Paul Durban, a chubby, bespectacled man in a white shirt, gray slacks, and a gray sweater vest, finished his sweep of Daniel’s apartment as Kate and Daniel watched from the couch. Durban concentrated his equipment on an area of molding for a few moments, then he turned to Kate. “One bug in the phone, one in the bedroom, and one in here.” “Thanks, Paul. You know where to send the bill.”
“Anytime,” he said as he gathered up his equipment and left. Durban had placed each listening device in its own evidence bag and left them on the coffee table. Daniel picked up one of the plastic bags and examined the bug. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said. “Until Kaidanov told me that his study was a hoax, I was sure that Geller was trying to cover up Kaidanov’s results. Now that I’ve learned about Aaron Flynn’s connection to Gene Arnold, I’ve been looking at everything that’s happened in a different light.” Daniel put the bug down. “When I dropped off the discovery I had a talk with Flynn. He told me that he’d hired more than twenty people to deal with the Insufort case and had leased another floor in his building to house them. That had to cost him. Now add in the expense of hiring experts at three hundred to six hundred dollars an hour and the other assorted expenses of litigation and you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. “Flynn made a lot of money from his other cases, but I bet he’s plowed a lot of that dough back into the Insufort case.
That’s a good investment if he wins. In some of the Insufort cases, the plaintiffs are permanently injured babies. You’re talking about a lifetime of damages. There’s lost earning capacity, medical costs, lifetime care. The life expectancy of a male is around seventy-two years and a female’s life expectancy is a little under eighty years.
What kind of care does a severely handicapped child need? There’s nursing care, doctors’ visits, psychiatric counseling for the parents.
We’re talking a hundred thousand dollars a year, easy. Now multiply that by seventy or eighty years and multiply that by the number of plaintiffs. Potentially that’s millions in attorney fees. When the first few plaintiffs showed up, Flynn must have thought that his ship had come in. I bet he started spending money like crazy, figuring he’d make a fortune when the cases were over.” “But the studies failed to show a causal connection between Insufort and the birth defects,” Kate said. “Exactly. And Flynn figured out that it was only a coincidence that the plaintiffs were taking Insufort and their children had birth defects. That’s when he decided that he had to manufacture evidence.”
“I see a problem,” Kate said. “Flynn would have to put on admissible evidence to prove Insufort causes birth defects. If the study is phony it would be torn apart by Geller’s experts at trial.” “The operative words here are ‘at trial,’ ” Daniel said. “That’s where evidence is put to the test and a fraud can be exposed. But what happened when Kaidanov’s lab was destroyed? The media jumped to the conclusion that Geller was covering up problems with Insufort. That’s what we believed, and it’s what a jury might believe. Now someone has murdered Kaidanov and Geller Pharmaceuticals has the obvious motive. With Kaidanov dead and the lab destroyed, Geller can’t refute his study results. They can claim they’re phony, but they can’t prove it.
There’s going to be tremendous pressure on Geller to settle rather than run the risk of a catastrophic jury verdict.” “You’re right,”
Kate said. “If the case settles, no one gets to show whether or not Insufort is safe.” “And Aaron Flynn wins a huge attorney fee instead of losing millions of dollars in costs.” Kate hesitated. “If Flynn is behind Kaidanov’s hoax, why did he try to hide the results of the study by erasing it from the hard drive on Kaidanov’s computer?
Wouldn’t Flynn want us to find the study?” The question stumped Daniel for a moment. Then he brightened. “When I broke into Kaidanov’s house it looked like a hurricane had swept through it, but there was one thing in that house that was untouched and sitting exactly where it was supposed to be.” “The computer!” “Whoever trashed Kaidanov’s house left his computer alone so I couldn’t help but notice it in the wreckage. He couldn’t have done more to draw my attention to it if he painted it red and stuck sequins on it.” “You’re right. They wanted us to think that there had been an unsuccessful attempt by Geller’s people to erase the file, but a pro would have left no trace on the hard drive. It was a snap for me to recover the study.” “There’s something else, Kate. Think about this. Flynn finding Kaidanov’s letter in the documents Geller produced was like buying a winning lottery ticket. But that’s not the only time that Flynn’s gotten lucky. The eyewitness in my murder case just happens to be April Fairweather, the defendant in another one of his cases. Then a guardian angel sends my lawyer a videotape that enables her to destroy Fairweather so badly that the insurance company Flynn is suing will have to settle. Bingo, Flynn collects another big attorney fee.” “That is quite a string of good luck,” Kate mused. “What if Flynn is making his own luck? I talked with Joe Molinari about my case when we ran. He wondered if Flynn’s got a mole at Reed, Briggs who stole the tape and put the Kaidanov letter into the discovery.” “Did he say who he thought it was?” “Brock Newbauer or Susan Webster. Both of them are involved with the Insufort and the Fairweather cases.” Kate was quiet for a moment. When she spoke Daniel could tell that she was upset.
“You might be onto something. About a year ago Brock Newbauer settled a lawsuit because Aaron Flynn found a witness no one outside our office was supposed to know about. The way I remember it, aside from the lawyers, only our client was supposed to know that this guy existed. A lot of people in the firm were upset when they received Flynn’s witness list. There were rumors that someone at Reed, Briggs tipped off Flynn, but they never came to anything. The next time you talk to Joe Molinari ask him about the Romanoff case. He was working on it with Newbauer. It was shortly after you started at the firm.”
Kate thought for a moment before making a decision. “I think our best chance of clearing you is to help the police find the person who killed Briggs and Kaidanov. I’m going to show Billie the bugs. We can tell her about Burt Randall. She’ll question him and find out who told him to install them. I’ll tell Billie about Flynn’s connection to Gene Arnold. We’ll nail him.”