It wasn’t hard to imagine that only one of the two would walk away from the confrontation that was brewing.
“I’m going into town; I’ll be back late this afternoon, “said Elliot as he left.
"Hi, Jen," Elliot said from behind.
Jennifer turned and flinched slightly before settling on a smile when she saw Elliot.
"Elliot, such a surprise. What brings you over to this side of the campus?"
"Just running an errand," he lied.
"It’s good to see you. What's new in your life?" she said as they exchanged the traditional Quebecoise greeting of a double cheek kiss.
"I wouldn't know where to start Jen. We haven't seen each other in such a long time."
"I know. I feel guilty for not pinging you more often. I could easily say I'm too busy, but that would be a cop-out. We really should have lunch one day."
"Exactly what I was thinking. How about today?" he said with urgency.
"Today, well, I— "
“Jen, I’m not here by accident,” he said as he lowered his voice. “I've been waiting for you to come out. I need to talk to you, and it can't wait."
"What is it, Elliot?" Jennifer whispered back.
"What do you say we eat at Bellagio’s. We can talk there."
Elliot kept the conversation light as they walked the two blocks over to the restaurant. Upon getting there, he asked for, and received, a table in the back.
"Jen, I need to talk to you about your work, and I didn't want to use phone or email."
"What have you gotten yourself into?"
"Let me start at the beginning. I think you'll understand. As you may or may not know, my father was killed last month, and I’ve been investigating his murder.”
“Sorry to hear about your father. That’s terrible! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Jen, but I’m here to talk about something more important than Dad's death. The investigation has led me down many paths. One of those paths pointed me to a fire in the Waller Building eight years ago."
“I remember it well. It took us a year to get our trials back on track," said Jennifer as she leaned forward.
"It’s possible those responsible for the fire are the same people who murdered my father."
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a long, twisted story, and I’m not going to suck you into it. The less you know, the better. I’m trying to fill in some blanks to understand the entire picture, and I think you might be able to help me with that.”
“Ask away.”
“I know that the university does a lot of pre-clinical work for pharmaceuticals. Is Biovonix one of your customers?”
“Biovonix? No, not any longer. In fact, after the fire, all of our clients had to find other AROs to take over the testing or do it themselves. Biovonix was one of the pharmas that never came back.”
“ARO?”
“Academic research organization. It’s the official name for universities and the like that perform pre-clinical trial work for pharmaceutical companies.”
“I see. Do you know what drugs you were testing when Biovonix was still at McGill?”
“I can’t remember, Elliot. I’d have to look it up.”
“Does the name Isotin ring a bell?”
“It does. Yes, I’m sure that was one of the drugs we were testing.”
“Changing tacks now. Do you know what Sarah was working on before her accident?”
“Elliot, how is this related to the fire eight years ago? Sarah didn’t even work for us then. She only started with us about four years ago, long after the fire and after our new building was finished. She wouldn’t even know who Biovonix was.”
“Understood, Jen. As I said, I’m just trying to fit together pieces of a puzzle over a long period of time. I don’t know if Sarah is part of the story I’m weaving and won’t know until I can knit it all together.”
“Well, as you know, Sarah was hired as the head of records administration. She managed the record keeping for all the various research projects at our facility whether they be corporate pre-clinical trials or graduate thesis projects.“
“What was lost in the fire?”
“Almost everything, Elliot. The computers were centralized at that time, so we lost the servers and almost everything on them. We had eleven years’ worth of backup paper files that went up in smoke. All the cultures, mice, and animal-based test subjects were lost. It shut us down for over a year. The entire program almost folded. Why all the secrecy, Elliot? What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I’m just starting to pull things together now, but here’s what I’m thinking. As you know, eight years ago, the Waller Building and everything in it was intentionally burned to the ground. The perpetrator was never caught and no motive established. Tell me, did any of the staff who worked in your department die around the time of the fire?” Elliot asked on a hunch.
Without thinking, Jennifer was able to reply. “Yes, one of our graduate students, Carrie Leblanc was killed in a boating accident the same day as the fire.” Jennifer’s face paled as the words left her mouth and she realized there was a connection that she never made.
“Elliot! What’s going on here? Why is this coming to light now, eight years later?” she hissed.
“Jen, I can’t burden you with the whole story, not now. It’s too dangerous. By the look on your face, you’ve made the same connection that I’m driving at. The testing process for one of the Biovonix products was, and is, being manipulated. There’s a lot of money at stake, and people are being killed to keep it under wraps. I’m going to blow the lid off this thing, Jen, and bring these people to justice.”
Jennifer looked down at her lap and drew a deep breath. “Elliot, was Sarah’s death related to this? Was she one of the casualties?” Her words came out with a hint of underlying quiver. She asked the question but already knew the answer.
“No more questions, Jen. As I said, the less you know, the safer you’ll be. If Biovonix and their army of mercenaries even get a hint that you know anything, they’ll kill you without a second thought. That said, I need some info from you.”
Jennifer said nothing and nodded at Elliot as if to say, go ahead.
“The fire report from the Waller Building, do you still have it?”
“Yes, I can request it.”
“Don’t do that. Can you retrieve it yourself without anyone else knowing?”
“I can do that.”
“What was Sarah working on at the time of her death? Do you have records on specifically what she was working on?”
“I’ll pull her time sheets. Nobody else will know,” Jen replied now understanding that secrecy was mandatory.
“I’m not really hungry. Do you have time today to look into those two things?”
Jen, visibly shaken, nodded. “I’ll get that for you now. I should have it in about an hour.”
“Good. I’ll meet you in your office in an hour. You walk out now. We shouldn’t be seen together if we can avoid it.”
“I’m so sorry, Elliot,” Jennifer said softly. Elliot knew she was mentally making the connections: the fire, Biovonix, Carrie Leblanc, Sarah and Hubert Forsman, Elliot’s father. “I never even considered it.”
“We can’t change the past, Jen, but we’ll do what we can to make sure it doesn’t continue.”
Elliot knocked once and entered Jennifer’s office.
“Have you found anything?” he asked.
Jen pointed to a thick folder on the desk “There’s the fire report for the Waller Building. I’ll have the time sheets shortly.”
He opened the folder and browsed through the contents. He unfolded the floor plan and spread it out on the desk starting with the basement. The plan showed a long, rectangular building divided into three separate areas—a large room on the left taking up about half of the entire floor, a smaller room in the middle and an even smaller room on the right-hand side. The large and medium areas were marked with
an oblong shape in red marker in the general center of the rooms. Elliot flipped through the other two pages that displayed the main and second floors, each with their unique red mark-ups.
“Is this where the accelerant was used?” said Elliot pointing at the red marked-up areas.
“Yes”
“What was in each of these areas?”
Jen walked around to the front of the desk beside Elliot and flipped to the pages to show the basement.
“Let’s start in the basement. This is records,” she said pointing to the large room on the left.
“It was where the written and electronic records were stored for all the medical research conducted at the university. The accelerant was splashed randomly over the rows of file cabinets and tape storage racks.”
“And in the middle room?” he asked pointing at the floor plan.
“This was the computer room. The computers were housed here, and this is also where most of the data entry was done. Remember, this was eight years ago, and the research system we used was antiquated even then. There were no web-based consoles accessible in the lab like there is in modern facilities. All the equipment racks were doused in accelerant.”
“What’s this tiny room at the end?”
“Storage mostly. It wasn’t targeted by the arsonists, but just about everything in there was damaged during the firefighting efforts.”
He flipped the page to display the main floor. “There was nothing targeted at all on this floor. What was it used for?”
“The main floor was almost exclusively lab area. Most of the large equipment was kept on this floor, freezers and cooling units, chromatograph separation equipment, incubation equipment and the like. Culture analysis was performed and stored on this floor.”
Elliot flipped to the second-floor plan and pointed at the only red markup area. “And this area?”
“The second floor was where we performed the “in-vivo” testing. We used mostly mice, but other animals like rabbits and rats were sometimes used.”
“How would animals be used in the Biovonix type of pre-clinical testing?”
“A large part of our testing portfolio focuses on pharmaceutical testing. Typically, we establish a test plan to introduce each drug into the hosts in a controlled manner. We set up multiple groups of live hosts we call colonies and vary the treatment dosage and dosage frequency across each. The primary purpose is to assess the toxicity of the drug on the animal at different doses, look for DNA and chromosome changes, and effects on reproduction, sperm and sometimes embryo. The hosts would also be monitored for outward signs of behavior anomaly. The test schedule would be modified as test findings are brought to light. “
Elliot thought about what he just heard and countered. “Is the testing limited to the first generation of mice?”
“Sort of. Most colonies are prevented from breeding by either colonizing with only a single sex or using genetically neutered mice. These colonies garner most of the tester’s attention as side effects are almost exclusively found in treatment recipients. That said, in almost all test plans, there are generational test criteria to meet. We create one or more free colonies and let them breed at will. The focus for free colonies is to watch for birthing defects. All offspring go through a complete visual and medical workup after they are born. Some will go through the more intrusive testing. Behavior analysis is not the focus on the free colonies, but if anomalous behavior is noticed, it might be flagged for further analysis.”
“Interesting,” said Elliot lost in thought. He flipped the plan back to the basement view.
“Why would they use accelerant in two adjacent areas? Is this wall a typical interior wood frame wall?” he said pointing to the wall between the large and medium areas.
“No. The internal walls are not shown on this blueprint as they tend to change as needed. The walls we see in this plan are cinderblock firewalls.”
“So they’re totally fireproof?”
“No, they provide a level of fireproofing, but in a large fire like we had, they will only slow down the spread of fire, not stop it.”
Elliot sat down in the desk side chair staring at the plan blankly deep in thought. Seeing this, Jennifer returned to her computer to complete the time sheet aggregation.
“I’ve got the time sheets for the three months leading up to Sarah’s…” Jennifer paused before continuing, not knowing exactly what to say, “..accident.”
Elliot returned to the present and moved behind the desk to look over Jennifer’s shoulder at the screen.
“Okay, we’ll start here in August.” Jennifer scrolled down the time sheet summary; each line represented a single day and contained the date, the number of hours and a field with one or more three-digit codes. There was also a comment field that was sparsely populated.
“What do those codes mean?”
“Each code represents a defined work function. Sarah’s job, as head of records administration, would mean that she would be doing most of her work using ‘600’ coding. ‘600’ code functions are tasks like validating record completeness, cross-referencing related test plans or organizing test plan reports.“
Jennifer continued scrolling down. “I don’t see anything unusual in August,” she said as she loaded the September summary.
“Again, nothing unusual here,” she said scrolling down and then paused at an entry near the end of September.
“This is odd. She starts doing some 300 tasks near the end of the month.”
“What are 300 tasks?”
“300 tasks are data entry tasks. It’s a code we don’t use anymore because what little data entry that we do is done by the researcher during or immediately after the testing.”
“Did she supply any comments for the work?”
“There’s none in this month. Let’s take a look at October.”
Elliot felt a crush of remorse pass through him when he noticed that the next summary was populated up until October 22nd, the day before his wife died.
“There are still lots of 300 codes here. Let’s see what this one says,” said Jennifer talking to herself as she expanded a comments field. Elliot leaned in close to read the text.
Completed scanning PFS batch #1 docs.
“What are PFS docs?”
Jennifer blanked for a second as she fought to bring back an ancient memory.
“Post-Fire-Survivor documents. I didn’t realize she ever worked on those. That’s the name we gave the unprocessed documents that survived the fire.”
“I thought you said everything was lost in the fire.”
“Not quite. All the paper records were burned as well as all the electronic archives. Back at the time of the fire, our process was somewhat different than it is now. All the test results and write-ups were done on paper, and we had staff whose job was to enter that data into the system in the data entry area of the computer room. We used students to do the data entry, and sometimes our backlog of un-entered test results would spike. In busy times, like the beginning of semesters, we might have a few months of backlog. We kept the backlog in cardboard boxes in the storage area in the basement.”
Elliot pointed at the storage area on the floor plan. “The room that was not targeted by the arsonists,” he said as a question.
“Correct. The fire did not spread into that room, but the water damage was extensive. We decided after the fire to let the unprocessed boxes of test results dry out, and we’d assess their condition later. Although I always kept the evaluation and processing of these documents on our to-do list, it was always a low priority and, as time marched on, their relevance diminished. In fact, last year we needed more space in storage, so I ordered them destroyed.”
“It looks like Sarah started processing them. Does that mean that the documents she scanned would be electronically preserved?”
“It certainly sounds like it. The scanning process is used for archival only. The documents are not in our testing applications but kept in mass storage so we
can eliminate the paper copy.”
“I think you can anticipate my next question.”
“Great minds think alike. If she put those in mass storage, I should be able to pull them up,” she said already pounding the keys to open a new window.
Elliot kept quiet as he watched Jennifer navigate through a series of file and folder screens.
“I’m going to search for all scanned documents in September and October that were submitted by Sarah.”
Elliot was spellbound by a small, rotating wheel that appeared in the middle of the screen to indicate the search was processing.
“Here we are,” Jennifer said when the file entries filled the screen with a summary at the top stating that two hundred and thirty-eight documents had been found.
“The answer lies somewhere within these documents,” Elliot muttered.
“Jen, do you mind if I go through these documents?”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure, but if Sarah saw something in these documents, then maybe I can see it too.”
“I’ve got a staff meeting in the MacAvoy Building, but you can stay here and use my account. I’ll lock the door, so nobody walks in on you.”
“Thanks, Jen. Remember, don’t tell anyone what we’re doing. The people behind this will not hesitate to kill.”
Elliot heard the key rattle in the lock. “It’s me,” Jennifer said entering the room quickly.
“Have you found anything?”
“I think I’ve got something here. Take a look at these, and tell me what you think.”
He reached over to a stack of printouts he had on the desk beside him.
“On a hunch, I looked for documents that were processed by your graduate student Carrie Leblanc. There are nine. The one that has me intrigued is this one,” said Elliot as he picked up a set of printouts and handed them to Jennifer.
“This is a failed-test follow-up request,” she said as she scanned the contents of the documents that the researchers created each time a test was failed.
“What can you tell me about it?”
Jennifer took a few moments to scan the document. “It says that during the course of testing, some mice were failing the maze test.”
“What is the maze test?”