An Invisible Client (4 page)

7

When Olivia Polley walked into my office, I was reading the CV Raimi had sent over, but only to see what her hobbies were. No other part of a CV said as much about someone as what they thought others should know they liked to do. I’d seen everything from “stand-up comedy” to “exotic dancer.” I’d interviewed the exotic dancer and left the comic alone—too much gloom and doom in those people’s personal lives.

Olivia looked younger than me and wore glasses. Her chestnut-brown hair skimmed her shoulders. She shook my hand, smiled widely, and said, “Hi,” in the way a teenage girl might say it. “I recognize you from the billboards.”

“That’s my twin, actually.”

“Seriously?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said, as though she didn’t understand I was joking.

“So Raimi is really impressed with you. He thinks I should hire you. Do you think I should hire you?”

“Yes . . . wait . . . yes?”

“It’s not a trick question.”

“Oh, then yes. Yes, you should hire me.”

“Why?”

She swallowed. Her face flushed a light hue of red. “Um . . . I don’t know.” Immediately, she mumbled, “Dang it, that was so stupid.”

I chuckled. “At least you’re honest. Look, I have nothing to do with our bankruptcy division. That’s Raimi’s thing. I only do PI and occasionally criminal defense. You’re going to be in Raimi’s division, so if he wants to hire you, I won’t stand in his way.”

She sat there for a long time, staring at me.

“That means you’re hired,” I said.

“Oh, thank you. That’s great. I’m so excited. I’m sorry for being such a goon. This is my first interview.”

“Your first interview for a lawyer position, you mean?”

“No, my first interview ever.”

“
This
is your first job interview ever? You never had a paper route or waited tables or anything?”

She shook her head. “No. Mr. Val and Mr. Keller did their interviews on campus. It was group interviews, so this is my first real one.”

“Well, good for you. The working man gets screwed, so it’s good you’ve never had to put up with it.” I looked at her CV. “So, in your spare time, you play chess, huh?”

“Yeah, I have senior master status. I was the first woman in Utah to do that. I love the game.”

“I used to play, too. Gave it up, though. I don’t remember why.”

“I can start right now,” she blurted. “I mean, you know, if you need someone who can start right now, I could.”

“You’re already hired.”

“I know, sorry. I read an article about how to do job interviews, and it said to make sure you say you can start right away.”

I stared at her for a second, then chuckled. “Okay, well, you can start right now . . . actually, hang on.”

I stepped out into the hallway and poked my head into a few offices. I didn’t want to go down to Pharma-K by myself—it was always best to have at least one witness for this sort of thing—but it looked like I’d waited too long. All the associates had gone home.

“I do need your help right now, if you’re ready,” I said, walking back into the office. “Just need a warm body to come with me and listen in.”

“Sure, I’d love to. Where are we going?”

“To see where the sausage is made.”

I had Olivia drive while I researched Pharma-K on my phone. They weren’t a massive drug company—their annual revenue was at about two hundred million—but they were gaining market share. They had been founded in New Jersey but moved to Utah in 2001 for the tax rebates. If a company had above a certain number of employees and agreed to hire local workers for a certain percentage of future openings, they could set up shop in the state of Utah essentially tax-free.

The most unique thing about the company was what they termed their “Pharma Future” program, a division of the R&D department that hired the top minds graduating from pharmacy schools and chemistry programs around the world, and dumped money on them to come up with new drugs. One article I looked at estimated that, because of the drugs being worked on in Pharma Future, the company would triple in value over the next five years. All the profit tax-free.

“Working man really does get screwed. He busts his ass for thirty grand a year and pays twenty percent in taxes, and a company that’s making hundreds of millions a year pays zero in taxes.”

Olivia, whose hands were turning white from gripping my steering wheel so hard, said, “It’s not their fault.”

“Whose, the working man’s?”

“No, the company. Everyone would pay less in taxes if they could. It’s the government’s fault.”

“And who do you think sent attack-dog lobbyists to Washington to get their taxes so low?” I scrolled through a portion of another article. “Don’t tell me you’re a libertarian?”

“Sort of. Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m all for state-of-nature, dog-eat-dog philosophy, but you struck me as the bleeding-heart liberal type.”

“I’m some of that, too.”

Pharma-K’s headquarters were in a section of Davis County known as North Salt Lake City, though the area was actually a completely separate city from Salt Lake itself. North Salt Lake had been founded by the owners of a mining company who thought they could get more hours from their workers if the miners didn’t have to drive back to a different city at the end of the day. The town consisted almost entirely of factories, warehouses, and manufacturing plants, with a few fast-food restaurants thrown in for good measure. A constant haze of thick, soupy smog hung over the surrounding county. It sometimes blew over the rest of the valley and made the air nearly unbreathable. I had once walked around wearing a surgical mask, and when I took it off at the end of the day, the mask was brown.

“Right here,” I said.

“Pharma-K? Is this about the Pharma Killer case?”

“It is.”

“Whoa.”

“And by the way, as an employee of Byron, Val & Keller, anything you see and hear is confidential. Don’t tell anyone about anything you see on the job that could be confidential, okay?”

“I won’t.”

We parked in front of a modern-looking business park, all steel and glass, with a courtyard in between three identical buildings. The grass was well kept. I always looked at the grass in front of buildings. When a property was struggling, they cut the landscaping budget first.

Pharma-K took up the top half of the first office building, floors three through six. Their manufacturing plant occupied a separate building. Inside the polished chrome elevator, I watched Olivia take a hit from an inhaler. We got off on the sixth floor and walked into the vestibule ahead of us.

A woman who looked like a model sat behind the large desk, smiling widely. “Hi, guys, how can I help you?”

“I have a meeting with Darren Rucker.”

“Okay, hang tight one sec. Okay?”

She remained quiet, the smile still on her face, and I realized she actually wanted a response. “Sure, we’ll wait.”

We sat down on the orange leather chairs. This didn’t look like any drug company I’d ever seen. Electronic music played over the speakers, and quotes from people like Nikola Tesla decorated the walls.

A man came out of an office down the hall. He wore jeans and a sports coat and sunglasses pushed up into his hair. He smiled and shook my hand. “Darren, COO of Pharma-K. You must be Noah.”

“I am. This is my associate, Olivia.”

“Oh, very nice to meet you.” He kissed the back of her hand. She blushed.

He looked back at me. “Everyone’s in the conference room.”

“Everyone? I thought this was just a chat between us.”

“Just a few people. Nothing big.”

We followed him down the hall. The office walls were primarily glass, and one large space was crammed with cubicles. We passed a break room that held a Ping-Pong table and an arcade video game I didn’t recognize. Off to the side was a massive conference room.

An oblong crimson table, with at least thirty yellow high-backed chairs around it, took up the room. About ten of those chairs were filled.

Darren said, “These are our lawyers. I think you know Bob there.”

I knew Bob. He was senior partner at Walcott, Smoot, Bagley & Hockett, one of the biggest law firms in Utah and Nevada. They catered exclusively to corporations with gross revenues higher than fifty million, and billed at an hourly rate of five hundred dollars, an obscene amount for the Mountain West.

Bob was in his sixties and had once been the Utah State Bar president. An eye patch disguised his allegedly blind left eye. The gossip, which no one had been able to verify, was that he didn’t need the eye patch and had himself started the rumor about being blind. Supposedly, he just thought the eye patch made him more intimidating.

His deposition tactics had put him on the radar of every plaintiffs’ personal injury firm. During depositions, he would excuse himself to the bathroom, leaving the plaintiff’s attorney alone with his or her client. Upon returning, Bob would demand to know everything said between the attorney and the client while he was in the bathroom. Opposing counsel would protest that their conversation was covered by attorney-client privilege. Bob, a smirk on his face, would then point to the stenographer in the corner. The presence of a third party negated attorney-client privilege, and everyone always forgot the stenographer was there.

I’d encountered Bob on my first big personal injury case and fell for his trick.

“I heard you got a nice settlement from Bethany Chicken.”

“No complaints,” I said, sitting down. This was clearly an ambush. In addition to Bob, there were at least four other lawyers in the room. “So I thought this was just going to be a friendly chat with your COO here. I didn’t realize the troops were marching.”

“Oh, it is friendly,” Bob said with a grin. “I’m always friendly.”

We stared at each other for a moment.

“So,” Bob said, “what should we talk about?”

“I’d like to talk about cyanide, Bob. Namely, how it got into your client’s cough medicine.”

The room fell silent. A few of the lawyers exchanged glances. They were scared of something. They seemed to have been hoping I’d come about something else.

“Tragedy,” Bob said. “Thank goodness nobody was killed.”

“I got a visit from a little boy’s mother yesterday. She thinks he might not make it.”

Bob shook his head. “Damn shame. What’s this world coming to when lunatics go around poisoning children’s medicine, for heaven’s sake? My clients just can’t believe it happened. They’re doing everything in their power to help the families of the victims and working with law enforcement to bring that sick bastard to justice.”

“Seems weird, though, doesn’t it? I mean, if I were a sick maniac—and I’m not, but if I were—I’d want to poison different types of cough syrup. Not just one brand from one company, in one geographic location. That’s too easy to take off the shelf.”

The lawyers glanced at each other again, but Darren Rucker just stared at me.

“Listen,” Bob said, “you’ve been doing this, what? Ten years? I’ve been defending companies for thirty-six years, son. And I can tell you, this company has done everything in its power to help the victims of this tragic situation. We set up an emergency board that met every day until the emergency was taken care of. We donated money to the county so they could devote more police officers to finding the man who did this; we issued a recall on the product; we—”

“Why a man?”

“What?”

“You said ‘finding the man who did this.’ Why a man? Why not a woman? What makes you think it’s a man?”

“It’s just a figure of speech, son.” He grinned. “See,” he said to everyone in the room while still looking at me, “Noah here is a little insecure. When I was at Harvard, we got a lot of that. People who just didn’t make it and carry chips on their shoulders. I think you went to school somewhere in the Midwest, didn’t you?”

“University of Kansas.”

He nodded. “So you still have a little bit of that Ivy League chip on your shoulder, don’t you?”

I had to swallow to keep my anger in check. “We both have the same law license, Bob. I paid twenty grand for mine. You paid ten times that for yours. Who’s the sucker?”

Bob ran his tongue along his upper lip, like a predator that had just seen prey. “Someone decides to get medicine down off the shelf and poison it. That is not my client’s fault, and you’re wasting our time.”

“Bullshit!” Olivia blurted.

Everyone in the room, including me, stared at her. Instantly, her eyes went wide, and her cheeks flushed red.

Bob said, “Looks like your associates still need to be housebroken.”

“My associates can speak their minds. Go ahead, Olivia. What do you mean?”

She swallowed, and her lower lip quivered. I thought she might pass out. “I was . . . I was watching
Ellen
and . . .”

“Excuse me,” Bob said, “did you say
Ellen
?”

“Yeah. And they had a pharmacist on. One of the families bought the cough syrup from a pharmacy.”

“So?” Bob said.

“So the pharmacy buys it directly from the manufacturer, already sealed. Then they stock it near the front at that pharmacy. There’s cameras there. No one could’ve tampered with it without someone seeing them. It had to come from the manufacturer with the cyanide already in it.”

I stared at Bob, who looked over at Darren.

“Well, Bob? Response?”

Bob rose. “Let’s talk in private.”

He put his arm around me and walked me out into the hall, away from earshot of the others.

“Listen, I know where you’re going with this. I know all about it. But it’s a dog case. Do you know what Pharma-K’s revenue will be this year? Four hundred million dollars. More than double what it was last year. This is a company that’s on the rise, and they will do anything to protect their reputation, spend any amount of money. You’re getting into a war you can’t win.”

My tie was slightly askew. He adjusted it and said, “Go back to the playground. You’re not ready for the big boys, counselor.”

As he walked away from me, I said, “There’s blood.”

“What?”

“There’s blood in the water, Bob. If I had shown up and talked with Rucker for a few minutes, I would’ve left and told that woman there wasn’t a case here. But you brought out an army. There’s blood in the water and I can smell it from a mile away. You made a mistake. It’ll be interesting to learn what’s got you so spooked.”