Page 86 of I’ll Be Watching You

“You should have told him about Liz’s phone,” Jack said.

“I planned to when I got home.”

“That’s what cell phones are for, sweetheart,” Cal said and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Brownies. They’re cooling off.”

I had definitely found the right guy.

“Grab the gelato from the freezer,” he said as he took off his apron and hung it on a hook he had installed just inside the laundry room door. “The new one, not the one we had the other night.”

“You made more gelato?”

“Vanilla bean goes better with brownies than chocolate. I cook when I’m stressed.”

“Working a difficult case?” I asked as I took out the gelato. I had learned that it needed to sit for a few minutes before eating. I didn’t want to wait, but I would.

Jack hit me on the backside of the head.

“Hey!” I said.

“You’re clueless,” he grumbled. “Do you have enough for me?”

“Of course,” Cal said.

He put three large brownies on plates and brought the carton of gelato to the table. Tito jumped into his lap, turning around three times before he settled.

We dug into dessert and I filled Cal in on the day, leaving out the part about Luisa hacking into the VA system. We’d made progress, we’d narrowed down the people who were privy to the Phase 1 trial and may have had a financial incentive to hide the bad data, but even if it was one of the people we’d identified, we couldn’t prove it.

Yet.

I had a plan for tomorrow, and Tess was doing more work on their financials.

And still, it might be none of them. It could be another doctor, another administrator. It could have been someone with Neurovantix who still had credentials and came in after hours because Dr. Klein tipped his hand about blowing the whistle on the trial.

“You’re focused on the people who were involved in the trial who are still employed there,” Cal said.

“Yeah, because that’s the most logical reason why Liz would have been killed. Who else could have known what she’d found unless they worked there? But she’s in general practice, that’s a huge division, there’s no feasible way we can investigate the hundred or so doctors, nurses, and staff who are attached to it. If we were cops, we could get warrants for staff time sheets and security logs and interview people, but even if the cops were involved that would take a lot of time.”

“How many people are you looking at?”

“Two are on the list because they were directly involved with the trial—the administrator Ames because he would have had to approve it, and Stockman, who was the assistant to the research director. We’re also looking at the staff listed on the website who work directly under Ames, but we don’t know which doctors or nurses may have been assigned to the project itself. I hope my dad has that information and tells Mom tomorrow. Jack and I talked to the retired research director and she wasn’t much help, and Tess is trying to track down Willa Blankenship, who was the Neurovantix rep on the trial.”

“That’s a lot of people to talk to,” Cal said.

“We’re still not certain how the record was deleted, if that’s even possible, but Luisa’s trying to figure that out. She’s the computer whiz,” I added, so no one asked me what, specifically, she was doing to ‘figure it out.’ “Tess asked Gabriel, but he didn’t know how to delete records, he thinks it’s not possible.”

“Liz didn’t know exactly what she was seeing, and then it was gone,” Cal said. “Why kill her?”

He sounded angry. I didn’t blame him; I was upset about the murder as well. It was so senseless.

But not to the killer. The killer must have thought Liz had information that would hurt him. Maybe she did. Because she hadn’t told me everything. That was why we were meeting.

“There’s too much we don’t know, too much we’re guessing at,” I said. “Maybe because at the end of the day when she checked, the record was gone—deleted. Deleting a patient chart can be a crime. It’s definitely unethical. She knew something. She implied during our conversation that there was another patient who had missing records, then she clammed up. Maybe she talked to her boss, or another nurse, or informed the administrator’s office. Maybe she said something to the wrong person and they didn’t want her talking about it with me.”

Jack finished his brownie. “We have two names, patients who were in the trial, but had an adverse reaction. They should have been included in the trial information. But according to Nadine Pierce, Dr. Klein said ten patients were missing from the results. In a trial of fifty people, that’s 20 percent. Not a small number.”