Pat, who’d been waiting for her when she returned to her room after the doctors were done with her leg, had told her what he’d discovered about the missing drugs at Corey Wellington’s house.
Working together — Pat making calls while she surfed on his laptop — they found out that Corey had no memberships at any gyms where he might have kept the drugs. Pat had officers comb through Corey’s desk at work and his car and they found no sign of the rest of the blister packs of drugs. His ex-girlfriend did not have any packets of his Calydrole.
Another relationship we don’t know about?
A secret place where he kept his meds hidden?
Lien-hua had to acknowledge that those were possibilities, but it seemed to be looking more and more like someone had removed the medication from Corey’s house after his suicide and before the police arrived.
But still, she didn’t have nearly enough information to work on even a preliminary profile, so together, she and Pat focused on pursuing the investigative leads that they actually did have.
The fingerprints from the medicine cabinet came back with four results: Corey’s, those of Officer Dustin Wilhoit, who evidently hadn’t worn gloves at the scene, the woman whom Corey had been seeing, and a former Marine: Corporal Keith Tyree.
A background told them that Corporal Tyree had served with distinction and had disappeared off the grid after he left the military a year and a half ago.
When they dug deeper, they found that there were no credit cards, e-mail accounts, addresses, phone numbers, or insurance polices in his name. Someone had wiped him off the electronic map, and in today’s world that was not something that was easily done.
It pointed to a major player, maybe a nation-state.
Considering how thorough the wipe was, Pat noted that it was surprising that Tyree’s prints were still in the system.
“I agree,” Lien-hua said. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to turn him into a ghost and now he leaves identifiable prints at a scene that was supposed to be a suicide? Something isn’t clicking here.”
“First, I think we need to find out everything there is to know about Corporal Tyree. Also, we should see if there’s any way that Corey’s life might have intersected with his.”
“I’d say we have enough to get Margaret to assign a couple more agents to delve into the possibility that there are other apparent suicides related to the use of this lot number of Calydrole.”
“Especially those where Tyree might have left his prints.”
“Yes.”
He put in the request, but Margaret was currently in a meeting and her secretary said she would relay it as soon as the Director was available.
He also contacted the pharmaceutical firm to find out more about this drug’s known side effects and about any class-action lawsuits that might be pending regarding the product. The analysts at the firm were going to e-mail him their data. Also, they were still looking into the lot number and promised to get back to him with details of the side effects of the drug.
“PTPharmaceuticals,” he mumbled. “I can’t believe it’s those guys.”
During the first case she’d worked with him in North Carolina, they’d had a run-in with the man who used to own the company.
Actually, it was more than a run-in. The guy, who, as it turned out, was sociopathic, had tried to kill Patrick and a group of dignitaries and media representatives.
It was a complex investigation that had tendrils running all the way back to the Jonestown massacre in the seventies. Lien-hua considered that briefly, but since the former owner hadn’t had any real connection with the firm for years, at least for the time being, she set those thoughts aside.
It didn’t take much research to find out that PTPharmaceuticals imported most of its products from India, where the FDA inspected only a small percentage of the plants to assure that the supplies weren’t tainted or substandard.
“So,” Pat said, “if there was tampering, it might have been done before the drugs were shipped rather than after they entered the supply chain here in America.” Lien-hua had done more interagency work than he had, and now he asked her, “Who do you think we should call? Homeland Security or FDA?”
“Well, if we’re going in the direction of the supply chain, let’s start with FDA. I know that some of their Office of Criminal Investigation agents pose as pharmaceutical wholesalers and distributors of counterfeit drugs to record conversations and confessions of wrongdoing, that sort of thing. Maybe there’s someone from the OCI who’s worked in India who can help us.”
He contacted the FDA’s Counterfeit Alert Network, but that proved to be a dead end. The FDA has only two hundred investigators total, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has more than three thousand who work to stop illegal trafficking of guns, humans, drugs, and intellectual property. It took Pat a little while, but he finally set up a meeting with an ICE agent named Jason Kantsos who’d worked in India. He agreed to meet tomorrow morning at ten o’clock at Pat’s office at the Academy.
After they ended the call, Lien-hua shook her head. “If there are counterfeit pharmaceuticals involved here, this is going to be a jurisdictional nightmare.”
“It shouldn’t be that bad.”
“Really? Are you serious?”
“Well, sure, there’s some overlap between us and the DEA…” While he contemplated that, she thought about that overlap.
Most people don’t know this, but the FBI has over three hundred different types of crimes it investigates, and one of them is drug trafficking. In fact, back in 1999 there was going to be a merger between the DEA and the FBI to take care of the overlap, but nothing ever came of it. Lien-hua hadn’t been with the Bureau at the time, but she’d heard about it all, yet to this day no one had ever been able to give her a satisfactory explanation for why the merger hadn’t happened.
“And,” Pat continued, drawing her out of her thoughts, “the OCI and ICE.”
“And U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, if they were shipped to someone here in the States.”
“Hmm…” he reflected. “So, hypothetically, let’s say someone living in India produces a counterfeit version of Calydrole.”
“Okay.”
“He ships it to a U.S. port and then has an associate mail it to a customer in another state. That crime would be investigated by local and state law enforcement agencies, as well as CBP, because it crosses our borders; USPIS, because it was mailed; OCI, because it’s a counterfeit drug; DEA, because it contains a controlled substance; ICE, because it’s a form of illegally trafficked intellectual property; and the FBI, because it involves interstate crime?”
“And that’s not to mention working with Interpol, the World Health Organization’s Anti-Counterfeiting Task Force, and…” She tapped at the laptop’s keyboard for a few seconds. “The Permanent Forum on International Pharmaceutical Crime, and testing agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
“Okay, you win. A jurisdictional nightmare.”
She scootched into a different position in the bed, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. “Reporting procedures vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but unless there’s an overdose, I’m thinking that most law enforcement personnel wouldn’t search for fingerprints at the scene of a suicide.”
“We’re going to have to do a national search for reports of suicides of people taking Calydrole.”
She didn’t even want to think about how long that could take. “Let’s start with people who have fatal stab wounds in the abdomen like Corey did. If there’s foul play involved here, it’s possible others who were taking the drug might have died from similar types of wounds.”