chapter twenty-one

Ben’s short lesson on artificial kidneys had me intrigued and wondering if somehow the work Phoenix had been doing with Global Devices was tied to Tommy’s murder.

I spent the better part of the next day finding out as much as I could about artificial organs. The internet was a great help and I was amazed to find out that not only were hearts and kidneys viable organs to implant in the body, but researchers were developing artificial livers, lungs, stomachs, pancreases and urinary bladders.

My research led me to a biography about the man the medical community had christened the “father of the artificial organ”. Dr. Willem Kolff was born in Holland and is credited with inventing the first artificial kidney during the Second World War using sausage casings and orange juice cans. He and his colleague Dr. Robert Jarvik are credited as the inventors of the first artificial heart that was implanted in a human.

Dr. Kolff’s early invention using the sausage casings, orange juice cans and a washing machine, led to the modern dialysis machine. In his first experiment in 1938, Dr. Kolff filled sausage casings with blood, then somehow expelled the air in the casings, added some urea (a kidney waste product), and agitated the contraption in a tub of salt water. Within minutes all the urea had moved into the salt water. The next device consisted of one hundred and forty-five feet of sausage casing wrapped around a wooden drum immersed in a salt solution. The patient’s blood was drawn from the wrist artery and fed directly into the casings. The drum was constantly rotating, removing the impurities from the blood. Okay, so far so good, I was understanding the basics.

And then the story got really good. Dr. Kolff used a design copied from the water pump coupling found in Ford motor engines to get the blood safely back into the patient. Voila! The concept for dialysis was born.

Unfortunately, the first fifteen patients placed on the machine died. By 1945 Kolff had made several more modifications to the machine and was using blood thinners to prevent coagulation of the blood. The first person to survive after being on the machine was a woman, in a coma from kidney failure. The machine worked its wonders and when the patient came out of the coma, her first words were “I’m going to divorce my husband”! She lived another seven years after receiving the treatment.

Dr. Kolff sent a prototype of his machine to doctors in New York City in 1947 and eventually the machine was improved to such a level that it was used regularly by people whose kidneys had failed. Today in the United Stated, tens of thousands of people undergo dialysis treatment three times a week. Many of them are waiting for a kidney transplant. Dr. Kolff moved to the U.S. in the fifties and went on to invent membrane oxygenators for bypass surgery, which eventually became the artificial heart, and worked on artificial eyes, ears and limbs.

I called Ben Tucker and asked him how much he new about the artificial kidney project. He told me that I knew as much as he did because he had pretty much told me everything the other night at Starbucks. I didn’t press him. Carrie told me that the artificial kidney project had been code named the Arapaho Project and she gave me a list of the people who had worked on it. Nat Scott was the project leader (in addition to her role as Vice President of Research and Development) and there were fifteen employees listed as team members. Tommy’s paper file was not very thick and contained very little information. When I asked if Tommy kept files on his computer at the office Carrie said she wasn’t sure. We turned on his desk computer and after putting in the password (which Carrie knew) we surfed around a little and discovered nothing. Apparently Tommy used his office computer for email only and there was nothing else stored or filed on it.

“Each project office is responsible for keeping the official files for their projects,” Carrie told me. “Before I worked for Mr. Connaught, I worked on one of the R and D teams as the project administrator. We had to keep really good files because a lot of the work we do is on medical devices. Our files have to be ready for audit at any time by the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration. We kept all of the research notes, results of tests and any trials, stuff like that. Do you want me to ask for the files on the Arapaho project?”

“No. No thanks Carrie.” Until I understood how things worked around Phoenix I wasn’t about to go upsetting any apple carts. I hadn’t received the warmest of welcomes so far from the staff. Admittedly, I hadn’t been expecting marching bands and group hugs, but I also hadn’t expected some of the icy attitudes either. I guess I didn’t know what to expect. Everything had happened so quickly. One day I was working in a law office as a legal secretary and then poof! the next day I was in charge of my own company. I guess if I was being fair, I should give the staff the benefit of the doubt and give them some time to get to know me and accept that Tommy was gone. But I didn’t have any feelings of fair about Nat Scott.

chapter twenty-two

Saturday morning I checked out of the hotel and moved into Tommy’s apartment. Correction: my apartment. I couldn’t very well justify spending scads of the company’s money on a first class hotel when I had 7,000 perfectly acceptable square feet of living space available to me on Central Park. The Upper East Side. The enormity of it all and the overwhelming notion that I owned property in Manhattan, and on Fifth Avenue was a little outside my realm of reality. Tommy had died and I was an instant millionaire. I had trouble breathing whenever I thought about how much my life had changed in such a short period of time. This was not a situation that gave me any happiness, just truckloads of daunting responsibility.

Today though was not a day for self-doubt or a pity-party. I had given myself a tough talking-to the night before and had decided to get on with what needed doing. I had been in emotional limbo since finding out about Tommy’s death and had been floating through each day, barely making a dent in what needed to be done. I had to move on and make some huge decisions.

Did I want to stay on as Chair and CEO of Phoenix Technologies? Did I want to live in New York?

I had spent my entire adult life living in Toronto, which is a big city by Canadian standards. In fact it was Canada’s largest city. But New York City was so huge, I wasn’t sure if I could live there.

My gawd, there was so much to think about. Did I need a work visa? What would I do with my apartment in Toronto? If I moved to New York, would I have to give up saying eh? Could I get Ron McLean and Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night on any of the American TV networks? Could I get used to four downs in American football? How would I cope on Labour Day weekend if the Toronto Argos and Hamilton Tiger Cats game wasn’t televised in New York?

And who was I fooling? Being CEO of a publicly-traded company took a lot more experience than I had or could probably learn fast enough. I was surprised that the share price of Phoenix hadn’t hit rock bottom with Tommy’s death and the shareholders finding out that a secretary was taking over.

If I stayed in New York, what would happen with Jay? He was on the fast track with his new company and although he was in New York now, he was only here for training. His full-time job was back in Toronto. Our relationship could probably not survive with us living in two cities. My past experience with Tommy in this regard was probably a good yardstick.

I loved Jay and I wanted to be with him. He had told me he loved me but did that mean he was committed to a long term relationship? There was six years difference in our ages and although Jay always told me he didn’t care about that, I wondered if the upheaval in my life was going to fit in with his career and his plans.

Staying in the Big Apple, staying with Phoenix, staying with Jay - it was all eating at me. It was no wonder my stomach was constantly upset. So last night I gave myself a verbal shit-kicking and made some decisions.

I was almost positive I could give New York and Phoenix Technologies a chance. What the hell. If Tommy thought I could run the company, I’d at least try for him. New York wouldn’t seem so enormous and so scary for me if I settled in for a while, so I decided to get out of the hotel, which felt so temporary, and move into the apartment.

I’ll be honest. The thought of moving into the apartment scared the crap out of me. The lump on the side of my head was gone but the memory of being cold-cocked upside the head was still very fresh in my mind’s eye. No one liked being scared and it made me mad to think about being vulnerable.

Feeling scared and feeling vulnerable were wasted emotions as far as I was concerned. I would have to do something about it and learn to defend myself, especially since there had been no breaks in Tommy’s murder or my mugging in the apartment.

Jay was waiting under the awning of the entrance to the apartment building when Lou pulled up in the car. My heart did a couple of flips and I smiled when I saw him standing there. Jay was good looking, by my standards, standing a little over six feet. His brown hair was wavy, cut short but not too short, and he had beautiful green eyes. He smiled widely back at me when the doorman opened the car door.

We held hands in the elevator on our way up to the apartment and didn’t say anything until the doorman had loaded all of our suitcases into the lobby of the apartment.

“Shall I put the suitcases in the bedroom, Miss?” he asked.

I peered at his name tag. “No thanks Albert. We can manage just fine.” He nodded and backed out of the lobby, closing the door quietly behind him.

Jay took me in his arms and hugged me tightly. I hugged back, with all my might. His embrace felt so good. We hadn’t seen each other in days, and when I had called him last night from my hotel, I asked him to move into the apartment with me.

“At least move in for the rest of the time you’re here in New York for your training. Why stay in that little walk up apartment?”

He had hesitated for a bit, and then said, “This is a big step for us Kate. Moving in together.” He hesitated again.

“I know,” I said. “But I don’t want to be alone here in New York.” Hopefully I didn’t sound like I was too needy.

“Is this just a New York decision then? If we were back in Toronto would we be in separate apartments?”

“Well,” I responded honestly. “I don’t know. We’re in New York and so much has changed in my life in the last two weeks. I know I want to be with you. Can we just say yes for now and talk about it when we’re face to face?”

Jay hesitated again and then said he would see me at the apartment in the morning. When the car pulled up and I saw he had his suitcases with him, I felt pretty good.

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him. He snaked one hand through my hair and the other one wandered down my back. He pulled me closer and I melted into him. Leaving the suitcases in the lobby we wandered into the guest bedroom and stretched out on the large, king size bed. Jay slowly unbuttoned my blouse and helped me out of my clothes. He covered my body with kisses and kept murmuring “Kathleen, I love you”.

Later, I dragged him into the shower for some more fun and games, but not before he made me scrub his back.

That afternoon Jay went to his office and I carried out a complete search of the apartment. I was looking for some very specific things, like Tommy’s hand-held electronic organizer, and some clue as to the password to his computer. But I was also on the look-out for anything out of the ordinary.

Starting in the kitchen I went through every cupboard and drawer. The cupboards held all the accoutrements one would expect to find in a kitchen comparable in size to a large restaurant. There was very little evidence that the kitchen was used on a regular basis. It didn’t look lived in. There were no piles of junk mail on the counters, no plants, no dish towels, and very little in the way of foodstuffs. There was no junk drawer. My kitchen and my mother’s kitchen always have a junk drawer. A drawer that holds take-out menus, elastic bands, pens, pieces of string, bills, receipts, Canadian Tire money, combs, and things we generally have no use for but can’t bare to throw out. Tommy’s kitchen did not have a junk drawer.

In the living room, dining room, lobby and hallways, I opened every drawer in every desk, coffee table, side table, buffet and credenza. I removed every picture and painting that was hanging on a wall to look behind it for a secret safe (I was really feeling like Nancy Drew at this point). I took each one of those pictures and paintings out of their frames to see if anything was hidden under the backing.

In the living room, I removed every book from the bookcase and turned it upside down, fanning the pages, hopeful that something would fall out and give me all the answers.

In the two bedrooms, I searched through every dresser drawer. The drawers and the closet were empty in the guest bedroom. In Tommy’s master bedroom I went through all his clothes hanging in his walk-in closet. I checked all the pockets of all the pants and jackets and shirts. I put my hand into each shoe, not knowing what I was looking for. I was exhausted by this point but refused to stop even when I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Tommy’s aroma was pungent in the walk-in closet, and I felt myself wanting to cry for him. There was nothing in his dresser drawers other than neatly folded T-shirts, socks, underwear, an old wallet (with nothing in it), and some work-out clothes.

I fanned all the pages of all the books in Tommy’s bookcase (which contained every bestseller in paperback from the last ten years), and was surprised to find two Harlequin romance novels in amongst them. They both looked vaguely familiar and I realized that they were probably old books of mine that Tommy had kept. He used to laugh at my secret obsession with romance novels, and would grab the books from me and tease me about the women on the front covers with their bosoms partly exposed, swooning in the arms of a Fabian-like Adonis.

I had no luck with the books, so I started on the framed photos and paintings hanging on the walls of the bedroom. The sun was going down by this point and the room was getting dark, so I turned on the bedside lamps. There was no overhead lighting and the room was subdued and sexy. I hurried through my task, not expecting to find anything pertinent at this point in my search. It had been a long afternoon and I was bone tired. The ends of my fingers were sore from prying the backs off picture frames, and the back of my neck was throbbing.

I pushed my way up onto the end of the bed and sat down, with my feet swinging off the floor. Now would be a good time to stop with this nonsense, I thought. If Tommy had left a clue, it certainly was not in this apartment, as far as I could see.

My eyes landed on the lone photo, sitting in the little space high up on the bookcase. It was the photo of me, taken on our honeymoon. What are the chances, I thought excitedly as I jumped down from the end of the bed. In the end I had to get a chair from the living room so I could reach the picture on the upper shelf, but the effort was worth it.

A key fell onto the floor when I took off the back of the picture frame. “Bingo,” I yelled.

chapter twenty-three

My heart was pounding and I needed a cigarette to help me get my thoughts organized. Stupid, stupid habit I chastised myself as I dragged deeply. Pacing back and forth on the terrace, I knew I was onto something significant. If Tommy had taken the trouble to hide a key in the back of a picture frame holding a picture of me, then the key was definitely a key to something.

I was waiting anxiously for Jay to come home because I wanted him there when I inserted the key into the filing cabinets hidden in Tommy’s secret place. I was certain the key would unlock one of those cabinets. It was small, brass plated and looked exactly like the key to thousands of filing cabinet keys I had handled over the years. And the fact that it had the word “Steelcase” engraved on it helped. Steelcase was one of the world’s largest manufacturers of office furniture and cabinets. Duh!

“Look what I found,” I said, and proudly held the small key up for Jay to see when he arrived. “I waited for you to get here before I tried opening the cabinets in the room behind the wall.”

Jay grabbed the remote control from the coffee table and activated the opening in the wall. The key worked on both cabinets which were chock full of files, neatly arranged alphabetically but in a strange way. The files didn’t have names or words on them, only letters of the alphabet, followed by a hyphen and a number. In the A’s, there were seventeen files, labeled A-1 through A-17. The cabinet on the left held files from A through R in two drawers, and the cabinet on the right had files S through Z in the top drawer. None of the files were thicker than an inch, and several appeared to hold only one or two sheets of paper.

The bottom drawer of the right hand cabinet held a jumbled assortment of power cords, computer and printer cables, a few magazines and a strong box. I eagerly grabbed the box and held it up by its handle. Jay calmly took the strong box from me and pushed the button on the front of it and it opened.

The box contained an interesting assortment of items: mine and Tommy’s marriage certificate, dated almost ten years ago, Tommy’s birth certificate, his passport, a crazy love letter that I had written him on the back sheet of a draft prospectus (I remembered writing it one late night at the office as we were all working on the initial public offering of Phoenix Technologies’ shares), another key (which appeared to be a safety deposit box key), and Tommy’s electronic organizer. Eureka! Now we were getting somewhere.

I was convinced that the electronic organizer would hold some clues and maybe some passwords. Tommy never went anywhere without it. Well, maybe he did, if it was in this strong box and not on him when he was murdered.

I handed it to Jay, hoping he would be able to unlock untold secrets. Needless to say, he was happy to work his magic on it while I started going through the files in the cabinets.

I had no sooner pulled out file A-1 when Jay told me that the electronic organizer was locked and we needed a password to access it.

“I give up,” I said dejectedly. “Could Tommy have made this any harder? What in God’s name could be so important that he had everything password protected?”

“Obviously, he and his company had secrets which needed protecting. I’d guess they were pretty big and possibly damaging, and it’s probably why he was murdered. The police haven’t said that it was a typical mugging, have they? I think he was shot because of something in his personal or business life,” Jay said.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “I’m just frustrated. And wanting answers. And I want them the easy way. Let’s take some guesses on his password,” I suggested.

“Okay shoot. I’m not sure how many tries you can have before the organizer will lock you out, but usually it’s at least ten. Let’s start with his birthday.”

“May 6, 1959.”

Jay entered 561959. And then he tried may61959. And a couple variations on my birthday, September 10, 1968.

“Any other ideas?”

“Try Phoenix.”

“No, another strike-out. I’m going to try your name.” He entered Kate. Then Kathleen. Neither worked. “You know, I think we might be on the right track. He left everything to you in his will. The key to the cabinets was behind a picture of you. No one in New York seemed to know about you so it’s a good guess that the password is one that someone wouldn’t cotton-on to, probably something to do with you.” Jay was getting excited now. “So, did Tommy have any nicknames for you?”

I blushed thinking about some of the pet names Tommy had for me.

“Okay,” Jay said. “Let’s start with one that may not be that personal.”

I thought about it for a moment and something niggled in the back of my mind. It had been many years since Tommy and I were together and it was difficult to recall everything but I definitely remember he used to tease me a lot about something. Then the light went on!

“My middle name,” I said.

“Great. What is it?” Jay asked ready to key it in. He paused. “That’s weird. I should know the middle name of the woman I’m sleeping with but I don’t know if you’ve ever told me.”

“That’s because I don’t make a habit of telling people my middle name.”

“Oh, a little testy about it, are we?” Jay teased.

I hated being teased.

“It’s my grandmother’s name. Florence,” I told him reluctantly.

“That’s not so bad,” Jay said, as he started entering Florence.

“Hold on,” I said quickly. “Don’t waste a try on Florence. That may be my middle name, and I’ll deny it if you ever tell anyone, but that’s not what Tommy used to call me. His nickname for me when he wanted to tease me was Flossie.”

Jay snorted. “Yeah, that’s bad.” He was trying to hold back a smile, but he failed miserably and broke into a laugh. “Okay, I won’t use it against you. Often,” he snickered and then he entered Flossie into the electronic organizer and the thing started to chime. Then we both broke into wide smiles.

chapter twenty-four

I turned around and booted up Tommy’s computer.

“If Flossie worked on that thing, what do you think the odds are that it’ll be the password to his computer?”

I could feel the excitement building and was anxious to find out as much as we could. When the password log in screen came up on the computer I typed in Flossie and the computer politely told me that it was an incorrect password and I should try again.

“Shit,” I mumbled and tried Flossie in all capital letters, all lower case letters and several other variations.

“Cut it out Kate,” Jay told me. “You’re going to lock yourself out of the computer. Hang on a minute, I’m looking for a password file on his organizer.”

I sat on my hands to keep myself away from the computer and tried to be patient. At just about the point where I was going to scream in frustration, I heard the doorbell sound through the building intercom. The noise startled me because everything about this apartment was so new. Anxious to do anything but sit on my hands, I jumped up and went through the living room to the lobby and picked up the phone on the wall.

“Yes,” I said into the phone.

“Albert at the Front Desk ma’am,” I heard through the handset. I would hope so, I thought. No one else should be able to call up.

“Yes, Albert, what can I do for you tonight?”

“You have a visitor, ma’am. Shall I send them up?”

“Well, would you like to tell me who the visitor is, before I agree to that?” I asked him politely, but through clenched teeth. I was starting to suspect that security wasn’t one of the building’s stronger suits.

“A Miss Scott. Natalie Scott. Your neighbour miss, from the twentieth floor,” he drawled.

Oh really, I thought. I wondered if she was bringing me a Bundt cake to welcome me to the building.

“Send her up Albert,” I told him.

I quickly ran around to the living room and told Jay that we had a visitor. He could either lock himself in the secret room or come out, and close the wall opening. He chose the latter. The wall just finished closing as the front door chimes sounded. I braced myself and opened the door with a tentative smile on my face.

Natalie Scott would be a beautiful woman if she didn’t have such a pinched look about her. She had beautiful hair, long and in corkscrew curls, but it framed her face in such a way to make her look thinner than she really was. She stood about five foot seven, a giant in my books, and she held herself ramrod straight with her arms across her chest. Such body language. God, I thought once again, what did Tommy see in her?

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said back. I held the door open and invited her in. I introduced her to Jay who was sitting in the living room and she barely acknowledged him. Personally, I think he’s great to look at and wondered why she didn’t show any more interest.

“So,” I began. “What brings you by?”

“I’m here for my things. The doorman told me you had moved in today.”

Again, was nothing sacred and secure in this building? Geez! And what things, I wondered. I had just carried out a search of this apartment that would have made the FBI proud. I didn’t recall finding any of her things.

She must have assumed, or been told, that I knew about her relationship with Tommy because she wasn’t shy about the implication of the meaning of “my things”.

“Uh, sure,” I said. “What things and where would they be?”

Nat quickly glanced at the aquarium as if she knew there was something behind that wall. I played dumb. Years of practice, you know.

“Oh some CD’s, and a few files from the office,” she said, a little too casually.

Yeah right, I thought. She wanted into those filing cabinets, or the computer behind that wall, and the only way she was getting in that room was over my dead body. I shuddered as the thought passed through my brain. Cut it out, I told myself. Stop jinxing the pitcher!

I pointed at a stack of CD’s sitting on a side table. “Help yourself,” I offered. “As for office files, I wouldn’t know where they would be. I went through Tommy’s desk and there weren’t any business files.” I nodded at the desk at the far end of the room.

She picked up the pile of CDs and started shuffling through them. She wasn’t looking at the titles, she was only going through the motions of looking. “Nope, not here,” she stated as she put the stack back on the table. I caught her glancing again at the aquarium.

“Well, the files must be at the office then,” she said. “I’ll check with Carrie on Monday.”

She headed back to the front door, and said goodbye over her shoulder. She was making a fast exit and I was glad. The woman gave me the creeps. I stared through the peephole in the door until she got on the elevator and the doors closed.

“Okay,” I said to Jay as I walked back in the living room. “Something’s up and she knows about that hidden room. We’ve got to do something about all that stuff in there.”

“Well, it’s probably a little late to do something tonight, but we could move it all out of here tomorrow to a secure place.” He stood in the middle of the room, with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking smug.

“What?” I said.

“I found his password file on the organizer. And these are serious passwords. Letters and numbers combined, upper case and lower case. Probably randomly generated by a computer program so they’re harder to break. I think I have the password to the computer. Good thing you told me our visitor was arriving because I was just about to yell out that we had hit pay dirt!” He grabbed the remote and opened the wall again.

The computer opened up on Jay’s first try with the password. There were thousands of files on the computer, all seemingly related to Phoenix Technologies. I recognized some of the hundreds of sub-directories that were labeled by project names but that was the extent of my knowledge.

“Oh, my, gawd,” I said slowly. The enormity of what lay before me was sinking in. How was I ever going to sift through all of this information when I didn’t even know what I was looking for? I felt defeated, discouraged and dead tired.

“Let’s call it a day,” I suggested, “and go find something to eat.”

chapter twenty-five

Over dinner, Jay and I talked about my big, pending decisions. Staying in New York. Staying on as Chair and CEO of Phoenix. Jay staying in New York.

Jay was no help at all on the first two issues. He kept telling me I had to do what I thought was best. He was so damn supportive! I was hoping for a little push-back but he wasn’t forthcoming. He was convinced that I could succeed as the head of the company and that I would adapt to New York. Jay had a blind faith in me that on the one hand was encouraging and flattering, but on the other hand, left me a little doubtful that things would be as easy as he made out.

On the question of Jay staying in New York, I was a little wary of how to broach the subject.

“So I stay in New York. What about you?” I asked.

“What about me?” he teased.

“Well, you’ve only got a few months of training left here in New York. Will you be going back to Toronto when you’re done? Would your company let you work out of the New York office? Could you live in this city? Both our families are in Canada and although Toronto and Ottawa aren’t half way around the world, it would be difficult to go for a Sunday drive and drop in on the folks for dinner.”

Jay was close with his mom and his sisters, just as I was with my folks and my brother. I knew if I decided to stay in New York, it was going to be hard.

“Yeah, I’d miss my family,” he agreed. “But you’re my family now too and I’d miss you more.”

I felt the same as he did. Had I told him yet that I loved him? I didn’t think so. I had been too hung-up on our age difference. Too hung-up on the crappy things going on in my life. Too involved in things that didn’t seem to matter at that moment. I was tired and emotionally spent but hell, life was way too short. So I told him.

I dry swallowed and felt a lump in my throat. This was the hard stuff for me. “Jay Harmon. I love you. I want to spend my life with you.” There. I said it.

Jay’s face broke into a wide smile. A wide, loving smile. “I knew you loved me. You think I’m sexy. You really want me,” he chanted and teased.

“Yes,” I said back. “So will you stay in New York if I stay?”

“Well, if my company won’t let me work in the New York office, I think I know someone at a local high tech company who could get me a job!” He reached across the table and took my hand. “Yes, of course, I’ll stay.”

We held hands across the table and I felt refreshed and a lot better. Over dessert I broached the other subject that had been bothering me.

“I need to learn how to defend myself,” I told Jay. “I don’t feel safe. Being in the apartment creeps me out a little, and I don’t want someone sneaking up on me again. After what happened to me in Toronto, and then again when I arrived here in New York, I think it’s time I learned how to defend myself. I hate feeling vulnerable and not in control.”

“Well,” Jay joked, “you could become an instant American and buy a gun. Start believing in your right to bear arms!”

“Yeah right! Guns scare the crap out of me.”

“I know, I know. I was just joking,” he said. He reached across the table and took my hand. “I have a friend in Toronto who does martial arts and some Israeli type of self-defense. Let me look into it and see if there’s someone here in the area who he would recommend as a teacher. We could both learn,” he said eagerly. Jay was a jock and liked all things physical. Me on the other hand, not so much. Walking at a brisk pace for a mile was enough to do me in.

“Great,” I agreed, trying to show lots of enthusiasm for something I knew was going to hurt.

The next morning I woke up early, resolving to get through as many files as I could on Tommy’s computer. With my coffee in a large mug, and a clean ashtray I sat down and logged on to the computer. Jay found me there a couple of hours later when he finally got out of bed.

“Anything yet?” he asked. He stood behind me and massaged my shoulders.

“Ohhh, that feels good. I’ll give you five bucks to never stop. And no, nothing yet. Nothing that’s jumped out at me giving me a hint as to why he was murdered. I’m going through his computer files in a methodical way, through each directory and every document or file in the directory. He’s filed everything meticulously by subject matter. I’m just finishing up going through the sales stuff including bid documents and RFP’s. Pretty heavy reading.”

“How about we forget about Phoenix for today?” Jay suggested.

It sounded tempting. I hadn’t really thought about anything else in the past ten days. “Okay. What do you think we should do instead?”

“Oh, I think you’ll like what I’ve got planned. Throw on your runners and some work-out clothes,” he told me.

“Aw,” I groaned.

“No complaints,” he ordered. Jay scooped me up from the chair, carried me into the bedroom and plopped me on the bed. “Hustle up, young lady. Sweats, work-out bra, runners. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

I gave in to Jay ordering me around. It was nice for a change to have someone else take charge and make the decisions.

Forty-five minutes later we came up the stairs from the subway onto Canal Street. The crowds were thick and tourists filled the small shops full of knock-off designer handbags and perfume. It reminded me of the Chinatown area in Toronto.

It was clear Jay knew where we were going and although he had so far refused to tell me what we were up to, I was glad that I wasn’t sweating and gasping for air. So far.

He told me the neighbourhood was called Soho, short for south of Houston, one of the main streets running west to east in lower Manhattan. We climbed the stairs to the second floor of a building on one of the streets off Canal and Jay rapped on the door.

The sign on the door read “Jeet Kune Do, Keepers of the Flame”. Under the sign was a picture of Bruce Lee and someone else I didn’t recognize.

That someone else opened the door and welcomed Jay and I. He introduced himself as Frank Sanchez, and led us into a large, nearly empty room. There were a few racks against one wall with boxing gloves and some other equipment I didn’t recognize, and up against the walls were several wooden structures with rounded, short poles sticking out of them. Frank saw me eyeing them and explained that they were called wooden dummies. Really.

By now I had figured out what we were doing, and I smiled at Jay.

“After dinner last night I called Jason in Toronto. He recommended Frank,” he told me. “So I called last night and explained the situation. Frank agreed to see us this morning and give us some private lessons in the art of Jeet Kune Do, or JKD.” Jay pronounced it jeet coon dough.

“Thanks for seeing us on such short notice, Frank,” Jay said.

Frank was a middle-aged man, about five foot ten. His face had some interesting wrinkles and his hair was black sprinkled with grey. He was wearing black Nike pants with a tucked-in black t-shirt. The t-shirt had a round, orange and yellow logo on the left breast. Frank looked like everyone’s father but somehow, I intuitively knew, his appearance was probably deceiving.

“So, Kate,” Frank said, “tell me why you’re here.”

“I want to learn to defend myself. More than a few times in the past six months I’ve found myself in situations where I ended up on the wrong end of a fist.”

“Jay mentioned that last night when we were talking. So let’s start with some basics.”

We spent the first hour learning some basics of JKD. We practised our footwork in our “ready stance”. One foot in front of the other with the heel of our back foot slightly elevated in order to allow quick movement. Frank told us our ready stance was our power base. It was too much information for me. I was concentrating so hard on what my feet were doing, that I missed some of what he was saying. We held our fists up, out and away from our body and practised our footwork while Frank stood behind us and knocked two small bamboo sticks together. Every time we heard the loud knock of the sticks, we were to move in the position that Frank had told us. We practised moving forward, backwards, to the side. Frank told us to focus on the feet and not worry about anything else. My legs started to ache after a few minutes, and my lower back was screaming. A glance at Jay told me that he wasn’t aching. At the end of the foot drills he was still bouncing on the balls of his feet, and miraculously, the aches in my legs and back had gone away. My body was tuning in and my feet were responding to the rhythm of the bamboo sticks.

When we finished the footwork drills, Frank transitioned us quickly into punching. With our feet in the proper position and our elbows tucked in, he showed us how to hold our fists and then he taught us how to punch with our front fist at an imaginary face. Frank’s fists and demonstrations punches were fast, and so powerful. I watched and quickly figured out that the power behind his punches was coming from his whole body, although he barely moved as he jabbed in the air. His forearms bulged and looked like Popeye’s. We practiced and tried to imitate Frank’s powerful punches.

He stopped us after several minutes and offered us each a bottle of water. My shoulders were aching.

“How do you make the punches look so simple but so powerful?” I asked my new teacher.

“That punch you were doing was called the jab. Jeet Kune Do or JKD translates as the ‘Way of the Intercepting Fist’,” he told us. “We try to intercept what our opponent is doing quickly and efficiently, and with as few movements as possible. Simple, right? All of my power is at the end of my fist and my hand moves before my body. And that’s one of the basics of JKD. Bruce Lee was the father of Jeet Kune Do and its philosophy. As we go along we’ll learn about the four guiding principles.”

Frank continued as be counted off on his fingers, “Simplicity. Economy of motion. Longest weapon to the nearest target. And no passive moves. Jeet Kune Do is all about skill, not how many forms or katas you know, or how many techniques you have. JKD is simple yes, but not easy. Bruce Lee used simplicity to define his art of Jeet Kune Do - to intercept your opponent’s intentions quickly and efficiently, with as few moves as possible.”

Frank told us that he learned the art from his teacher, Jerry Poteet, who lived in California and who was one of Bruce Lee’s original students.

“Jerry often uses an analogy to illustrate the point of simplicity and economy of motion. If you want to leave your house, would you crawl out a window, shimmy down the drain pipe, jump down two stories, and hope to land in a tree? Or would you simply walk out the front door? Wouldn’t that be more efficient, simple and non-complicated?” Frank smiled as he used this example.

Simple and efficient worked for me. We spent some more time on our jab and understanding the core of our power before Frank called a halt.

“Kate,” he said. “Jay told me that you were attacked recently. What we’ve learned here today will help you in the future if you’re ever attacked again, but it takes months of practice and years of commitment to be a martial artist. What I’d like to do to help you is understand the situations you were in when you were attacked, teach you some basics in understanding your reactions while you were under attack, and how to deal with them. How does that sound?”

I nodded mutely, not really wanting to re-live those moments. We walked over to the side of the room and sat side by side on a long, low bench. It helped that I didn’t have to look directly at Frank or Jay as I tried to describe the attacks.

My voice was not more than a whisper as I started the re-telling. “The first time, I was asleep in my bed in my apartment. I woke up and someone was straddling my body and had his hand over my mouth. The second time, I was grabbed by the back of my blouse, and he put his arm around my neck from behind, and dragged me.” I stopped for a moment and took a long drink of water, trying to make the metallic taste in my mouth go away. The sweat pouring down my back and between my breasts wasn’t just from working hard on my jab. This was cold sweat, the type that smelled like fear. I blew out a few breaths and continued.

“That second time I did manage to land a punch on the side of his head, but he was a lot bigger than me. And it didn’t help anyway in the end. He smacked me on the side of my head with the butt of a gun and it knocked me out.” Jay’s hand was lightly massaging my upper back and his touch gave me strength. I stood up, chugged the rest of the water in my bottle and turned around and faced Frank and Jay.

“The most recent attack was here in New York. Whoever it was came up behind me, pushed me down on the floor. When I turned around to face them, they grabbed the front of my jacket and hit me on the side of the head so hard it knocked me out. Again.”

I took several deep breaths and then smiled a little at Frank.

“And, I’m here to tell you that I’m not taking that kind of shit anymore. Next time someone wants to mess with me, they’re going to suffer too!”

“Well,” Frank said. “You’ve got one of the critical elements of self-defense going for you. Attitude.”

“Oh yeah,” Jay agreed with him. “There’s plenty of that!”

Frank stood up and looked straight at me. His hands were clasped in front of him and he respected my space and didn’t crowd me. “Kate, you did the best you could to defend yourself in those circumstances,” he told me quietly. “The first thing I want to do is teach you how to be cognizant of your surroundings. How to put your internal antenna on constant alert. Then we’ll talk about how your body and mind react when you’re attacked and how to deal with that.”

He exuded confidence without coming across as cocky or pumped up. I liked him.

When we finished that first day, my arms were rubbery from the punching, my feet were aching from the footwork, and I had a new appreciation for my surroundings. Overall, I was spent, and hardly had the strength to make it to the subway.

chapter twenty-six

Working my way through the files on Tommy’s computer was not an easy job. There were thousands of them in different formats. Excel files, Word files, pdf files, pictures, videos. Everything was organized methodically and the file system on the computer matched the system in the file cabinets. Alphabetical files with numbers. Which made it a total pain in the ass to randomly search and call up a file based on its name. And the pain in my ass was exacerbated by my stiff muscles and my total lack of understanding of what I was searching for. I gave up, disgusted at myself for not having the attention span to work through it all.

That night I dreamed of Tommy but when I woke the dreams eluded me. I felt sad and think it was because I was still mourning for him. It had been eleven days since he was murdered, and although there had been a funeral and memorial service, I didn’t feel the closure that’s supposed to happen when we say our public good-byes. Sure he was dead, but how had he died? Why hadn’t the police found his killer? Why had he died? Who shot him? I felt sure that somehow and somewhere I had the key to unlocking the answers to some of these questions. So where the fuck was the key?

I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder these questions because I was due in the office early for meetings. Ah, the life of a chief executive officer.

In the coffee room at the office I was surprised to see a few early birds like myself. I longed to sit with them at the small round tables and have a good chit-chat but held myself back. Instead I shook their hands, introduced myself, and asked them a few questions about their jobs. Bit by bit I was recognizing faces and getting to know the employees.

Three coffees later, I was up-to-date on emails and determined to get through the snail mail which filled the in-basket. Most of it was garbage so I left a note telling Carrie to feel free to throw out anything that was junk. There were several envelopes addressed to Tommy from the First City Bank of Manhattan and I wondered who should open them. I knew that technically everything that Tommy had was mine now, but I also knew that it wasn’t mine until mammoth legal hurdles were overcome.

Dennis Hillary was his typically nervous self when I got him on the phone. “Dennis, I can’t remember if you told me who will be the executor of Tommy’s estate?” I asked him.

“I am,” he squeaked. I heard him suck air through his teeth.

“So I should be sending any bank statements and stuff like that your way?”

“Yes, and anything else that you’re not sure of,” he offered.

I remembered the key we found in the strong box at Tommy’s apartment. “Dennis do you know if Tommy had a safety deposit box at the bank?”

“No, but let me call them and find out. Did you find a key?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure what it’s for, and it has no identifiable markings on it.”

Ten minutes later Dennis called back and confirmed that Tommy had a safety deposit box at First City Bank.

“And if you like,” he told me, “you can go over there at any time during business hours to open it. Would you like me to accompany you?”

I declined his offer, and he gave me the bank manager’s name and the branch address. The bank was closer to the Phoenix offices than to Tommy’s apartment so I asked Carrie to make an appointment for me to meet the bank manager and to have Lou drive me over. I crossed my fingers that the key I had would fit the safety deposit box.

Sara Williston was the person in charge at First City Bank and she defied all preconceived notions of bank managers. She was tall, elegant, beautiful, and soft-spoken. I vaguely remembered seeing her at Tommy’s memorial service. She clasped my hand in both of hers and without feeling like she was patronizing me or being overly sympathetic, she told me that she was going to miss Tom Connaught as a customer but she was looking forward to serving me and Phoenix.

“What can I help you with today?” she asked me. We were sitting in her office which was on the mezzanine floor of the bank.

“Is this a key for the safety deposit boxes here at your bank?” I held up the mystery key. It was very old-fashioned looking, very thin and longer than a normal key. The number 330 was engraved on the stem. The key manufacturer’s name (Chubb) and logo were engraved on the other side. Other than those two things, there was nothing to identify it as a key to the safety deposit boxes at First City Bank.

“It sure looks like it,” she said and held out her hand. I gave her the key. “Looks like one of ours, but lots of banks buy their safety deposit boxes and the keys from Chubb.” She turned to her computer which was placed on the corner of her desk and started keying in some information.

“Here it is.” She turned the monitor around so I could see it and pointed to a line of information. “Right there. Three thirty. That was the number of Mr. Connaught’s safety deposit box.” She smiled gently. “Mystery solved. Anything else?” she offered. “Do you want to access the box? Mr. Hillary from Scapelli, Marks & Wilson sent over a letter by fax a little while ago telling us that you were Mr. Connaught’s heir and that we were to give you access to the safety deposit box and any information you needed.”

I was nervous and anxious. Going into the safety deposit box could be the point of no return, so to speak. Searches of Tommy’s computers, files, organizers, drawers, cupboards, and file cabinets had so far turned up nothing. Nothing that could be construed or interpreted as having any relevance at all to Tommy’s murder.

Tommy had something hidden somewhere. The fact that he had layers of passwords protecting his electronic files and keys hidden in picture frames to protect his paper files, told me that there were secrets somewhere. I was desperate to find that something that could help me understand why my life was no longer my own. My mother always says that there is a reason for everything, and I was bound and determined to find that reason. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Sure,” I told Sara. “Let’s open up the safety deposit box.”

Did I have any inkling about what I was going to find? Not really. Because as street-smart as I like to think I am, the levels of human depravity that I encountered because of what was in that box, were beyond my imagination. The key to the safety deposit box ended up being the key that unlocked the end of my innocence and naivete.

The bank manager led me into the vault at the back of the bank on the main floor. The back left-hand corner of the vault held floor-to-ceiling safety deposit boxes, each identified with a number engraved on a brass plaque on the front. Number 330 was about halfway up the wall and was one of the larger boxes. Sara removed a key chain from the pocket of her suit, chose a key, and inserted it into the top lock on the box. She held out her hand and I passed her my key which she inserted into the bottom lock. She turned both keys, removed them, and then slid the box out of its slot and handed it to me. Its weight and size surprised me.

Sara led the way and I followed her to a private booth that contained a waist-high counter and one chair.

“Ms. Watson will help you put the box back when you’re finished,” she told me and pointed to a woman sitting at a nearby desk. “Take your time, and please be assured of complete privacy. You can lock this door when I leave. And please let me know if you need anything else today.” She shook my hand and closed the door when she left. I quietly pushed the thumb lock on the door, took a huge cleansing breath, sat down in front of the box, and reluctantly lifted the lid.

chapter twenty-seven

Jay was cooking and I was watching him move effortlessly around the kitchen. He was barefoot, wearing his ragged jeans and a white T-shirt. The view from where I was sitting at the kitchen island was yummy and I was very appreciative. Jay placed an ice-filled glass of Diet Coke in front of me and leaned his elbows on the counter.

“Anything else, ma’am?” he teased.

“At this very moment, no, but thanks for asking.”

Jay returned to the stainless steel gas stove and grabbed the handle of the large skillet that was sizzling with ambrosia-scented ingredients. He tossed the ingredients in the air and amazingly they all landed back in the skillet. Apparently he was making my favourite dinner. Call me kookie but I thought my favourite dinner, bar none, was pizza, and this sure didn’t look like the makings of a meat-lover’s special. However, I was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and decided that whatever Jay was cooking was going to become my favourite dinner. It is possible that he had made this dish for me before and I had forgotten. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not something I was about to own up to.

Jay was an enthusiastic cook. He had grown up in a houseful of women, the youngest child of a single mother who had five children, four of them daughters. Jay’s sisters had babied him until he stopped putting up with that nonsense at age five. After that, all of the kids were treated equally, all having to share the responsibilities of the house with their mother, who worked two jobs. Each of them was expected to know how to cook, clean, do laundry, cut the grass, take out the garbage, shovel snow, wash the car, and change the linens on a bed. We had the same type of rules in our two-parent house, but I never became skilled at any of those chores because I hated doing them. To this day, I remain a reluctant housekeeper, laundress and cook. Don’t get me wrong, I clean, do laundry and can make all the basic foods. But do I like it? Not really. I rush efficiently through those tasks, always knowing there is something more worthwhile that I could to be doing. Like relaxing with a good romance novel.

“Where shall we eat,” Jay asked, “in here, or in the big room?”

I stopped my daydreaming and looked at Jay who was standing in front of the counter where I sat, with his hands full of cutlery, napkins and two placemats.

“Let’s eat at the big dining room table. I want some room to spread out some documents.”

“Okay. Let me put this stuff on the table and dinner should be ready in a few minutes. Are you going to share with me what you found out today?”

I had been holding my breath when I gently lifted the lid of the safety deposit box. As if the box contained a bomb or something. Scared to see what could be in there. Knowing that there had to be something, if Tommy had gone to all the effort he had to hide the key to the file cabinet that contained the key to the safety deposit box.

Was I a little disappointed when I found only two items in the safety deposit box? Relieved, yes, but not disappointed. In fact, I was naive enough to think that the large, legal size, buff-coloured file folder, and the large, brown envelope had to be harmless. Paper couldn’t hurt you, right?

“I’m not sure what I found today,” I said, finally answering Jay. “I emptied the safety deposit box into my briefcase, put the box back in the vault, and had Lou bring me straight home. I’m doing my denial thing.”

Jay looked at me questioningly.

“Okay,” I told him reluctantly. “I’m sure you’ve noted one of my personality quirks. It’s called denial mode. If I think something bad is going to happen, or if I know something is going to make me sad or upset, I ignore it. Deny that it exists. I think I’m doing that with the things I found in the safety deposit box.”

“Alright,” he said. He put the cutlery and placemats down on the counter and came around to where I was sitting. I swiveled around on my stool and looked up at him. “I’ll help you with your denial thing.” He mimed quotes in the air with his fingers when he said denial thing, and then picked up both my hands. He put my right hand to his lips and kissed it lightly on the palm. “Now get off this stool and go set the table.” Jay pulled me down from the stool and kissed the top of my head. “We’ll figure this out together.”

Jay was right. My favourite meal was now the pasta dish he prepared. Large pasta shells stuffed with mushrooms and cheese, covered in a fresh tomato sauce.

Stuffed and satisfied, we tackled the treasures from the safety deposit box together. I placed the file folder and the envelope in front of me on the large dining room table.

“Here.” I shoved the envelope at him. “You go through this. I’ll tackle the file folder.”

Inside the file there was a stack of papers about an inch thick, all neatly punched with two holes at the top of each page, and arranged on foldable metal spikes. The sheet of paper on top was on the letterhead of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. It was a copy of a letter from Dr. Victoria Edwards, Director of the Center for Devices & Radiological Health and was dated about three months ago. The letter was addressed to Dr. Jordan Francis, the Vice-President of Research at Global Devices. In the letter the Director denied “for a final time” Global Devices’ 501(k) pre-market application for its totally implanted artificial kidney. The Director went on to say that she fully endorsed the decision of the Office of Device Evaluation (which she emphasized was part of her organization and which she emphasized reported to her) not to allow clinical trials of the artificial kidney. The Director finished the letter by advising Global Devices that she was the final adjudicator of this matter and that there were no other avenues of appeal available to Global Devices at this time. So there!

Several letters along the same vein but not quite as abrupt were filed behind the top letter. These letters were dated over a six month period earlier this year.

I glanced up from my file to see what Jay was doing with his envelope. He was sitting still, looking at me, waiting for me to finish. The contents of the envelope were stacked in front of him.

“What?” I said.

“Guess. Just guess what was in this envelope.” He held up his hand. “No. Forget it. No guessing. You’ll never get it. Are you ready for this? Your friend Miss Natalie Scott is a stalker.”

“What?” I said, again.

“You heard me. This envelope is full of love letters. Really sloppy love letters.”

Although I thought I knew the answer, I asked it anyway. “Love letters addressed to who?”

“There’s no name. They all start with ‘my love’.”

“Are there dates on the letters?”

Jay flipped through the pile of paper in front of him.

“Some have dates and others don’t. The earliest letter is dated about six months ago.”

“I don’t know if I want to read those.”

“Hey, none of that. No ‘denial mode’ allowed. You’ve been so eager to figure this whole mess out, so here,” Jay shoved the pile of letters across the table to me. “Give me your file folder and let me go through it.”

There were about fifteen or twenty letters in the pile. Without reading them, I flipped through the pieces of paper to get some sense of the letters and their timing. They were written over a two month period and the last one was dated almost four months ago.

The first letter was casual, breezy, non-threatening. Natalie bearing her soul. “I’m so shy and so scared to approach you. Can we get together for coffee? I’d love to talk to you, outside the office. I would love to be your friend. Call me on my cell or send me an email. Yours, Natalie”

By the fifth letter, though, the letters were from a whining, desperate woman. “Why won’t you acknowledge me? Why can’t we meet, have coffee, maybe dinner? Please, I only want to talk with you, be your friend.”

The tone changed from whining and clingy, to romantic and lovesick, in the next couple of letters. They were embarrassing to read and I wondered why Tom kept them. “I can’t think of anything but you my darling. Every night my dreams are filled with the wonder of you. Our life together would be heaven on earth.” Yuck.

Why oh why did this woman continue to work at Phoenix, and why oh why did Tommy have these creepy letters in his safety deposit box?

“To be with you for the rest of my life is all I ask. Let me take care of you and be with you. Together we will be one.”

I ask you, who writes like that? Even the romance novels I had been known to read once in a while did not have such lovesick dialogue in them. Did Tommy give her any encouragement? One wonders if she was getting encouragement because the letters kept coming.

The last letter sounded more like the first letter. Whining, insecure and pleading. “I will never forget you. My love for you does not diminish, even though you won’t meet me, you won’t look at me. Can we ever be together?”

Okay, I was thoroughly disgusted and totally unsympathetic. What type of woman (or man for that matter) would throw themselves so pathetically at another individual? And what type of woman couldn’t take a hint? It was clear that she wasn’t getting any encouragement but she kept at it.

Jay was still busily reading the file so I got up and wandered around the apartment. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I stepped out on the balcony and lit a cigarette and leaned my elbows on the cement railing. I couldn’t marry-up the image of Natalie Scott and Tommy together, and I had been having trouble with the concept of the two of them ever since I first heard mention of it at the office. Tom Connaught was a strong man, physically and mentally.

Strong men like Tommy didn’t take the whining type of crap that Natalie Scott was dishing out in those letters. That’s why guys like Tommy were physically strong too - so they could run, as fast as possible, away from someone like Nat. On the one hand, Tommy wouldn’t give someone like that encouragement if he wasn’t interested in her, and she sure didn’t help herself by letter number five when she was pleading for some companionship. On the other hand, he would have put a stop to the letters after letter number two if he wasn’t interested in her. He would have made short-shrift of her. There’s no way he would have allowed that to go on for four or five months. I was more and more convinced that those letters weren’t addressed to Tommy even though everyone at the office thought they had been a couple.

Jay was at the computer in the hidey-hole behind the aquarium when I went back inside.

“What are you up to?” I asked him.

“I’m on-line trying to figure out the Food & Drug Administration. I’m not that familiar with American government organizations.”

“Well, if they’re anything like the Canadian government, they are one massive pile of bureaucracy. What have you found out?” I pulled a chair up and tried not to crowd him in the little space.

“The Center for Devices and Radiological Health is one of the branches of the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The head of this unit is a Director and the Director is a Medical Doctor. There are about six or seven departments which all report to the Director.” Jay was staring at the computer screen reading this information to me.

The letters in the file from the safety deposit box that I had seen were from the Director of this branch, Dr. Victoria Edwards.

“One of the departments reporting to Dr. Edwards is the Office of Device Evaluation. Hang on,” he said as he scrolled through pages on the internet. “Oh,” he finally said. “Now I get it. I think.” He turned to me.

“The letters in that file all relate to an artificial kidney that a company called Global Devices is developing.” I nodded my head because I knew that.

Jay continued. “If I understand the process from quickly looking on the internet, this department of the government authorizes clinical trials to be conducted of unapproved medical devices and they evaluate the pre-market submissions from the medical device industry. There are various classes of devices that they evaluate and if I read the file right, the artificial kidney would be a class three device - those are the ones that have the most stringent regulatory requirements.”

I was quickly becoming confused, but that wasn’t anything new - whenever someone talked to me about government departments my mind wandered. I tried to keep up with Jay who amazingly had made his way through the myriad of pages on the internet and already had a basic understanding of this department.

“Class three devices are those that support or sustain life,” he read from the computer screen. He looked over his shoulder at me, “I would suppose that an artificial kidney would fall into that category, huh?” I nodded in agreement.

Jay started shutting down the computer. “What else was in that file?” I asked him. The file was more than an inch thick, and more than an inch of paper equals a couple hundred of pieces of paper.

“It’s basically the history of Global Device’s correspondence with the Office of Device Evaluation from when they first notified them of their work on the artificial kidney. The final letter in the file, the one on top, is from the head honcho herself, denying, for the final time, their applications. In other words, Global Devices had not proven to the Director and her staff that their device was safe and ready to be tried on humans.”

The date on the letter from Dr. Edwards was about three months prior. Ben Tucker at Phoenix had told me that our project was cancelled about two months ago. And he told me that it was cancelled due to a lack of research funds. Things were getting more confusing by the moment.

chapter twenty-eight

The next morning I got to the office well before the earliest arrivals and fired up the big Xerox machine down the hall from my office. The behemoth copy machine might have scared off lesser beings, but I was quite intimate with this model, having spent the better part of my last job in front of one. There was one time in my illustrious career as a legal secretary that I had stood in front of a copy machine for days, making copies of documents for the closing of a huge transaction involving over eighty different interested parties. Myself and a few articling students figured out that if we stacked the equivalent amount of paper passed around on that deal, the stack would be almost as tall as One First Canadian Place, a seventy-two storey skyscraper in downtown Toronto. The mechanical sound of the automatic document feeder on the copier haunted my sleep for weeks after that deal was done.

I made two copies of the correspondence file and two copies of the love letters. I planned on returning the originals to the safety deposit box later that day.

Next on my agenda and top of my mind was doing my civic duty. I called the detectives who were investigating Tommy’s death. Neither of them were available so I left a message with the clerk at the Precinct. I was certain that the contents of the safety deposit box were relevant to Tommy’s murder and I was also certain that the cops would want to know.

When Carrie arrived I asked her if she had a phone number for Dr. Jordan Francis at Global Devices.

“I do,” she told me. “Mr. Connaught and he talked on a daily basis for a long time, but I don’t think they’d been in touch for a while. I don’t remember him calling lately. Shall I get him on the line for you?”

“No, it’s okay. I can dial,” I told her. “Just write the number down.” She looked a little hurt and I remembered that a lot of executives had their secretaries place calls for them, announcing that they were on the line. “I’m not sure when I’m going to call him, so I just need to have the number.” She handed me a slip of paper with the number on it.

“Anything else?” she wanted to know.

“There is actually. Can you get me the most recent file on the Global Devices project.”

Carrie was busily writing this request down on the ubiquitous steno pad. She looked up at me.

“Which project? We have several contracts with them.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. The one where we were working with them on the artificial kidney. I think the project was cancelled a couple of months ago. Nat Scott was leading the team.”

Carrie stood up from her desk. “I’ll go right now and ask for the files.”

“Let’s not make a big deal about this. I really don’t want everyone and their dog knowing I’ve asked for the files. Okay?”

“No one will be the wiser,” she told me. “If the project is done, the files will be in the central storage area under lock and key, and I have access.” She opened a door to a closet behind her desk and pulled out a large, four wheeled cart, with a wire tray on the top and one underneath. “Be back in a little bit,” she said and headed down the hall.

Yikes! I was naive enough to think that “the file” would be a couple of folders. Carrie obviously knew better and I readied myself for some tough slogging through technical jargon and medical research data. Neither of which were my strong suit.

My stomach sank when Carrie arrived back with the cart full of file folders. The top and bottom trays of her cart were jammed with files, and several more were perched precariously on the top.

“Where do you want these?” she cheerily asked me.

“Why don’t you just leave the cart over there beside the meeting table, and I can spread out.”

“Is there anything I can help you with, Miss Monahan?” she offered.

“There is,” I told her. She eagerly stood in front of the desk and waited for my instructions. “You need to call me Kate. That’s a start.”

She nodded her head in agreement. “But, I won’t call you Kate in front of other people. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed with her. I knew that Carrie was trained as an executive secretary and stood on formalities. “Secondly, sit down for a minute.” I motioned to one of the chairs in front of my desk.

Carrie sat and smoothed her skirt. She was wearing another beautiful outfit and I was jealous as all get out that she looked so good. “Tell me about Mr. Connaught and Natalie Scott.”

“Tell you what?” she asked tentatively.

“Tell me what you knew about the two of them, their relationship. What they did together.” I was half-way convinced that Tommy and Natalie’s relationship was no more than a figment of someone’s imagination.

“Well, I never actually saw them together. And like I told you before, Mr. Connaught never came out and talked to me about the relationship. I only heard about it through the rumour mill. One of the secretaries who works with the project teams told me that Miss Scott actually told one of the team members that she was going out with Mr. Connaught. And then when the project ended, and she had her famous hissy fit, they broke up. Everyone knew that.”

I still wasn’t convinced but didn’t let on to Carrie.

“Great, thanks for the info. So, what’s on the plate for today?”

“You have no meetings booked, so far,” Carrie said.

“Well, let’s leave it like that, okay? Unless it’s urgent, I want to keep the day clear.” I looked over at the mass of files piled in the cart and felt more than a little sick at the thought of plowing through them.

The files were organized by subject matter and each subject matter had several files. The subject matters included RFP (request for proposal), Correspondence - General, Project Schedule, Client Sign-off, LED Research, FDA Approvals, PISTON Trials, etc., etc. Each of these file categories had several file folders of material and they were stuffed into what we in the legal field called bellows files. Heavy cardboard, expandable file containers. In all, there were probably close to one hundred file folders. I took a deep breath and plunged in, starting with the original request for proposal.

Global Devices had put out the RFP several years prior, and they had been looking for a technical partner to assist them in developing the interface between the implantable artificial kidney and the external energy source. The RFP had some details in the information section about how many artificial organs had failed because of high infection rates. Apparently, earlier artificial organs had to be physically connected to external energy sources and this was done through tubes connected to the device, through the patient’s skin and hooked up to the energy source. There was an incredibly high rate of infection for those patients, many of whom died because of this. Other manufacturers started covering these tubes with a type of polyester fiber which the patient’s skin would intertwine with, reducing the rate of infection and the germs that could get into the body.

Global Devices had come up with the bright idea of finding a company to help them develop an artificial kidney that could work with radio waves, specifically electro-magnetic waves. The external device would give power and computer commands to the internal device, without any physical hook up to the patient’s body. The RFP was being sent to companies that Global Devices thought could develop this external device. The artificial kidney was being built in-house at Global Devices.

About seventeen months after the original RFP was sent out, Phoenix Technologies was awarded the contract to partner with Global Devices. The total value of the contract was over $20 million and if the device was successful, Phoenix would be required to sign over all intellectual property rights and the source code to Global Devices. Phoenix would have no further rights to the device. Period. End of sentence.

So far, so good. I was understanding the basics of what I was reading. I spent the next four hours going through technical files, the contents of which were pretty much Greek to me. The only thing I understood was that it was four hours out of my life I would never get back.

My back was aching from sitting for so long and I was so hungry I swore I could eat the back end of a Buick. I grabbed my purse and headed out to find some food. The streets were teeming with tourists and I had no idea where to go to get some lunch. Every day I had spent at the office, Carrie had made sure my lunch was delivered. Today I felt like a kid out of school, so I wandered down East 46th towards U.N. Headquarters.

You could easily differentiate the tourists from the natives, because the New Yorkers were dressed for success, and all were carrying take out bags with their lunch. The men were wearing open necked dress shirts with no jackets, and the women looked summery in their sun dresses and lightweight suits. And apparently native New Yorkers did not sweat. Both women and men looked cool and collected whereas the tourists (yours truly included), were dripping from the humidity. I had thought Toronto summer days were brutal with humidity, but Toronto had nothing on Manhattan. The heat generated by thousands of taxis and buses, the asphalt on the roadways, the smelly, hot air coming out of the subway grates, the exhaust from the buildings and wall to wall people made it feel like a little bit of hell. Sweat was running freely down my back and chest.

I stopped to get some lunch at a sandwich shop that had a line up out the door. I marched out of the shop with my take-out lunch bag swinging, just like all the other business people in front of me.

Surprisingly there were several empty benches outside the U.N. Headquarters building so I claimed a spot and sat back to do some people watching. I smiled at the very large sculpture of a revolver with its barrel tied in a knot. Very clever. Nine busloads of tourists unloaded in front of the plaza in the time it took me to eat half my sandwich.

In spite of the throngs of people, I found it very peaceful and quiet, and my thoughts turned to Tommy and Phoenix Technologies. Was my life ever going to be as simple as it was last month? I knew that no matter what I turned up, if I kept digging to find out what happened to Tommy, it wouldn’t be pleasant. If the path I was going down didn’t give me any answers, I was stubborn enough that I’d find another path. Somehow, I would find the answers. At this point though, I was so confused with all the different details, I didn’t even know what questions needed asking. Except of course, the big one: who killed Tom Connaught?

chapter twenty-nine

I spent the rest of the afternoon reviewing the files and dealing with mundane issues that didn’t require any thinking on my part. My brain was in overload, and although I have never been nominated for membership in Mensa, I proud that I was keeping up with some pretty technical stuff.

For the first year the development staff at Phoenix had worked on the “guts” of the device, and early on in the development work, the team had baptized it the PISTON system. PISTON stood for Percutaneous Intelligence System Transfer Nephrology. Needless to say, I had to look up the definitions of percutaneous and nephrology. Percutaneous is a medical term for “through the skin” or “through unbroken skin” and nephrology is the branch of internal medicine dealing with kidneys. Which makes sense (of course) because this was a device to be used outside the body, not hooked up to anything inside the body, namely, the artificial kidney. I was not just another pretty face.

At 5:00 p.m. Carrie knocked on the door and came in to ask me if I needed anything else before she headed out. I had lost complete track of time and was surprised that it was the end of the business day.

“Wow.” I got up from my chair and stretched. “I can’t believe it’s the end of the day already. I still have to call Sara Williston at the bank to see if I can drop over and I haven’t called Dr. Francis.” While I was rummaging around my desk looking for their numbers, Carrie quietly picked up my phone, dialed, spoke a few words, hit the red hold button and held the receiver out to me.

“It’s Sara Williston. You talk to her and I’ll go get Dr. Francis on the line.”

I smiled my thanks at her, took the phone and hit the button on the phone taking the line off hold. “Sara, it’s Kate Monahan. I want to return some things to the safety deposit box and wanted to drop by. Is that convenient for you?”

Sara told me that I could drop by any time before 7:00 p.m. After that, she was leaving for a rock climbing class. Apparently, they have rock climbing walls inside old warehouses where people can practice the sport. I did not ask for further details. Rock climbing, indoors or outdoors, would rate right up there with watching golf on television. Yawn, bore.

As soon as I hung up, Carrie was back in my office looking a little disturbed.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“Dr. Francis,” she said. “He’s no longer working at Global Devices and they didn’t have a forwarding address. I find that strange.”

“Who did you talk to over there?” I asked.

“I called his old number and got someone else’s voice mail. I tried the number a second time, thinking I might have dialed wrong, which I didn’t. So then I called the main switchboard, which was closed for the night. Then I remembered that one of my friends who I went to secretarial school with worked there. I tracked her down through the automated directory.”

“Oh. My. God. How long were you out there on the phone?”

“Just a few minutes,” Carrie continued. “Lucky for me Naomi works for the head of the human resources group. Which means she has access to their internal systems. She logged on to their HR system and found out that Dr. Francis left the company about four weeks ago, and they have no forwarding address.”

“You’re amazing,” I told her. “Go home now. We’ll worry about Dr. Francis tomorrow.”

“I’m off then,” she said. “Just remember to page Lou when you’re ready to leave.”

Lou had a heck of a time navigating the streets in SoHo after my bank appointment. Cars were double-parked and two lane streets narrowed to one lane. When he finally pulled up in front of Frank Sanchez’s place, I was about ten minutes late for my appointment. Jay was pacing on the sidewalk, running his hand through his hair. He almost made a move towards the car to open my door, but knew better. Lou was very possessive about his duties.

I told Lou that I didn’t need him for the rest of the evening and he took the news stoically. The man had such pride in his job, and he was so over-protective of me.

“You shure, ma’am?” he asked in his thick New York accent. “Nuttin’ I can do for you tonight?”

“No, Lou. Really. I have an appointment here, and then Jay and I’ll go for something to eat, and then we’ll catch a cab back.”

When I said “cab”, I swear Lou almost gasped. Like I had insulted his mother or something. “It’s okay Lou,” I told him as I placed a hand on his arm. “You deserve some time off. Really. Come and get me tomorrow morning at our usual time. Enjoy your evening.”

“Ma’am,” he said and tipped his hat at me. “Sir,” he said directly to Jay. “Night.” With that he got back behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town Car and left us.

“Wow,” Jay piped up. “Who would have thought it would be so hard keeping the hired help happy?”

My lesson with Frank that night was all about being personally aware of my surroundings, and the effects on the body of violent or aggressive surprise. But we only got to that part of the class after Frank had put Jay and I through our paces. We spent time on our footwork drills and our punches, practicing our jab, cross and hook, and then Frank introduced us to the qua choi or ‘back fist’. This was a punch where you used your forearm like a piston and met your target with the back of your hand. I loved this punch and got great satisfaction from the sound of my hand hitting the practice glove with a satisfying thwap. After thirty minutes I was dripping with sweat, and although Frank’s dojo was air conditioned I could hardly feel the effects of it.

While I sat on the bench sipping from a bottle of water, Frank talked to me about some of the basics of self-defense.

“I don’t really like to call it self-defense,” he explained. “It’s more self-protection. It’s about being aware, sometimes hyper-aware, of your surroundings. Kate, you’re responsible for your own personal security and safety.” When our peripheral vision is active, he explained, our ability to detect danger increases. He talked about how to approach your car at night, why you should lock the doors as soon as you get in your car, and other different types of situations to avoid.

Frank then asked me to describe how I felt physically the first time I was attacked.

“Other than scared out of my mind?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Tell me about other things you remember.”

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on that night, just a few months ago. Just remembering the weight of him sitting on my stomach, one of his large hands covering my mouth and the other trapping both my hands over my head, caused a metallic taste in my mouth. My stomach and bowels tightened.

I looked up at Frank standing in front me. “I remember feeling helpless,” I started. “I wanted to scream but nothing would come out of my mouth. It felt like I was falling down a tunnel. It sounded like thunder in my ears.” My breathing started to get short so I concentrated on taking some deep breaths. I suddenly felt like shit.

“See, even after several months, the incident still has the ability to cause physiological effects on you. You’re breathing is hard.” Frank sat down beside me on the bench. “Kate, look at me,” he directed. “Your face is flushed and it’s not from our workout. This is what I want to talk to you about.”

I took a couple of deep breaths and looked at Frank. He seemed like a nice guy and even though it was only the second time I had met him, I decided I had to trust him. Jay was standing on the other side of the room, leaning on the wall, sipping from his water bottle. He was the smart one, he knew to give me my space.

“Frank, I want to forget about those incidents. I hate the way remembering them makes me feel.” I stood up and starting pacing, getting myself worked up. “I can’t stand not feeling in control. That son-of-a-bitch attacked me three times and then he shot me. He’s fucking lucky he’s in the Kingston Penitentiary because I don’t know what I’d do to that sorry bastard if I ran into him. Just thinking about what he put me through makes me so angry I could spit.”

“Kate. All of these feelings are totally natural. I think you’re handling it well. Some women who aren’t as strong as you don’t cope well at all after they’ve been attacked. Some of them become suicidal. Let’s consider your anger as some positive energy. You can picture him in your mind when you’re working on your punches. Right now I want to talk to you about the effects on your body when you’re under attack. Everything you described to me before is caused by a whole bunch of chemicals in your body that go haywire when you’re attacked or surprised. Your muscles tense up. Right?”

I nodded in agreement.

“You suddenly can’t hear certain noises and others are magnified. Right?”

I nodded again.

“You feel like you’re in a tunnel. Sometimes you feel like you’re falling. You have no sense of time. Everything seems totally out of your control. Right?”

Again, I nodded.

“That’s the effect of the chemical cocktail. Your body goes into self-preservation mode. Your attacker counts on you being surprised and unable to help yourself. Let’s learn how to keep our awareness levels high and how to defend ourselves if we’re the subject of a surprise attack. Okay?”

Jay and I spent the next hour learning how to deal with unexpected surprises. Frank taught me how to take a knife away from someone who was attacking me and even though I was highly doubtful that I could do something like that, within ten minutes I was able to take the knife away from Frank and lay him out, flat on his back on the floor. Frank told me to be submissive and passive with my attacker and to never look them in the eye. That way, the attacker could feel superior and in control. I didn’t need to be stronger than my attacker and I didn’t need to be bigger than my attacker.

Suddenly I felt totally empowered and realized that I had found the magic I had been looking for. I had vowed to learn how to defend myself and even though I was a short little person, I was learning that size didn’t mean anything in these situations, if you knew what you were doing. We practiced on Jay, the poor guy. While he pretended to attack me with a knife, I practiced taking it away from him, and dropping him to the mats that Frank had supplied. Frank ended the lesson by showing me what to do and how to escape if someone grabbed me from behind. By the end of the two hours, I was exhausted but feeling more and more in control. My thanks to Frank were heartfelt.

“Just doing my job, Kate, just doing my job,” he told me. “See you in a couple of days.”

chapter thirty

Jay woke me from a deep sleep that night. I was so physically exhausted after our class with Frank that I could barely make it through dinner. When we arrived back at the apartment I dumped my stuffed briefcase on the large dining room table.

“I have no strength to go through this shit tonight,” I said to no one in particular.

Jay on the other hand, was fired up. Apparently, he gets ‘juiced’ after a work out and has too much energy to sleep. I highly doubt that I will ever feel like that.

I showed him the files I had brought home from Phoenix. He asked if he could go through them.

“Fill your boots,” I told him and dragged my ass to bed. I was totally disoriented when he woke me.

“Kate,” he was saying softly as he shook my shoulder. “Kate. Wake up.”

“What?” I tried to push myself up with my arms into a sitting position but my forearms and shoulders ached so much they were useless. I flopped back down on the pillow. “What? This better be good Jay, or I’m telling your mom.”

He threw the covers off and tugged on one of my useless arms. “Come on. I need to show you what I found in those files.”

I followed him into the dark living room. A bit of light from the street below was coming through the windows and from the cubby hole in the wall behind the aquarium. The computer screen gave off a glow and a small lamp beside it was lit.

“What time is it?” I asked Jay.

“Around two,” he told me. He pulled a chair up beside him and patted the seat. “Here. Sit down.”

“Two?” I yawned. “Aren’t you tired?”

“No. Now pay attention.” He lifted up one of the files that I had brought from the office. “See here?” Jay pointed to the label on the side of the file folder.

“Yeah. I see.”

“What does it say?”

I read off the name on the file folder. Global Devices. Technical Specifications. PISTON.

“Right. But look carefully. What else is on the label?”

“Oh for God’s sake Jay. What? I’m barely awake.” I squinted and looked at the label. “T-7,” I read out loud.

“Right,” Jay said. He took the file back and swiveled around on his chair to the file cabinets behind us. He pulled out the top drawer of the second cabinet and rifled through the files until he found the one he wanted. Jay pulled the file folder out with a flourish and handed it to me. “Ta da,” he proudly said.

“Ta da, what?”

“These two files should be mirror images of each other. Obviously the filing system at Phoenix assigns a number to each file. I only noticed it after I had been reading the contents of the files. I remembered that the files in the cabinets were only labeled with a letter-number combination system. If this file here,” he lifted up the one I had brought from the office, “is the official T-7 file, then this file,” he pointed at the file I was holding, “should be a copy of the T-7 file.” He took the file from me.

“But,” he continued, “it’s not a completely true copy.” He flipped several pages to where it was marked with a small yellow Post-It note and handed it back to me. Jay then opened the file from the office to the same spot. “Remember that game we used to play when we were kids? You know, the one that came with the Saturday comics? They’d have two pictures which looked identical and you had to find the differences? Well, let’s pretend we’re playing that game. Do you see the differences between the two?”

The sheets of paper he was pointing to were part of a report to Global Devices detailing tests on the PISTON system. There were columns of figures, headed with symbols and letters I had never seen before. My brain was still foggy with sleep and I was having just a teensy bit of trouble with my enthusiasm level.

“Sorry, Jay. I can’t see any differences.”

“It’s okay. Look. Here.” His finger came to rest on a number on a sheet of paper in the file from the cabinet, and with his other hand he pointed out a different number, but in the same place on the page on the other file. “See? Same reports. Different numbers. And this isn’t the only place where there are differences.”

He turned around and faced the computer and started fiddling with the mouse. “None of this was obvious when you look at these things in isolation. If you look at Tom’s computer files, nothing seems wrong. Same thing for the files in the cabinet or the files you brought from the office. It was when I had this file from your office and I saw the number on the top of the label, that I thought to look at the file in the drawer. I didn’t put the Post-It notes in the file you know. They were already there, so Tom had already done his homework.”

“What do you think this means?” I wondered out loud.

“That’s pretty obvious to me,” Jay said. “Your Mr. Connaught found some discrepancies in the reports. I think that’s why he has all these files in the drawers. They seem to be a duplicate of the files from your office.”

“Let me see,” I said. I stood up and bent over the file cabinet and pulled a few files out randomly. When we found these files the other day, I hadn’t bothered to go through them because the labels meant nothing to me. The contents of the files that I pulled out now looked familiar to me, and I said to Jay, “I think you’re right. These look like the files I spent all day going through.” I opened the second cabinet and pulled out the file labeled R-1. The contents were the same as the RFP file I had reviewed that afternoon.

“But where are the differences?”

“Look for the yellow Post-It notes,” Jay said. “I think that’s a start. And I want to look at the file from the safety deposit box - that correspondence with the FDA. Maybe that’s what triggered Tom to check out the files.”

“A copy of that file is in my briefcase too, but I’m too tired to go through any more papers. I’m going back to bed.”

Sleep would not come and I dozed on and off for the next couple of hours. My mind kept going back over those files. How did Tommy find out about the differences in the files? What triggered him to go looking? Or who had triggered him? I wondered where Dr. Jordan Francis fit into all of this. And why wasn’t he working at Global Devices anymore? When I dragged my sorry, tired ass out of bed at six o’clock, I decided to make Dr. Francis my priority for the day.

Carrie’s friend Naomi said that the address they had on file at Global Devices for Dr. Francis was on the Upper West Side, near West End Avenue. She was pretty sure he wasn’t living there though because when he left, he told Global Devices that he was moving. They didn’t have a forwarding address.

Carrie told me all this while she stood in front of my desk. “Ask her for the name of Dr. Francis’ boss. I’d like to talk to him or her.”

The next time Carrie was in front of my desk, she was there to tell me that she had Dr. Bill Pritchard on the phone. “He was Dr. Francis’ boss at Global.” I thanked her and picked up the phone.

“Dr. Pritchard. This is Kate Monahan at Phoenix Technologies. I thought it would be a good time for me to introduce myself now that I’ve been here for over a week.” I didn’t want to get to the real reason for my call right up front. I thought I’d test the waters first.

“Yes,” Dr. Pritchard replied. “What can I do for you?” He sounded like a man in a rush.

“Well, I’d like to spend some time with you folks at Global. Get to know you and the people on your team. I understand we’ve been partnering on some pretty important work with you guys.” I knew that although the artificial kidney project was down the tubes, we still had at least two other projects on the go with Global.

“You listen here, Miss,” Pritchard said. “You’ve got some nerve calling here. I’ll tell you the same thing I told Tom Connaught.” He paused for a moment and I thought I could hear him actually seething over the phone. Pritchard’s reedy breathing was coming through loud and clear on the handset. “Phoenix Technologies can take a flying leap. Global Devices will never do business with you again. So stop calling here. The next time you’ll hear from us will be through our lawyers.” And then, not surprisingly, he hung up.

What the hell was that all about, I wondered. “Carrie,” I called out. She came into the office at a trot with her ever-present steno pad, eager to help.

“I need to talk to Natalie Scott. And I need to stop bellowing for you. Sorry about that,” I apologized. “I know you showed me how to use the intercom and I keep forgetting it’s there. Can you ask Ms. Scott if she’s available?”

But Nat Scott was nowhere to be found. Carrie came back and told me that she wasn’t in the office and no one had heard from her.

“Who’s her 2IC?” I asked Carrie.

“Huh?” Carrie responded.

“Sorry. I always forget that not everyone grew up in a military family. 2IC stands for second in command. They used initials for everything in the army. Used acronyms as words and had strange expressions for every-day things.” When I was a kid growing up it was just like being a soldier - we were never “grounded” if we misbehaved, we were CB’d (confined to barracks). When we were learning anything new, we were in “basic”. Each year when we moved on to another grade at school, we were “promoted” and we went up a rank. My dad told everyone affectionately that my mom was his 2IC (yeah, right, mom used to snort). Carrie was giving me a blank stare so I got back on the subject.

“Who looks after the R and D team when Nat isn’t available?”

“I’m not sure,” she told me. “But I can find out.”

“Why not do this. Dig out the file from my meeting the other day with the R and D team. I was given a list of projects that they’re working on. Find out who’s working on the Global Devices projects and that’s who I need to talk to.”

She came back about ten minutes later. “There’s no one working on Global Devices projects,” she told me. “Apparently all work on those projects was stopped. So no one is working on them.”

I felt my blood pressure rising. “That’s ridiculous,” I yelled. “Is that what they told you?” She nodded, mutely. “Which little geek told you that?”

“Rick Williams,” she whispered.

“Get that short little shit down here, right now.” Carrie started beetling out of my office. “And Carrie.” She stopped and turned around with her steno pad clutched to her chest. “Sorry. I wasn’t yelling at you. You know that, right?” She nodded her head. “Okay. So go find me that short little shit.” I heard her giggle as she left the office.

A few minutes later Rick was sitting in one of the chairs in front of my desk. He had his legs crossed and one arm thrown back over the chair in an attempt to look casual. How a man could look casual wearing a short sleeved, white shirt, buttoned to the neck, without a tie, was beyond me. His darting eyes belied his casualness however.

“What’s the status on the Global Devices projects?” I thought I’d dispense with the niceties and get right down to it. My blood pressure was still up there.

“As far as I know,” he said, “there are no Global Devices projects.”

I took a deep breath. “And that is contrary to what I was told in the meeting last week.” I looked at the project status report I was holding in my hand. “As of last week, there were still two current projects with Global Devices. The Fort Apache project, and the San Carlos project. Those teams are supposedly headed up by Belinda Moffat and Ben Tucker. How do you explain the discrepancy?”

“And that is contrary to what I know.” The little shit was mimicking me. “Nat told us in a staff meeting that all contracts with Global had been cancelled.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“A couple of weeks ago?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t remember.”

“Do you remember our meeting last week? When I was introduced to all of you? Do you remember that each of you gave a status on the projects you were heading?”

I wasn’t sure why I was so pissed off. Maybe it was the fact that something was really wrong and I didn’t know what it was. Rick had uncrossed his legs and was hunched over his knees, picking at a hangnail on his thumb. He didn’t respond to me or look up as I harangued him.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. He was examining his thumb now, probably looking for a good chunk of skin to chew on. The man was really weird. No doubt he was good at his work though. Like my estate lawyer Dennis Hillary.

“Well Belinda and Dan talked about those projects at that meeting,” I reminded him. “They gave me a status report on each of them. Neither of them had the good manners to mention that they’d been cancelled. What is the matter with you people?” I demanded. “Does everyone on that team have a career death wish? Does everyone in the research and development department feel the need to lie to me?” I was really steamed.

“Here’s what you’re going to do for me Mr. Williams. You are going to go back to your department, and you are going to find the correspondence with Global Devices where it says that the projects have been cancelled. Then, you’ll find Belinda Moffat and Ben Tucker and bring both of them back with you.” I was standing up, leaning forward over my desk when I finished. I wasn’t sure if I sounded like a pissed off grade school teacher or the drill sergeant that I had grown up with (also known as my dad).

Rick stood up and quickly left my office without saying a word. I lit a cigarette and stared out the windows. This was unbelievable. If it was true that Global Devices had cancelled their projects with us, then it would mean we would be showing some losses or less cash on the income statement. I’m not sure how we would account for the work already done if we hadn’t been paid for it. Russell Freeson, our chief financial officer, had not mentioned to me anything about the two cancelled projects, so unless there was a big cover-up going on, someone had made a mistake somewhere on the status of these two projects. After the receptionist, the one person in a company who should be on top of all the news, and the comings and goings, is the chief financial officer.

“Miss Monahan,” I heard Carrie say behind me. I stubbed out my cigarette in the small ashtray on the windowsill and turned around. Carrie was standing there with Belinda Moffat.

chapter thirty-one

“Belinda. Hi. Come on in. Where are Rick and Ben?” I asked her.

“Rick’s gone home with a migraine.” Her voice boomed in my office and I cringed at the sound. Not that I mind loud, it was the sound of a fog horn in close quarters that got me. This woman had a serious problem and I thought of my great-aunt Irene who used to tell us to “modulate our voices” whenever we got a little rowdy.

“Really?” I said. “And what about Ben? Has he got a migraine too?”

“No ma’am, I’m not sure what his problem is, but he’s not here today.”

Was anybody at work today in that department? Belinda had some papers in her hand which she held out to me. I walked around the desk and took them from her and offered her a seat. The top sheet of paper was a letter from the President & CEO of Global Devices, Dr. Bill Pritchard, the lovely gentlemen I had spoken to earlier that morning.

It was basically a cease and desist letter. We were to cease and desist from doing any more work for Global. And furthermore, Dr. Pritchard demanded that we send back to his company all of the work in progress, source codes, proprietary information of Global’s, working file documentation, test results, blah, blah, blah. We were to send a final invoice for work completed to date, and if we had any problem with any of his demands, we were to call his law firm. He personally wanted no further contact with anyone at Phoenix. Now I understood why he was a little pissed with me this morning.

I looked up from my reading at Belinda. Lord, if her bottom lip wasn’t quivering.

I held up the letter and waved it at her. “What is this all about?” I asked her.

Then she burst into tears. Well, to be kind, burst into tears would be the dictionary definition of someone starting to cry. Belinda burst like the Hoover Dam. I swear to God liquid shot out of her nose, mouth and eyes at the same time, and gushed. Within seconds her chin and cheeks were sopping wet with fluids from her nose and her mouth. The tears were coming out of her eyes like a geyser. To top it off, the sounds coming out of her made her sound like a barnyard animal. She was crying, moaning and gasping all at the same time. At a decibel level that would put the rock band KISS to shame.

Carrie appeared miraculously with a box of tissues and a tall glass of water. She closed the door behind her as she exited.

Belinda grabbed at the tissue box and pulled out about six which she used to pat down her face. She ungracefully mopped her chin, grabbed several more tissues and blew her nose. Oh. My. God. The sound was fascinating and I wondered if any tug-boats on the East River thought they were hearing a mating call.

I waited while her facial orifices dried up. After a few minutes she gulped a few deep breaths and shuddered a bit. Thankfully, it was over .

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

Belinda nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. For now. I feel so stupid.” Her eyes were bloodshot and the end of her nose was a bright red.

“It’s fine,” I told her.

“No. It’s not fine. I should have done something about this a lot sooner.”

“About what?” I prodded her.

“This whole mess with Global. You know, they’re good people. I’m so proud to work on their projects. They develop medical products. Not like the pharmaceutical companies. Those greedy bastards are just in business to suck out every last cent of usurious profit from sick people before their patents run out and the medicine goes generic. The group at Global are working on some leading-edge medical devices. It’s absolutely breakthrough science.” She had lots of enthusiasm in her voice as she talked about Global. Not so much for the pharmaceutical companies though.

“So why did we get this letter from Dr. Pritchard?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. You have to believe me,” she pleaded. “Nat Scott told us that we were to follow what Dr. Pritchard said in the letter, and return their stuff to them, but we were not to tell anyone about it. I asked her how she expected to keep this quiet.” She looked at me expectantly. “You know, we have to do monthly reports on progress against the contract to be able to have invoices generated to bill them for our work. We stop producing against those contracts, no invoices go out. Which means no money coming in. Right?”

I nodded silently. I assumed that’s how it worked. “So someone was bound to start asking questions sooner than later, right?” I nodded again. “You know Miss Monahan, we were doing good work on the Fort Apache project. It was true development work. The client had an idea and wanted to know if we could help them make it work. I love that part of my job. When I graduated from MIT with my degree, I knew that someday I’d be working on projects that actually helped people.”

She sounded genuinely distressed. I was glad though that she had stopped crying. Belinda took another deep breath and sat up straight in her chair.

“The past few weeks have been hell for me. I’m glad this is out in the open now,” she told me.

“But do you know what caused Global to cancel with us?” I asked her.

She shook her head sadly. “No, and I tried asking Natalie about it. She called me a fat cow, and told me to mind my own business. I told her it was my business. My project. I was the team leader and I’m responsible for those staff working on the project. I told her she could call me anything she wants, but we are accountable to the shareholders of this company.”

Belinda may look and sound different than most of the people working around me, but she demonstrated a clear understanding of her responsibilities. I was stymied though as to why she hadn’t come forward sooner with this information.

“If you understand your responsibility to the shareholders of this company, then why did you allow this cover up to go on for as long as it did?” I demanded of her. “You should have stepped up right away with this information. You should have gone immediately to someone on the executive team and told them.”

I wasn’t yelling at her, just stating the facts. But then geez Louise, she started bawling again. Through the tears, the drool and the snot, she told me that she had family obligations. I leaned over the desk and pushed the box of tissues toward her. A little hint to dry herself up.

When she had composed herself, again, she told me that she had been threatened. By Nat Scott. All of the team leaders had been threatened with their jobs.

“You remember the first day we met you?” she asked me.

“How could I forget that wonderful, first meeting?” I responded with a large dose of sarcasm thrown in.

“Well, Nat had told all of us before we went into the meeting that if we breathed a word, she would fire us all. The same thing she had told us a week or two earlier when we got the original letter.” Her loud voice dropped to a whisper and I had to lean over to hear her when she spoke next. “I have twin sisters who require round the clock care. I pay for their care. I couldn’t afford to lose my job.”

Son of a bitch. Nat Scott had not only exposed this company to liabilities I didn’t even want to think about, she had ordered a cover-up of potentially material information. Covering up, or not disclosing, material information to our shareholders and the regulators was a big no-no. I swallowed hard.

Was I as afraid of the Ontario Securities Commission as I was of their U.S. counterpart, the Securities & Exchange Commission? The thought of both of those regulatory bodies gave me the willies but if the truth were told, the Ontario Securities Commission had yet to really punish anyone for not disclosing material information. That’s because they were more into the typical “let’s embarrass them” style of Canadian securities law enforcement. Unlike their U.S. brethren, who got great joy at throwing the book at crooked executives and its “let’s make an example of them” style.

Our company’s shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, so we had to abide by the rules of both the OSC and the SEC. The fact that a large customer of ours had cut off all ties with us was considered material information. Why was that material information? Because if I recalled correctly, the total worth of all the contracts in terms of revenue was around $50 million. Contracts we had already announced to the world, and revenue from those contracts that our shareholders were counting on. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a material amount of money. The loss of that amount of revenue would definitely have a negative effect on our bottom line.

And securities laws say that when you are in possession of information that could affect someone’s decision to buy or sell your company’s shares, then you need to disclose that information. Publicly. By press release. As soon as possible after you come into possession of that information.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Time to call Cleve Johnston for some advice on two things. What to do about the material information now in my possession. And how to fire that manipulating bitch, Natalie Scott.

chapter thirty-two

Being in charge of damage control is not something I had ever experienced first hand. Behind the scenes support was more my forte. So where to start with the whole mess was a big question mark for me, although I did know we needed to get some people involved who I could trust and who knew what they were doing. “Delegate the duty, assume the responsibility” was something my father had taught me early in life and it stuck with me.

The first person I called was not our in-house legal counsel. Experience told me that faced with the type of problems that I was going to throw their way, the first thing they were going to do was call outside counsel, at a very large law firm, who charged at least $500 an hour, and who would provide advice and opinions backed up by huge errors and omissions insurance policies.

Not that this was a problem that couldn’t be fixed eventually, it was the urgency of dealing with it that was important. Bottom line was we needed to come clean with the public and the securities commissions, as soon as possible. But before we got to the bottom line, I knew I was going to have to be patient, and get the best advice for the company that I could.

Russell Freeson’s secretary wasn’t at her desk so I knocked on the open door to his office. Russell and three other people were sitting at his long, rectangular meeting table. Everyone was in shirtsleeves, so I assumed it was an internal meeting. Russell looked surprised to see me and stood up as I tentatively entered his office.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need to speak with you on an urgent matter,” I told him.

“Yes, Kate, come in.” He pulled out an empty chair at the table, inviting me to sit. “We were just finishing up, weren’t we guys?” He addressed the three others, and after a quick introduction to their new CEO, they swiftly gathered up their papers and made an exit.

“Okay,” he said once the office was empty. “What’s up?”

“I think we’ve got a little problem,” I started out tentatively, understating things a tad. “I found out today from one of the team leaders in R and D that Global Devices pulled all of their contracts with us a couple of weeks ago. Were you aware of that?”

Russell paused for a long moment.

“No,” he said. “Hell no. What do you mean when you say they pulled all their contracts?”

“Apparently they told us to cease working on all contracts and return all of their property to them.” I handed him a copy of the letter from Bill Pritchard and he studied it for another long moment.

“I don’t believe this. And we’re just finding out now?” A rhetorical question, of course.

Red blotches were appearing on his long neck and chin and I wondered how he normally functioned under stress. Russell had been with the company since the beginning but he wasn’t more than forty years old. I knew his age from reading his bio but he seriously didn’t look more than thirty. Here’s hoping he’s weathered a few good corporate storms.

“I just found out and came straight down to see you. We need to get the lawyers involved.”

“Of course, but, how did this happen? Have you spoken with Natalie Scott? What’s her explanation for this? Jeez, these contracts are worth millions.”

“Nat Scott isn’t in the office today, so, no, I haven’t spoken to her yet. I think the next time I speak with her, it’ll be through our lawyers. My number one priority, after we figure out when and how we disclose this, is to fire her skinny little ass. I’m pissed Russell. Severely pissed.” Now I was getting red blotches on my neck.

Russell and I spent the next half hour confirming with some of our own people that basically no one knew about the cancellations, except of course the heads of the teams in R and D. The accounting system showed that time was still being tracked against the projects. The current billing cycle was ending in a few days and invoices were scheduled to be issued within seven days of the end of the cycle. Just how many people were involved in perpetuating this continuing myth of having Global Devices as a revenue generating customer remained to be seen. One thing was certain though, all perpetrators would be held accountable. I had only been at the helm of Phoenix Technologies for a short while but I felt as protective of the company as a mother bear. I would track down each and every person involved, and hang them from the yard-arm at noon. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Cleve Johnston said it was good to hear my voice and he sounded genuinely happy to talk to me. Until I explained what was going on. He agreed that we had some major damage control to do and he said that he would feel better if he was in New York, directing the traffic on this.

“I’ll be on the next flight,” he told me. “In the meantime, let me call our New York office and get Barry Golden up to speed. Barry is our expert in all things relating to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He worked there as counsel for fifteen years and joined our New York office about three years ago.”

Law firms were smart like that. They often hired lawyers who worked for government departments or agencies that they dealt with on a regular basis. Having these people on staff gave the law firm the appearance of being on the inside track. It was key though to make sure you were seen to be hiring smart people and not bureaucrats.

“Well, you and Barry can figure out what we need to do with the OSC and the SEC. Who’s your best employment law expert here in New York? We’re going to need them because I believe there’s going to be a wholesale firing of staff in our research and development group.”

“Hold your horses,” Cleve advised me. He sounded like my grandpa, hold your horses. “One thing at a time. Don’t go off half-cocked and angry.”

“Angry?” I repeated. “You’re damn right I’m angry.”

“That’s okay, Kate,” Cleve interrupted me. “We just need to keep our heads level here.”

I took a deep breath and decided that now was not a good time to get into a pissing match with Cleve. He was doing exactly what we paid him $500 an hour to do. He was giving me counsel. Advising me, instructing me, coaching me. I should probably shut up and get my money’s worth.

chapter thirty-three

My stomach was sour from the three gallons of coffee I had ingested and the fact that I had not given it any real food since the night before. I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed, and my head was pounding. Sharp pains were stabbing at my skull behind my ears, a tell-tale sign of the combination of caffeine overload and low blood sugar. It was stupid of me to have gone so long without eating.

Today I decided to eat at the sandwich shop rather than take a leisurely walk and find a bench. It was mid-afternoon and downtown Manhattan had a different feel at this time of day as compared to the hustle that happened at lunch time. I took my time eating and sipped a Coke, filling up on sugar and carbs. The combination of food and two extra-strength Tylenol helped quell the sharp pains in my head.

For a while my mind wandered and I deliberately avoided thinking about the crap happening at Phoenix. I thought about other, mundane things. Tasks on my ever-present list of mental notes. Call my parents. Do some laundry. Send my brother a birthday card. Feed Tommy’s fish. Practice my footwork drills and back fist. After a while I realized my headache was gone and the acid in my stomach had disappeared.

I stopped at the small plaza outside my office tower for a cigarette before heading back into the mess and saw Ben Tucker’s wheelchair going through the handicapped entrance of the building.

Son of a bitch. I ground my cigarette out under my shoe and hurried into the building, hoping to catch him. I waved my hand between the closing elevator doors and they magically re-opened for me. Ben was in the elevator with three other people.

“Mr. Tucker,” I said. “Good to see you. I’d like a quick word with you.” I gave him my phoniest smile.

“Good to see you too Kate,” he said back. He gave me one of those smiles that make most women feel fluttery down there but it wasn’t working on me. I stood beside his wheelchair and focused on the electronic display of the floor numbers as the elevator moved quickly up to our offices. The doors opened at our floor and Ben held out his hand and said, “After you, Kate.”

I stepped off the elevator and waited while he wheeled himself out. Once the elevator doors closed and I was sure no one else was in earshot, I said, “My office, Mr. Tucker. Now.”

I turned on my heel and marched down the hall, not waiting for him. When I passed Carrie at her desk, I told her over my shoulder that Mr. Tucker and I were not to be interrupted. With my back still to Ben, who I assumed was keeping up with me, I told him to shut the door. I lit a cigarette, took a drag and got myself worked up to indignant before I turned around to look at him. He had parked his wheelchair between the two guest chairs in front of my desk.

“And just where have you been today, Mr. Tucker?” I demanded.

“Whoa. Kate.” Ben held up his two hands as if he were stopping traffic. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face. “You sound like my sixth grade teacher.” I decided right there that I definitely did not like this man.

“I asked you a question,” I said.

“Since when are my absences important enough for the CEO to notice?” Ben asked. The smile was still on his face and his tone was playful and patronizing. “We’ve never been attendance checkers here at Phoenix Kate. We all know what we have to do and we get it done. We don’t punch clocks.”

He sounded like he was trying to sweet talk me. There is nothing that makes my blood boil more than being patronized and being talked down to.

I jammed my cigarette into the ashtray, put my hands on the desk and leaned over it towards him. “I repeat, Mr. Tucker. Where have you been today? Your absence was noted by the CEO because you were needed on an urgent matter.” I think I finally got through to him because his smile disappeared.

“If you must know, I was at a medical appointment,” he told me.

“Fine.” I wondered what type of medical appointment kept you away from the office for most of the day.

“What’s the urgent matter?” he asked me.

“Global Devices,” I spit out. “What the fuck is going on?” His face paled and he looked down at his lap for a moment before answering me.

“What do you mean, what’s going on?”

“Are you kidding me, Mr. Tucker?” I demanded. “I spent the better part of the morning with Belinda. And Rick Williams.” He stared at me dumbly, and I took a deep breath before I blew up like Mount Vesuvius.

Rather than yell at him which he was probably expecting, I said in a very controlled tone, “Don’t play dumb with me Ben. Tell me why Global Devices have cancelled their contracts with us. And tell me why no one in this company had the good sense to let us know that Global was no longer a client of ours.”

The silence between us lasted a good thirty to forty seconds before Ben finally spoke. Thirty to forty seconds for him to formulate a good story.

“Nat Scott knew a couple of weeks ago. She was the one who had all the dealings on the contractual side with Global Devices. When they cancelled, they dealt directly with her. The people at Global who I worked with haven’t returned any of my calls, so I don’t know what happened.”

“That doesn’t explain why no one told Tommy, or me, or one of the other senior executives. Do you know what this means to the company? Do you understand our obligations as a public company? Do you have any sense at all?” I probably sounded like his school principal now, not just his sixth grade teacher. “Ben, you’re one of the senior people in that group. What the hell were you thinking?”

His eyes stared through me, and his lips were pursed the whole time I was launching into him. His face was blank, expressionless and pale. I watched him noticeably shake his head and refocus his eyes on me before he spoke.

“Natalie Scott told us what had happened. She didn’t tell us why. And she threatened each of us with our jobs if we said anything.”

“You know Ben, I find it hard to believe that Nat Scott had that much sway over all of the team leaders. So she threatened you with your job. Why didn’t one of you come forward? It makes no sense to me. I would have thought that Tom Connaught would have hired people with more common sense than what I’m seeing. This whole mess is about to become a self-fulfilling prophecy for you and your co-workers Mr. Tucker. Before the dust settles on this, each and every one of you will likely be out of a job. Now get out of my office.”

Ben turned his wheelchair sharply and left without another word.

I did not sign up for this shit, I thought angrily, as I stomped around my office. Hmpf, I snorted, reminding myself that not only did I not sign up for this shit, it had all been dumped in my lap by the gods of irony. This is what you get Kate, I told myself, for acting so high and mighty all these years, acting like you’re so special. So confident in yourself, making sarcastic remarks about everyone. The gods of irony finally had enough and said, here, you think you can do better? Think you can be a better manager? A better boss? Go ahead. Here’s a little company called Phoenix just for you. Now go and lead the employees.

The irony was not lost on me.

Dr. Bill Pritchard was a gentleman. He proved this when he agreed to see me when I showed-up, unannounced, at the offices of Global Devices. Determined to get to the bottom of what had happened, I impulsively had Lou drive me to their offices located on East 29th Street in the area of the NYU Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital. The receptionist called Dr. Pritchard’s office for me, even though I admitted that I didn’t have an appointment.

I paced nervously and watched the receptionist pack up her desk for the day. The reception area was windowless and was furnished like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Sparsely and without too much thought of comfort. I was secretly glad to see that these folks didn’t spend good money on trying to look like they had money. Like big law firms and the head offices of banks. So much money spent on furnishings that looked good and screamed look at how much money we make.

Dr. Pritchard was a small man, with a head full of white hair. I put him in his late seventies. He carried himself erect and although he must have been extremely pissed with Phoenix and myself, he did hold his hand out for a gentlemanly shake.

“Thank you so much for seeing me,” I told him.

He stood in front of me with his hands clasped behind his back. I was hoping for an invitation into his office but we remained in the reception area.

“What can I do for you Miss Monahan? I do believe I told you that we here at Global Devices didn’t want anything to do with Phoenix Technologies. Ever. I don’t believe there’s anything you can do to change our mind on that.”

He sounded pretty adamant. For a small man, Dr. Pritchard had quite a presence and he made me feel uncertain. I stumbled over my words and suddenly felt out of my league.

“Well, Dr. Pritchard, I can’t say that I blame you, however, I’m not clear on the why. I don’t know why you terminated our contracts. I’m new to all of this, and I’m just trying to find my way.” And then I felt tears stinging the back of my eyes. Oh God. I took a deep breath and willed the water in my eyes to go away. Dr. Pritchard must have noticed.

“Come with me, Miss Monahan. Let’s go back to my office and have a talk.” He turned and I followed. Like a good little girl.

We sat across from each other at a small working table in his office. The top of the table was the only clear space in the office. Massive stacks of papers, magazines, books, newspapers, files and God knows what else were piled around the room. On the floor, on top of what I think was his desk, on top of bursting bookcases. I looked around the room and felt just a wee bit righteous, thinking about how I used to let my filing get away from me. It was never this bad though.

Dr. Pritchard watched me looking around his office and told me, “I can’t bear to get rid of anything. My wife calls it my sickness. And on top of that, she won’t let me bring papers home, so it’s all here. Over fifty years of medical records and research.”

“But what would you do if there was ever a fire, or something got spilled on something important? Do you have copies of everything?” I was sounding like a worried secretary.

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” he assured me. “I’ve had the best secretary for the last forty years and she has copies of everything.” He smiled and I realized he was a very nice gentleman. I was worried about the conversation we were about to have. I felt like a child about to tell my father something that I knew would disappoint him.

“Thank you again Dr. Pritchard for seeing me. After we talked this morning, I spoke with several of the staff at Phoenix. The cancellation of your contracts was news to me, and so far I haven’t received any satisfactory answers as to why Global pulled the plug. This is dreadful news for us and I have to get to the bottom of it.” I smiled weakly at him. “I’ve only been in this job for a few days, and I’m still feeling my way around. It’s quite a shock to the system to find yourself promoted to president of a company.”

Dr. Pritchard smiled at me. “I think I know what you’re talking about. I was a practicing physician for many, many years before I joined the corporate world. It was like moving to another country where the culture was totally different and they spoke another language. I think it took me several years to acclimatize.”

I nodded in agreement. Several years? Yikes. I was hoping that the culture shock would wear off in a couple of weeks.

“Where was your medical practice?” I was interested to hear how he had made the change from the medical to the corporate world.

“I was a surgeon at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. It’s been called the Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 1980. In the early nineties, there was a push for the development of artificial organs, and I was recruited to head up Global Devices. There were some venture capitalists out there who had some money to invest and I made the jump at that time.” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “These hands weren’t getting any younger. Plus there was a history of arthritis in my family. Hands are a surgeon’s life blood you know.”

“How long has Global Devices had a relationship with Phoenix Technologies?” I asked him.

“Probably six or seven years,” he told me. “We do business with many high tech companies. There’s lots of talent out there that complements the medical talent here at Global. We spread the work around. But,” he said but with a lot of emphasis, “we are ethical in all aspects of our work. Ethics are something we demand of our partners.”

I had a feeling I was about to find out why we had been fired.

“When it was revealed that Phoenix Technologies had falsified test results which were submitted to the FDA, I immediately terminated all contracts. This type of behaviour is simply reprehensible.” He was sitting up straight in his chair and I could feel his indignation across the table. “Falsifying test results for life saving medical devices is not quite the same as a small lie on your income tax return. Lives are at stake in this business, Miss, and we cannot, and will not, tolerate falsification of records. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get approvals from the Office of Device Evaluation? Years! And in the case of our artificial kidney, with Phoenix having falsified records, we have been set back at least two years in our research and our approvals.”

I felt extremely sick to my stomach and craved a cigarette. Dr. Pritchard had stopped talking at this point, and it was probably time for me to say something.

“Dr. Pritchard, this is the first I have heard of these accusations,” I started.

“Accusations?” he interrupted me. “These are not accusations. These are facts.”

“Sorry, Dr. Pritchard. Like I said, this is the first I have heard of these, um, facts.” My legal background screamed for me to at least say allegations, but I wasn’t taking a chance on getting a further reprimand from this man.

“Can you start at the beginning and fill me in, please?”

When he was finished, I wished I had never asked the question.

chapter thirty-four

Lou was standing beside the town car when I finally came out of the Global offices an hour later. Traffic was light and for once, Lou didn’t seem to be illegally parked.

“Message for you ma’am,” Lou said and he handed me a slip of paper. Although I had a company-issued cell phone in my purse, I rarely had it turned on and Carrie knew she could always get a message to me through Lou.

Lou’s handwritten note said that Cleve Johnston was arriving at La Guardia on an Air Canada flight from Toronto at 7:30 p.m. I checked my watch. It was 6:30.

“How long will it take us to get to the airport?” I asked Lou.

“At this time of day, anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. We’ve got lots of time,” Lou said knowingly. He opened the back door of the car for me. Before he closed it though, he leaned down and told me that he had to make a quick call to his dispatcher, to cancel the other car that had been ordered by Carrie to pick up Cleve.

La Guardia Airport looks like every other godforsaken airport in North America. Steel and sterile. Airports are the loneliest places in the world in my view and my stomach cramped every time I got near one. Since the tragic events at the Twin Towers, airports are now the worst places on the earth. If you’re dropping off a passenger, you barely have time to stop the car and unload them before the traffic cops are on your ass. Inside the airports, it’s hell on earth thanks to Mr. Osama Bin Laden and his band of heartless murderers. So before we arrived at the airport, I told Lou that he could drop me at the arrivals area, and I would go in and meet Cleve. Lou could keep circling until we came back out.

Lou’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror and I could tell he was not happy with this plan.

“Can’t we just circle and wait until he comes out? You can call him on his cell and tell him we’re out here,” he suggested.

“Lou, it’s okay. Seriously. I will not get into any trouble inside the airport. I’ll just go to the baggage area and wait for Mr. Johnston.” I wanted to tell him not to be so over-protective, but that’d be like telling Joan Rivers to stop visiting the plastic surgeon.

“Okay Miss. Here. Take another one of my cards. You call me on the car phone as soon as he arrives and I’ll pull up as quick as I can.”

Surprisingly, the Air Canada flight was on time and it wasn’t long before I saw Cleve in the surging crowd coming down the escalator to the baggage area. It wasn’t hard to miss all six and a half feet of him, towering over everyone. He spotted me standing by the baggage carousel and winked. My heart melted just a little. Do we ever get over our crushes?

He was by my side in about six strides once he stepped off the escalator. He put his briefcase down and engulfed me in a huge bear hug. I hugged him back, my arms around his waist. There was no way I could reach his shoulders without a step stool.

“Good to see you Kate,” he said. “It’s a nice surprise to see you here.”

“Well, I had nothing better to do,” I lied. Truth be told I was desperate to talk with him. “If you’re not too tired, I was hoping we could have dinner. I’m anxious to talk about all this crap.”

“Sure, that’s not a problem,” he agreed. “Any place in particular that you want to eat?”

In the end, we had dinner at a steakhouse around the corner from his hotel. Cleve was booked into the New York Palace, the same hotel I had been staying at before I moved into Tommy’s apartment.

The concierge at the hotel had assured me that we would have privacy at the restaurant when he made the reservation for us and I wasn’t disappointed when the maitre d’ led us to our table. The lighting was subdued and all of the settings were banquettes. The restaurant wasn’t overly busy.

We pushed ourselves into the banquette, both of us struggling with the seating because of our body types. Once our drink order had been given to the waiter, Cleve put his large hands in front of him on the table and said, “Okay Kate. Let’s have it. What in the heck is going on?”

“I wish I knew, Cleve. Seriously. We are in deep shit and if we don’t get some answers pretty soon, I’m not sure we’ll recover from the potential disaster that’s waiting for us.” I was deadly serious, especially after my talk with Dr. Pritchard.

I brought Cleve up to speed on what had been going on. Told him about Tommy’s computer and the hidey-hole in the apartment. Told him about the contents of the safety deposit box. Told him about how Jay had discovered the anomalies between the files from the office and the files in Tommy’s office. Told him about the lovely Natalie Scott and her team. Gave him a very graphic description of how Belinda Moffat had shed buckets of body fluid during her crying jag. And ended by relating what Dr. Pritchard had told me that afternoon. During the course of my storytelling, our drinks had arrived, we ordered dinner, ate our meals and were now having coffee.

“Dr. Pritchard, bless his soul, is truly an amazing man. He told me that he had been a member of the team that had carried out the first successful kidney transplant in Boston in 1954. The doctor who was the head of that team, Dr. Joseph Murray, went on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1990.” I was getting off track. “Anyway, to put it mildly, Dr. Pritchard is some pissed with us.”

“Can’t blame him,” Cleve said, “Assuming it’s true what he says.”

“He was pretty adamant that it was true. Kept insisting that what he had were facts, not allegations. I didn’t argue with the man. He says that his man in charge of this project, Dr. Jordan Francis is no longer with Global Devices.”

“Was he fired because of this mess?” Cleve asked.

“No, at least that’s what Pritchard says. He said that he received Dr. Francis’ resignation letter a few weeks ago and hasn’t heard from him since. The resignation letter appeared on his desk a few days after they found out about the test results.”

“What were the tests specifically for?” Cleve asked.

“They were clinical trials of the device that were carried out on a pig. They implanted the artificial kidney in the pig and our device, PISTON, the remote signaling piece, was monitored to make sure it was giving all the proper signals and data. The data that was gathered was not the data that was given to the FDA. I’m not entirely clear on how that was found out, or who discovered it, but Global Devices now have a black mark against them. Apparently, it’s not considered kosher to fake results in medical tests,” I said with just a tad of sarcasm.

“Dr. Pritchard said at first they were overjoyed that the tests had gone so well, that they were able to submit the devices for approval to the FDA. He said he was somewhat surprised, considering that they had run a bunch of these tests earlier and they had come up against several different problems every time. But suddenly, boom, everything’s a go and everybody’s happy, and the thing goes in for approval. The first Pritchard heard about this was a letter from the FDA. Addressed to Dr. Francis but it ended up on Pritchard’s desk because Dr. Francis had already resigned.”

“Did Pritchard say what Dr. Francis’s explanation of all this was?” Cleve asked.

“He told me that he hasn’t been able to talk to Dr. Francis. He’s incommunicado so to speak. Pritchard said that a copy of an email between Dr. Francis and Tommy was found in one of Global’s files dated a few days before Dr. Francis resigned. The email was vague but Dr. Pritchard said he was pretty certain that Tommy and Dr. Francis both knew what was going on.”

“Does he think that Tommy was involved in this? The falsifying of records?” Cleve was indignant. He was very protective of his good friend.

“He implied as much,” I told him. “The whole guilt by association. Tommy, and all of Phoenix by implication, are guilty in his mind, and hence he will not ever, ever do business with us again.”

I sipped my coffee and craved a cigarette but we were in a non-smoking restaurant.

“But this doesn’t explain how Natalie Scott knew and why no else found out,” Cleve reminded me.

“Natalie Scott is involved with this somehow. Big time. She’s responsible for research and development, and she’s responsible for whatever transpired with Global. I hardly know her, but her name is stamped all over this God awful shit-pile. Her ass is so fired,” I said.

“Who was the head of the team on this project?” Cleve asked.

“Nat Scott. This project was her baby, as everyone reminded me. She has every one of her team leaders shaking in their boots, afraid for their jobs. When she got the letter from Global, she threatened them all that if they mentioned it, they’d lose their jobs. That was a couple of weeks ago. Our dilemma is damage control. What do we do now Cleve?”

The stalker watched the restaurant, hidden in the shadows of a brick encased, arched doorway. Across the street from where the bitch was having dinner. Going about her life with no worries. No problems. The bitch was getting in the way but the stalker would not let her stop the progress. Things that got in the way of progress were dealt with. The stalker’s breathing was in control now because control was what it was going to take. Control over mind and over body. Control to see the project through to the end.

chapter thirty-five

While we waited for the waiter to bring our bill, Cleve and I made a list of things that needed our focus. We agreed that he would deal with damage control with the lawyers, the regulators and the resultant press releases. I was tasked with getting in touch with the two detectives who were investigating Tommy’s murder. The more we talked, the more we were convinced that Tommy’s death was because of the Global Devices project. The detectives needed to be brought up to speed as soon as possible. It was two weeks to the day since Tommy was murdered and as far as I was concerned, there had been no progress on finding Tommy’s killer.

“I called the detectives yesterday and left a message,” I told Cleve. “I haven’t heard back from them. This case clearly isn’t their top priority. I’ll get to them first thing tomorrow.”

Which proved easier said than done. I was completely exasperated after leaving two voice messages each on the detectives’ phones the next morning. So I put the phone wizard on the case. She reported back in about fifteen minutes.

“I called over to the 20th Precinct,” Carrie told me. “No one was willing to give me any information on the whereabouts of either detective. So I called my dad, to get the phone number of his friend who plays first base on their softball team, who’s a police officer in Brooklyn. He called the 20th Precinct for me and found out that Detective Bartlett is in the hospital with back problems. She has two herniated disks. Detective Shipley has been handling their case load on her own, and is out of town, upstate, investigating a tip they got on a three year old case.” Carrie read all this information from her steno pad and when she finished she looked eagerly at me. “What else?”

“Well,” I said, duly impressed with Carrie’s information gathering talents. “Unless there’s someone else handling Tommy’s murder case, make sure that Shipley has my message to call. Say it’s urgent, okay?”

Next on my list of things to do was to track down Natalie Scott and get some answers, direct from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. The interoffice telephone directory gave me her phone number but when I dialed it there was no answer. No surprise there. She probably knew it was me calling and she was likely avoiding me. I decided to take the bull by the horns, and pay a visit to the research and development department.

The R and D folks were located on the floor below the executive offices. The area took up one quarter of the entire floor. In spite of all the natural light pouring in from the floor to ceiling windows, everything appeared dingy, dull and overloaded with paper, manuals, computers, printers, and pieces of equipment that were unrecognizable to me. Some desktops had two or three monitors sitting on them. It was a beehive of activity, but eerily quiet, the clicking of keyboards the only sound. Each person apparently had their own workstation, although it was difficult to discern the difference or dividing line between some areas. The amount of electronic equipment and paper was mind-boggling. I stood in the middle of the area and looked for a clue as to where Nat Scott might hang her hat. There was a lone, enclosed office on the far side of the floor, and I headed in that direction, sure that as a Vice President, Natalie would have an office with a door.

The door to the office was closed and outside, in an open area, a young woman sat at a secretarial desk which was pushed up against the wall to the office. Her back was to me as I approached the desk and she was bopping in her chair to the music which I could clearly hear coming out of earphones plugged into her ears. She was typing on her keyboard, keeping rhythm to the music. I walked around her desk and stood to the side, hoping she would pick me up in her peripheral vision, not wanting to startle her. She saw me and held up one index finger, the universal sign for wait. With a flourish of pretend drumming on the edge of her desk with her two index fingers, she finally looked up at me with a very big smile and removed the ear plugs.

“Hi,” she said, apparently genuinely pleased to see me, judging by the smile that just didn’t go away. Her short hair was jet black and cut severely, with one large mass hanging over the right side of her face. Not quite punk. She appeared to be in her late twenties.

“Hi yourself. I’m Kate Monahan.” I held out my hand and she gave me a shake.

“Jenn. Jenn Ludlow. What can we do for you today Kate?”

“I’m looking for Natalie Scott. Is this her office?”

“Yep. You got it.”

“Is she in?”

“Not sure.”

Gawd, this was going to be painful. One question, one answer, at a time.

I thought I’d try a different angle. “Do you know if Miss Scott is in the office today?”

“Not sure,” she repeated. “Door was closed when I got here and it hasn’t opened. I’m not allowed to open her door when it’s closed.” She held up her index fingers and mimicked quotes in the air. “On pain of death, the boss tells me. Not sure if she’s building something secret for NASA in there, but I’m sure not going to die finding out.” She burst out laughing.

“Well, I really need to speak to her so should I just knock on the door?”

“Not supposed to do that either,” Jenn said. “A door closed means no interruptions.” Her voice went up an octave as she tried to imitate Nat Scott. “But, if I see her, I’ll be glad to give her a message,” she offered.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m going to interrupt her.” I raised my hand to knock on the door and Jenn jumped out of her chair and leaned across the desk to grab my arm.

“Please,” she pleaded with me. “Don’t do it.”

Whoa, this was one weird set up, but I didn’t want to get the girl in trouble. “Then go to the ladies room, and we’ll pretend you weren’t here. I’m new enough to the company, I can honestly say I didn’t know the rule.”

“Go right ahead then,” Jenn said. “Promise though you won’t tell I was here?”

“Promise,” I assured her. She grabbed her purse and took off.

There was no response to my two loud raps on the door and when I tried the door knob, it wouldn’t turn. It turned just fine when the security guard showed up about ten minutes later with a master key. Jenn had returned from the ladies room at this point and she was not happy that we were unlocking the door.

“A closed door means no interruptions,” she told me again. “A locked door means don’t come within ten feet of the door, even if the fire alarm is going off.” Her eyes were wide and she seemed to be hyperventilating just a little as she told me this. Several employees in the area were standing up at their desks now, peering over the dividers and watching the action.

I took Jenn by the arm and led her a few feet away from the security guard who was standing there, like a bump on a log, just watching us. “It’s okay Jenn. You won’t get in any trouble for what I’m doing. I guarantee it,” I told her.

“No one can guarantee my job,” Jenn said. “That’s what Nat tells all of us every day.”

“Well, I can,” I told her. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it.”

“She’s right, you know.” This from the security guard who was supposed to be out of earshot. “She is the new President.”

Jenn looked at me, surprised. “You are?”

I nodded.

“Go ahead then. It’s all yours.” She waved me into the office with a flourish.

It ended up that Jenn was worrying for nothing. Because the office was empty. There was nothing in the office except a desk, a credenza, a two-drawer filing cabinet, a chair and a telephone. Bare, deserted, unoccupied. No trace of a human ever having inhabited the space. I stuck my head out the door and motioned to Jenn to join me. I also told the security guard that he could leave and thanked him.

Jenn stood in the center of the office with her hands on her hips and looked around. “Well, would you look at that,” she said. “The rat has finally deserted the ship.” She said this with a certain amount of pleasure in her voice.

“How long did you and Nat work together?” I asked her.

“Ha! Work together? Together?” she repeated. “Together implies a team. We were never a team, and she never let me, or most of the people in this department forget that. We worked for her.” Her voice was wavering just a little bit when she finished, and she turned toward the window. I could see her taking a deep breath.

She turned back around and faced me. “Kate. Can I call you Kate?” I nodded. “Good. Kate, I hope she rots in hell. There. I said it. And I mean it. She didn’t deserve to work here. And ever since she started boffing the boss, she’s been worse. Gawd, what did that man see in her?”

My thoughts exactly!

“When was the last time you saw her in the office, Jenn?”

“What’s today? Wednesday? Yeah? She was here on Monday morning. A regular team meeting. Hah! I guess I haven’t seen her since.”

“You didn’t think it was strange that two days have gone by and you haven’t talked to her or seen her?”

“Nope.” Jenn shook her head. “Sometimes I’d go weeks and never see her. She worked weird hours. Heard sometimes she’d come in and work all night. I’d get emails from her time stamped three in the morning. Whee!” She jumped up a little bit and the smile I’d seen earlier was back. “She’s gone. The wicked witch of the west has flown the coop. I used to think she looked just like Margaret Hamilton.”

“Margaret Hamilton?” I didn’t get the reference.

“The woman who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. She and Nat Scott had the same nose.”

I had to agree.

chapter thirty-six

My next stop was a visit with our in-house security manager. His office was on the same floor as Nat Scott’s but on the opposite side. Jenn Ludlow showed me the way to his office, chatting a mile a minute as she weaved her way around the maze of workstations, loads of crap on the floor, and quietly working staff members.

“What do you think it means?” she asked me. Without waiting for an answer, she kept chatting. “I think it means she’s left the company.” Duh. “Nothing in her office. Everything gone. What did she do with all the files in there?” Good question, I thought. “How did she get everything out of the office?” Another good question.

We had arrived at the other side of the floor, where there were several glassed-in offices along the wall. The walls of the offices were made of glass brick that obstructed the view into the offices, but allowed the light from the windows to seep through. Jenn stopped in front of one that had its door open and she poked her head inside.

“You’re here Kelly? Good. Kate needs to talk to you.” She put her hand on my shoulder and said in a whisper, “You need anything, you call me. Okay Kate?” I nodded to my new best friend.

“I’ll do that. Thanks Jenn.” She walked off, bouncing to the internal music in her head, with a wide smile plastered on her face.

Kelly was standing when I entered his office and he walked around his desk to greet me. “Hi, Ms. Monahan, I’m Kelly Northland.” Kelly spoke with a soft southern drawl. I wasn’t sure if it was Georgia “south” or Texas “south” because my ear wasn’t attuned to American accents.

We shook hands and he offered me a chair in front of his desk. Kelly appeared to be in his late thirties, early forties and he was what you would describe as wiry. Probably no taller than five foot seven or eight, with not an extra ounce of fat on his trim body. His hair was curly, grey and cut very short on the sides. He had great posture and I guessed he was ex-military.

I made a snap decision not to trust him. Not that he gave me any initial reason for that decision, but I was finding out the hard way that not every employee at Phoenix was loyal and trustworthy. From this moment on they were all going to have to earn their way with me. The fact that we had never met but he knew who I was, was only a wee bit disconcerting, because if he was in charge of security, he would know who I was at this point in the game.

“So,” Kelly started. “Are you here about the mess with Global?” He was either a mind reader or very well plugged in.

“Yes,” I told him. “There are a few things I’d like to discuss with you. First off, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself.” I was going to sit back and get to know these people.

Kelly Northland was all business. He didn’t balk at my request to talk about himself, and he didn’t glorify himself in the telling.

“Been with Phoenix for almost five years now,” he told me. “Before that I was a Marine. Served twenty years in the Corps as a Military Police Officer.”

Ah, I thought. A meathead. At least that’s what we called the MP’s, or military police, in the Canadian army.

“Got interested in doing corporate security work the last few years I was with the Corps. Was stationed at headquarters in Arlington and then got promoted to Staff Sergeant and worked as an investigator at NCIS. That’s the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Some of the work we did was with the civilian authorities. So when I took retirement after twenty years, I decided I wanted to get out of policing and into protection. That’s how I ended up here. I consider myself lucky, ma’am. Tom Connaught was a good man, and I’m damn sorry about what happened to him.”

He finished without a flourish. Kind of reminded me of that detective in the old TV show, Dragnet. Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am. A man of few words.

“Tell me about security here at Phoenix, Kelly. What do we protect and how do we do it?” I asked him.

“Well, our mantra is to protect our people and our assets. On the people side of things, we make sure that everyone coming to work here has a background check done on them. Lots of our work is with government agencies, so those people need more in-depth security clearances. Government’s coming out with more onerous requirements soon on background checking and security clearances, thanks to Mr. Bin Laden. On the asset side, we protect our proprietary property. That includes our patented technologies, our source codes, our software development stuff. We don’t own any buildings or much of anything on the physical side, save and except for computers. But we do have a lot of money invested in our technology. So our job is to protect that technology and the designs and software work that goes into it. And with the way technology is advancing these days, it’s a moving target. Our biggest threats right now are hackers and cyber terrorism.”

“How many staff do you have?”

“It’s me and four others. That’s it. But a lot of our work is done from our desks. We’re well-connected all over the world.”

“Okay. Tell me what you know about the mess with Global.” I sat and stared at him, with my hands on my lap.

“What I know, I heard from Russ Freeson. He called me late yesterday and filled me in. Told me that Global had cut ties with us. Told me that Natalie Scott didn’t let anyone know about it. That’s it.”

“Did you know that Nat Scott has vacated the building?”

“Not sure what you mean. She comes and goes at very odd hours, so I’m not sure that I’d know whether she had vacated or not.”

“Well, I just came from her office. And it’s empty. The only thing in there is a desk, a chair and a phone.”

His eyebrows went up, just a little. I’m pretty sure he was surprised to know that. He didn’t say anything.

“Any idea when she packed up and left?” I asked.

“No ma’am. This is news to me.” He looked a little perturbed. “Can you give me a few minutes to look into this?”

“Sure. Come and see me in my office.” I stood up to leave. “And bring me the background checks on Nat Scott and all of her team leaders.”

When I got back to my office I asked Carrie if Cleve Johnston had arrived. She told me he had been there for about an hour and he was working in one of the boardrooms down the hall.

He was on the phone when I opened the door but he waved me in. The round boardroom table was strewn with newspapers and files, two empty coffee cups, and a plate with half a muffin, some grapes and an apple core. The small credenza against the wall had a coffee urn and a tray of breakfast goodies. I helped myself to a coffee and waited until Cleve got off the phone.

“Morning Kate,” he said as soon as he hung up.

“Morning Cleve. Looks like you got right down to work.” I nodded at the mess on the table.

“Lots to do. And I brought some work from Toronto. I hadn’t planned on coming to New York, so I brought some files with me. Some of my clients expect round the clock service.”

We spent the next hour in a meeting. Cleve had asked Carrie to gather the executive management team for an urgent meeting. Barry Golden, the lawyer from Cleve’s New York office had been asked to attend as well.

When we arrived in the main boardroom, the silence was deafening. The tension in the room was palpable. Steve Holliday and Mark Hall were doodling on papers in front of them, Sandra Melnick was staring at the wall. No one was talking and no one was looking at the person next to them or across the table from them. Needless to say, Nat Scott’s absence from the table was noticeable. Barry Golden was the one face I didn’t recognize so I walked over to where he was sitting and introduced myself.

“Barry, Kate Monahan.” He stood up and we shook hands. Barry was medium-sized, with a bit of age on him. Part of the age was showing in his middle, which was thick and he had a bit of a paunch. He hid it well though in a tailored, double-breasted suit. His hair was snow white and well cut. “Thanks for joining us. I’m sure Cleve has filled you in and I think you’ll get the flavour of the problem shortly.” Barry nodded and sat back down quietly.

Sitting beside him was Terry-Lynn Jacobsen, our in-house counsel. Although she wasn’t a member of the executive management team, Cleve thought it was important that she be at the meeting. Terry-Lynn was sitting hunched in her chair, staring with her head down at her notebook. Her face was covered by her thin, stringy, badly permed, chin-length hair. I had never met her but Carrie had told me a couple of days ago to be quiet around her. Apparently she scared easily and was very self-conscious of a large strawberry-coloured birthmark that covered her left eye and part of her left cheek. She didn’t look up at me so I decided not to introduce myself. If she scared easily, she wouldn’t want to be around me. Apparently she was a wizard at patent law (yawn, bore) and that’s why Tommy had hired her. The types of problems we were about to talk about fell outside her area of expertise, but still, she was in-house counsel.

I sat at the head of the table and looked around. No one was watching me and all heads were down. A sign of guilt perhaps? I hoped to hell not. One bad apple in the barrel was enough for me. I took a deep breath and told myself to remain professional, remain calm, and above all, remain in control.

“So, as you may have heard, we’ve got some problems we need to deal with a-sap. You all know Cleve Johnston. He’s brought his partner Barry Golden with him. Barry works at the New York office of McCallum and Watts.” I took another deep breath. “You all know that Nat Scott isn’t here. I just came from her office downstairs, which has been cleared out. There’s not a sign of her in R and D.” With that revelation, everyone was now looking at me. Even Terry-Lynn.

“We’re trying to ascertain when it was that she left. Anyone here got any idea?” No takers. “When was the last time any of you talked to her?”

Sandra Melnick, our VP of Operations offered that she hadn’t seen Natalie for days. That pretty much jived with everyone else’s memory as well.

“Well, apparently, several weeks ago, Nat Scott received notice from Global Devices that we were to cease and desist all work on their products. Was anyone aware of that?”

Every head around the table shook in the negative. Mark Hall, the Vice President of Sales put his head in hands and I was pretty sure I heard him moan.

“Mark, you okay?”

He looked up at me, closed his eyes and nodded. Grim. I took this as a yes, and pressed on.

“So, we need to do some damage control. That’s why Cleve and Barry Golden are here. Barry’s got some familiarity with the SEC and hopefully we’ll be able to finesse the fact that we haven’t disclosed this information. Yet.”

Barry spoke up. “First off Kate, this is for everyone in the room,” he glanced around the table. All eyes immediately focused on Barry and everyone was paying attention now, because having the riot act read to you by a high-priced securities lawyer was the same thing as having your grandmother grab you by the earlobe. You listened. It might be painful, but you listened.

Barry had a voice that commanded attention and he continued, “As of right now, everyone in this room refrains from trading in any shares of Phoenix. We’re all in possession of material information and until that information is disclosed to the public, any trades would be considered illegal.”

All heads around the table were nodding, some in acknowledgement and one nodding as if to say, “tell me something I don’t know”.

“I’ll need a record of any shares you, or anyone in your immediate family, may have bought or sold since the date the company was put on notice by Global Devices. I’d like that information right after this meeting.” Everyone nodded. “Normally, you file your insider trading reports on EDGAR at the end of each month.” EDGAR was the SEC’s electronic document filing system that public companies used to submit reports and filings. “We’ll need to let the SEC know if there have been any trades in this period. They’ll look favourably on us if we put all our cards on the table.”

“Okay so far?” he asked the room.

There was a chorus of yeps, yeahs, and okays around the table.

“Next thing we need to do Kate, is get a press release out on the wire. I’ll work with your communications people on the drafting. We should have something worked up this morning. As soon as we get it drafted, and ready to release, I’ll call over to the Enforcement Division at the SEC. Cleve and I’ll go over there and fill them in on what’s happened. It should be no big deal, as far as they’re concerned. The law says we have an obligation to disclose to the public on a rapid and current basis. This’ll be rapid because we’ll send out the release as soon as the markets close today. As for it being current, well, we’ll have to take the position that we have only just found out. Which is true.”

Cleve jumped in at this point. “One of our partners in Toronto will be visiting the Ontario Securities Commission Enforcement Branch at the same time as Barry and I are visiting the SEC.”

Cleve and Barry’s plans made me feel a little more at ease. “Sounds like a plan,” I told them. “Thanks. Barry, you and Steve Holliday might want to get started on that release.” Steve stood up to leave and Barry was right behind him. Cleve left to make some phone calls and I was left alone with the others.

It was a pretty small executive team when you boiled it down. With Nat Scott out of the picture and Steve off drafting press releases, I was left with Russ Freeson, our chief financial officer, Mark Hall, our VP of Sales, and Sandra Melnick, our VP of Operations. Terry-Lynn was looking forlorn and lonely so I thanked her and sent her on her way.

“So. Here we are.” I clasped my hands together on the table and looked at the three of them. “What a fucking mess.” Mark audibly moaned again and I knew then that I wasn’t going to be able to count on him when the chips were down.

“Mark, are you okay?” I demanded.

He nodded. “I guess I’m just tired. Been putting in some long hours ever since Tommy passed.” He held up his hand. “But I’m okay. Really. Just gotta tough it out and look on the positive side.” There was a catch in his voice and I wondered if he was going to break down. This was not a good time for one of the executives to curl up in a fetal position under his desk.

“Good,” I told him in my cheeriest voice. “Right now we’ve got to do some major damage control.”

“First off,” I announced, “we need someone to take over R and D for the interim. That’s a lot of staff without a boss, and a few of the team leaders are pretty ineffectual, I’ve been finding out. So they’re rudderless. Any volunteers?”

I watched Sandra look pointedly at both Russ and Mark. “I’m in,” she told me. “Russ has enough to do with counting the beans, and Mark needs a nap.” Mark’s head snapped up at this snarky remark but I gave Sandra credit. “Besides, I know more about the R and D side of things.”

“Thanks,” I told her. “We need to sit down and figure out what we’re going to tell the staff. We probably need Steve’s help with that too. We should send something out to the staff at the same time as we let the press release go.”

“Russ, what are the numbers on this?”

“Not good,” he said. “The total loss of revenue will be close to $40 million. We’d already billed and been paid for about $60 million worth of work over the last couple of years. And that’s not counting the potential other work we could’ve got from Global.”

“Okay team. Let’s divide and conquer. There’s plenty of work to go around. And Mark.” He looked at me. “There’s no time for a nap.” This time his moan could be heard all around the room.

chapter thirty-seven

Carrie told me that Kelly Northland was waiting for me in my office and sure enough there he was, sitting ramrod straight in one of the guest chairs, with a stack of files on his lap.

“Let’s sit at the working table,” I said, “and you can show me what you’ve got.”

It was early in the day but I was feeling tired and familiar feelings of being overwhelmed hovered. I was determined to keep those feelings under control. Before joining Kelly at the large work table, I walked around my desk and shrugged off my suit jacket, hanging it on the back of my chair. I ignored an urge to light a cigarette and got focused on the job at hand.

“Okay, Kelly, sit rep,” I ordered. His eyebrows shot up at the familiar, military talk, and a little smile played on his stern face. My dad would demand a sit rep anytime he needed information on what was going on. Sit rep for situation report, gimme the details, don’t leave anything out, and make it quick.

“Your dad was military,” he said.

I looked at him, not sure if he was asking a question or stating a fact.

“Career infantry soldier,” Kelly continued. “Served with NATO in Germany and the U.N. in the Sinai. Finished up his career with the Airborne.” Kelly rattled off these facts easily and now my eyebrows shot up. I guess it would be easy to check my background and Kelly was proving that he was doing his job. So I nodded to let him know he had the correct facts on my father.

“I followed up on Natalie Scott’s move out of the office. Security cameras show that she moved out of here two nights ago,” Kelly said.

“Two nights ago, and all of this was on security cameras? Did anyone think to say something?”

“No ma’am. We don’t monitor what our cameras see. They’re only there to record what’s going on and if there’s an incident, we can play back the tapes. We’re only a tenant in this building, so we rely on the building landlord’s CCTV system, which is monitored. They have a security office on the second floor, where guards monitor the cameras. Their tapes say the same as ours. Two nights ago, around four in the morning. Natalie Scott is on tape, leaving our offices and going to the parking garage in the basement of this building. She made three trips, each time carrying a large banker’s box. Once she had those boxes loaded in her car, she left the building.”

“And security didn’t think this was unusual, someone making repeated trips to their car, loading it up with boxes?”

“Not at all, ma’am. Miss Scott was known to come and go at odd hours. Security didn’t think anything of it. You see, they would have done something if they knew she had left Phoenix. When someone leaves, whether they’re fired or they quit, we take away their access pass which gets them into the building and into our offices. And we let the building security know so they can keep an eye out. Miss Scott was not terminated and did not quit, as far as building security was concerned, so she had carte blanche to come and go as she pleased.”

“But those boxes contained company property,” I protested.

“That’s right, ma’am,” Kelly agreed with me. “But employees take company property out of the office everyday. Lots of them work at home or at client’s work sites. And, as far as I’m concerned, Natalie Scott is still an employee of the company. Isn’t she?”

Jesus Christ this was frustrating. Cleve had advised me at dinner last night to hold off doing anything about Natalie until more facts were known. He told me that I needed to talk to her and get her side of the story before I ran off, half-cocked. That’s why I ended up at her office this morning and why I was having this conversation with Kelly.

“Yes. She is.” I wanted to stamp my feet like an eight year old who wasn’t getting her way. I pushed back my chair from the table and fetched a cigarette from the bottom drawer of my desk.

As I smoked I stared at the traffic on the street below. Total gridlock. Typical at lunchtime in Manhattan as I was finding out. A sea of yellow cabs as far as I could see. I turned around and looked at Kelly who was still sitting, ramrod straight, at the work table.

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to track Ms. Scott down at home and pay her a visit,” I said.

“I wouldn’t advise that ma’am.”

“And why not, Mr. Northland? She hasn’t returned any calls or emails. I think the next thing to do would be to go to her home and talk to her.”

“Like I said,” Kelly drawled, “not recommended. I don’t trust the woman. Allow me to try and contact her.”

“I’m quite capable you know Kelly.” He was being just a little patronizing in my view and this whole conversation was getting me no-where.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And stop calling me ma’am,” I demanded.

“Yes, ma’am,” he smiled. “I know you’re capable. But you’ve also been known to barge into situations and put yourself at risk. You’re damn lucky that bullet only grazed the top of your ear. And you’re damn unlucky to be living in a posh building right now that has an eighty year old man as its only security.”

Okay, so Kelly had done more that a little bit of background checking on me. He knew about my run-in with that demented pile of shit in Toronto who shot me. And somehow, he knew about the security set-up at Tommy’s, correct that, my apartment.

“What do you mean, the only security in my building is an eighty year old man?” I asked. “There’s got to be more than that.”

“Really? And after you got knocked out on one of your first visits to Mr. Connaught’s apartment, did the building management offer to check security tapes to see if anyone had accessed the service entrance? Did they say they could check their logs to see who was in and out of the building? If they had logs, they’d have known if your friendly neighbour, Natalie Scott, was at home when you got hit over the head. The security in that building is non-existent.”

Mr. Northland had been doing his homework and had not missed the fact that Natalie Scott lived in the same apartment building. But why was I only meeting him now? If Phoenix had security staff who were on the ball, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Maybe Tom Connaught would be sitting here, in his chair, at his desk, running his company.

“Where the hell have you been the last two weeks?” I demanded. “Were you going to point any of this out to me or just sit on your tight little Marine ass in your office downstairs?” My voice was raised by the time I finished.

“Ma’am, with all due respect,” he started but I cut him off.

“Don’t ma’am me,” I shouted. “I’m running around like a crazy woman, trying to find out what happened to Tommy, and you’ve got information that may be relevant and you’re sitting on it?”

Get a grip, Kate, I told myself. I butted my cigarette angrily in the ashtray on the windowsill, turned my back to Kelly and stared at my reflection in the window. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Deep breaths. Calming breaths. I have to stop losing my temper so easily, I thought.

I turned back around with my arms wrapped around myself and faced Kelly.

““Sorry,” I said. Kind of. “Sorry for yelling. But seriously, why haven’t you come forward before this?”

“With all due respect, Ms. Monahan, Mr. Connaught did not allow me to provide any sort of executive protection. He didn’t let us do any snooping on the industrial espionage side of things either. He never asked more of us than to do background checks on employees and make sure the technology was safe. In my view, he was pretty naive about some things. You don’t know why he was murdered, and the police have no clue either. I can’t help but think he got himself into a situation that could have been avoided, had he thought it through. If he had come to me, maybe I could have helped.” He paused. “With all due respect, ma’am, I’m not about to allow anything like that to happen again on my watch.”

Kelly Northland was a military man, through and through. Just like any good soldier, he reverted to his training, even when given certain latitudes. All women who ranked above him in a traditional and military sense, were to be addressed as “ma’am”. I was his superior in this situation and would henceforth and forevermore be known as ma’am. I’d have to live with it.

chapter thirty-eight

“So when were you going to come and talk to me?” I demanded.

“When I felt you were in danger, or when I had any news that I felt was important.”

When he felt I was in danger? What the fuck did that mean? How would he know if I was in danger? The only way he would know that I hadn’t been in danger was if he had been watching me. For the last two weeks. I pointed at the door to my office.

“Out,” I demanded. “Get out of my office. You’ve been following me and watching me. That not only creeps me out, it’s a little whacked.” Kelly stood up and headed for the door. My head was spinning and I was a little freaked out.

He quietly closed the door when he left and I knew what I had to do.

Mom wanted to chat but I was too distracted to fill her in on any news. I needed to talk to my dad.

When my father came on the phone I explained that I needed him to check into someone for me. Even though he was retired from the Canadian military, he was still connected and could make things happen.

“Kelly Northland. Says he was in the Marines, retired five years ago. Worked at their headquarters near the end of his career and then transferred to NCIS. He was a meathead.”

“Got it. You stand by and I’ll get back to you asap.” I loved the way he said that. Not A-S-A-P. A-sap.

“I don’t trust this guy dad,” I told him.

“Okay Kathleen. I understand. I’ll call my sources. Might take a couple of hours.”

A little tit for tat, I figured. The checkee is going to do a little checking on the checker.

“You sure everything’s okay there?” he asked. “What’s this all about anyway?”

“Dad, everything’s fine. Just make those calls, okay?” I made sure he had my office number before we hung up.

When Kelly had left my office, the files he had brought with him stayed behind. They were in a pile on my work table and while I waited for my lunch, I took a look. There was a file for Natalie Scott and each of her team leaders.

Papers were clipped to both sides of the files when you opened them up. On the left side was a copy of a form, several pages long. The form had the Phoenix logo on the top left side and the logo of INTELLI-Guide on the right side. INTELLI-Guide must be the company we used to carry out the background checks. On the right side of the file were copies of the employee’s offer letter, resume, letters of reference, and a couple had hand-written note summaries of reference checks carried out by telephone.

The INTELLI-Guide forms asked for employee information going back fifteen years for residential addresses, twenty years (if applicable) for employment history, all educational institutions attended (even if a degree or diploma was not granted), birth, death and marriage/divorce dates for all immediate relatives (mother, father, children, brothers, sisters, grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law). The form had more boxes on it than an income tax return and went on for pages.

I started reviewing the files of each of the R and D team leaders. Mr. Tight Ass Marine had piled them in alphabetical order so the first one I checked was Derek Hutton. I remembered him as the quiet one from that first, dreadful meeting with the R and D team. His file told me that he was four years older than me, he had been working at Phoenix for the last seven years, and he had two Masters degrees, one in computer science and one in biomedical engineering from the University of Arizona. Very impressive. Derek was married, had three children, and lived in Brooklyn. He had moved to New York four years ago from Phoenix, where he had worked for the company. The file said he joined the company right out of University.

Belinda Moffat’s file contained a lot of the same type of information, but just to up the ante in my catalogue of impressive, Belinda had a Ph.D in medical engineering from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wow. She had worked for us for three years. Her father and mother were both deceased, she had twin sisters who were ten years younger than her, and three brothers, all older. I remembered her telling me about the twin sisters and how she was responsible for their care. Belinda lived in Queens.

Nat Scott’s file gave me all the basic information and nothing extra. I was hoping to find something buried which would lead me to an ah ha moment but I was out of luck. She was another highly educated member of our team, with a Masters degree in Biochemistry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and a Ph.D in the same thing from the City University of New York. I knew where she lived and wasn’t at all surprised to see that she had been at the same address for most of her life. Her father died over twenty years ago and her mother was apparently still alive when Nat filled out the application form four years ago. She was an only child, which explained why she acted like a spoiled brat, and had only ever worked for our company. Four years with the company, right out of graduate school and already she’s a Vice President?

I was just opening Dan Thornton’s file when Carrie stuck her head in the door and told me that my dad was on the phone. Singing to her.

“Yeah, sorry about that Carrie,” I apologized. “He can’t help himself.”

“I loved it. He asked me if I knew the song Stardust and I told him I did so he sang it to me.” She was smiling as she left the office.

“Dad, stop harassing the staff,” I teased him when I answered the phone.

“Harassing the staff? I doubt that. Everyone loves my singing.” He was chuckling.

“So? Do you have anything for me?” I asked him.

“I do. Your Mr. Northland is okay. He checks out.” I felt a little bit better at that news. “Trusted by the brass, even though he was a meathead. Worked his way up, retired as a staff sergeant. My guys tell me he was known as a hard worker who always got the job done. Thorough. Didn’t cut corners. Did everything by the book.”

“That’s good to hear,” I told him.

“You in some sort of hot water?” dad asked me.

“Not at all,” I lied. “Just getting to know the people here. He manages our security department.”

“Did Tommy hire him?”

“As far as I know he did.”

“Then he’s got to be okay.” Dad had always been head over heels in admiration of Tommy and never quite got over the fact that our marriage didn’t work. “Tommy would never have hired someone he didn’t trust.” Dad sounded so sure of himself.

“You call me then if you need anything else,” he said, hanging up abruptly. Dad was not one for long phone conversations. Unless he was in the mood to sing a medley of Perry Como songs to you.

Kelly Northland was sitting in a guest chair outside my office when I went to ask Carrie to call him.

“Have you been sitting here for the past hour?” I asked him.

“Yes ma’am. Figured I wouldn’t go far because you’d be wanting to talk to me sooner than later.” He stood up.

“Well come on back in.”

We sat in the same places at the table and Kelly couldn’t help but notice that I had been going through the files. They were strewn about the table, not in a neat alphabetical pile, Marine-style. With hospital corners.

His eyes met mine, square on, across the table and he waited for me to speak first.

“Apparently, you are trustworthy. I have it on good authority,” I told him. He nodded. “I needed to find out about you for myself, by myself,” I explained.

“No need to explain. You did the right thing.”

“You’re not off the hook yet, Staff Sergeant.” He smiled at my mention of his previous rank. “I want to know what you’ve been up to the past two weeks.” I sat back and waited for his explanation.

“I’ve been watching out for you ma’am. Lou, your driver, keeps me posted on your whereabouts as best he can. He sure doesn’t like it when you go off on your own.” That explained why Lou had conniption fits every time I sent him home early.

Kelly continued. “After I heard about you getting mugged at Mr. Connaught’s apartment, I made sure your back was covered at all times.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about this explanation. In fact, I found myself getting angry again.

“Did you have me followed?” I demanded. Kelly nodded his head. Son of a bitch. What else had he done?

“Did you put bugs or listening devices in my apartment?”

“No ma’am!” he said, quite indignantly. “I’m just watching your back. I would never invade your privacy by listening in on conversations or anything like that. It’s my job to protect our employees and you are our number one employee.”

“Okay,” I told him reluctantly. “I don’t know whether I should be grateful or not.”

I leaned over the table a little towards him and whispered, “Do you carry a gun?” You know, being a Canadian in the country where every four year old can cite the Second Amendment to the Constitution, was a little intimidating. And I’ll admit to being a teensy bit tainted by Hollywood and all those gun-toting ‘Mericans.

“Yes ma’am, I do,” he told me.

“Okay, Kelly.” I sat for a few moments and thought about the whole situation. There were only two people who knew everything that I did about Tommy, Global Devices, and where we stood today - Jay and Cleve. I wondered if it was time I brought someone else into the picture. If I did that I would have to open my kimono for someone I had only met that morning. Someone who allegedly was ‘looking out for my back’. How was I to know if he was trustworthy? Based on my dad’s recommendation and report, I should be good to go, but I was a little gun shy these days, excuse the pun. Admittedly, I was finding it hard to trust people ever since the murder of my best friend Evelyn, and the events that happened after that.

I made up my mind quickly then to push on. I needed all the help I could get. It had been two weeks since Tommy’s murder and our company was in a crisis.

“We need to start working together on this mess,” I told Kelly. “You said you were an investigator at NCIS?”

He nodded.

“Good. Time to dust off those skills.”

chapter thirty-nine

The next while was spent bringing Kelly up to speed. Just like I had with Cleve the night before. Only this time, Kelly interrupted and asked questions. And, he took copious notes. When I finished my narrative covering the last two weeks, we sat in silence for a few minutes. I had no idea what Kelly was thinking about, but I was a little relieved to be sharing the burden of all this information with him. If he had experience in law enforcement and was trained as an investigator, maybe now we’d start tying up all the loose ends of information we had.

I broke the silence. “So Kelly. What do you think?”

“I think this is a lot of information all at once. I’d like a couple of hours to think this through.”

He gathered up the R and D team leader’s files. “First thing I’m going to do is pass these off to one of my team. Have them do some deep background checking. I’ll also pull the files on all staff who’ve worked on the Global Devices projects. Do some checking there too. Then I’m going to touch base with some of my contacts at NYPD.”

I asked him if he knew Detectives Bartlett and Shipley.

“No ma’am.” He shook his head. “But I did ask around about them. They’re both supposedly solid cops.”

This didn’t make me feel any better about the lack of progress on Tommy’s case. They may be solid but they weren’t getting any results.

Carrie stuck her head in the door and interrupted us. “Ms. Monahan, there’s a call on your line that I think you may want to take.”

“Who is it Carrie?”

“Dr. Pritchard,” she told me. “From Global Devices.”

Well colour me surprised.

Kelly stood up. “I’ll go then. I’ll stay in touch.”

I nodded my head but I wasn‘t really listening. Dr. Pritchard was on the phone, calling me. As nice as he was to me yesterday when I visited him unannounced, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be talking to him again, anytime soon.

I picked up the phone and hit the flashing light on the console.

“Kate Monahan.”

“Miss Monahan,” he said. “Bill Pritchard here.”

“Yes, Dr. Pritchard. How are you today?” I asked.

“Confused, worried, and frankly, just a little overwrought,” he told me.

His use of the old-fashioned word overwrought had me a little puzzled. As far as I knew it meant really upset, but his tone of voice was fairly calm.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Dr. Pritchard,” I told him.

“Not your place to be sorry, Miss Monahan. Although I have stated that Global Devices will have nothing more to do with your company, I seem to be plagued with some lingering after-effects.”

You and me both, Mister, I thought. Like a shortage of about $50 million in revenues. I bit my tongue.

“Some disturbing news has come to my attention since we last talked Miss Monahan,” he continued, “and I wish to speak with you about it.”

“That’s fine Dr. Pritchard. What can I do for you?”

“I don’t wish to discuss it over the telephone. Would you be available at the end of the day?”

“I am. Shall I come to your office?” I offered.

“No, this is a subject to be discussed over a fortifying beverage. Can you meet me at the Blue Square Tavern?”

We agreed on six o’clock. Apparently, the Blue Square Tavern was close to his office and Dr. Pritchard was sure I would have no trouble finding it.

I spent the next couple of hours doing things that apparently keep chief executive officers busy. Answering emails. Returning phone calls to bankers. Ignoring phone calls from analysts. Reading internal progress reports on projects and contracts. Trying to decipher government bulletins on taxation issues. Learning how to understand our internal financial statements. Sometime around four o’clock, I looked up from the monthly income statement to find Cleve Johnston standing in front of my desk, smiling at me.

“What? Geez, you scared me.”

“Ah, you make me proud,” he said.

“Oh shut up,” I shot back.

“Look at you,” he teased. “Working like a big shot executive.” He helped himself to one of the chairs in front of my desk.

“Yeah, some big shot executive. I’m sure it’s taking me ten times longer to get through this stuff than an experienced executive.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Kate,” he told me.

“So, what are you here to tell me?” I asked him.

“That all’s well. The folks at the SEC tell us that so long as we issue the press release today when the markets close, we should be okay. Barry gave them the background and it helped that we produced the information on all insider stock trades for the past month or so. I’ve heard basically the same thing from our guy in Toronto.” He smiled. “Although he did tell me that the people he met at the OSC were not very friendly, and that he felt the temperature drop in the room when your name was mentioned.”

My stomach dropped. “Don’t tell me. Missy?”

He nodded. “The one and only.”

Missy Goodman, or Melissa as she preferred to be called, was the lawyer I had worked with many years ago at Scapelli’s, who had eventually left the private practice of law and gone to work at the Ontario Securities Commission. The one who I had told to fuck off one day in front of lots of people. I had totally forgotten that she was at the OSC when Cleve told me someone from his office would be meeting with them.

“Tell me that everything’s okay with the OSC and Missy isn’t holding a grudge against me.” For embarrassing her in front of all those people. Not that she didn’t deserve it.

“We got the same reaction from them as we did from the SEC. You’ve seen the press release?” Cleve asked me.

I nodded. “Signed off on it a little while ago and sent it back to Steve Holliday. It’s supposed to be released when the stock markets close today.” I looked at my watch which told me it was past 4:15 p.m. “Which should be any time now.”

The press release was a dry piece of work, stating that our business relationship with Global Devices had been terminated by Global, with an estimate of the loss of revenues. I fully expected that our share price would take a shit-kicking in the morning when the markets opened. I also expected that Steve Holliday was going to be busy taking calls from the financial press and pissed-off shareholders. He had been advised on what he was allowed to say, and that wasn’t much. I was hoping that the press release would go unnoticed but that was probably naive thinking on my part. The last two weeks had seen enough upheaval at this company that anything coming over the wire on Phoenix would be picked up and picked at by a good financial reporter. It’s not often they get to report on things other than price earnings ratios and cash flows. Although, all the heat in the press these days on Bernie Ebbers and the boys at WorldCom gave me faint hope that the reporters might be so busy chasing down another whistleblowing accountant that our news would go unnoticed.

The Blue Square Tavern was located on a side street near Bellevue Hospital, and Lou had no trouble finding it.

The Blue Square Tavern certainly lived up to its name. It was a tavern in the traditional sense, it was painted blue inside and out, and the interior was a large, square room. The only thing non-traditional about it was the large, no-smoking signs pasted everywhere. I found Dr. Pritchard sitting by himself in a large booth along the left wall. The right wall was taken up by a massive bar. Bar stools in front of the bar were full, as were most of the tables and booths. Surprisingly, the noise level was relatively low and the atmosphere was subdued.

Dr. Pritchard stood and offered his hand, and waited while I sat down before he took his seat again. We ordered a Diet Coke for me and he asked the waitress for a refill of whatever it was he was drinking. Idle chit chat took up the time while we waited for our drinks. He told me that the Blue Square Tavern was a favourite hang-out for the medical staff of the two nearby hospitals. Which would account for the non-smoking signs.

I looked around the room. “It’s a pretty quiet place for a tavern,” I said.

“It’s suppertime for the doctors so most of them will be going back to work after they eat,” he explained.

Dr. Pritchard got down to business as soon as the waitress brought our drinks. He plopped a large, brown envelope on the table and slapped the top of it with his hand. The slap contained a lot of emotion from a man who up until now had been the epitome of reserved, polite and in control of himself.

He took a long sip of his drink and placed the glass in front of him. The silence between us was deafening, and I could feel the blood pounding in my ears. I was waiting for a tongue-lashing even though I had no idea what this was all about. The man just had that type of persona. His presence alone made you sit up and pay attention. I wasn’t sure if he was expecting me to say anything, so as hard as it was, I stayed silent.

After what seemed like an eternity, he said, “This envelope contains some disturbing material. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to explain some of it.” His tone was icy.

I kept my hands wrapped around my Diet Coke to keep them from grabbing the envelope and ripping it open. Dr. Pritchard had called this meeting which meant he got to say how things would unwind. I waited while he took a few deep breaths through his nose. Finally, he slid the envelope across the table towards me but I resisted touching it for the moment. I glanced at it quickly and saw that there was nothing written on the outside of the envelope.

“Why do you think I would know anything about the contents of the envelope?” I asked him in an even tone. I reserved snarky and bitchy for other folks who didn’t make me feel eight years old.

“Open it,” he demanded. “Open it and then we’ll talk. I’ll be back.” He marched off towards the back of the tavern to the men’s room, I presumed.

The envelope was a large one. Probably measuring fourteen by sixteen inches. I used one finger to slide it in front of me and I stared at it, willing it to disappear. Knowing it wasn’t going away, and knowing that Dr. Pritchard would be back soon, I flipped the envelope over and tore at the flap, opening it. Inside was another large, brown envelope, with a white label pasted in the middle, addressed to Dr. Jordan Francis on West 97th Street in New York. There was no return address on the front of the envelope but in the upper right hand corner there was about three dollars worth of U.S. postal stamps. I couldn’t read the date on the U.S. postal service stamp which was inked over top of the stamps. The envelope was cleanly slit open along the top. The materials inside the envelope were neatly ordered and clipped at the top with a black fold-back clip. A sense of relief and deja vu washed over me when I pulled out the papers and saw what they were.

chapter forty

When I removed the large, black clip holding the stack of papers together, two distinct packages of papers were revealed. The smaller of the two was a copy of the “love letters” written by Nat Scott and the thicker pile was the same correspondence with the FDA that was in the file folder I found in Tommy’s safety deposit box. My stomach stopped flipping with fright and I willed myself to calm down. These documents were no surprise to me, although why they were in an envelope addressed to Dr. Francis was a big question.

Dr. Pritchard slid back into the booth and took a quick sip of his drink. “You’ll remember what we talked about yesterday,” he said. I nodded. Of course I remembered. Dr. Pritchard had laid out for me the sequence of events that led to his team discovering that test results had been falsified. By Phoenix people. I was still disgusted at the thought and couldn’t imagine how Tommy would be feeling.

Dr. Pritchard had some funny business going on at his place as well, because apparently work continued on the artificial kidney project for some time after the date of the letter from the FDA denying the pre-market application. Someone at Global had hidden or covered up this wee bit of news. That someone was obviously Dr. Jordan Francis, the head of the project. And that someone had stolen away into the night about four weeks ago. Dr. Pritchard had told me that he came to work one morning and found Dr. Francis’ resignation letter on his desk. The resignation was totally out of the blue and Dr. Pritchard was shocked at the time. Until he uncovered what had been going on. It took him a couple of weeks, but he eventually found out that the reason the FDA had denied their applications was because of the falsification of test records. By Phoenix people. Global had immediately cancelled all work with Phoenix.

“Like many in my profession,” Dr. Pritchard had told me yesterday, “I’m litigation adverse. Global Devices could have sued Phoenix over this, but I thought the most efficient way to deal with it was to cancel everything with Phoenix and to try and recoup our losses with another company.”

“After you left last evening,” he told me, “I found myself in Jordan’s office. Nothing has really been touched since he left. He hasn’t returned any phone calls and his resignation letter said that he was moving and that he didn’t have a forwarding address.” He sipped from his drink. “What’s the word to describe all of this?” He looked at me, but I wasn’t sure if he was expecting an answer, so I kept quiet. “We were such good work friends. We’d been together for so many years. This whole thing was out of the blue and so unexpected.” He swirled the liquid in his glass and appeared lost in his thoughts.

“Surreal. That’s it. Is that the right word?” he asked. I nodded my head, still silent.

“This whole thing is surreal,” he continued. “Really, to think that Jordan could be involved with falsifying records. What happened to him?” Another question which I didn’t believe I was expected to answer.

Dr. Pritchard hung his head and slowly shook it back and forth.

I felt horrible for Dr. Pritchard. “Had you known Dr. Francis long?” I asked him.

He raised his head and looked at me. “Known him? We had worked together for the last twenty-seven years. We were surgeons together and then moved to Global Devices together.” He sighed. “I thought I knew him. But really, how much do we really understand and know each other? When something like this happens, all notion of your understanding of another human being goes out the window.”

Dr. Pritchard looked around the tavern, held up his empty glass when he caught the waitress’ eye and motioned for another one. He shook the ice around in the bottom of his glass and looked at me.

“You know, when I got Jordan’s resignation letter I thought it was some sort of joke. When I realized it wasn’t a joke, I was confused. But when I found out later on the reason for his resignation, it felt like I had been hammered in the stomach by a battering ram. I literally felt faint and like I had the wind knocked out of me.”

The waitress arrived and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. He grabbed it and drank half of it, fortifying himself.

“I’m over the shock now. Meeting with you last night gave me renewed strength to get to the bottom of this.” He put his glass down sharply on the table.

“I found this,” he pointed at the envelope, “in Jordan’s office last night. Taped to the underside of one of the drawers in his desk.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen these documents,” I told him. “The exact same letters were in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box. Except, the love letters,” I mimed quotes in the air when I said love, “were the originals.” Dr. Pritchard looked a little surprised at this news.

“You’ve described this as surreal,” I went on. “And I agree. I’ve known Tom Connaught for years and when I first arrived in New York two weeks ago after he was killed, someone told me that he and this Natalie Scott were a couple. I could hardly believe it, based on the few times I met her. She wasn’t his type. When I found the letters in the safety deposit box it got me thinking that maybe they weren’t meant for Tom. There is no way that Tom Connaught would be in a relationship with the person who wrote those letters. They’re not addressed to anyone. Do you think they were meant for Dr. Francis?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Jordan has been a bachelor all these years. Never married, never had a serious girlfriend. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. The tone of the letters don’t sound like the Miss Scott I’ve met and worked with. But you should know that I carefully went through all the letters to and from the FDA. I matched them to our files. And I’m almost certain some of the ones supposedly originating from Global Devices are forged. Those ones do not appear in our files.”

My stomach sank at this news.

“Along with falsifying data, apparently your people felt it was okay to forge signatures on our letterhead.” Dr. Pritchard’s voice was slightly raised and I was surprised. Up until now he had been the picture-perfect gentleman.

My insides started boiling and I felt myself getting angrier by the minute. I gathered the papers sitting in front me, re-clipped them together, slid them back into the envelope and held the package in my hands.

“Dr. Pritchard, I will get to the bottom of this,” I promised him. “Whatever is going on is affecting both of our companies.” I pushed the envelope across the table towards him and stood up. “Thanks for the Diet Coke.” I left him staring into the bottom of his glass.

Kelly Northland answered his cell phone before the first ring finished.

“Northland,” he answered.

“It’s Kate. Where are you?”

“At the office. What do you need?”

“I need to punch someone but that won’t solve my problems. Can we meet? In an hour or so? At my apartment?”

“On my way,” he said.

I told Lou to take me home. It had been a long fucking day and I was sure the evening wasn’t going to be much better.

Dinner was on the stove, the fish were fed and there was a stack of clean laundry sitting on the end of the bed. Life on the home-front was blissful. Too bad I couldn’t say it was the same at the office.

Jay was coming out of the shower as I was stripping off my office clothes, my gut wrenching control top pantyhose and cross your heart bra. Jesus, Mary and Joseph it was fucking uncomfortable being dressed for work. It felt almost sinful to put on an oversized pair of Jay’s sweat socks, my sweat pants, and an extra large T-shirt. In fact, I felt practically naked with hardly a piece of polyester or cotton touching my skin.

I stuck my head in the open door of the ensuite bathroom and watched Jay towel dry his hair.

“We’re having company,” I told him. “Did you make enough dinner for an extra person?”

He dropped his towel and grabbed me in a tight bear hug. “Hello Kathleen,” he said. “How was your day?” I slapped his bare ass and pushed him away, laughing. “I’ll tell you all about my day as soon as you get dressed.”

In the kitchen I checked our stock of beer in the fridge. Kelly Northland struck me as a beer drinker. There were several bottles of Canadian beer on the top shelf and I smiled, thinking about Americans drinking Canadian beer, and commenting that it tasted ‘thick’. I remembered the old joke: what do making love in a canoe and American beer have in common? They’re both fucking close to water.

Canadians can be a little snobbish about our beer - not that I ever drank the stuff.

chapter forty-one

Kelly was a good sport and having Jay around while we talked business didn’t faze him in the least. Of course, as I suspected, the Canadian beer helped. Kelly allowed himself one while we ate dinner at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. I had the feeling that he was a very controlled person, which you probably had to be if you had been a tight-ass Marine for twenty years.

After we finished eating, I got right down to business.

“Are your staff working on the background checks?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re still at the office, doing a lot of phone work and digging deep. I’ll have a report for you first thing in the morning on anything we might have dug up.”

“Okay, I’ve got something I need you to do.”

Kelly whipped out a pen and a small pad of paper from the inside breast pocket of his sports jacket. Ready to take notes like a good Staff Sergeant. I put my hand over the pad and pushed it away. “No notes,” I told him. He clicked his pen shut and laid it neatly on the counter beside the pad.

“I want you to find Dr. Jordan Francis. He’s the doctor who was involved with the artificial kidney project at Global. I think I told you that he had resigned his position and no one has heard from him since. I met with Dr. Pritchard today and he showed me an envelope full of documents that he found taped to the underside of a drawer in Dr. Francis’ office.”

I looked at Jay who was standing on the other side of the breakfast bar loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

“Guess what was in the envelope?” I challenged Jay.

“Oh that’s an easy one,” Jay said. He reached over the counter to take away my dirty plate and Kelly’s. “The same thing that was in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box.”

“Right you are Mr. Harmon. The envelope had copies of the letters from Nat Scott, which by the way I am no longer referring to as love letters. From now on they will be called stalker letters.” Jay smiled at me. “The envelope also had copies of the letters from the FDA, denying Global Devices the pre-market applications. Dr. Pritchard told me that he had compared that stack of letters to his files and several appear to be forged. They don’t exist in his files. So now we’re not only accused of falsifying test data, we’re forgers too.” I turned to Kelly. “Dr. Francis resigned over four weeks ago and no one has heard from him. His apartment is over on West 97th Street.” I gave him the address. “Although in his resignation letter he said he was moving. I think we need to do a little checking on him. Do you have someone who can find him?”

“Let me make a call.” He walked out of the kitchen into the living area.

“I think I might like him,” I told Jay. “Although I wasn’t too sure this morning when I met him. I had my dad check him out.”

“Oh yeah? And what did he have to say?” Jay asked.

“Kelly checks out. Apparently a good guy. My dad said his sources gave him the thumbs up. I’m more comfortable with him now. Though he strikes me as a bit of a tight-ass.”

Kelly picked that moment to walk back in the kitchen and I wondered if he’d overheard us. Before I could find out though, his cell phone started ringing. Kelly quickly grabbed it from where it was clipped on his belt. Kind of like a little gun. He flipped it open and answered it in one movement. “Northland.” He listened for a moment and turned and walked back out of the kitchen into the living area.

“What’s his military background?” Jay asked.

“He was a marine staff sergeant who retired a few years back. He was military police and spent some time at NCIS.” Jay’s eyebrows rose in a question mark so I clarified it for him. “Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Kelly was an investigator for them.”

Kelly was sliding his cell phone into its holster when he came back into the kitchen.

“That was one of my guys who’s been doing the background checks. Apparently there’s more to the story on Ben Tucker than we thought.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“My guys have been going through the background histories of the people in R and D and checking the facts themselves. We’re not relying on the facts in the INTELLI-Guide background information. He’s come up against a few walls as he’s been checking out Mr. Tucker’s story. The first time he thought it was just a fluke. But the second, third and fourth time the facts didn’t check out, the red flags were wavin’. So far, his education and work history are lies. He apparently had several previous jobs listed and none of them are true.”

“How can that be?” I demanded. “How much do we pay this company to do background checks? Has anyone checked their background? Did your guys find discrepancies in any of the other files?”

“Not that I’ve heard so far,” Kelly said. “I’ll give INTELL-Guide the benefit of the doubt here, but if we find any more discrepancies, I have a feeling we’ll be using another company after this to do our background checking.”

“You’re fucking right we will be.”

“So my guy has stopped checking what Mr. Tucker put down on the file, and we’re now starting a trace on him with other sources. It shouldn’t be too long before we find out Mr. Tucker’s true identity. Apparently his social security number is fake too.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I fumed. Kelly’s cell phone rang again and he disappeared into the living room to answer it.

“Well, he seems to be getting things done,” Jay observed. He closed the dishwasher door and started wiping down the counters. I didn’t understand how he could appear so calm. My insides were roiling and I was royally pissed. I grabbed my cigarettes and headed for the balcony. Mr. Chisel Jaw, Drop Dead Gorgeous Tucker was a phony and I couldn’t even begin to fathom why he was employed at Phoenix. I wondered who had hired him and how much damage he had done since he’d been with the company.

Kelly joined me on the balcony before I was halfway through my cigarette. He referred to his notebook and told me, “His real name is Donald McLean. He spent time in one of the state prisons in Arizona. And he’s a registered sex offender.”

In spite of the humid evening air, I felt a little chilled, pacing up and back on the balcony. I cupped my hands against the windows and peered inside, where Kelly was sitting at the dining room table, at the far end of the apartment. The chandelier above the dining room table was the only light coming from that end of the apartment and straight ahead of where I was on the balcony, the apartment was in darkness except for a soft glow coming from inside the cubby-hole in the wall, where Jay was working on the computer. Even though I lived on one of the main streets of Manhattan, there was little sound coming from Fifth Avenue below me.

Kelly had been working the phones ever since he broke the news to me about Donald McLean, a.k.a. Ben Tucker. Jay was somehow helping out and doing some digging on different computer databases. Me, I felt useless, so I stayed out of the way, and chain-smoked on the balcony.

Things were spinning out of control as far as I was concerned. Nat Scott had vacated the premises, left her job and the company without a word to anyone. She might as well have sent a one-word email to everyone in the company: GUILTY. But just exactly what is she guilty of, I wondered. Tucker, one of our senior people in R and D turns out to be a felon. Was he involved with Nat Scott? Jordan Francis disappears. What did he do that was so bad he had to resign his position? Was he falsifying records? Was Natalie Scott guilty of the same thing? Did Ben Tucker - or Donald McLean, dammit - help Nat Scott? Did they kill Tommy because he figured it all out?

I was suddenly very conscious of the fact that Natalie Scott lived in the same apartment building. Was she not worried about running into me, seeing me in the lobby? She left Phoenix without so much as an email, a phone call or a kiss-my-ass. One could surmise that she had no desire to have any contact with anyone from Phoenix. Too fucking bad, I thought, as I stormed into the apartment and headed for the elevator. The front door to the apartment closed quietly behind me and I punched the button on the wall to call for the elevator.

The ride to go up six floors took less than a minute, hardly enough time for me to figure out what I was going to do or say when I confronted Nat. I was surprised when the elevator doors opened to see four apartment doors, each with a solid brass plaque mounted on the door with the apartment number. All the floors in the building were apparently not like mine, containing only one apartment. I stood and stared at the four doors and tried my Amazing Kreskin routine, trying to conjure up Nat Scott’s image behind one of the doors. When that didn’t work, I did the next best thing. I knocked on the door closest to me. And waited. When there was no response to my knock, I went to the door next to it and rapped.

I didn’t have to wait long before the door opened a crack and I heard a voice.

“Hello?” The voice was elderly.

“Hello,” I answered back. “I’m Kate Monahan, from the fourteenth floor.” The door opened another half inch or so but I still couldn’t see who was there.

“You don’t live on the fourteenth floor, Miss, and I’m calling building security right now. Mr. Connaught lives on that floor.”

“Oh, please, don’t call security,” I quickly pleaded with her. “Mr. Connaught is my ex-husband. I’m living in the apartment now.”

The door opened about six inches and a little white head peered out. The little white head was on a tiny body, one that was actually shorter than me. She was stooped over, and held onto a cane with both hands.

“Tom never spoke of an ex-wife,” she told me. I wasn’t surprised at this and told her so.

“Kathleen Monahan, ma’am.” I held out my hand and she offered hers. It was delicate and her skin felt like silk. “Constance Everwood,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you Miss Everwood.”

“Allow me to say how sorry I am about the loss of Tom Connaught. He was a good man, a solid man. And a gentleman. There aren’t many of those around these days,” she said. I agreed with her. “What can I do for you tonight, Miss Monahan?”

“I’m looking for Natalie Scott’s apartment,” I told her.

“Well, why didn’t you just ask at the Front Desk?” she asked.

“I came straight up on the elevator. I just thought all floors had one apartment, like mine.”

“Ha,” she half-laughed. “Yours and the nineteenth floor are the only ones with single apartments. The rest of us live four apartments to the floor.” She made it sound like she was living in a tenement building when in fact she was living at a very exclusive, Fifth Avenue address.

“Yes, that’s too bad. Can you tell me which apartment Miss Scott lives in?”

Miss Everwood pointed at the apartment two doors over from hers. “Whatever business would you have with that one?” she asked.

“Oh, we work together,” I told her, making it sound like we were girlfriends who were getting together to paint our toenails.

“Well, she’s turned out as sour as that mother of hers. Do you work at Tom’s company? You must, because she,” Miss Everwood poked her nose in the direction of Natalie Scott’s apartment, “works there too. Tom told me.”

“Did you see Tom often?” I asked her.

“Often enough. At least once a week,” she told me. “In the lobby. We’d ride the elevator together. He’d help me with my packages. Such a nice man. Have they found out what happened to him?”

I shook my head. “Thanks Miss Everwood.” I took a step back, letting her know I needed to move on. “I hope to see you in the lobby or the elevator,” I told her.

“Don’t waste your time going to her apartment,” she nodded again in the direction of the Scott’s door. “No one answers the door after eight o’clock at night. Been that way since they moved in. You can bang on that door, you can yell that you’re with the police. No one will come.”

“Oh, okay,” I said reluctantly. “Do you know if Miss Scott is at home? She wasn’t at work today and I wondered if she was okay,” I lied. I didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass if she was okay.

“She’s home. Came in around five this morning and hasn’t gone out.” Constance picked up her cane and pointed it at a small peephole in her door which was placed at about the four foot mark. “I keep track,” she bragged. “Can’t sleep so I pace. And when I hear the elevator, I check to see who’s on it.” I wondered if she had ever applied to work the Front Desk of the building as a security guard. This was Neighbourhood Watch at its best, although admittedly she was only keeping track of three other families.

“Although I must admit, it’s strange,” she said.

“What’s strange?” I asked.

“That I haven’t seen her mother in six months. Good night Miss Monahan.” She turned around and shuffled back into her apartment.

“Good night Miss Everwood,” I answered.

Six months? That was strange.