Adverse Events, page 6
“I just knew it wasn’t right between them. I knew there was something there! She denied it. But I still had this uneasiness in the back of my mind, you know?”
Johnson nodded in sympathy as he thought about how to ask his next question.
“Did you ever consider breaking up with her? I mean, it sounds like your suspicions were a big issue. If you thought she was lying, why didn’t you just walk away?”
David stopped pounding his fist and stared at the photo of him and Emily hung prominently above the couch. They were on the beach, sun-tinged cheeks pressed together as they grinned at the camera while the waves lapped the sand behind them. His face softened as he stared at the image. His shoulders began to sag.
“I believed her because I wanted to,” he finally said. Bitterness saturated every word. “I kept thinking as long as she stayed with me, I hadn’t lost her completely. For a while, things got better. I guess that’s when she broke things off with Newhouse. Then she started to pull away again. I told myself she was just distracted by the pending vaccine trial and all the attention. Do you think they started...whatever...again?”
“I don’t see any evidence of that in her emails.”
Johnson watched as anger, sadness, and disbelief battled for supremacy, the emotions rolling across his face like dark clouds over a flat sea. He finally collapsed onto the couch next to Johnson with an agonized moan.
“She humiliated me! Why couldn’t she just break up with me and be done with it? How am I going to face people once this comes out? They’re all going to be laughing about how she played me.”
Johnson cleared his throat to hide his surprise at the turn in the conversation. It hadn’t taken David long to go from worrying about Emily’s fate to fretting over his own reputation. No matter what she’d done to him, she was still missing—presumed dead. Did he no longer care about that, or had his sorrow been an act all along?
Newhouse admits intimate contact with missing researcher
Photos, emails appear to show the relationship was consensual | By Kate Bennett
Dr. Aaron Newhouse has admitted to having an intimate relationship with his lead researcher, Emily Gibson, who went missing Sunday.
Newhouse had maintained his contact with Gibson was strictly professional. But investigators discovered photos on Gibson’s computer that suggested otherwise.
“The photographs are of a private, intimate nature,” said Det. Peter Johnson, who declined to describe them in detail or make them public.
Investigators also discovered emails between Newhouse and Gibson that confirmed the relationship went on for months. Johnson said all the evidence indicated the relationship was consensual.
But Gibson worked for Newhouse, and he had significant influence over her academic career. Such relationships violate the University of Texas Medical Branch’s faculty code of conduct.
“This is a serious breach of policy, and we will launch an internal investigation,” UTMB President Stephen Phillips said in a statement. “Faculty members should never compromise their position of authority over students by engaging in personal relationships, even if they’re consensual.”
Newhouse and Gibson were working on the development of the Ebola vaccine. It is set to begin FDA trials next week. On Wednesday, Phenalta Corp. confirmed it had reached a deal to buy the vaccine for $24 million. UTMB will get a portion of the money, but the bulk of it goes to Newhouse. It’s not clear what amount Gibson would have earned.
The researcher has been missing for four days, and investigators still don’t know what happened to her. Even with the latest revelation about her relationship with Newhouse, Johnson said he had no specific reason to believe the doctor did anything to harm her.
“We are continuing to investigate all aspects of Emily Gibson’s life, including her personal and professional relationships,” Johnson said. “At this point, we have no definite suspects. But every detail we learn about Ms. Gibson’s life will hopefully get us closer to the truth about what happened to her.”
UTMB Spokeswoman Claire Dupont described the entire situation as troubling, especially in light of the personal relationship between Newhouse and Gibson. She said the university was cooperating fully with the investigation.
“We are as anxious as Emily Gibson’s family and friends to find out the truth,” Dupont said. “This whole situation has been devastating to our entire community.”
Chapter 6
Kate awoke the next morning with a dull ache just getting comfortable across the top of her head. It felt like it was settling in for a day of misery. She had stayed up too late the night before. And had too many glasses of cheap red wine. She had brooded over what she considered Emily’s betrayal of the code that bound all strong women. Work hard. Succeed. Don’t let anybody say you can’t. And don’t let any man take advantage of you.
She knew her disappointment was irrational. She hadn’t even known Emily, had only met her once at a press event. But she’d admired her from afar. Cheered her on as a champion of the ideals she felt sure they both believed in. So much for that.
She rolled gingerly out of bed, her pulse pounding the back of her forehead with each step. Clear, bright sunlight streamed through the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows of her loft efficiency. She groaned and shaded her eyes as she fumbled with the coffeepot. As the fog-clearing brew slowly dripped into the carafe, she walked to the front door and swung it open. Today’s paper sat on her mat, the headline of Jessica’s story shouting in 48 point type: Newhouse cashes in on vaccine success.
Kate unfurled the tightly rolled pages and spread them out on her kitchen table. She smiled slowly at the thought of Newhouse choking on his fancy espresso when he saw it. She didn’t even begrudge Jessica her prominent position on the front page. Her own story about the photos discovered on Emily’s computer sat in a smaller column next to Jessica’s bombshell. All in all, it was shaping up to be a terrible day for Newhouse.
The oppressive thudding at the top of Kate’s head became a little more bearable.
By the time she sauntered into the newspaper office, her headache was gone and she was ready to browbeat Johnson into giving her new information that would bump Jessica out of the prime real estate she’d claimed on today’s front page. Before heading to her desk, she stopped by the panel of old metal mailboxes where the receptionist deposited anything that came in for the reporters. She cringed as her stubborn drawer let out a squeal of protest when she tugged it open. Jammed into a space too small to hold it was a large manilla envelope. The sender had printed her name and the newspaper’s address across the front in neat block letters. But it had no return address.
Frowning, Kate walked to her desk and slung her messenger bag across the back of her chair. Tape sealed the envelope shut, as though whoever sent it feared its contents might escape before reaching their destination. Kate worked the tip of a pen into the corner of the flap and tugged at the seam until it gave way and she could slide her finger along its length.
She reached in and pulled out a stack of papers. The top page contained a spreadsheet filled with numbers. But it was the soft yellow sticky note attached to the middle of the page that caught her attention. In the same careful block lettering, someone had written: It’s all lies. Look at the data.
Kate quickly thumbed through the pages. Every one contained columns of numbers.
“What the hell?” she muttered as she stared at the pages.
She was so focused on trying to make sense of what she was looking at that she jumped when Hunter Lewis knocked on her desk to get her attention.
“You look like you’ve just been handed a pop quiz over material you’ve never seen before,” the editor said with a smile, sipping coffee from a cup emblazoned with the slogan “World’s best dad.”
“Ha! It kind of feels like that. What do you make of this?”
She held up the stack so he could read the note. His eyebrows shot up then scrunched into a perplexed line over the bridge of his nose. She set her elbows on her desk and rested her chin on her clasped hands while he flipped through the pages. A suspicion had lodged itself in the back of her mind. It elbowed through her doubts and objections until she could no longer refuse to look it square in the face. Goosebumps swept across her arms.
“Do you have any idea what this is?” Lewis finally asked, handing the sheets back to her.
“It looks like data from a vaccine trial to me.” She tried to hide her growing excitement, but she couldn’t stop the grin from tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Lewis nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. But where did it come from?”
Kated picked up the envelope and carefully looked it over, front and back. The only thing besides her name and the newspaper’s address was the postmark. She was about to set it down again when the number in the circular stamp caught her eye.
March 11.
Kate shot out of her chair, gripping the envelope in both hands as she held it up.
“This is postmarked the day Emily Gibson disappeared.”
Lewis examined it himself and a slow whistle escaped his lips. Then he frowned, squinting at the envelope as he lay it back down on her desk.
“That may be a coincidence. We don’t know who sent it, or why.”
“True…” Kate said, drawing out the word in exasperation. “But it’s a possibility.”
Lewis tapped the stack of spreadsheets. “Focus on the why and that will go a long way to telling you who.”
He glanced over his shoulder into Kenton Mattingly’s office. The managing editor had his door shut, phone pressed to his ear.
“Let’s let the boss finish up his morning calls and then see what he thinks. In the meantime, see if you can figure out what all these numbers mean.”
Kate nodded and managed to suppress a groan until her boss made it back to his own office. This was sure to resurrect her headache. She always joked with her dad that her stunningly poor performance in high school algebra had sealed her career fate. She had no chance of succeeding in anything technical or numerical. But English was another matter. Diving into literature, deconstructing meanings, and swimming back to shore with a perfectly organized and punctuated essay produced an unbroken string of straight As. She concluded early on that she was destined to make a living with words. The lure of journalism came naturally after that.
After poring over the spreadsheets for forty-five minutes, she’d concluded that the rows were test subjects, and the columns were readings of various biological markers. Each page held readings from a different day. The numbers rose over time but then leveled off and eventually plummeted close to their original values. The most recent sheet was dated from about a month ago.
Kate looked up when she heard Mattingly’s door open. The managing editor stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips.
“What are you looking at, Bennett?” he barked. “Shouldn’t you be on the phone trying to get more information about this missing researcher? Or do you just plan to give Linton your spot on the front page permanently?”
Kate’s cheeks burned. Kenton Mattingly could be a first-class jerk. But he was also a first-class news man, and that covered over a multitude of sins.
Hunter Lewis strode through his own office door as Mattingly stalked back to his desk. Lewis motioned for Kate to follow him into the lion’s den.
“Kate got an interesting package in the mail this morning,” he said, settling into one of the two chairs facing the managing editor. Kate perched on the edge of the other one, clutching the envelope and stack of papers tightly in both hands. Her heart picked up speed as her excitement grew. Mattingly cocked one bushy eyebrow at her.
“Well?”
“Twenty pages of what looks like data from the vaccine trial. The envelope has no return address. But it’s postmarked the day Emily Gibson went missing, which probably means someone dropped it in a mailbox the day before. And stuck to the top page was this note.”
She held it up for him to read.
“Well, I’ll be—“
“We don’t know who sent it,” Lewis cut in before Mattingly could finish. “So let’s not jump to conclusions. And we don’t even know what these numbers mean. They could even be fake.”
“Why would someone send us fake data?” Kate asked. “Would anyone think we would print something without verifying it?”
Lewis shrugged. “Why would someone send it to us in the first place?”
Kate opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t think of a good response. After a few moments, Mattingly’s gruff voice broke the silence.
“Because they wanted us to keep digging.”
Kate grinned at him triumphantly. That’s why she’d wanted to work for Mattingly, despite his tendency to shred his reporters’ dignity.
“I don’t really understand what these numbers mean. But I can see that the levels of whatever they were monitoring went up and then went back down again. Seems like that could be a bad sign?”
“Mmmmmm…” Mattingly grunted, leaning forward and tapping his pen against the calendar that covered half his desktop.
“The note says it’s all lies,” she continued. “What if that’s a reference to the trial results? What if the vaccine doesn’t really work?”
Kate glanced between the two editors. A pause stretched between them so long she wondered if she’d speculated a step too far. Mattingly tapped his pen a few more times before throwing it down and looking directly at her.
“That would be one hell of a story,” he finally said. “One hell of a story.”
A dizzying surge of adrenaline pumped through Kate’s heart. Mattingly couldn’t have made her happier if he’d offered her a raise and a promotion.
“It’s also a solid motive for murder,” Lewis muttered.
Kate scooted back in her chair and took a few deep breaths to slow her skipping pulse. Mattingly nodded at Lewis.
“Whoever sent this, assuming the data is real, has the ability to blow up this whole project,” Mattingly said. “I can’t imagine Aaron Newhouse would sit by and let it go public.”
“But surely he knows someone will figure it out eventually, especially now that he’s supposed to hand everything over to Phenalta,” Kate said, trying to make sense of the possibilities swirling around her mind.
“I don’t suppose it’s possible he doesn’t know?” Lewis asked, the doubt threading through his question, effectively answering it.
Kate snorted. “Not likely. But I could easily imagine him doing whatever it took to keep it quiet as long as he could.”
“So where does the missing researcher fit into all this?” Mattingly asked, bringing the speculation back to the place it started.
“Well… if Emily Gibson knew about this and threatened to expose him, I bet Newhouse would find a way to shut her up.”
Kate shuddered at the thought of what might have happened to a woman she’d written off as a traitor to the sisterhood just hours before. The thought of the researcher defending the truth and possibly even dying for it certainly redeemed her.
“So you think Emily Gibson sent this to you, knowing she was in danger?” Lewis asked, lines of worry creasing his forehead.
“Maybe it was her insurance policy.”
“Humph,” Mattingly said, but it sounded to Kate more speculative than dismissive. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. The first thing we need to do is figure out if these numbers say what you think they say. After we know that, we can figure out what to do with them.”
Kate pressed her lips together as she thought about how to verify the data. Sharing it with anyone opened the possibility that word would get out. She refused to get scooped on a story like this.
“So, do you know anyone you could trust to review it and keep quiet?” Mattingly prompted, as though he’d read her mind.
Kate shook her head and tried to ignore the tickle at the back of mind that reminded her that wasn’t true. She cursed her luck and sighed.
“Well, actually, I might. I dated a doctor last year who might be willing to help. He’s not a researcher, but he’s probably looked at enough things like this to at least let us know whether we’re on the right track. And I know I could trust him.”
I’m just not sure I want to make that call, she added silently.
“Good!” Mattingly barked. “Let’s start there. Then we’ll figure out what to do next. In the meantime, don’t either of you say a word about this. I don’t want even a whisper to get out. This will be the story of the year if we get it right.”
Flutters of excitement swirled in Kate’s stomach as she walked back to her desk. She’d be content to expose Newhouse for a fraud, but writing the story of the year would be a pretty nice bonus.
Two hours later, Kate pulled into an empty parking spot outside the UTMB Emergency Room. It had taken her about 20 minutes after leaving Mattingly’s office to finish composing a text message to Brian Dougherty. She hadn’t seen him for months. The last time they’d talked, she’d told him she wasn’t ready to take their relationship any further. She didn’t know whether he’d moved on, or found another companion for his regular dinners at Frank’s. The thought of him sharing his seared scallops and expensive white wine with someone else conjured a pang of regret. She missed him.
Anyone else probably would have ignored her text. But she counted on Brian’s uncommon decency, and he didn’t disappoint. He texted back about ten minutes later to say that he was in the middle of a shift but could meet her for a coffee in the hospital cafeteria during his break. Now she sat in the parking lot taking deep, even breaths to calm her nerves.
She didn’t immediately see him when she walked into the cafeteria, so she methodically scanned the room. She hadn’t expected to beat him here.
“Kate! Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”
The voice behind her sounded warm, confident, and not the least bit perturbed. Kate cursed her pounding heart. She tried to fix a casual smile on her face and turned around.
