Her eyes got huge and she asked back, “Why?”
“Just do it, honey.”
She set her latte aside, gave her attention to her phone, and put it to her ear. I sipped my latte, leafed through the file on my knee I didn’t see, and listened to her connect with Furlock, as well as give a lame excuse why she was calling, totally no good at cloak and dagger.
I looked back to her when she disconnected and told me. “He’s there.”
I nodded. “So the files on the server that people can see are the tampered ones?”
It was her turn to nod.
“And the other ones have disappeared, outside what Furlock has.”
“Yes, Frankie.”
“Did you take this to Lloyd?”
“Not yet,” she said. “We wanna make sure all our ducks are in a row.”
All their ducks.
Shit.
“What ducks?” I pressed.
She drew in breath, grabbed her latte, and took a sip, trying to look cool and casual doing it—and failing—then she looked back to me.
“Okay, Frankie, there’s a lot,” she said quietly.
“Tenrix is dangerous,” I stated, also quietly.
She nodded again. “In five percent of test subjects who were on the product for more than three years, serious and irreparable heart conditions formed that could be traced directly back to taking Tenrix.”
Shit, shit, shit.
“How did this get by everybody?” I asked.
“Because Bierman is just the henchman. The mastermind is Barrow.”
I sucked in breath.
Clancy Barrow. CEO of Wyler Pharmaceuticals.
The top of the food chain. The number one shark.
Shit!
I leaned toward Tandy and hissed, “How do you know?”
“Okay, Frankie, okay…” she semi-chanted, then leaned toward me. “My big sis, she went to school with this girl—totally cool—her name is Roxie.”
“Babe, point,” I warned.
“I’m gettin’ to it,” she squeaked. “Roxie moved to Denver a while back. She met this guy, married him. He’s a cop.”
“Okay,” I prompted when she stopped talking.
“But his brother owns this big investigations firm.”
And there it was.
She kept going.
“And we did trials for Tenrix at a research facility in a hospital in Denver.”
“So you called her, she engaged the brother-in-law, and what happened?”
“What happened was, the guy he put on it found out two, Frankie”—she leaned deeper toward me—“two nurses on that trial got in bad car crashes. Bad. One lost her legs. One, such severe head trauma, she can’t work anymore.”
“Whistle-blowers,” I whispered.
Tandy nodded. “We think so. We also know the turnover in nurses during that trial was severe. Nearly all of them went in and out the door. The investigator tracked some of those nurses down and they would not talk. Not at all. The investigator suspected this was because of fear, but maybe payoffs. And Bierman may make some dough, but we figure he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of operation.” She paused before she finished, “But Barrow does.”
I figured they figured right.
“They find evidence of the payoffs?” I asked.
Tandy shook her head. “We only could pool so much money together to pay the investigator guys, so no. We couldn’t ask them to dig deeper. They’re really cool guys and they offered to keep going, get us on a payment schedule. But we really couldn’t do that.”
Fuck.
“But Peter found something,” she stated, and I again focused on her.
“What?”
“He’s really clever with computer stuff. He did some of his voodoo and found out Dr. Gartner was getting payoffs. He’d put it in an account under his stepmother’s name. His dad’s dead so that’s probably why the cops didn’t catch it. I don’t know how he managed that, but he never touched it and neither did she. And we all figure—because, apparently, he was a super guy—Gartner was playing the game, pretending he was taking payoffs, but amassing his own evidence to take to Berger or the board or whoever could do something to stop Tenrix getting out. They found out and he got killed.”
I’d totally forgotten about it until that moment, but it was then I remembered the tense phone call I partially overheard Bierman having. It was before Gartner died. But it could have been anyone in this drama he was threatening.
“Miranda and Peter are working that,” Tandy informed me, and I focused back on her.
“Working what?”
“She’s in production now and Dr. Gartner’s computer, files, and assistant are in production. They’re looking to see if he left anything behind or if they cleaned up after him. ”
Jeez, they totally had it going on. The Miranda move was a ploy to get her into production.
I was impressed.
But I still didn’t get it.
I looked away from her and asked, mostly to myself, “Why would Barrow be behind this?”
“Because we need a winner,” Tandy answered.
I looked back at Tandy. “What?”
“They headhunted you, the best of the best to jumpstart our sales program which, the numbers were okay, but it wasn’t buying anyone yachts. Before you, they headhunted Heath. He was a big hotshot rep from another company. We’ve had two big products that have had competing products launched in the last five years that have cut into our profit margins. And we had one major earner that went generic and now is sold over-the-counter. It’s not like the company is dying, but they need a winner and none of the other products are even close to launch. Tenrix is supposed to be that winner. Most of the data is awesome. The problem is, in those few cases, it’s devastating and, if not caught, could be lethal.”
She and her crew had done their homework.
“Tandy,” I started gently, “with all that, can you please tell me why you didn’t give this to Lloyd or Berger?”
Her shoulders straightened, and when she spoke, her voice was stronger. “Because I need this job, Frankie. I have a roommate. We live in a nice place, but only because we go in on it together. Without her, it’d be tough to find somewhere to rent that’s that nice, safe, and in a good part of town. I want to be able to afford to keep my part of that place and it isn’t like people headhunt for assistants. I don’t have the reserves to make it if I get fired. I need to work. And with things this big, you never know who’s in on it. So, if we don’t have everything we have to have to prove what we know is true, if they fire us, we have nothing to give to the newspapers to expose them.”
She and her crew hadn’t just done their homework, they’d thought it all through.
But my mind was whirling with what to do next.
Then I hit on it.
“I need the name and phone number of the investigator in Denver. I also need Peter to make copies of absolutely everything he has. Call him and tell him to do that, then I’ll go down to IT on my way back from the gym at lunch to get it myself. You make the rounds and be cool about it, telling everyone to stand down for now. I’ll let you know what we’re doing next.”
Her expression went suspicious as she said, “No offense, Frankie, but we’ve been at this a lot longer than you and you’re kind of management. So I know you’re cool, but with this kind of stuff, I have to know you’re cool. I don’t think it’s a good idea to hand everything over to you.”
I got that.
I also had to get past it.
“All right, honey, take a deep breath and keep your cool when I tell you something that’s gonna blow your mind, freak you out, and put the fear of God in you.”