Three days of re-reading everything in Zach Williams’ case files hadn’t brought me any new revelations, but there hadn’t been much I could do over the weekend. I’d had to wait on Hal, the private investigator our firm kept on retainer, to research the pharmaceutical company where Jordan worked.
He normally gave me his reports over the phone, but this time he’d asked that I meet him at our office. He had to be there anyway to deal with a few items Anderson had assigned him for other cases.
I hadn’t yet met Hal in person, so it seemed like as good a time as any.
I arrived before they were finished. I should probably wait for Hal in my office, but my feet already felt too big for my shoes, and I had nothing to prop my feet up on in my office. Both Mark and my doctor assured me that swollen feet were normal. Normal didn’t mean it was any more pleasant to deal with.
I pulled a second chair over to the one I planned to sit in and settled in with my feet up.
I glanced down. The only drawback was this position made my baby bump bulge out and look bigger than it otherwise did. Even the flowy shirt I’d chosen settled down around it rather than hiding it.
While I waited, I read a few more articles on whistleblowing. They didn’t tell me anything all the others hadn’t already. Whistleblowing put great emotional stress on people, making them often feel unsafe and increasing their risk for drug or alcohol abuse. All of which pointed back to suicide, and we knew Jordan hadn’t committed suicide.
I typed in murder of whistleblowers instead. The only even remotely related results that came up were sensationalized lists of suspicious or mysterious deaths of whistleblowers.
I read a couple pages anyway. Most of the deaths were in foreign countries. The only one in North America was the gunshot wound death of Enron whistleblower John Clifford Baxter. Police ruled his death a suicide, despite strange evidence that didn’t match up.
At least the police weren’t trying to cover up Jordan’s murder. While I didn’t know anyone in the department who’d investigated her death, they seemed to want the truth. They’d charged Zach because they thought that was where the evidence pointed. My job was to show that, however pure their motives, they were wrong.
The door to Anderson’s office opened, and I lowered my feet. The rest was nice while it lasted. I wouldn’t get much more this week. Along with following whatever leads Hal found, I needed to finish selecting the movies for the summer with Stacey, source them, and find out where we could buy a movie screen. Stacey and Russ were anxious to start building the frame, but they couldn’t until we were absolutely certain we could buy the size of screen we wanted.
I pulled my mind back to the present.
Anderson was coming toward me with a man who had to be Hal.
He was younger than I imagined. I’d expected a man in his fifties, and he was closer to Mark’s age—late thirties, early forties.
He was also shorter than I’d expected. He couldn’t have been more than three inches taller than me. Coupled with his plain dark jeans and t-shirt and oversized, slightly nerdy glasses, he was the kind of man who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.
Even his walk had a certain practiced casualness to it that made me think he’d carefully curated his appearance so as not to be remembered. Smart for a private investigator. As much as I loved the old Matlock shows growing up, I’d always wondered why Conrad McMasters drove a flashy car.
Hal wouldn’t make the same mistake of standing out.
The smile Hal gave me had a you-can-trust-me quality to it. He held out his hand. “Nice to finally meet you in person, Ms. Fitzhenry-Dawes.”
I shook Hal’s hand, but glanced at Anderson. “Does he still call you Mr. Taylor?”
Anderson flashed his toothpaste-commercial-white teeth. “No, but we’ve been working together since we both started our businesses.”
I filed that tidbit away. Anderson hadn’t founded his business immediately after law school. He’d worked at another firm first. So Hal must have had a career or worked somewhere else before he became a private investigator.
I matched Hal’s smile. “I don’t want to have to wait that long, so how about you call me Nicole now that we’ve met.”
He ducked his head. “Yes, ma’am.”
The ma’am came out almost second nature. Former military maybe?
“Do you mind if we use a conference room?” Anderson asked. “This was a weird case, and I have a half hour before my next meeting. I’d like to sit in.”
I braced for the voice in my head that would tell me that the truth was Anderson didn’t trust me.
It didn’t come. For the first time, the self-critical voice stayed quiet. Instead, my head was filled only with my own thoughts. Anderson had mentioned from the start that he felt this case was interesting. Beyond that, it made sense for him to stay up-to-date on it. If the case didn’t wrap up before I had the baby, Anderson might have to fill in for me for a little bit.
The guys hung back and let me pick a seat first. On his way by, Hal casually moved another chair closer to my feet.
He did it so nonchalantly that he might have been simply moving it out of the way. The fact that he didn’t so much as glance in my direction, though, made me suspicious that he’d seen me with my feet propped up and was making sure I could do it again if need be.
They took seats across from me.
Hal pressed the Home button on his tablet and tapped the screen a couple of times. “I don’t have any proof that the victim in the Williams case was a whistleblower, but I did find out a few things about the company she worked for that could support your client’s story.”
I held back a snort. Wouldn’t that have been nice if Hal had found proof that Jordan was a whistleblower and that someone powerful in the company wanted her dead because of it?
Murder cases rarely handed another viable suspect on a platter that way, though.
Hal slid the tablet across the table to me. It was the first time I’d been acknowledged as the lead on the case. A warm feeling expanded inside my chest.
“Papyrus Medical had a new blood thinner that they’d been doing pre-marketing on for months,” he said.
I glanced down at the screen. It was a picture of the type of promotional material that pharmaceutical reps left with doctors. I zoomed in. The informational overview said initial studies showed a 50 percent less chance of accidental bleeding than with conventional blood thinners like warfarin, and lab tests also showed a potential for reduced strain on the liver. The release date for the drug had already passed.
I slid his tablet back, then propped my feet up on the nearby chair. I might as well use it since it was there. “You’re thinking Jordan had information on the drug?”
Hal handed the tablet over to Anderson, sitting on the other side of him, farther away from me. “They pulled the drug two weeks before release, saying they felt they needed to run more tests. Your victim might not have made anything public, but it sounds like she could have threatened to.”
That made an even better motive for murdering her. Once she made what she knew public, the only reason for killing her would be revenge. If she hadn’t gone public on the condition that they pull the drug, someone might have wanted to make it look like they were playing along until they could kill her. With her dead, they could easily release the drug in a few months, claiming their additional tests supported their earlier claims or showed even better results.
I sat quietly while Anderson looked at Hal’s tablet.
He handed the tablet back to Hal. “That gives you a great start to creating reasonable doubt.”
Sometimes Anderson sounded so much like my dad I’d have sworn that he was my parents’ child rather than me. For my parents and Anderson, all that mattered was winning. Creating enough reasonable doubt for an acquittal was a consolation prize for me. I wanted to prove that my client was innocent, and whenever I could, I wanted to find out the truth about what happened.
Despite how much better my feet felt when I had them propped up, I lowered them to the floor. If I wanted to be treated as an equal, even in my own business, I needed to make sure I acted the part.
“It’s a start. To get more, I’ll need to go to Jordan’s office and speak with some of the people there. I’ll start with her boss. I’d like to get a read on how much he or she knew.”
Great, now I was putting he or she everywhere. Not knowing the gender of my baby was at least making my speech more grammatically correct. In the past, I would have said what they knew since English didn’t have a singular generic pronoun the way other languages did.
Anderson’s smile shifted. It was like watching ice crystals form over water. He softened his expression almost immediately. If I hadn’t been looking at him at that exact moment, I would have missed it.
There could only be one reason that my statement would have made Anderson lose his professional mask, even for a second. “Not you, too.”
Anderson’s face relaxed, and his actor’s smile disappeared completely. “You and I work with evidence. If you looked at the evidence objectively, what conclusion would you draw?”
Likely the same one that he had, and that Mark had, and that Russ had. That my job placed me in danger. Still.
“You’re the one who brought this client to me.”
Anderson flattened his hands calmly on the table. “And I want you to take it. I also want you to take some extra precautions. If you’re going to speak to anyone or investigate a location, take Hal with you.”
Yeah, like that was going to work. Hal’s firm—let alone Hal himself—was in high demand. He wasn’t going to have time to follow me around, sometimes at a moment’s notice.
Anderson shifted in his seat to face Hal.
Hal nodded. “We can make it work.”
I sighed internally, but I didn’t let it out. At least Hal was better than a bodyguard. Hal’s background as a private investigator meant he’d know how to play the game. He wouldn’t just stand around looking intimidating.
And if that’s what it took to get everyone off my back about doing my job, I’d have to go along with it.
I pulled out my cell phone. “I’ll call and try to get us an appointment with the company’s CEO while you’re here to check your calendar for availability as well.”
Anderson pushed to his feet. “I’ll leave you to it.”
The paranoid voice that lived at the back of my brain said that I’d been played somehow. Anderson had certainly been interested in the case, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d also been there as a watchdog. Now that he’d passed that role over to Hal, he didn’t need to stick around.
Hal read the number for the CEO’s office off his tablet. He was certainly thorough in his research.
“Papyrus Medical. Martin Raymes’ office,” a woman’s voice said.
Her tone made me think of a woman who wore large clip-on earrings that she had to remove every time the phone rang.
I mentally reviewed my schedule in my head. I didn’t have anything this week that couldn’t be moved, and I’d need to be flexible if I was going to bring Hal with me. He couldn’t have many openings on short notice.
“I’d like to make an appointment to speak with Mr. Raymes.”
She made an mm-hmm noise that sounded like she’d been trained to use it to reassure people that she was listening. “What’s the meeting about?”
I’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask. The last thing I wanted to do was tip anyone off that I suspected someone in their office had killed Jordan Williams. Or, more likely, put out a contract on her life. Her death had been so carefully staged that it would have taken someone with knowledge of the differences between suicidal hangings and execution hangings to pull it off. Most corporate executives, scientists, and pharmaceutical reps didn’t have that sort of technical expertise.
That said, if I lied, she’d likely redirect me to another department. The company’s CEO wouldn’t take meetings that could be handled by someone else.
“Are you still there?” the woman asked.
“Yes.” Even though it would give him advance warning, the truth seemed like the best tact to take. Or at least some of the truth. “I’m working the Jordan Williams case. I need to speak to Mr. Raymes about Papyrus Medical’s competitors and whether any of them might have had reason to target Ms. Williams. Because of the sensitive nature of my questions, I can’t speak to anyone else at the company. I’m sure you understand.”
I made sure to add a note to my voice that said I trust that you’ve dealt with enough sensitive information to see how important this is.
If part of her job was to keep Martin Raymes’ schedule clear of unnecessary appointments, then I needed to sound important.
“I understand. Of course.” The sound of a mouse clicking on the other end of the line filled the quiet. “He has an opening at two o’clock on June 24th.”
I sucked in a breath that left me feeling like I’d nearly swallowed my tongue. That was over a month away. We couldn’t stall out the investigation that long. Zach’s case would already be proceeding by then.
I smiled, hoping all the marketing advice that said people could hear it in your voice if you smiled was correct. “I’m sure if you told him what this is about, he’d find a spot for us sooner.”
“He definitely would.” A hint of defensiveness slid into her voice. “But he leaves tomorrow for China, and he won’t return for a month.”