Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) (8 page)

She considered the company’s
options. If she were Tate, she wouldn’t let this one go. She’d hire a private
investigator to track down Celia Gerig and fire a shot across ViraGene’s bow.
But, what? She didn’t have the evidence to connect the missing employee with a
competitor.

Not yet
. She wondered if
whatever Ben was going to show them would help build a case against ViraGene.

Leo glanced back at her, his face
tense as he waited to see what Ben had in store.

Ben pushed open one side of a set
of large metal doors and held it while they passed through and entered a
brightly lit, cavernous room with a concrete floor and a high ceiling. The temperature
dropped a good twenty degrees as Sasha crossed the threshold, and she shivered
involuntarily.

“Sorry,” Ben said, “I should have
told you to bring your coat. The vaccines are supposed to be refrigerated. We
get them into the walk-in as quickly as we can, but have to check them in
first, so we keep it cool in here.”

The room was three-quarters
empty. The final quarter was filled with rows of wooden pallets. The pallets
were stacked high with cardboard boxes. Each pallet was wrapped in a giant
sheet of what looked to be industrial-grade cellophane.

Men and women wearing fingerless
wool gloves hurried back and forth between an open loading dock bay and the
columns of pallets, wheeling dollies piled high with more cardboard boxes.

“Another truck full of vaccines
came in this morning,” Ben explained. “So, we have to check them in, make sure nothing’s
been damaged in transit and that the shipment quantity matches the manifest. Then,
we restack them and wrap them up for pickup by the Army.”

“You open every box?” Sasha
asked.

Ben nodded. “It’s a pain in the
rear, but the contract requires a manual check of each box of vials. That’s the
government for you. And that’s the other problem we’ve got.”

He crossed the room and walked
past the tall rows of pallets and headed for the far corner where one lonely,
wooden pallet had been shoved up against the wall, its clear wrap torn open.

“What’s wrong with that one?” Leo
asked.

“Well, Jason over there got his
keys caught on the wrap as he was walking by this morning,” Ben said, pointing
to a tall, muscular man whose keys dangled from his belt.

Jason kept his head down and
moved in the self-conscious way of someone who knows he’s being watched, every
motion exaggerated.

“And, thank God he did. Because
as he was rewrapping the pallet, he noticed that a box lid was open. So, he
went to close it and, sure enough, two vials were missing.”

“Missing?” Sasha asked, her
stomach dropping with dread.

“Yup. That box was two vials
short. So, Jason called me. I came down here and went through the rest of the
boxes myself. Each pallet holds 144 boxes. Every box on this pallet is missing
two vials. That’s 288 missing doses that we know of.” Ben flung his arm wide,
gesturing toward the stacks of pallets. “Who knows how many more there are? I’m
going to have to have these guys work mandatory overtime and recount six
pallets.”

“Why just six?” Leo asked. “Why
not all of them.”

Ben removed his glasses with one
hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because Celia Gerig checked in a
total of ten pallets, according to our records. One is right there, with the
missing doses. Six more are somewhere in the stacks.”

“And the other three?” Sasha
asked, afraid she knew the answer.

“The other three were picked up
on Friday and taken to Fort Meade,” Ben said.

Colton pushed the
brown, wilted lettuce around on his plate with the side of his fork. He
realized it was the dead of winter, but for the amount of money he was paying
for a salad he expected fresh greens.

He snapped his head up and
scanned the room. When he caught the waiter’s eye, he gestured with a finger.
The young man gulped visibly and trotted over to the table, walking as quickly
as he could without breaking into a run.

“Is everything okay, Mr. Maxwell,
sir?” he said, the crisp white napkin draped over his arm, still fluttering
from his rushed approach.

“No, everything is not okay,
Manuel,” Colton said, reading the waiter’s name from the small gold bar pinned
to his starched shirt. “I ordered the fresh grilled salmon salad, did I not?”

Manuel’s eyes darted to the salad
plate to confirm that he’d brought the right dish. Then, they clouded with
confusion, and he answered slowly, “Yes, sir.”

Colton speared one soggy leaf of arugula
with the tines of the fork and held it up for Manuel to inspect. “Does that
look fresh to you?”

“No, sir,” he said immediately.

“That’s right. It does not. Take
it back and bring me a new one,” Colton said. He released the fork, and it
clattered to the plate. He congratulated himself on resisting his initial urge,
which had been to fling the lettuce at Manuel’s face.

Relief flooded the waiter’s face,
and he ducked his head and scooped up the plate. Colton realized Manuel had
been expecting to be pelted with greens. It appeared the story of how he’d
returned cold chowder at his last visit had made the rounds of the Club’s wait staff.

He didn’t need to draw attention
to his temper. He indulged in a small measure of regret for his decision to
dump the crab chowder over Marta’s head.

“Thank you,” he called to Manuel’s
retreating form in a belated effort at damage control. Then he turned to his
lunch companion and smiled. “How’s your sandwich?”

“Fine,” he said, mumbling the
words around bites of his Reuben. Then he returned the sandwich to his plate
and dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

Colton’s guest took a long drink
of water and then said, “So, I have what you want.”

Colton flicked his eyes to the
nearest occupied table. Two trophy wives were babbling about their tennis
lesson and paying no attention to anyone else.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

The man—who’d told Colton to call
him Andre, even though they both knew he wouldn’t be using his real
name—shrugged. “I think so. You’re the expert, not me.”

Andre reached into his jacket
pocket and pulled out a small glass vial. He handed it across the table, “The
rest of it’s in my trunk. You can inspect it there. Either way, payment’s due
in full.”

Colton stared at the ampule in
his hand. The man was insane to just pull it out in the middle of the dining
room.

He scanned the room to ensure no
one was watching them, then hissed, “Don’t worry, Andre, your money’s in my
trunk.”

Colton slipped the vial into his
briefcase as adrenaline coursed through his body.

“Forget the salad. Let’s go.”

He stood and waited for Andre to
gulp down the last bite of his sandwich, eager to get on with his plan.

Sasha let
Connelly drive her car back to Pittsburgh so she could work the phone. Her
representation of Serumceutical had taken on a new urgency. The familiar sense
of all-consuming drive filled her.

Connelly glanced over at her. “You
look jazzed,” he commented.

She was sure she did. The stakes
had been raised, awaking her love for competition. ViraGene was going to pay
for what they’d done to her newest client.

She just smiled at Connelly and
held up a finger to silence him as she waited for Naya, her legal assistant to
answer the ringing phone.

“The Law Offices of Sasha
McCandless,” Naya’s voice rang out through the speakerphone, clear, formal, and
businesslike, especially for a Saturday.

Sasha felt a smidgeon of guilt
for asking Naya to come in, especially with all the holiday preparations she
had going on with her church’s pageant, but Naya had assured her it was fine,
as long as she didn’t miss the pageant rehearsal Sunday afternoon.

“Naya, it’s me,” she said.

“I know, Mac, just messing with
you.” Naya laughed. “How’d the meeting go?”

“It was interesting. Oh, you’re
on speaker,” Sasha said, giving Naya an unspoken warning not to ask about her
relationship with Connelly.

“Hi, fly boy,” Naya cracked.

“Hello, Naya,” Connelly said,
unable to hide his smile at Naya’s ribbing. “Have you missed me?”

Before Naya could respond, Sasha
jumped in. “You two will have plenty of time to play your games when we get
back to the office. Naya, I need you to get started on something.”

“Got it,” Naya said, the playfulness
gone from her voice. “Hit me.”

“Okay, first, Celia Gerig is
gone. As far as we know, all of the information on her application was false,
except for her social security number and her name.”

“Will do. Do who know what she
looks like?” Naya asked.

“Ben’s secretary is going to
email you a copy of her personnel file, which includes a digital photo they
took at the distribution center for her employee ID. That’s all we’re going to
have, I think. A name, a social, and a picture,” Sasha said.

“I’ve done more with less,” Naya
told her.

It was true. Naya had what Sasha
considered good people skills. She wasn’t always great at dealing with people,
but she was an ace at two more important things: finding them and reading them.
Naya could track a person down. She could also look at a person and know if he
was lying. Those two valuable traits more than made up for her occasional lack
of tact in her personal interactions.

“Great. There’s more, but start
there, because we have to find this woman. And fast.”

“I hear you. Hey, should I order
you guys some food from Jake’s?”

Sasha checked the time. It was
past lunchtime. After Ben had dropped his bombshell, the three of them had
returned to his office and hammered out their next steps. None of them had been
in any mood to eat at that point.

Now, she felt too wired to eat.
She looked over at Connelly, who was nodding vigorously. His stomach rumbled
loudly, driving home his view.

“Connelly’s stomach says ‘yes,’”
she told Naya. “We’ll be there in about forty minutes.”

“See you later,” Naya said and
ended the call.

Sasha cleared her throat. She had
more calls to make, but first she wanted to take one more run at Connelly.

“Connelly?”

“Yeah?” he said in a tone that
suggested he knew what was coming.

“You have to call Tate,” she said
in a soft voice.

“I know, Sasha. Not yet.”

She watched his knuckles turn
white as he gripped the steering wheel tighter and waited a moment to see if he
would say anything further. He did not.

“Waiting’s only going to make it
worse,” she said.

She’d tried to explain as much
back in Ben’s office. But Connelly and Ben had refused to budge. Ben wanted to
finish checking in the new shipment of drugs, then have his employees open the
six pallets that Celia had handled and recount all the boxes to determine the
extent of the problem before they told anyone.

Connelly had agreed with Ben’s
suggestion because he wanted Grace to coordinate with human resources to finish
all of the distribution center employees’ reference checks to ensure there were
no other Gerig-type problems lurking in the files.

She understood their instinct to
get a full picture of the damage done. But the board of directors had to be
informed and soon. They needed to authorize a move against ViraGene and,
perhaps more critically, they needed to tell the government.

Sasha knew from past experience
representing companies in antitrust, accounting, and bribery investigations
conducted by the various arms of the federal government that self-reporting
always resulted in cooperation and leniency from the governmental alphabet
soup. If, however, a government agency suspected a corporation of stonewalling
or covering up a problem, there would be consequences—usually to the tune of
several hundred million dollars, but occasionally jail time for corporate
management. Sasha was fairly certain her relationship with Connelly could not
withstand distance
and
an orange jumpsuit.

“The board has important decisions
to make, and I want them to do that with full information. Surely you
understand,” Connelly said in a firm voice.

Sasha shook her head. “I do
understand. But it’s really not your call to make. You need to talk to Tate,” she
repeated.

“Later. We’ll get Oliver on the
phone as soon as Ben and Grace finish,” Connelly promised.

Connelly had instructed Ben and
Grace to work around the clock if necessary to get him all the information he
needed.

“Connelly, if ViraGene is behind
this, nothing’s stopping them from anonymously tipping off the government that
the shipment was short. In fact, they probably will. You have to get out in
front of this.”

“We will,” Connelly said, setting
his mouth in a firm line.

Sasha exhaled loudly. She knew
him well enough to know he felt responsible for the theft. And he wouldn’t drop
a problem in the decision makers’ laps without also presenting them a solution.
He was right that they needed to know the full extent of the issue in order to
address it. She just hoped it wouldn’t be too late by then.

“You’re the client.”

She opened the Amazon shopping
app on her phone.

Connelly glanced over at her. “What
are you doing now?”

Sasha answered without looking
up. “Some Christmas shopping.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I have to do it
some time, don’t I? And until you’re ready to talk to Tate, there isn’t much I
can do for you.”

She was working her way through
her list methodically. She started with her nieces and nephews because shopping
for kids was easy and fun and saved the harder people for the end. Connelly
was, not surprisingly, dead last on her list.

“Who are you shopping for?”