Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) (7 page)

“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 town. 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, “After 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.

Ben squeezed past them and sat
behind the desk.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” he
said. “There’s a coat rack behind the door.”

Leo took off his overcoat and
waited for Sasha to wriggle out of her red wool coat, then hung them both on
the rack behind the door and eased it shut.

“Are those your grandkids?” Sasha
asked, leaning in to see the only personal touch in the musty room—a
wood-framed picture of a group of towheaded kids, arms linked, standing on a
beach, squinting in the sun and laughing.

Ben’s tanned face lit up. “Yep,
all five of them.”

“They’re beautiful,” Sasha said.

Ben laughed. “Well, I think so.
Might be biased, though.”

Then he nodded toward the cups. “Help
yourselves. It might not be good, but it should still be hot. That gal of yours
said you’d both appreciate a cup of joe when you got here.”

“That sounds like Grace, all
right. Thanks, Ben,” Leo said.

Leo sipped at the muddy coffee
out of politeness. Grace’s request had been for Sasha’s benefit, not his.
Although he liked the stuff, he didn’t need it. Sasha seemed to be fueled
entirely by coffee; despite being a fraction of his size, she consumed it in
quantities that would have rendered him jerky, shaking, and frenetic.

He looked over the cup at the man
on the other side of the desk.

He’d met Ben once before, when the
older man had visited headquarters to work out the details of his contract and
discuss with the operations team the logistics of filling the government’s orders.
The face-to-face meetings had been unnecessary—the details could have been
worked out over email or by arranging a web conference. But Ben was old school,
a man who believed in handling things personally.

“Thank you for meeting with us,
especially on short notice and while you’re scrambling to meet your schedule,”
Leo said, a gentle nudge toward getting down to business.

Ben’s smile faded, and his skin
drained white under his tan. “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m scrambling on this
Celia Gerig thing.”

Leo found himself leaning forward
at Ben’s ominous tone. Beside him, Sasha put down her cup and mirrored his
posture.

“Oh?” Leo asked.

“I know Grace told you about my
run-in with Celia and how her references were bogus. That realtor lady called
me back this morning: Celia never lived in that house. And I asked everyone on
the warehouse floor today. She never shared any personal information with any
of them. We have no idea where to start looking for her.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. This was
a human resources error, not yours. You’ve done us a favor by ferreting it out.
We’re grateful,” Leo told him.

Ben shook his head. “Don’t be. It’s
about to get ugly.”

“Ugly?” Sasha echoed.

Ben nodded and pushed himself up
from his desk.

“Come see for yourselves,” he
said as he headed for the door.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sasha and
Connelly followed Ben along a long hallway lined with metal filing cabinets.
Sasha took in the worn, thin carpet and peeling paint with one part of her
brain while another processed the information Ben had shared so far: the woman
Grace and Connelly suspected of being a ViraGene plant was in the wind, leaving
behind a fake address, fake references, and a non-working telephone number.