncontentious. It seemed that the victim saved this space for matters that bothered her most. To that end, she’d made only two mentions of Big Pharm companies and their involvement on the fringes of her life. Beatrice didn’t like to be paraded around like a show dog. She didn’t want to be examined. She would allow that privilege only to her father and King.
“Listen to this,” Nicole said, and began to read, “Dated December twenty-fifth. ‘The Dynamic Duo showed up for cocktails tonight. Michael says they’re necessary. The Big Six got together and decided an independent broker for dad’s research was the only way to go, but they give me the creeps. The woman especially. She’s touchy, and I mean the kind where she reaches out and puts her hands on people. And keeps them there too long. I avoid her. Michael says I should introduce myself. When I asked him if it was because I’m the product, he got all soft and sorry, which I knew he would. He doesn’t like looking at me that way, and I like that he doesn’t like it.’”
“Benjamin and Charlene,” Lars said.
“Yes,” Nicole agreed. She peered over the pages and through the windshield. They were scaling the mountain pass that would spool them out at the entrances of several swanky resorts. A sideways look captured the icy Lake Maria below them and in the valley next to it the turbine farm under tall vapor lighting. “Here’s the other one,” she said, and turned back to the pages, rustling through them to the very end.
“Geneva is here. And someone else. The guy from Axis Labs. I liked when they were silent. When we were working only with Michael. But now they get to have a look at me. Just a meet and mingle. I told my father no. Of course he didn’t listen. Michael agrees it’s the only way to handle these things. It’s business. I don’t have to talk, but it’s preferred. I don’t have to stay more than twenty minutes. Of agony. I’ll hate it. Them staring at me, trying to look under my skin. That’s what labs are for. Blood draws and biopsies. And that’s what they’ll get. Why do they need more?”
* * *
Sanders was staying at a five-star resort north of town, more than a mile from the Huntington and closer to the crime scene. Lake Maria was spread out behind the three-story chalet and was part of the ambience, with an oval skating rink marked by bumpers and over which were strung colored lights. Hills both west and east of the lodge were thinned of trees for tubing and sledding. An outside deck with bistro tables and butane heating lamps was a popular alternative to the indoor lounge with its inglenook fireplace and artificial heating. They found Geneva Sanders there, bundled into a down parka and
sipping a latte. She was a short woman, sturdy in stature, and had a fleck of whipped cream at the corner of her mouth. She sat alone, a book on the table but closed. Nicole noticed she favored memoirs. This one of a fallen giant in the music industry.
Sanders noted their approach and didn’t wait for introductions.
“Sheriff Cobain?” She sat up in her tall seat and offered her hand. Nicole took it.
“You were expecting us,” she said.
“Yes. Your deputies recognized me from a photo on Beatrice’s cell phone.”
“And told you we’d be coming and why?” Nicole asked.
“Oh, they tried to be discreet about it, but I was in the lobby when they came in. And of course I had a few questions of my own. It’s a little disconcerting, happening upon the police circulating your photograph.”
Nicole nodded.
“How well did you know Beatrice?”
Sanders thought about that. “Not as well as I do my grandchildren, but certainly better than the daughter of a friend.”
“Why?”
“She was our star pupil. And as is often the case, we had a lot more to learn from her than she from us.”
“Then you know about Nueva Vida?”
“Almost from the beginning,” she confirmed.
“But Dr. Esparza worked exclusively with Michael King.”
“We’re always snooping through each other’s pockets, but that’s the nature of the pharm business. In any case, Esparza gave Callon first pass. We declined, but we hadn’t lost interest.”
“Why didn’t you jump at the chance of buying out Esparza’s super cell?”
“Michael was far more desperate than us,” she said. “For reasons I’m sure you’ve begun to understand. When business becomes personal the lines of protocol are blurred. Ethics are weighed against the needs of the heart.”