Jessica Andersen - Under the Microscope

“Listen.” Tori stabbed another button and cranked the speakerphone volume.

After a moment of hissing silence, her recorded voice said, “Rainey Days, Incorporated, this is Tori speaking. How may I help you?”

“Thriller killed my wife.”

The oxygen evaporated from the conference room. Raine couldn’t breathe. She could barely hear over the roaring in her ears.

After a long pause, Tori’s voice said, “I’m sorry to hear about your wife, sir, but-”

“Cari… She had a sample packet.” The man swallowed loudly, and the sound echoed on the tense air. “The doctors say she had a heart attack. She was only twenty-eight. We have a baby…”

More hissing silence.

“Oh, God. Oh, no. Nonononono-” Heart pounding, Raine looked around to see who was saying that and realized it was her. She clamped her lips together and fought the nausea. Fought the panic.

Think. She had to think.

She was in charge.

On the recording, Tori’s voice said, “Will you hold, please? I’m going to connect you to-”

There was a click, and the line went dead. After a long moment, Tori moved to punch off the speakerphone. “I called back, but nobody picked up. Caller ID says it’s registered to James and Cari Summerton in Houghton, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philly. He must’ve used Google to find the company and gotten the main number rather than the help line…” She trailed off. “Do you think it could be a prank?”

Raine didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know what to do. She could barely feel her body-everything was numb besides her brain, which pounded that same panicked litany of no-no-no-no.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

Fear for her company bubbled up alongside basic human horror. A woman was dead. A mother.

Panic brushed at the edges of her soul, trying to take over everything, but she beat it back. She wasn’t the weak woman she’d once been, ready to crumble and let someone else take over and fix things. She couldn’t be.

She was the boss now.

She placed her palms flat on the conference table and pressed until the numbness receded and she could feel the wood grain beneath her fingertips. “Cancel the party. We have work to do.”

THAT NIGHT, RAINE SLEPT a couple of hours stretched out on the couch in her office, waiting for new information. She had to have new information because what little they had didn’t make an iota of sense.

Thriller hadn’t killed Cari Summerton. It couldn’t have.

The fast-track clinical trials had shown that it was safe for human use. The toxicities were so minor as to be nonexistent. The drug researchers hadn’t noted anything unexpected-certainly nothing had suggested a connection between Thriller and heart attacks. There had to be another explanation for the woman’s death.

But what, exactly?

Coincidence? Fraud? Something else? As the cold winter dawn broke outside her office window, her mind buzzed with the possibilities, each of which seemed equally unlikely, but none more unlikely-at least to her-than the thought that her drug was a killer.

Please, God, let there be another explanation.

By ten that morning, as Raine downed her third cup of coffee, changed into the spare power suit she kept in the office closet and headed for a council of war, she wasn’t any closer to an answer. She just hoped to hell they found one soon.

Tension hung heavy in the conference room, which was crammed with nearly half of Raine’s forty-person staff. She sat at the head of the table and gestured for Jeff to begin with the first report. “What have we got on the caller? Is James Summerton for real?”

A sleepless night was etched in the young man’s earnest face, but he shook his head. “Not much. I’ve confirmed the names and the address, but nobody’s answering the phone. I can’t find an obituary on Cari Summerton in the local paper, but they may not have gotten it organized yet.” He paused. “Sorry. I wish I had more for you.”

So do I, Raine thought, but she didn’t say it aloud because she knew Jeff was already working as hard as he could. They’d each taken a chance on the other-her in hiring a young genius with no managerial experience, him in working for a startup company with only one major product in the pipeline. He was putting his sickly younger brother through college. She was trying to grow up at the age of thirty-five and learn how to take charge of her own life.

They both needed Thriller to succeed.

“Keep looking,” she said. “We need to be absolutely certain this guy is for real before we proceed.” Scam artists had planted severed fingers in fast food before, looking for a quick settlement. It was possible that Summerton was looking to cash in on an unexpected-or faked-death, figuring the company would pay rather than risk Thriller’s reputation on the eve of its launch.

If that was the case, she’d be tempted to pay, just to keep things quiet. But, if there was a problem with Thriller, they needed to know about it before the drug went on sale. She was trying to do this right, trying to protect the consumer while covering her own butt.

She had already called the Food and Drug Administration-FDA-where she’d filed an unexpected toxicity report that likely wouldn’t get read for a few days or even a week. Then she’d called her distributors, delaying the launch.

She’d said there were problems with the print ads and the commercials, that the hype wasn’t where she needed it to be. “Push it back a week,” she’d said. “We’ll have everything straightened out by then.”

She hoped.

That had taken care of the new prescriptions, but there were thousands of sample packets already in use. Were they safe or not? One possibly fraudulent death report wasn’t sufficient evidence for her to recall the samples, but if another user died and the press got wind that Rainey Days had known about the problem…

Instant media crisis. How could she balance the company’s welfare against the possibility that she might be endangering lives?

Raine pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to fight back the impending headache. She gestured to her head epidemiologist, Red, who was a sharp- faced woman with wild auburn hair, a mercurial temper and a photographic recall for facts and figures. Raine asked, “Did your department find any cardiac problems in the toxicity databases?”

Red scowled, apparently taking the question-and the death-as a personal affront. “Of course not. There’s nothing to find. Thriller is safe for human use. Hell, it scores better in terms of side effects and cross-reactions than aspirin . This is a setup. It has to be.”

Raine, who’d butted heads with Red on more than one occasion, fixed her with a stern look. “You did check the clinical-trial databases for cardiac toxicity reports, right?”

The epidemiologist bristled. “Of course. There were none. Headaches. Sleeplessness. A few sniffles. Nothing more, like I already told you six times.”

Ignoring the attitude because Red was the best at what she did, personal style notwithstanding, Raine called on the other department heads. They didn’t have much to add until she reached Phillip Worth, the gaunt, forty-something head of the legal department.

“You need to get yourself an investigator,” Phil said. “We can’t plan a strategy without more information. Is the dead woman really dead? Did she actually take Thriller? Was an autopsy performed? Tox screen?” He spread his hands. “There’ll either be a monetary demand or a lawsuit. We need to be prepared for both.”

Raine nodded. “You’re right. I know you’re right.” Both about the preparations and the investigator. “I’ll work on it.”