Due Diligence (18 page)

Chapter Eighteen

“What the hell is going on in St. Louis?” Flo asked.

I gave a weary groan. “Crazy, huh?” I cradled the phone against my shoulder as I reached for my coffee mug.

“I just talked to Benny. It's totally outrageous. Have they caught him?”

“Not yet.”

“What do the police say?”

“They're working on several different scenarios.”

“What are they?”

“One: a rapist. Two: a stalker. Three: a serial killer. Four: none of the above.”

“Great,” she said contemptuously. “In other words, they have no idea. Are they city cops?”

“No, suburban.”

“Even better,” she snorted. “I covered that beat in Detroit for a year. Your typical suburban cop couldn't find his own asshole with a map.”

“Benny probably has more details. He met me at the police station last night and asked most of the questions. I was kind of woozy.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“Flo, Benny was a doll. He refused to let me go home alone. He spent the night on the couch. Don't tell anyone, though. He said it'll ruin his image. Actually, you're going to ruin his image.”

“Me?”

“The last time he fell for someone his own age was in kindergarten.”

“It's a little early for either one of us to be falling for the other.”

“He said he's going to visit you in D.C.”

“I'm not holding my breath.”

“I think he really likes you.”

“We'll see.”

“Do you like him?” I asked.

“He's okay,” she said without a lot of conviction.

“What's wrong with him?”

“I like him and all. It's just that he's…I don't know.”

“He's what?”

“Well, overly polite.”

“Benny?” I asked incredulously. “Overly polite?”

“He's considerate and all, but almost too much so. From what you told me about him, the last person I expected was Mr. Goody Two-Shoes.”

“Oh, my God, Flo. He's not like that at all. I've never seen him like that. He must have been nervous. In reality, Benny's incredibly obnoxious. I promise. He's one of the crudest people I've ever met. Once you get to know him, you'll see that he can be vulgar beyond belief. Trust me on this, Flo. You've got to give him another chance.”

“We'll see. But enough about me. How do you feel?”

“Sore.”

“Did you catch a cold from all that water?”

“No, and I'm not complaining, believe me. I'm glad to be alive. In fact, I'm going into the office in about a half hour. It'll get my mind off all this.”

“Not a bad idea. Listen, Benny called me yesterday afternoon. He had some questions from you about the FDA.”

“Oh, right. What did you find?”

“Plenty about process, nothing about specifics.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to Benny, you want to see the FDA files on Chemitex Bioproducts and Armstrong Bioproducts, right?”

“Right.”

“Forget it.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was on the phone for over an hour this morning with an attorney in the general counsel's office. There are two relevant FDA filings for each drug. The first is the Investigational New Drug Application. Known for short as—”

“—the IND,” I said.

“Right. That's what you file when you're ready to start testing your drug on humans. Among other things, the IND describes in detail how you are going to do each of the three phases of human testing.”

“Three?”

“That's what the guy told me. You start with phase one clinical trials. That's where you test the drug for side effects, usually on thirty or forty healthy volunteers. Then you move to the phase two clinicals. That's where you test it on people who have the target ailment. If it passes phase two, you move to the phase three trials and test the drug on a few thousand patients over a couple year period. If the drug passes all three phases, you're ready to file—”

“—a New Drug Application,” I said.

“Yep. But that one wouldn't be as helpful to you. Apparently, the NDAs are humongous—hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, most of them highly technical.”

“So how do I get a hold of an IND?”

“You don't,” Flo said.

“Why not?”

“The FDA won't let you see them. They treat the IND as a trade secret of the applicant.”

“What about an FOIA request?” I asked. The Freedom of Information Act is a federal law that requires various governmental entities to turn over gobs of information if requested to do so by a member of the public.

“Nope,” Flo said. “INDs are specifically exempted from FOIA. Same with the NDAs.”

“Rats,” I said glumly. “No way Chemitex will let me see them voluntarily. Sherman Ross said he made some inquiries for me, but I'm not optimistic.”

“There's another possible route,” Flo said, “but it's a long shot.”

“It's probably my only shot. Tell me.”

“I asked the guy to describe a typical IND.”

“And?”

“They all start off with the FDA Form 1571.”

“Which is?”

“A two-page, fill-in-the-blanks federal form.”

“Okay.”

“But the rest of the IND is usually one volume of text and test data, and that's the key.”

“What's the key?”

“The length. I asked the lawyer pointblank: do the drug companies ever have their applications professionally printed?”

“And?”

“Not often these days, he told me, but it was more common back before most companies had sophisticated in-house word processing capabilities.”

I smiled. “You're a genius, Flo.”

“I admit it, counseler.”

“I'll start working the phones as soon as I get to the office.”

“Call me if you score a direct hit.”

Before leaving for the office, I took out the second of the two documents that Karen Harmon had typed from the tapes Bruce Rosenthal had dictated during his review of the Chemitex R&D files. It was the document with the baffling series of questions on Primax and Guillain-Barré” and the hitherto cryptic “Phase Two Trials.” I glanced at Bruce's questions:

Primax? Where?

Cross-referenced materials not there—Filing glitch?—Need to locate—Need to ask

What's going on with Guillain B?

Where are Primax files???—must find

Be sure to look for LGB—Sounds like typical G-B syndrome

Cross-reference to Phase Two Trial?—Need to check date—Phase Two Trial?—Nof possible!?

Thanks to Flo, I had a good idea what “Phase Two Trial” probably meant, at least generically. How it related to whatever had agitated (and probably killed) Bruce was still a mystery.

***

Jacki was at lunch when I got to the office. I flipped through my phone messages and glanced at the mail. Nothing that couldn't wait.

I took out the Yellow Pages and flipped to the heading for Printers. I was expecting six or seven listings. Instead, there were nine
pages
of listings. But as I went down the columns, name by name, I saw that I could eliminate many that were obviously geared toward the walk-in trade and ordinary customers looking for a wedding invitation, stationery, or business cards. A major pharmaceutical company was not likely to have a formal FDA filing handled by Sir Speedy Prints or Tommy's Print & Copy Corner. But even after eliminating the obvious ones, I still had more than fifty companies to call. With a deep breath, I lifted the receiver, checked the listing and punched in the number for Ace Printing Company.

I was up to Chesterfield Graphics Corp. when Jacki returned from lunch. She was surprised to see me and came rushing into my office.

“Oh, Rachel, how are you feeling?”

“Much better.”

“You should have stayed home for a day. You need your rest after that dreadful night.”

“I'm okay, Jacki. Really I am.”

She crossed her beefy arms and frowned with concern. “Maybe, but I'm still going to send you home early.”

I smiled. “Yes, ma'am. In fact, you can help me get out of here early.” I handed her the Yellow Pages. “I've been calling printers, and this is as far as I got.” I pointed to Chesterfield Graphics. “I need to find which of these companies has ever printed FDA filings for either Chemitex Bioproducts or its predecessor, Armstrong Bioproducts. So far, I'm zero for eight.”

She lifted the Yellow Pages and frowned at the listings. “I'll start right in.”

“Use a little indirection. A pointed question might put them off. I told the ones I called that a client of mine in the pharmaceutical business needed to have an Investigational New Drug Application printed. I asked whether they had ever done one before. So far, no one has.”

She was taking notes. “An Investigational New Drug Application?”

I nodded. “If you find one who's done it before, ask them for references of pharmaceutical companies that they've done work for. If they don't mention Chemitex or Armstrong on their own at that point, you can ask them.”

Jacki finished taking notes and nodded. “I'll start now.”

“Thanks.”

She paused at the door and turned to face me. “Rachel, did you happen to come back here last night before you went to the mall?”

“No. Why?”

She looked perplexed. “I always turn off my computer at the end of the day. I would have sworn it was off last night when I locked up. Yours, too. But they were both on when I got here this morning. Odd, isn't it?”

I nodded uncertainly. “Maybe you forgot. I usually turn mine off when I leave, but I honestly can't remember whether I did yesterday.”

“Maybe, but I know I looked in your office before I locked up. I could swear your computer was off, too.” She paused. “And another thing.”

“What?”

“I was catching up on my filing this morning. Were you in the file drawers yesterday?”

I felt an icy finger on my spine. “I don't think so.”

“Hmmm,” she said with a puzzled frown. Although her personal life was in disarray, Jacki was a stickler for order at the office, especially in the file drawers. I realized early on in our relationship that I should let her do all of the filing.

“What?” I asked.

“Things are out of order,” she said. “I thought you might have gone into the drawers yesterday looking for some document and forgot to put things back in the right place.” She heaved a sigh. “Oh, well, it's probably the darn hormones again. I woke up at two in the morning with my nipples on fire.” She left my office shaking her head and returned to her desk.

I sat there motionless, absorbing the clear import of what Jacki had noticed. I carefully surveyed the top of my desk, looking for something askew. I couldn't tell for sure. There were always piles of documents on my desk. There happened to be four of them this morning. As far as I could remember, there were four when I left yesterday afternoon. Whenever Jacki was the last to leave at night or the first to arrive in the morning, she would neatly square each pile. All four piles were neatly squared. I couldn't remember for sure what had been in each pile, and thus I couldn't tell whether any of them had been disturbed or rearranged. The same was true of the drawers of my desk and credenza. Jacki maintained all the really important files in her filing cabinet. The few files in my credenza were a real hodgepodge of documents—my TWA Frequent Flyer materials, the documents from my house closing, sets of local rules from the various federal district courts in Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, a miscellaneous collection of photocopies of judicial decisions that I had at one time or another thought worth saving, copies of some of the briefs I had filed over the years. Nothing essential, nothing I had looked at recently, and thus nothing I could say for sure had been disturbed or rearranged since yesterday afternoon.

Then there were the contents of my briefcase, including all my notes and photocopies of materials from my ongoing investigation. But my briefcase had been with me the whole night. It had been locked in the trunk of my car while I was at Town & Country Centre, and it remained there until I opened the trunk much later that night with the set of keys from my waterlogged purse, which the police fished out of the stormwater culvert under the shopping mall. I brought the briefcase into my house when Benny and I came home from the police station.

As for any other valuable documents…

I glanced at the heavy, squat safe, which sat in a corner of my office. I went over and kneeled in front of it. It was a banged-up relic that I had bought at a garage sale from a retired criminal attorney. I examined the combination dial and the handle and the other parts for signs of tampering, but the safe was already so battered it was impossible to identify any new marks. I turned the combination and opened the safe. Everything that was supposed to be in there was, and in the right order. I removed the original of the Beth Shalom/Labadie Gardens list from the top shelf of the safe and then closed the door and spun the dial to lock it.

I went back to my desk and, for the umpteenth time, studied the list: