Page 39 of I’ll Be Watching You

What she could do was research. That was her strength. If there was information to be found, she would find it. She always had.

Pharmaceutical trials were new territory for her, but learning was part of the work, and part of what she loved about research.

So she’d do what she did best: dig until the truth surfaced, no matter how deep it was buried.

It didn’t take Tess long to understand the basics of clinical trials, and the unique hoops a pharmaceutical company would have to go through to conduct a trial through the VA, even if it wasn’t funded by the government. Her fingers moved quickly over her laptop’s keyboard as she navigated a labyrinth of VA documentation, clinical trial registries, and government funding portals. She had already bookmarked four studies, each connected to PTSD treatments using novel medications—ketamine, MDMA, and a few experimental compounds with government project numbers that led to dense, bureaucratic PDFs. She downloaded everything to read in greater detail, while also creating a spreadsheet of each trial starting five years ago—eighteen months before Dr. Klein was murdered. Every additional study she found she added to the spreadsheet and linked to the appropriate documents.

The only information her mother had about the trial was that it was for PTSD, which made sense considering Dr. Klein’s specialty. And until they could ask Dad for more details, it was all they had to go on right now.

Nico had given her some advice. Follow the money, he’d said. That’s usually where the bodies are buried.

She tracked every grant for each of the trials she had identified—but there were two trials that had no federal money behind them, and the funding source wasn’t immediately obvious. While all the trials appeared to be standard with proper protocols and clean reporting, she wouldn’t be able to know just by looking if something was wrong.

Tess cross-referenced each trial she cataloged against the public ClinicalTrials.gov database. By law, that was where the data had to end up. But what if it never got there? Or what if the information was falsified, as Dr. Klein had feared?

How would she even begin to know what data was accurate and what data she needed to question?

It should be difficult to upload data that couldn’t be verified, but she could see ways it might be done, even though this wasn’t her area of expertise. But to know without a doubt that something was wrong, she would need to have access to the raw data, and that information was not available online for most of these reports. They would be available through the Freedom of Information Act if they were government funded. Private? She would have no access at all.

And FOIA requests took time, sometimes months. They didn’t have months, and she didn’t know which trial information to ask for.

She opened a file on her screen and whispered to herself as she typed, “To falsify data on a VA-sponsored trial, you’d need someone on the inside, either at the research site or running the study. Probably both. The manipulation would have to happen before submission of the data to the online portal, at least that’s my best guess. Raw data can be manipulated, but bad data may be excluded entirely. Incompetence or intent? How to prove either?”

“What good is an alarm system if you don’t use it?” a deep voice said.

Tess jumped up and screamed, knocking over her nearly empty coffee. Nate stood in the doorway of the library, intimidating in his black T-shirt and tactical pants.

“Dammit, Nate!” She looked frantically for a towel, but of course there weren’t any in the den. She grabbed blank paper from the printer and pressed it onto the spilled coffee before it dripped to the floor and stained the beautiful antique rug.

“You locked the door, but didn’t dead-bolt it. Picking the lock was easy. Color me surprised when I didn’t hear the beep of an alarm. Then, I made quite a bit of noise walking around the house, but you couldn’t hear anything over the music.”

“You broke into the house?”

“You’re missing my point,” Nate said.

She hadn’t missed it, but she was still angry with him for scaring her.

Tess turned off the music, went to the kitchen to grab paper towels, then returned to fully clean up the spill. Nate was still there, standing just inside the library entry.

“Okay,” she said, mostly to try and get Nate out of here before Gabriel returned. “I’ll set the alarm when you leave.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Gabriel will be home soon, and if you’re hovering he’s going to be worried.”

“He should be worried.”

“You’re going to make this worse.”

“Make what worse?”

“Are you being deliberately obtuse?”

He cracked half a smile. “Maybe.”

She relaxed. That was the old Nate, and she was glad he was still in there somewhere. “You should be sitting on Margo,” Tess said. “She’s the one stirring the pot. And don’t tell me it’s because Margo can take care of herself,” she added quickly.

“Well, she can, but Luisa is with her today, and I heard that her boyfriend has practically moved in with her.”