WASHINGTON, D.C.
Private investigator Robert Brixton wasn’t anxious to start the day.
The desire to remain in bed and pull the covers up over his head had been present ever since his youngest daughter, Janet, had been slaughtered by a terrorist bomber in an outdoor D.C. café two years earlier. Although he’d managed to help bring the brains and money behind the terrorist attack to justice—which was supposed to bring “closure” according to those who enjoy bandying about that word—he awoke each morning with vivid visions of Janet being blown up along with a dozen others in the name of God knew what, some warped religious fervor or sense of geopolitical justice? While those visions had been with him every morning since, they’d become more prevalent of late and lasted longer.
Flo Combes, the love of his life—he considered himself too old to use the term “girlfriend,” live-in or otherwise—had tried a variety of ways to help mitigate these painful episodes, but had come to the conclusion that she was losing the battle. She’d sought mental counseling to help her formulate approaches to Brixton, and had put some of the professional advice into play, but ultimately she was told that the only hope for him to ever come to grips with his sorrow, and occasional bouts of rage, was to work with a psychologist or psychiatrist and hopefully banish the demons that lived within. She’d finally come to the point where she urged him—no, begged him—to see a psychotherapist, her pleas falling on deaf ears.
Not that she was surprised by his reticence to seek the help of a professional.
Brixton had been a cop, a good one, and had a cop’s mentality that tended to dismiss “shrinks,” who he claimed ended up in that business only because they were nuts themselves.
He’d put in a short tenure on the D.C. police force before heading for Savannah, Georgia, where he retired after twenty years on that southern city’s MPD, and became a private eye. Savannah was also where he’d fallen in love with the feisty, attractive Flo, like him a transplant from Brooklyn, and who gave as good as she got to the crusty, cynical Robert “Don’t Call Me Bobby” Brixton. Flo told friends that while Brixton could be difficult, he could also be “adorable”—her word for him—and they’d been together ever since, aside from occasions when Flo decided she needed a break from his jaded view of the world and the people who populate it. Those separations never lasted long. The fact was that they loved and needed each other.
Getting up this day was no different from the others since Janet’s murder except that there was one added reason to dread it. He’d finally agreed with Flo that a session or two with a psychotherapist might be helpful, or, as she’d couched it, couldn’t hurt. She’d made an appointment for Brixton with one of the professionals she’d consulted, John Bradford Fowler, whose office was in his Capitol Hill apartment.
“I don’t trust somebody with a name like Bradford,” Brixton groused as he joined Flo at the small table in their kitchen after showering and dressing.
“His name is John Bradford Fowler,” Flo countered. “What’s wrong with his name?”
“What is he, some nerdy little guy with a beard and big glasses?” Brixton said.
“He happens to be a very handsome man, and a very smart one, too.”
“What’s he want me to say, that I’m crazy?”
“Robert, stop it!” she said. “All he wants is for you to talk about what’s bothering you. By discussing it you can hopefully put it to rest.”
“Put it to rest? How do I put to rest the fact that some whack job blows herself up and takes my daughter with her?”
“That’s why you’re seeing him. You can work out those feelings so that they don’t dominate your thinking all day, every day.”
He guffawed. “Fat chance of that,” he said as he slathered an English muffin with cherry preserves.
The conversation continued in that vein until Flo put a stop to it. “Robert,” she said with finality, “you go see Dr. Fowler and see whether he can help you. If he can’t, that’s fine, but you at least have to try. You can’t continue living this way, and neither can I.”
He knew that she was right and didn’t argue the point any further. They left the apartment together, she on her way to open Flo’s Fashions, he to keep his appointment with Dr. John Bradford Fowler. As he headed for Fowler’s office he felt as though he was about to face the guillotine. “John Bradford Fowler,” he muttered to himself as he searched for a parking space within walking distance of the psychologist’s apartment and office. He’d faced many tense situations as a cop and private investigator but had never felt the anxiety he suffered as he stood in front of the townhouse and summoned the courage to climb the short set of steps and ring the bell.
* * *
Lobbyist Eric Morrison also had reason not to want to get out of bed that morning.
He and his wife, Peggy Sue, had entertained sixteen people at their expansive home in Chevy Chase the previous night, and Eric was hungover. Eric and Peggy Sue were known for their parties—or “soirees” as she preferred to term them. While their gatherings always included friends, Eric also used them to cement relationships with those who could do him and his lobbying group some good, congressmen, congressional staffers with clout, and media types.
It had been a pleasant evening. Drinks flowed freely, a sumptuous array of hors d’oeuvres were passed by two uniformed servers from the caterer, and a young musician played popular tunes on the living room’s black grand piano. But halfway through the party Morrison received a call from the VP of the Pharmaceutical Association of America’s biggest and most powerful member.
“Can you talk?” the VP asked, cued by the sounds of music and cocktail party chatter in the background.
“Not at the moment,” Morrison said. “We’re entertaining guests and—”
“This is important, Eric.”
“Can’t it wait until morning?”
“Yes, it can, but no later than the morning. Meet me at eight at Hains Point at the eastern end of Potomac Park.”
“What’s this in reference to?” Morrison asked, put off by the VP’s tone.
“I’ll tell you in the morning, Eric. Get back to your guests.”
“Who called?” Peggy Sue Morrison asked.
“Oh, just a client. Get the piano player to play more up-tempo songs. The party’s dragging.”
* * *
The VP was waiting when Morrison arrived. Tourists had already begun to show up; a family posed two children for photos.
Morrison and the VP shook hands and walked to a bench away from the gathering crowd.
“What’s this all about?” Morrison asked.
“That doctor in Papua New Guinea.”
“What about him?” Morrison asked, twisting on the bench against a knot forming in his gut. He hadn’t told the VP about Dr. King’s murder.
“He was murdered,” the VP said.
“Murdered? Who? How do you know?”
“We have a source in Papua New Guinea who reported to me, but who told us is irrelevant. The question is who did you make arrangements with to burn and plow that plot of land?”
“Who did I—?” Morrison shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. But if you’re suggesting that whoever I hired killed the doctor, you’re wrong.” He didn’t sound convincing.
“Who did you hire?” the VP repeated. “Whoever it was failed to get ahold of the doctor’s research results.”
“Please, I can’t reveal who it was. It’s a very reputable group. All I know is that the acreage was destroyed, per your instructions. As far as the research results, something must have kept it from happening. Maybe the doctor’s murder had something to do with it. Maybe whoever killed him took the results. Yes, that must be it. Look, the doctor’s murder is news to me. Sorry to hear it but it has nothing to do with what I did on your behalf.”
Did the VP buy his lie? Did it matter? Did the murder of some crackpot doctor in a far-off place like Papua New Guinea matter? Had Alard and his people not only uprooted the plants but also killed the doctor? If so, so what? He, Eric Morrison, had made it clear to Alard that no one was to be hurt. Besides, Alard’s people had nothing to do with the doctor’s death. He believed that. Probably some drug addict. Why question me about it?
The VP answered his unasked question.
“I just hope that you didn’t do anything to put the company in an awkward position, Eric.”
“Of course not. Look, I accomplished what you wanted by getting rid of this doctor’s field. His murder had nothing to do with us. Relax. Everything is cool.”
“That’s what I want to hear,” said the VP. “We’ll just forget about the whole thing.”
“Exactly,” Morrison said, feeling the tension ebb.
“Before we go,” the VP said, “what’s new with Senator Gillespie?”
“He’s in our pocket,” Morrison assured him. “He’s working both sides of the aisle to get the legislation you want passed. No concern on that front.”
“Are you making any progress in helping defeat that goddamn bill that Senator Barnes has been pushing to reward pharmaceutical companies who develop drugs that can immediately be marketed as generic instead of waiting twenty years?”
“That doesn’t have any chance of even coming up for a vote,” Morrison said. “Gillespie is fighting it tooth-and-nail. The bill will fail big-time.”
“Good.”
The VP got up, shook Morrison’s hand, and walked to where he’d parked his car. Morrison waited a few minutes before doing the same. The meeting had gone okay. The VP seemed to buy his denial of knowing anything about the murder of the doctor. Hopefully this conversation marked the end of it, for which Morrison was grateful. He’d never imagined that arranging for a four-acre plot of useless land to be bulldozed would also involve a murder. Did one thing have to do with the other?
It didn’t matter.
He drove to his office feeling considerably lighter than when he’d gotten up that morning.
* * *
Jayla King wore her new dress with the “Flo’s Fashions” label to work that morning.
While getting ready to leave the apartment she’d reflected on her dinner with Nate Cousins, and was glad that she’d accepted his invitation. She knew that it was important for her to try and live as normal a life as possible while simultaneously mourning the death of her father. She also thought back to the evening spent with Flo Combes, Robert Brixton, and the others at the Smiths’ Watergate apartment. The journalist Will Sayers had been entertaining with his stories of political figures in the news, and the judge and his wife and the Smiths had been welcoming and intelligent dinner companions. She’d wondered at times about Brixton, Flo’s boyfriend. Aside from his iconoclastic view of the world, she sensed a pervasive despondency and wondered what was at the root of it. She didn’t know, of course, about his having lost a daughter in a terrorist bombing. Had she known, her having recently lost her father would have given her a sense of kinship with the brooding private investigator. Before leaving the apartment she took a final glance at her desk. Everything was in place, papers neatly aligned with each other, two pencils and a pen lined up like soldiers.
After arriving at Renewal Pharmaceuticals she slipped a white lab coat over her dress and entered the lab where two male scientists were already busy. They’d worked as a team for more than a year in search of a more effective, less expensive painkiller without the addictive qualities of such current popular prescription drugs as oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydromorphone, and morphine.
“Anything new?” she asked as she settled at her station.
“No. Those tests we ran while you were away came up a cropper. The blends of the synthetic compounds never produced anything useful.”
“Does Walt know?” she asked.
One of the men laughed. “No. We figured we’d let you deliver the bad news.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because he likes you,” was the response. “He’s got a thing for you.”
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “He does not.”
“Hey, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I can see when a guy has the hots for a woman.”
“He’s a happily married man,” she said.
“Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an eye for an attractive woman. Hell, I’m happily married, too, but I still look.”
She ignored them and started perusing the written results of their failed test.
“What’s this I hear about your father?” one of them asked. He received a stern look from his colleague. “I mean about the research he was into. Word around here has it that he was after the same thing we’re after, a better mousetrap, aka a better pain med.”
“That’s right,” she said, not looking up from her reading.
“Using what, medicinal plants?”
“Uh, huh,” she said.
“How far did he get before—?”
“He was making progress,” Jayla said. “He used what he’d developed on his patients at the clinic he ran. It seemed to be working.”
“So why don’t we pick up on what he was doing? Do you have his lab results?”
“No. I mean, I know some of what he’d accomplished but not enough to carry on with it.”
“That’s a shame. Make you a fortune.”
“My father was never after making a fortune, and neither am I.”
The phone rang.
“It’s Walt Milkin’s office,” the tech who’d answered said. “He wants to see you, Jayla.”
“See what I mean?” the other lab worker said, chuckling.
She smiled and went to the executive floor where the company’s president and CEO, Walter Milkin, had his office. Milkin possessed both a PhD in cell biology from Johns Hopkins, and a law degree from George Washington. He’d founded Renewal Pharmaceuticals fifteen years ago, and had guided it to some minor successes, enough to sustain its constant quest into the development of the next “wonder drug” that would vault it into the sphere of Big Pharma. He was a charming man, nicknamed the “the Silver Fox” thanks to his thick head of snow-white hair that was always meticulously groomed. He was a popular guest at pharmaceutical company gatherings, and had testified before numerous congressional committees and the FDA. He’d just returned from a conference in Geneva. But beneath his hail-fellow-well-met exterior was a steel trap of a mind and a commitment to succeed no matter what the cost.
His secretary ushered Jayla into his handsomely furnished office where he got up from behind his desk.
“Glad to see you,” he said as he grasped her hand in both of his and indicated a chair. “Sit down, Jayla,” he said. “Coffee, tea? Midge whips up a decent cup of coffee.”
“Nothing, thank you, Dr. Milkin.”
“I’m coffee’d out myself this morning,” he said, taking a chair across from her. “So, you’ve been through the mill lately with what happened to your father.”
“Yes.”
“Murdered! We never think that something that terrible can happen to us and our families. Any word on—well, on who did it?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“And how are you holding up?”
“Pretty well. The horror of it is never far from me, but I’m managing. It’s what my father would have wanted. He didn’t have a lot of patience for people who cave in to sorrow. He was a very philosophical man—and a wonderful one.”
“I’m sure he was that, and more. His work had piqued some interest in the industry.”
Jayla’s face reflected her surprise. “I wasn’t aware of that,” she said.
“He’d been mentioned at a few conferences I’ve attended.” He laughed. “Not that anyone knew precisely what he was up to in his lab. He was sort of a loner.”
Jayla wasn’t sure that “loner” was an apt description of her father. He’d been deeply involved in the health issues of patients in his clinic, and was known as a pleasant, sometimes gregarious neighbor. But she said nothing.
“Of course you, more than anyone, would know what successes he had in his experiments.”
She thought once more of the long letter he’d left her, along with the packets of selected seeds. And then the bloody photos of the crime scene came and went.
“I’m afraid I’m more immersed in the experiments we’re conducting here at Renewal than in dwelling on my father’s work. His research notes were stolen at the time he was murdered.”
“Adding insult to injury.”
“Just another piece of the puzzle,” she said.
“Lucky for us that you’re immersed in your work here.”
Should she use that moment to break the news that the latest round of lab work hadn’t paid off? She decided not to. He’d find out soon enough. Besides, that particular failure only meant that they would go on to another attempt. That’s the way pharmaceutical research went. Win some, lose many.
Milkin continued, “I suppose what I’m saying is that I’d like to know more about your father’s work. After all, breakthroughs sometimes come from unexpected sources. Who was it that said all the advances of society are carried on the backs of its neurotics?”
“Are you saying that my father was—?”
“No, no, no,” he quickly said, reaching and patting her hand. “What I mean is that those of us in the business of discovering and developing new medicines sometimes overlook the fact that it doesn’t necessarily take a fancy laboratory and dozens of smart people to succeed in that goal. Your father worked alone, far from where we’re sitting, and from what I’ve heard he might have latched on to something important.”
“I know how pleased he would be to know that,” she said, eager to leave. His kind words to her about her job at Renewal were welcome, but the shift of focus to her father’s work was unsettling.
“Was anyone else involved in his research?” Milkin asked.
“No. Well, he had an assistant, Eugene Waksit, but I don’t know to what extent he was directly involved.”
“Interesting name,” Milkin said.
“Not an uncommon name in PNG.”
“PNG?”
“Papua New Guinea.”
“Yes, of course. Are you in touch with this fellow?”
“No. I saw him when I returned home following my father’s death, but I haven’t heard from him since.”
“He’s from PNG?”
“Originally. I suspect that he’s gone to Australia.”
“I’d enjoy meeting this fellow.”
“If he ever decides to visit me here in Washington I’ll make a point of introducing you. I really should get back to the lab.”
“I understand. Thanks for spending time with me, Jayla. As I said, we’re extremely pleased to have you working here at Renewal.”
He stood and offered his hand, and she left the office. Rather than return directly to the lab she stopped at an employee kitchen where she made herself a cup of tea and sat at a window reflecting on the meeting.
That her father’s work was known to others really wasn’t a surprise, although she seldom thought of him as someone who would be talked about in larger medical circles. She knew that he’d maintained contact with some of his physician colleagues during trips back home to Australia, and it was likely, even expected that he would discuss his work with them. But Milkin’s interest in her father was off-putting for reasons she couldn’t identify. Interesting, she thought, that Milkin asked whether anyone else had shared in her father’s research. That question had resurrected Eugene Waksit to her thinking, and she wondered whether he was still in Port Moresby or had moved on. Would he ever show up in Washington as he said he might? Despite her mixed feelings about him, she would be glad to see him again, glad to see anyone with a direct connection to her father.
* * *
Psychologist John Bradford Fowler glanced at the wall clock above Robert Brixton’s head. The session was almost over, ten minutes to go. Brixton had taken note when first meeting the shrink that he wasn’t anything like Brixton had imagined he would be. Fowler was a big, rawboned man with a ruddy complexion and steel gray hair. If he didn’t know that he was a psychologist Brixton would have pegged him as a retired drill sergeant.
They’d spent most of the appointment talking about the loss of Brixton’s daughter. It hadn’t been an easy conversation. Fowler had initially asked how Brixton preferred to be addressed, Mr. Brixton, or Robert.
“Your choice,” Brixton replied. “Just don’t call me Bobby.”
Fowler had laughed, said, “Fair enough, provided you don’t call me Johnny.”
“Dr. Fowler?”
“Whatever you wish.”
Fowler was not out of the Freudian psychoanalytical school of therapy, sitting passively while the patient talks. He engaged Brixton numerous times, asking questions to clarify statements Brixton had made. Toward the end Brixton said, “I really don’t know why I’m here.”
“You’re here I assume because Ms. Combes asked for my assistance in helping you put the tragic death of your daughter in perspective. She encouraged you to see me, and here you are.”
“Flo means well,” Brixton said.
“That’s a left-handed compliment, Robert. She obviously loves you and wants you to feel better about yourself.”
At that moment Brixton feared that he might tear up and gave himself a harsh, silent reminder to not allow that to happen.
“What does she think, that I’ll go out and jump off some building?”
“Have you thought of doing that?”
Brixton laughed. “Here in D.C.? They have height limits for buildings. The worst that would happen if I jumped off one is a broken leg.”
Fowler smiled. Brixton’s MO seemed to be to make a joke out of something he didn’t wish to confront in a serious manner.
“I’m afraid our time is up,” Fowler said. “I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.”
Although Brixton didn’t admit it, he’d enjoyed it, too.
“Will I see you again?” Fowler asked.
Brixton gave him his best Robert De Niro shrug. “Yeah, okay,” he said.
“I’ll look forward to it,” Fowler said. “Make an appointment with my receptionist on your way out.”
Brixton made the appointment for three days later, stepped out onto the street, and drew a deep breath. He’d dreaded walking into the shrink’s office, but now that what he’d anticipated would be a waste of time and money was over, he felt lighter in spirit than when he’d arrived.
Of course, the forty-five minutes spent with Dr. John Bradford Fowler had had nothing to do with it. While he told himself that, he looked forward to seeing the shrink again.