Last Shot Page 20

  Chapter 37

  You’re not safe here.” Kaitlin followed Walker down the hall, over a dozen or so floor-adhered labels reading CARPIT. She grabbed his arm, spinning him around outside Tess’s door, speaking an urgent whisper. “There was a deputy poking around.”

  She produced a card, and Walker paused to take a look. TIM RACKLEY. DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. Vaguely familiar name.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, bravo, but we won’t. You’re all over the news. I get an aiding-and-abetting, what happens to Sammy?” She returned his silent stare, her eyes surprisingly pretty in their anger. They’d always been; it was as though the rust flecks around the pupils glowed with the intensity. “He won’t be safe until you’re…”

  “Until I’m what?”

  Her gaze dropped; she released his arm. The fire had dissipated as quickly as it had flared. “Gone,” she said.

  Walker set his mouth, nodded. He turned the corner into Tess’s room and began loading up an army knapsack with all the Vector materials he could find. Kaitlin watched him from the doorway, arms crossed. He stopped, hand tapping a bookshelf. “There was another tape. Kid’s writing. Where’d it go?”

  “I think Sam said the deputy took it. Wait a minute, Walker, don’t wake him—”

  Walker brushed past her and into Sam’s room. Sam scrambled up from the floor, smacked the TV to turn it off, and dove into bed.

  Kaitlin’s anger shifted, heat-seeking the new target. “You’re supposed to have been asleep two hours ago.”

  “I couldn’t. Too itchy.”

  “There’s a tape missing from Tess’s room,” Walker said. “Did the cop take it?”

  “He’s a deputy U.S. marshal,” Sam said. “That makes him a fed, not a cop.”

  “Did he take it?”

  “Don’t spaz. I have another.” Sam bugged his eyes at Kaitlin. “Am I allowed to get out of bed now?”

  She waved a defeated hand. He dug in the closet, rubber T. rexes, comic books, and orphaned board-game figurines taking flight over his shoulder. He handed Walker a duplicate, except MY NEWS SEGMINT was now rendered in label-print.

  Eyes on the tape, Walker headed out swiftly. He heard Sam call after him, “You’re welcome.”

  Walker lowered himself to the living room carpet and plugged the tape into the VCR. That annoying local reporter, Melissa Yueh, led the way to the house in which Walker now sat. A shot of Sam sacrificing army men to an ant hill in the front yard, then a clip from his Vector commercial. All the while, Yueh’s honey-sweet voice singsonged on, detailing the magic of gene therapy and Sam’s “tragic” condition. Some inserts from the Vector lab featured Dolan answering Yueh’s questions awkwardly, until Chase, clearly the more charismatic of the brothers, took over.

  Next the segment cut to Tess, the archetypal Troubled Mother, sitting at the tiny Formica-topped table wedged in the corner of the kitchen. She leaned over her coffee, her wrist and hand curled around the mug the way they always did. Despite her evident exhaustion and the widened span of her crow’s feet, which had begun incursions on her upper cheeks, she still had that inner life pouring out of her. God only knew the source—it certainly wasn’t inherited, and it was more than the sum of her looks. Men homed in on it at a glance, crossing movie theaters, pursuing her at shopping malls; when she used to take him for walks around the park, she’d actually stop cars. Girls were wary—they either steered clear or went submissive like bellied-up dogs. Women hated her, blindly and irrationally. “Spirit,” some people called it, though to Walker the word had been worn useless by repetition, like “miracle” or “values.” Or “tragic,” for that matter. Whatever Tess had, she drew hotshots who wanted to possess it, older men who fed on it, and tough guys who were afraid of it, but she always skipped on, unscathed, until an unplanned pregnancy ensnared her with a wedding band. The sight of her now—her captured aliveness—was disorienting, like a déjà vu that retrieves a segment of dream.

  “…I got a new job,” she was saying, “so we got health insurance in place now. Group coverage, so they had to take preexisting. And I’m—me and Sammy are—so grateful to Vector, which has given us some real hope.”

  Yueh enumerated Tess and Sam’s “struggles” that led them to Vector, adding, “You were at the end of your rope. How many people were ahead of Sam on the transplant list?”

  Tess made a popping sound with her lips. “Sixty-seven.”

  “And how long would that take?”

  Tess watched the steam rise from her coffee. “Too long.”

  Yueh looked on, lips pursed with camera-friendly empathy. “So Xedral is your only hope,” she said, in full movie-trailer-voice-over glory.

  A scene worthy of a talk show followed, Dolan entering the house as the scientist-savior, appreciation and humility offered up like cheap goods. The usual staged interaction—Dolan playing Dungeons & Dragons with Sam—as Yueh v.o.’d “the hopes of an ailing community.”

  The segment ended with a zoom on Tess. Walker could see her age more clearly now. Sound quality was slightly lacking, the soft crackle of the mike pinned to Tess’s lapel lending the moment a genuineness absent from the previous footage. Yueh doled out a classic human-interest-story question, vicious in its kind concern. “If you could wish for anything, what would it be?”

  A ripple passed through Tess’s face, a sob put down in its infancy, and her toughness reasserted itself over her features. Her voice wavered slightly with conviction. “The only thing I want is for Sammy to be well enough. To live a life. That’s all.”

  Walker rewound the tape and watched her again closely, her face, the tremor, the still-unblemished skin at her left temple. He missed her as he hadn’t yet, and it struck him for not the first time that anger gave him access to grief instead of vice versa.

  He heard Kaitlin’s soft footfall on the carpet behind him. “You want to dig into this, Walk? Well then, you get this mess. The whole mess. The pain and the pager and the wait list. You want it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the problem with you. You never got the ‘for better or for worse’ stuff.” Kaitlin looked as though she’d expected him to fight back; her weight was even forward, like someone who’d swung and missed.

  “How much time does he have?” Walker asked.

  “If he doesn’t get the liver? Months. Weeks. Maybe not even. That’s one of the torments of this thing—there’s no road map. He just fades and fades, and then all of a sudden there’ll be the final downturn.” She checked the pager again, a little ritual she must have repeated a hundred times a day, but this time she caught herself. She brought the pager level to her eyes, confronting it on its own terms. “You find yourself hoping for some kind soul to get run over or drop dead.” The desperation in her voice made Walker want to cringe, and it called up in him an anger toward her that he didn’t understand. “You wait and you watch the pager. I’ve been doing it since the minute I got him.” She laughed, and he noticed that the lines around her mouth, like Tess’s, had grown more pronounced. “You get Sammy, you get the pager. That’s just how that goes.”

  “Is he gonna get a liver?” He gestured for the TV. “They say—”

  “I know what they say.” She covered her mouth, then looked away, and her hair fell across her eyes. A sob creaked out of her. “I can’t save him. I can’t do anything. Except help him to die.” The VCR signaled that the tape had reached its end and clicked over to regular programming, Paul Newman popping eggs into his mouth, one after another. Kaitlin jerked the hair from her eyes. “Why am I bothering? You don’t get it. You’ve never done a goddamned thing for anyone but yourself.”

  “Then why did you marry me?”

  “Because I was stupid and self-destructive.”

  He laughed, and a moment later a grudging smile replaced her frown. Sweatshirt sleeve pulled over her fist, she swiped at her tears like she was aggravated with them.

  “I thought you forgot how to smile,” he said.
/>
  The thumping of feet as Sam beelined down the hall. “I’m on TV! I’m on TV!” He stopped. Twisted a finger until the knuckle cracked. His commercial ran in the background, the poor-me orphan shot. He drew a rattling breath. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

  If Kaitlin’s voice were any more weary, it would have been inaudible. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”

  “I’m sorry.” He cocked his head slightly, trying to see her face. “You okay, Kaitlin?”

  “Yeah. Just go to your room, kiddo.”

  His eyes shifted to Walker. “Don’t make her cry.”

  Walker held out his hands: Whatever you say, boss.

  “He’s not making me cry, Sammy.”

  “Am I?” Sam asked.

  Kaitlin pressed her lips together for a moment to still them. “No. Of course not. Go to your room. I’ll come tuck you in.”

  Sam shuffled off, bouncing his head side to side and murmuring the theme song to one of his video games. Walker extracted the tape from the VCR and stuffed it into his knapsack.

  Kaitlin said, “The night Sammy was diagnosed, I came over and sat with Tess. She was furious she was type B. She said if she could’ve cut out her liver and given it to him, she would have.” She studied Walker, no longer angry, though her tone was cool, judgmental. “Do you know what it’s like to have that kind of love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? How?”

  Walker shouldered the knapsack and turned for the door. “From her.”

  Chapter 38

  The command post took shape as it usually did, around an enormous conference table on the third floor, the Top Fifteen designation buying the Escape Team a two-story promotion, court security officer admin backup, and a few loose hands from Probation/Parole. It was just the second dawn since Walker’s escape, but already the paperwork had claimed most surface areas in the room. The false sightings were rolling into the phone banks, Walker Jameson popping up everywhere from the Griffith Park Zoo’s reptile house to the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier.

  Tim lifted his notepad, the page now more ink than white. Ignoring the palimpsest effect from Tyler’s purple crayon—in toasting an English muffin, he’d left the young artist unattended—he reviewed the updates on the checklist he’d jotted at the breakfast table. No word back from Aaronson yet on the red stain with the odd sweetener and gelatin composition. No information on Aryan Brotherhood hit men from Ian Summer and the Vegas Task Force.

  The Bronco had indeed traced to Ted Sands. He’d been taken in a front-yard snatch, the dried rivulet of blood and snapped fingernail on the driveway saying it hadn’t been gentle. Since Walker had driven Ted off in Ted’s own vehicle, Guerrera was running down taxi records to Cheviot Hills around the time of the kidnapping—Walker had to have gotten there somehow. The cab companies that were actually organized enough to keep records had produced logs too numerous to be helpful, and there were enough other transportation scenarios—accomplice, bus, cached car—to irritate Guerrera about doing likely dead-end work.

  Thomas had spent the morning looking into Dean’s head of security. Percy Keating, who’d done two tours in Vietnam, lived in the Kagan guesthouse with his Bangkok mail-order bride. He’d been investigated for a handful of indiscretions over the years—everything from illegal wiretapping to criminal threats—though he’d never been formally charged.

  Working a vast range of mostly inherited business and IRS contacts, Freed was still gathering background on Dean Kagan’s corporate doings. When Tim had arrived a little before seven, Freed was at his desk downstairs, slaving away, wearing the same suit he’d had on the day before. He’d waved Tim off; Freed wasn’t ready to talk until he was ready to talk.

  Haines and Denley reviewed Sam’s news segment on the wall-mounted TV in the corner. Tim had watched it through several times last night, his somber mood prompting Dray to recommend that he incorporate SpongeBob into his Netflix queue. Tess’s moving declaration—“The only thing I want is for Sammy to be well enough. To live a life. That’s all.”—was tearjerked into cheapness by Melissa Yueh’s sobering coda: “We can all hope that treatment for young people like Sam Hardy…may not be far away. For KCOM News, I’m—”

  “Believe me, lady,” Denley said, “we know who you are.”

  Chewing his pen cap flat, Tim swiveled to take in Yueh’s windblown image outside Tess and Sam’s house. “Hey, Denley. Will you contact Yueh, see if you can get the raw footage? Unedited?”

  “Can I wear earplugs?”

  “I’d recommend a condom, too, socio,” Guerrera said.

  Freed entered, soft briefcase swollen, Armani wire-frames low on his thin nose. With aplomb he kicked aside the rolling chair at the head of the table and began removing and organizing his notes. Everyone silenced. Tim caught sight of a cover of Forbes magazine, Dean Kagan astride a golf cart with Jack Welch, looking tanned and pleased with himself.

  “Dean Kagan,” Freed said, displaying an impressive grasp of dramatics, “was a legend in the barter trade in the seventies and early eighties, dealing primarily with the Soviet Union. He made tens of millions in the commodities market, walking the line between free trade and private profiteering, raping the USSR of their natural resources.”

  “Poor commies,” Denley said.

  Freed continued, “He set up a shell corp in Australia to get around Our Country ’Tis of Thee’s more stringent regulations.”

  “What kind of product?” Bear asked.

  “He bartered copy machines, shoes, TVs, jeans, toilet paper, that kind of shit, for copper, tin, steel, fertilizer. He’d acquire enough tonnage to resell at up to a two thousand percent return to, say, China, even before having to fork out for the acquisition. His activities engendered more investigations than I could count, but he was never charged. In some of those years, he paid seven figures in legal fees. It wasn’t until the late seventies he made the move to pharmaceuticals.”

  “Why’d he go legit?” Zimmer asked.

  In a rare instance of inelegance, Freed released a guffaw. “Yeah, legit. There’s a reason Kagan, with his From Russia with Love skill set, saw an opening in Big Pharma. Greener pastures, zero downside. The Rx T. rexes are a step ahead of clowns like Kozlowski, Lay, and other relatively honest, hardworking corporate looters. They don’t have to do anything illegal—they bought the three branches and retooled the laws instead. Big Pharma has the largest lobby in Washington—more members than Congress—and a revolving-door employee policy that would make Dick Cheney dizzy. We, the humble taxpayers, get hit twice: First we foot the research bill, then we pay marked-up prices for the drugs generated by the research our money funded.

  “And guess who was a prime mover behind the reengineering of the FDA and American patent law to work in Big Pharma’s favor? In 1980 our very own Dean Kagan helped ram through the Bayh-Dole Act, solidifying technology-transfer laws and granting exclusive licenses for NIH research to drug companies for a royalty arrangement that in any other sector would be mythical. In ’84, at Mr. Kagan and his competitors’ prompting, our unparalleled Congress passed an act that extended monopoly rights for brand-name drugs to the point of preposterousness. Another piece of chicanery Mr. Kagan helped tug the marionette strings on: tax credits for ‘orphan drugs.’ These kick in if a pharm company bothers to tackle a disease with a smaller patient population—an unprecedented congressional guarantee that they’ll profit on every product. Not that they don’t manipulate the classification system anyway to get tax breaks on money earners. Beacon-Kagan has proven masterful at dodging kickback laws, too, offering prescribers—I mean physicians—paid consultancies, speaker-bureau gigs, advisory-board positions, and various other tits to slurp on the sow belly. Meanwhile those lobbyist dollars keep paying off in spades. The Medicare Bill of 2003 actually prohibits the government from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies. You couldn’t make this shit up.”

  Freed took a breath—his first?—then continued. “If they have troubl
e marketing a drug for a disease, they’ll market a disease to sell the drug. Ever notice all the new disorders that pop up every year? Well, new, for-profit companies carry out trials or crunch the data from trials the pharmaceuticals run in-house. They’re called contract research organizations—CROs. And guess who owns them?”

  Denley, bored by his own cynicism, said, “Big Pharma.”

  “Worse.” Freed smiled, a wan, bitter shaping of his mouth. “The advertising agencies employed by the pharmaceuticals. In some cases the ad execs are closer to the test tubes than the scientists.”

  Tim had never seen Freed—a laissez-faire, highest-tax-bracket, fiscal Republican who’d worked landmark corruption and embezzlement cases—so fired up.

  Guerrera, channeling his past, naïve self, said, “That can’t be true.”

  “There’s a lot at stake,” Tim mused, “in Dean Kagan’s empire.”

  Freed glanced at him. “You’re thinking if you’ve gone legit to the tune of a 4.7 billion annual gross, you don’t risk it by offing some broad in a glorified trailer home.”

  “No. You wouldn’t.”

  Thomas added, “Not without a very compelling reason.”

  Slumped in his chair, Bear livened up at the switch of topic. “Did you get any information on Pierce?”

  “I looked into it a bit,” Freed said, “but got sidetracked with this stuff. I can say this, though—the guy may be a smaller fish than Kagan, but he’s just as slippery. He’s got corporations spun out of corporations. Not an easy trail.”

  Bear stood, hoisting his pants in a manner that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a western. “I think whatever Tess had on her computer got her killed. As far as I’m concerned, the case turns on that missing hard drive. Guerrera, how are you making out with her phone records?”