Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (14 page)

And then he remembered. “Shit,” he said. “You’re still waiting on that lab report.”

“At least you know why I’m not ready to storm into a lawyer’s office and make a case for why I’m the best possible man to watch over Sophie for the next ten years.”

“You are, Mike, and you’re going to be around for a long time.”

“I know this is going to sound like an asshole thing to say, but that’s probably what Bruce Bower said to Claire.”

He started the car, and we drove to the hospital in silence.

Bruce was in a private ICU suite, a uniformed cop sitting outside his door.

“He knows about his wife,” she said.

“How did that happen?” Terry said.

“He kept asking for her, and one of the residents told him.”

We thanked her and went inside.

Bruce’s body was hooked up to a series of tubes that allowed fluids to drip in or drain out, and he was plugged into a tower of flashing, chirping, and beeping machines that monitored his vital signs like the black box on a Boeing 747. For a man who had just survived a shooting, only to wake up and remember he was still dying, he looked relatively alive. Not exactly rosy-cheeked, but not deathbed gray either.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” I said.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” he said, staring at the ceiling.

“No, it’s not,” Terry said. “Your friends betrayed you.”

“They weren’t friends. They hired me to kill Yancy and take the secret to my grave. I made the mistake of sharing it with
Claire. Did you get who killed her?”

“Not yet,” Terry said. “Do you want to help us find him?”

No answer.

“Fine,” Terry said, “but off the record, I’d have probably done exactly what you did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bower said, his eyes still glued to the ceiling.

“It means I’m not just a cop. I have a wife and three daughters, and if I were in your shoes—well, let’s just say I understand why you did what you did. What I don’t understand is why you won’t let me and my partner get you the one thing you can’t get for yourself.”

“What’s that?”

“Look at me, asshole!” Terry snapped.

Bower shifted in his bed and locked eyes with Terry. “My wife is dead, and I’ve got nothing left to live for. What the fuck could you possible get for me that I give a shit about?”

Terry lowered his voice to a whisper. “Payback.”

CHAPTER 34

WITH THAT SINGLE
word, Terry had given Bruce something to live for. We helped him sit up in his bed, and just to cover our asses, I reminded him of his Miranda rights. He gave me a sardonic smile when I said, “You have the right to remain silent.”

“I’ll be silent soon enough,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can give us,” Terry said. “Just tell it in your own words.”

“It was Labor Day,” Bruce said. “I was still feeling pretty good back then, so Claire and I threw a little barbeque—invited half a dozen people from the program. We’re all having a good time, and at one point Charlie pulls me aside and tells me about this company that’s been doing clinical trials for a new cancer drug in Sweden. He says the results are phenomenal—even in Stage IV, but the FDA won’t let them run any trials in the US.

“I tell him I’m not going to Sweden, and he tells me they’re doing underground testing in LA. He says I’m the prefect candidate, and he can hook me up. But it’s all super hush-hush. Don’t tell Claire. Don’t tell anyone.

“I figure what have I got to lose, so the next night Charlie picks me up, and he tells me there are some crazy ground rules. The company is so paranoid about getting caught that he’s got to blindfold me so I don’t know where their testing facility is. It’s
all starting to sound pretty hinky, and if it were anyone else I’d have bailed out. But it’s Charlie, so I get in the back of his car, put on the blindfold, and I go along for the ride.

“It took maybe twenty minutes. I wish now that I’d paid more attention, but I just sat back and listened to music till we got there. Charlie walked me into the lobby of a building, still blindfolded. We took an elevator, maybe three or four floors, and he led me into a room, and said he would wait for me.

“The door closed, and a voice says I can take off my blindfold. I do, and I’m looking at myself in a mirror. I figured after all that undisclosed location bullshit it was probably one of those two-way mirrors where whosever on the other side can see you, but you can’t see them. And then the voice thanks me for coming.”

“Male or female?” I asked.

“It was filtered through one of those electronic synthesizers, like one of those phone robot voices. He, she, it said, ‘You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you. Charlie lied. There are no clinical trials. There is no new miracle drug. There is no cure.’

“I’ll never forget it. I’m staring at myself in the mirror, and I’m devastated. I finally say, ‘If there’s no cure, what the hell am I doing here?’ And the voice says ‘Claire is going to need money when you die. We’re prepared to deposit half a million dollars in an offshore account in her name.’ I say, ‘What do I have to do for that? Kill someone?’ The answer comes back, ‘Precisely.’ I go, ‘Do I look like a hit man? I’m a fucking accountant.’ And he says, ‘But you have what we need, Bruce. You’re going to be dead soon, and dead men are excellent at keeping secrets.’

“By now I’m freaking out. I get up and try to leave, but the door is locked. There’s a pitcher of water there, and he tells me to pour myself a glass and calm down, but I’m not drinking anything this whack job puts in front of me. I know I’m locked in, so I try to humor him. I tell him I need the money, but I can’t kill anyone. He says, ‘Let me see if I can change your mind.’

“He asked if I ever heard of Chilton-Winslow. I had. He says that their most lucrative product is this hormone shot that women get if they’re having trouble conceiving. It helps her produce more eggs, then the docs harvest them and use the best ones for in vitro fertilization.

“Five years ago Chilton figured out how to make the same drug for two-thirds less than the real thing. When they tested it, they found out that the new formula worked even better than the old one. So not only were they making more money per dose, but more women got pregnant, so more doctors started using it, and the upside for the company was in the billions.

“There was only one problem. The tests showed that some of the women were getting sick with the new stuff. Not just sick—dying. By all rights Chilton should have pulled it off the market. But they don’t. A handful of people at the top of the food chain decide to bury the test results and keep the product on the market. Wade Yancy was one of them. His job was to sell as much of that poison as possible until the FDA woke up and said, ‘Hey guys, you have a problem.’”

Bower closed his eyes, no doubt reliving that night in his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes opening. “I’m not doing the story justice. He gave me plenty of facts, figures—all kinds of details that convinced me this wasn’t bullshit. By the time he was done I figured, hell, somebody should kill this bastard. For half a million bucks, it might as well be me.”

My heart was pounding. “Do you remember the name of the fertility drug?” I asked.

“Ovamax. And it’s still on the market. According to the mystery voice, there are at least seventy-three cases of women who took the shots hoping to have a baby, but wound up dying of ovarian cancer instead.”

I felt my knees buckle. Joanie had been one of them.

CHAPTER 35

I HAD TO
leave the room. Terry followed me.

“What just happened?” he said. “I thought you were going to pass out.”

“Joanie was on Ovamax,” I said. “One injection a day for two weeks. She hated giving herself needles, so I had to do it. She used to joke about it. Once she called the station and left a message with Mulvey—‘Tell Detective Lomax to come home and shoot his wife.’”

“Sounds like Joanie,” Terry said, an appreciative grin spreading across his face

“We tried it for three separate cycles, so I probably pumped that toxic shit into her body about forty times.” I covered my face with one hand and dug my nails into my scalp. “Fuck!”

“You want me to finish the interview?” Terry said.

I pulled my hand away. “No. I want to find out who paid to have Yancy and Kraus killed, and then I want to be locked in a room with them until they give me the names of everyone involved in the cover-up at Chilton-Winslow.”

“And then what?” Terry said. “Hunt them down and kill them yourself? No one would ever suspect you.”

“Kiss my ass, Biggs.”

“Attaboy. Now you’re starting to sound like your old self again. Let me ask you something, Lomax. Does it come as a sur
prise to you that a giant corporation put profits over humanity? The big banks do it, the oil companies do it, hell, they all do it. I have no trouble believing that Chilton-Winslow covered up the truth so they could add a few billion dollars to their bottom line. But all that means is
they
killed Joanie. Not you.”

“I know,” I said.

“So let’s go back and see what else we can get out of Bruce, because this case just got personal. As of now, he’s not the only one looking for payback.”

We went back in, and Terry took the lead. “Tell us what happened after you agreed to kill Yancy.”

“This faceless voice gave me the rules. They were pretty simple. Make it look like an accident, and don’t tell anyone, not even your wife. But I couldn’t keep it from Claire. She was worried sick about money. I had a solid plan for our golden years, but I never planned on dying at fifty-one, and Claire was positive that I’d die broke, and she’d wind up homeless. I kept telling her she’d be okay, but she didn’t believe me, so I finally showed her the Cayman Islands bank account. There was already fifty thousand in it. I explained what I had to do to earn the rest, and once I told her, she said she didn’t want me to be alone. She wanted to come with me. If I’d have played by the rules, she’d still be alive.”

“Cal Bernstein’s wife told us you and he were friends,” Terry said. “Did you know he was recruited?”

“Not at first, but we were having coffee one night after the meeting, and Cal somehow let on that his wife was going to be taken care of when he was dead. And I knew—I just knew. I said, ‘Did Charlie blindfold you and take you for a ride? Did you talk to some ghost behind a two-way mirror?’ And it was like two guys who are lost in the desert who find each other. You still may not know the way, but God, it’s good to have company. We talked about how we were going to do it. Cal was in sporting goods. He knew a lot about guns.”

“He didn’t make it look an accident,” I said.

“The plan was that he was going to bust in to Kraus’s office like a junkie who was jonesing for drugs. He was going to shoot the doc and steal a script pad and whatever drugs he could grab in a hurry. It was supposed to look like a robbery gone bad. He didn’t expect the cops to be there. I guess once you saw him, his whole crazy-junkie story blew up. So he killed himself.”

“You say Charlie Brock recruited you,” I said.

“He recruited Cal too. Those are the only ones I know, but I know they had a much bigger hit list. Charlie is probably still hanging around the LWD meeting looking for terminal assassins.”

“He’s not hanging around anywhere,” Terry said. “Which makes us think he’s the one who shot you and Claire. Do you know where he lives?”

“No. If I did, I’d pull out these tubes and be on the way to his house.”

“You wouldn’t get very far,” Terry said. “You’re still under arrest. There’s a cop right outside your door.”

“I know I’m going to jail, but do you think I can get permission to go to Claire’s funeral?”

“I think that can be arranged,” Terry said.

“Thanks. It’s just going to be me, her brother, and maybe a few cousins. Claire and I never had kids. We tried, but it didn’t take. Back then we didn’t think we had a lot of options. Our lives might have been completely different if we had gone to a fertility doctor.”

I looked at Terry, and I’m sure he knew what I was thinking. Joanie and I
had
gone to a fertility doctor. And our lives might have been completely different if we hadn’t.

CHAPTER 36

WE LEFT UCLA
Med and drove straight to City Hall. One of Mel Berger’s other nicknames is Deputy Mayor in Charge of Dirty Little Secrets. His network of moles extends from Bel Air to Skid Row, from Sacramento to DC, from the stalls of the Farmers Market on Fairfax to the executive suites of the Fortune 500.

We told him what we’d learned from Bruce Bower.

“Do you believe him?” Berger said.

“Of course we believe him,” Terry said. “Why would he lie? He wants to help us track down the people who killed his wife.”

“I’m sure Bower
believes
he’s telling you the truth,” Berger said, “but have you considered that all he’s doing is repeating the same bullshit story somebody behind a two-way mirror fed him in order to convince him to murder Wade Yancy?”

“It sounds like you’ve got your own version of the same story,” Terry said.

Berger nodded. “I am well aware of the Ovamax debacle,” he said. “I heard it firsthand from Egan Granville.”

“And who is that?”

“Mr. Granville is a close personal friend of the mayor, a major fundraiser on our behalf, and the CEO of Chilton-Winslow Pharmaceuticals. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him, since his picture was on page nine of today’s
LA Times
.”

“It’s been a busy morning,” Terry said. “I haven’t even had time to open the paper and check my horoscope. What was on page nine?”

“Granville was nominated by the President for a cabinet position—Secretary of Health and Human Services. I watched his Senate confirmation hearing on C-SPAN yesterday. He was asked about Ovamax, and he handled it quite well.”

“Fill us in.”

“Your Mr. Bower was right about the problem. About five years ago, Dr. Amanda Dunbar was the head of Research and Development for Chilton when she came up with an ingenious process for creating a synthesized version of clomiphene citrate, which the company marketed as Ovamax. Dr. Dunbar trumpeted it as more effective and more profitable. Chilton went with it, and when their fortunes multiplied, they in turn rewarded Dr. Dunbar handsomely. What she didn’t tell them was that there was one devastating effect that had never manifested itself with the original formulation—the risk of ovarian cancer in infertile women increased tenfold.