By the time they finished, the water pitcher in front of him was empty, and he was so wet with perspiration he might well have dumped its contents over his head instead of drinking it. The only good news was that the questions about the formulary had centered on the dollars and cents, details such as how much items cost and the volume of prescriptions. Ash didn't really probe how new drugs got listed in the first place. Ross found it agonizing to wait for that shoe to drop-what if they knew? Or even suspected? Wouldn't they have had to tell him he was under investigation? Would he have to stop and insist on seeing a lawyer?
But these fears remained unrealized. Ash moved along to her own priorities. "So, Dr. Ross, to summarize. It is your testimony under oath that you do not expect Parnassus to go bankrupt within the next six months, whether or not the city pays the thirteen-million-dollar bill it has presented."
Ross put on a fresh face for the nineteen citizens seated in front of him. He was surprised to see such a focus, an apparent interest, in most of them. They were waiting for his answer, although he had a sense of gathering impatience. But maybe, he realized, that was him. "Well, never say never. Bankruptcy protects the corporation from its creditors, true, and we could indeed use some relief there if the city defaults on its obligation. But with a group like us, when our biggest client is the city and county of San Francisco, it would also negatively impact our credibility, which is not too high as it is. As some of you may know, we've been getting a lot of bad press lately."
"I'm glad you brought that up, Dr. Ross." Ash looked like she meant it. "I was hoping that you could give us some insight on the type of disagreements that must have surfaced at Parnassus in light of, say, the Baby Emily case. I should tell you that the grand jury already has a working knowledge of those events. Maybe you could fill in some of the blank spots? Specifically, Mr. Markham's role and reactions of various staff to it. Please begin with Mr. Markham."
"Are you saying you think his death might be related to Baby Emily or something of that nature?"
"That's what this inquiry is about, Doctor. Mr. Markham's death." She had moved a few steps closer to him and now, standing while he sat, she loomed as somewhat threatening. "Someone introduced a lethal dose of potassium into his IV. As a doctor, would you agree that it is unlikely that this could have been an accident?"
Ross didn't know what kind of answer Ash wanted. He wished they would have allowed him to bring his lawyer into the room. He had to rely now upon the truth, and this made him uneasy. "It's always possible to give an improper dose of any drug. If Mr. Markham's heartbeat had become irregular, I could envision the need to administer a therapeutic dose of potassium. It's also possible, though rare, for a drug's concentration in solution to differ from what's on the label."
He was slightly shocked to find Ash prepared for this. "Of course. Please assume we have the drip bag that held the potassium in this case, and the concentration is correct. Also assume that there is no indication that Mr. Markham's heart, prior to the attack brought on by the overdose, was malfunctioning. So given these assumptions, do you have any explanation for these events other than that this was an intentionally administered overdose?"
Ross wiped sweat from his upper lip. "I guess I don't see any other possibility. Do you mind if I take off my coat?"
"Not at all." In half a minute, he was seated again. Ash hadn't lost her place. "So, Doctor, if Mr. Markham was intentionally overdosed-"
"I didn't say that." Then, amending, "I didn't realize we'd gotten to there."
At this, Ash turned dramatic. She paused, as though in midthought, and glared down at him. "That's exactly where we are, Doctor. Did you and Mr. Markham have serious disagreements, for example, over policy?"
Ross lifted his chin in controlled outrage. "Are you joking?" he asked her.
"About what?"
"As I take it, you're asking me if some argument about business would have made me want to kill my longtime friend and business partner. I resent the hell out of the question."
"I never asked that question," Ash said. "You made that leap yourself. But having asked it, please answer." She fixed him with a steadfast gaze.
He matched her with one of his own. "No, then, nothing. Nothing that even remotely would have made me consider anything like that." He spoke directly to the jury. "Tim was my friend, a close friend."
Ross forced himself to slow down. A fresh pitcher of water had appeared-maybe it had been there for a while. He poured some into his glass and took a sip. "I need to point out, Ms. Ash, that the medical decision on Baby Emily, though hugely unpopular, wasn't all wrong. Baby Emily did in fact make it to County and to the premature baby unit, where she lived until she was transported back to Portola. I didn't kill her by any means, or even endanger her unnecessarily."
"But how did Mr. Markham react to all this?"
"He was all right with it until it became big news."
"You two did not have words over it?"
"Of course we did, after it blew up on us. He thought I should have consulted him, that I shouldn't have acted only on business considerations." Again, he directed his words to the grand jury. "We had some heated words, that's true. We run a big, complicated business together, and our roles sometimes overlap. We'd been doing this for twelve years." He made some eye contact, decided he'd be damned if he'd even dignify Ash's insinuation with a further denial.
As they'd been sitting down to the Tuesday lunch group at Lou the Greek's, Treya had made apologies for Glitsky's absence. He'd been called away at the last minute to a murder scene in Hunter's Point. Hardy was convinced that this excuse was an outright falsehood.
A murder scene at Hunter's Point indeed, he mused. As though they didn't happen every week. Hardy knew that unless some gangbangers had slaughtered themselves and twenty or thirty other bystanders in a daylight shootout involving children, drugs, the Goodyear blimp, and a sighting of the Zodiac Killer, Glitsky the administrator wouldn't need to be called to a "murder scene in Hunter's Point."
In Hardy's mind, the nature of the excuse had even deeper implications. The mundanity of the explanation, though perfectly plausible on the surface, was in reality so lame that Hardy took it to be a secret yet personal fuck-you message to himself. Murder scene, my ass, he thought. Right up there with "My grandmother died." Or "The dog ate my homework."
Furious at most of them, but especially at him, Abe was avoiding the group today. It probably hadn't helped when he'd gotten the word this morning that Jackman had directed Strout to go ahead with Wes Farrell's request to dig up his clients' mother. Before they'd sat down, Strout told Hardy that he had called Abe as a courtesy to tell him about this decision. He'd endured an angry earful of Glitsky's opinion on the question, then thanked him for it, and said he'd be going ahead on Jackman's approval anyway.
But no one else seemed bothered by his absence. They'd barely gotten settled before the conversation had gotten into full swing. David Freeman had started with a few comments about the Parnassus situation, how prescient they'd all been last week. Before too long, half the table had chimed in with one comment or another. Eventually, they got to Jeff Elliot's first column on Malachi Ross, which led Jeff to ask Marlene Ash if she'd talked to Ross yet and, if so, how he'd fared before the grand jury.
She'd smiled, glanced at Jackman, and sipped her iced tea. "No comment, I'm afraid, even if we're off the record here."
"Ross and Markham were close personal friends is what I hear," Hardy said. "Never a cross word between them." He shot a look at Treya across the table from him. "Kind of like me and Abe."
But Elliot thought he knew where the story lay. "Let me ask you this, Marlene," he began. "Diz thinks they are close personal friends, yet I have heard that they disagreed on just about every decision either one of them made over the past couple of years-Baby Emily, Sinustop, formulary issues, you name it."