Gordon Buchanan took the back stairwell to the second floor, the wooden stairs groaning under his weight as he navigated them two at a time. He swept past Belinda who was on the phone setting an appointment for one of the firm’s lawyers, and strode into Christine Stevens’s office. He closed the door behind him in a single motion, causing the door to bang shut. Christine looked up from the brief on her desk.
“Good afternoon, Gordon,” she said. She slid her reading glasses off her nose and set them on the brief.
Buchanan didn’t sit but paced back and forth as he spoke. “I’m not satisfied with where things are going, Christine,” he said. His voice was strong, his words clipped. “I want some action. It’s been four months since Billy died and we haven’t made any progress. These bastards at Veritas are treating us like a bothersome fly, just brushing us off. That’s not good enough.”
Stevens’s voice was equally curt. “What do you want me to do? There’s a certain legal protocol to follow. I can’t just go charging into their corporate offices and demand they pull Triaxcion off the market, then issue you a formal apology and a big check. Motions have to be filed and responded to. This takes time.”
“You’ve had time, Christine,” he said. “I’m not kidding. I want to move this to the next level. You’ve had this on your desk for almost four months. Billy died in April, and it’s August-September in another week.”
“How, Gordon? How do I move this to the next level? We have no definitive proof that Triaxcion causes clotting factors to fail in people with A-positive blood. We have suspicions, but that’s all.”
“That’s a load of shit and you know it. This drug is dangerous. It killed Billy and it’s killed at least eleven other people we know about.”
“There’s no solid proof,” Christine said, leaning on her desk and raising her voice. “And without proof, we’ll get killed in a court of law. Not one of the other lawyers representing clients who have died as a result of Triaxcion has filed for litigation. We just don’t have a winnable case.”
“So they get away with it?” he asked, his face taking on color.
His lawyer relaxed a bit, leaned back in her chair. “I told you from the start that these tort cases are difficult. They don’t happen overnight, and no matter what we do, Billy is not coming back. The best I can do, and I stress it’s the best, is that we get Triaxcion pulled off the market. You’re not going to get any personal satisfaction out of this, Gordon. No one from Veritas is going to end up in jail.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Christine was immediately struck by her client’s tone of voice. “What does that mean, Gordon?”
Gordon stopped pacing and placed his hands on her desk, leaning over so he was only a couple of feet from her. “I took the liberty of hiring a private investigator. He managed to dig up a woman, a Veritas employee, who agreed to work with me, collecting information from the company’s classified files.”
“You did what?” Stevens said, aghast. “That’s illegal.”
“I don’t care. I told you, I want answers.”
“I don’t want to know what they found. If they’ve stolen classified information from the company, I could get in serious trouble if you tell me.”
“Okay, Christine. If you can’t help me, I’ll have to take another approach. Outside the legal avenues available.”
“Again, Gordon, I don’t want to hear this.”
He withdrew from her desk and walked slowly toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned back to face her. “The woman who agreed to help me…” He opened the door and stood half in the hall, half in her office. He locked eyes with his lawyer.
“She’s dead,” he said, then left.