Page 95 of I’ll Be Watching You

Hollander & Wyck Laboratories.

“I just got off the phone with a totally disgruntled employee who used to work for them. She had a lot of things to say, most of which were useless, but I think I have a connection.”

“Who are they?” Lu asked, grabbing a water bottle for herself and sitting down on the leather sofa.

“A small, private research lab that was bought up by a major pharmaceutical company when they created a state-of-the-art prosthetic device. They aren’t important. Except for the fact that Willa Blankenship, Mildred Maddox, and Peter Stockman all worked there at the same time.”

“Interesting,” Lu said. “But not illegal. Even if Mildred hired a former colleague to work with her in the VA, it’s not illegal. How did you find this out?”

“LinkedIn. I went through the LinkedIn profiles of everyone we have and started charting their employment history, to see if they match up other than the VA. And I got Hollander & Wyck. I reached out to a couple former employees with no connection to the VA and one actually talked to me. That’s how I found out that Peter Stockman—who doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile—worked with Willa and Mildred at Hollander & Wyck.”

“Good work,” Luisa said. “How can we use this?”

“I don’t know, I’m still making connections. I have more Hollander & Wyck former employees who aren’t with the VA, but maybe they connect up elsewhere—like with Neurovantix. And not everyone is on LinkedIn, though I’ve found that some people will start a page and put in their information and then just forget about it. It’s not up-to-date, but it has some history. And my new contact gave me more names to check out. Still, that Stockman was associating with the same people who ran this corrupt trial, that tells me they might all be involved in some way.”

Luisa looked at her board, nodded. “Devil’s advocate: Neurovantix was a small subdivision of a larger company, and only Willa Blankenship is connected to it, right?” She pointed to Tess’s chart. “Are you suggesting that because Willa knew people here in Phoenix that she decided to run the trial here? Was she even in charge of that decision?”

“I don’t have any evidence suggesting she was or wasn’t,” Tess said. “I’m giving you facts that I know. Margo and Jack talked to Mildred Maddox, who appeared to let her staff handle everything and she barely even supervised. Well, I suppose there’s a lot of paperwork in that position.”

“You’re digressing.”

“Right. Sorry. Well, we only know about Peter Stockman because he was promoted to replace her. But now we know that he and Mildred worked together in the past, Willa worked with them in the past, and they are all involved in some way with the Neurovantix trial.”

“This is a good direction,” Luisa concurred. “You’ve done a lot of work.”

“But we don’t have proof of anything.”

“We’re getting there.”

Tess felt that she was on the right path, but she was still running backgrounds on each person in the VA administration and research departments, anyone who was listed on their website. She also had a full list of doctors from the public search database, but that was virtually insurmountable to research. The administration alone was time-consuming.

“Did anything come from your meeting with Novak?” Tess asked.

“We couldn’t talk to him, but his nurse was super helpful. I think I know what happened on Monday to the file Liz was looking at.”

Luisa explained how records couldn’t be deleted, but they could be merged and, essentially, made to disappear.

“I told Jack and Margo,” Luisa said, “and we agree that when Liz saw the file missing, she contacted Medical Records. Maybe an IT request, or maybe she talked to someone specifically.”

“But how did they know to delete it—I mean merge—so that it was gone?”

“I have two theories on that,” Luisa said. “Either someone flagged the file and knew Liz saw it that morning during Novak’s appointment, and subsequently merged it, or Liz filed an IT request about the missing data, which alerted the medical records department and then someone merged the file because they didn’t want anyone asking questions.” She paused, then added, “Or a third option is that she mentioned it to someone she shouldn’t have.”

“But why kill her?” Tess asked.

“Perhaps they felt the questions would shine a light on their fraud,” Luisa said. “Remember Dr. Pierce said the drug is up for approval next week.”

“Killing her seems unnecessary,” Tess said. Her heart went out to the boys who’d lost their parents. “She couldn’t have known why it was important, and they could have given her the run-around for a week or two.”

“She called Margo,” Luisa said.

“How could they have known that?” Tess said, worried about her sister.

Luisa shrugged.

“How big is the medical records department?” Tess asked.

“They have fourteen people on staff at the VA full-time,” Lu said. “There are a couple people who work part-time. I have a list.”