Stash (37 page)

He thought of Gwen, how he wouldn’t be there when she came to see him again. Then Dana. Suddenly he realized he wouldn’t be able to visit in the morning and take her out for breakfast, and right now that was the most important thing in the world. Sitting in a diner with his daughter, eating fried eggs and disparaging the weak coffee. What would he say to encourage and comfort her? Quick—what words?

He expected it to come from Mario, the bear wrestler he had pegged as the ax man. But Mario was only holding CDs in his hand. It was Sweet who reached into his jacket and pulled out the gun. Jude stumbled backward against the stairs before righting himself against the railing.

“Here’s your early retirement,” Sweet said, the steel barrel rising up level with Jude’s forehead. Jude leaned back, as if the few inches of space could make any difference in the world.

Dana opened her eyes to see a single massive cloud, billowed at the edges, gray middle, drifting across a crisp blue background far above her. She lay faceup in a wet ditch, her body embedded in mud. She tried to move and the mud sucked to keep hold of her. A car whooshed past on the road above, a gleam of steel and tires.

She sat up, using her hands for support. Vomit laced the front of her jacket. Her head throbbed. Her ripped tights sagged like soiled rags around her knees. Her knees. She bent one, then the other. She had run, even with her bad knee, she’d run hard and fast and he couldn’t catch her. That much she remembered: a sweeter victory than crossing any finish line. She outran him.

But how had she ended up in the ditch? She must have tripped and fallen or rolled and then blacked out. Did she hear him driving up behind her and scamper off the road? Did he pass back and forth slowly along the road searching for her, the engine growling like a hungry animal? Or was that a dream. It was dark then, and now it was light. That was all she knew of time. He had drugged her somehow, she also knew that. No way a half glass of beer rocked her that way. There had been a unit in her health class senior year that covered date rape, and the drug that made it easy. She couldn’t remember its name, but she could describe the effects—she’d just experienced them all.

She crawled out of the cold ooze and worked her way up to the
cindery shoulder. The road extended long and straight in both directions, with open fields and rolling meadows on either side, the profile of mountains in the distance. She could see a black-and-white road sign ahead with the number eleven on it. She was somewhere between Potsdam and Canton.

Her purse was gone, her wallet and phone. She had nothing. She had herself. She’d gotten away.

She stood and pulled off what remained of her tights. One of her shoes was missing. She looked down into the ditch but didn’t see it. She started walking. She kicked the other shoe away and continued barefoot, no idea how far she needed to go, no other cars in sight.

She wished she could call her daddy to come get her. It was crazy, he was hours away in Morrissey, and she was grown up now and in such a hurry to go to college and no longer dependent on him, but he would drop anything he was doing for her and she would stop and sit right where she was and wait for him. If she could.

A car approached from behind her and she turned to look at it but made no motion to flag it down. The driver crossed to the far lane and sped past. Another car came from in front. No, it was a pickup truck. She stopped walking and stared at it. The driver slowed to a stop, shifted into reverse and backed up, stopping alongside her. A man wearing a camouflage hunting cap rolled down his window and asked if she needed a ride.

“No thank you.”

“Are you okay?”

She started to run, one foot in front of the other, barefooted on the stones and cinder, stepping on a crushed beer can, splashing in a puddle, stubbing her toe on a rock.

The truck drove off.

She slowed again to a walk. The sun slid out from behind
another cloud. It lay low in the sky, early morning, but already warmer than yesterday and though her ripped clothing hung from her like wet laundry, she was not cold. Would her team be on the bus? Would they think she’d blown them off because she wasn’t running? Says who she wasn’t running.

She started out again, walking a steady pace. She focused on getting back to the dorm, taking a hot shower, sleeping for six days. She would write about what happened to her, she would fill an entire notebook, someday.

Another ten minutes of trudging and she reached the crest of a long, gentle rise in the road, then started down the other side. She felt strong enough to keep on, for as long as necessary.

She didn’t hear the car until it was upon her. It came from behind; the crest of the hill blocked the noise from reaching her. She turned at the sound of tires skidding against the asphalt and saw the back end of the car whip around as it came to a stop and three doors opened at once.

Out of the car jumped Steve and Jen and Mark. Steve reached her first, putting out his arms and hugging her and Jen saying we’ve been driving around all night looking for you and calling you, thank God we found you. All three of them had hold of her, no one wanted to let go.

Not until driving back to Morrissey with his family did Brian begin to think about work and remember to check his voice mail: the usual fire drills, new demands, why haven’t you called me. He returned one call he hadn’t expected, from Dr. Marta Everson, and agreed to fly out to Chicago the next day and meet her at the airport for what Everson called a confidential meeting and potentially career-changing proposal. You would think Everson had done enough to his career already, but Brian decided to explore all possibilities, keep all options open.

They met in the Admiral Club in view of the busy runway. Brian watched jets take off and land and wheel along the taxiway while he listened to Marta explain her idea.

Dr. Everson remained convinced that Zuprone posed a danger when prescribed at high doses for weight loss. Yet its popularity continued to grow due to Caladon’s aggressive and stealth marketing of it for such off-label use. The seminars she had participated in on Caladon’s behalf could be justified because the presentation included discussion about other drug therapies. But the entire Zuprone sales and marketing strategy, when the programs were examined in the aggregate—now, wouldn’t that tell a story of unethical and illegal practices?

No, it was not a rhetorical question. Yes, she wanted Brian to answer.

Does she think she’s the first one to pose such a question? Why should he answer her?

Because Everson needed an insider at Caladon willing to blow the whistle, and did Brian know that under the legal concept of
qui tam
, he would be entitled to a percentage of the fines levied by the federal government against Caladon. The amount would likely be in the millions.

Did he know about
qui tam?

Of course he knew it. Being awarded a slice of the settlement pie motivated many whistle-blowers, who were shunned and pressured by management, often lost their jobs, and were blackballed from their industries.

“You would know whether a case could be made against Caladon,” Marta said. “You’re the one who implemented the marketing programs for Zuprone.”

“And what’s in it for you?” Brian asked. “Why do you want to go through all of this?”

“If you could see the condition of some of my patients, you would agree it’s the right thing to do. Two of them are quite ill; anorexia can be a life-threatening condition. Other patients could be experiencing similar bad outcomes—someone needs to protect consumers.”

The right thing to do, plus the express line to media exposure for a publicity junkie like Everson.

But what about the fact that Dr. Everson had accepted consulting arrangements from Caladon for hosting medical education seminars about weight-loss therapies?

“I was duped, just as you were,” Everson said. “I want to right a wrong.”

No one had duped Brian. On the other hand, it was never too late to do the right thing. He said he would consider her proposal,
knowing he had the upper hand now. Without him to blow the whistle on Caladon, Everson had no substance to her claims. But there might not be any substance, anyway. Brian didn’t believe Caladon had crossed the line into illegal off-label marketing. Maybe because the line wasn’t a line at all, not in the traditional sense, but a blurry landmined zone you could navigate if you knew where to step and what to avoid—and if you had an army of crack attorneys ready for triage if anything exploded in your face.

He flew back that afternoon and discussed his options with Gwen.

“If you do this, aren’t you admitting you were involved in something illegal?” Gwen asked.

“Not necessarily, but I was following orders. I read about some other cases, and the whistle-blower is typically granted immunity.”

“That’s an awful expression—whistle-blower. It’s like being a tattletale.”

“You don’t approve?”

“I endured my own dark period of tattling recently and it wasn’t pleasant.”

“That was coerced out of you,” Brian pointed out. “This is just one option for me.”

“You shouldn’t do it for the money,” Gwen said. “And it doesn’t seem like a good career move, since you’ll lose your job and like you said get shut out from the industry. So the only reason to do it is if Caladon is purposely practicing deception or recklessly harming people. If that’s the situation, you need to step up and I’ll support you all the way.”

“I don’t know if that’s the situation. I’d like to think it wasn’t.”

And now, heading into Stephen’s office, Brian still hadn’t made up his mind what to do. With her limited sample of patients,
Marta Everson had a weak basis for a lawsuit against Caladon—unless she allied with Brian as the insider who could expose Caladon’s intent. Except Caladon’s intent remained murky.

But, as Stephen said, consumer watchdogs and regulators had placed a target on their industry, which is why the
Times
article raised such an uproar and put Brian in peril. If Stephen tried to fire him today, Brian could mention Everson’s offer and see how it played.

Teresa caught up with him as he walked toward Stephen’s office.

“Everyone’s been asking if I knew where you were,” she said. “I heard they even sent someone around to your house. People were thinking you committed suicide or something.”

“I hope I didn’t disappoint anyone.”

She tugged his sleeve to stop him, turned so they were face-to-face. “They’re sending me back to Jersey. I’m working on a new project to redevelop our sales territories. We’ve had multiple reps calling on the same doctors, fighting over who has what account, and even complaints from doctors.”

“The fighting’s going to get worse before you’re done realigning the territories,” Brian told her.

She shrugged. “I can take it.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Teresa started to speak, stopped, then started again. “Anyway, I want to apologize for the other day in the bar. You know, the way I threw myself at you. I shouldn’t have done it, and you were right to turn me away.”

“It wasn’t as easy as you might think.”

“Thanks, but I know you weren’t that interested.”

Brian nodded; Teresa was right. “When are you going back?”

“I start tomorrow. Today’s my last day here.”

“It could be mine, too,” Brian said. “I’ll stop by and see you before I leave.”

No one with Brian’s talent or ambition kept the same job or career path for long, and he was prepared to make a move as need or opportunity dictated. What Brian could never prepare for was losing Gwen, because he’d a glimpse of that and the view was bleak. The night Gwen was missing he lay awake for hours stroking his children’s cheeks and hair and swallowing back the dread that he’d never see his wife again. He played over and over again the worst-case scenarios. At one point he moved from Nate’s bed to Nora’s after having been kicked too many times by his sleeping son. He dozed in and out but the dreams were as bad as being awake, and he surfaced from one of the bad ones when his phone rang and woke him, while the kids slept on and morning light filled the windows.

Her voice—quiet, a single note from breaking—telling him she was safe. Like getting a call from God and ever after you are blessed with faith. Later, when Gwen told him how she’d gotten lost—the call with Jude, losing her direction, the horrific and freezing night in the wilderness—he did not chastise her or erupt in anger or jealous conniption. He comforted her and himself by holding her and whispering how she was his one true love, the only one, and please don’t ever leave him like that again.

Shelly told Brian to go right in, Stephen was waiting. She kept her face neutral, even though she knew what was about to happen: whether he was a goner or not. The executive assistants, they always knew; they held more inside information than the chairman of the board.

“Brian, sit down.” Stephen rose from his chair and shook Brian’s hand, as if Brian had come for an interview.

Brian sat in one of two leather chairs facing Stephen.

“We were getting a little worried about you. Thought maybe the FDA had snatched you up.” Stephen laughed, making light of his own comment.

“I was away with my family on a trip we’d been planning for some time.”

“Well, good, welcome back. I’ll get right to the point. We have to do something about Zuprone, and I know you’ve been working on it for a long time. So you understand the current situation. We’re going to make some changes, starting immediately.”

Here it comes.

“We’re going to issue a statement to the FDA and the media recommending that Zuprone not be prescribed for weight loss except in clinical trials.”

“What clinical trials?”

“We’ve evaluated your business case and conclusions and have decided to apply for FDA approval for Zuprone as a weight-loss drug.”

Brian sat speechless.

“That is still your recommendation, isn’t it?” Stephen asked.

“Yes, but what about the reports of anorexia?”