Read Online Fatal Reaction by Gini Hartzmark - Free Book Online Page B

currently defending itself against a suit involving its newest drug offering, a compound used in the treatment of schizophrenia. Serezine, tortuous to develop and expensive to produce, had been a controversial drug from the first. Azor had taken its hits in the press when it was announced that a year’s treatment with Serezine would cost $10 thousand. Despite the fact that this was only a fraction of what it cost to institutionalize these patients, the media had fed on stories of greedy drug companies for weeks.
    Six months after the drug was first made available, Azor was served with a lawsuit, filed in Texas by plaintiffs alleging that the drug had improved the condition of a previously institutionalized nineteen-year-old man to the point where he could be returned home to his family. Unfortunately, once there, he proceeded to murder both his parents and a furnace repairman who had the bad luck to be in the house at the time. Although it appeared that the patient had stopped taking the drug soon after his discharge from the hospital, Azor had nonetheless already racked up close to $100 thousand in legal fees defending itself.
    As I read through the complaint in my hand my stomach churned. The family of an East Lansing woman was bringing suit alleging that she had become so despondent while taking Serezine that she killed her three-day-old infant, then took her own life. Feeling sick, I dialed Stephen’s extension only to have Rachel tell me smugly that Stephen was in a meeting with the Hemasyn clinical trial group and had left explicit instructions not to be interrupted. Nothing I said was able to sway her, so I hung up the phone and called Callahan Ross to speak to Tom Galloway.
    Tom was the litigator at the firm who was preparing the Texas suit for trial. While Tom and, more important, Azor’s insurer were both convinced the first suit was baseless, the existence of a second suit could under no circumstances be construed as good news. When I got Tom’s secretary on the line she explained that Tom was out of the office for a few days due to a death in the family.
    “Just my luck,” I thought to myself callously as I slammed the receiver into the cradle. Now I had another crisis that was mine to deal with because someone else had inconveniently dropped dead.
     
    * * *
     
    I arrived back downtown in a foul temper without having managed to speak to Stephen and with the news of the second Serezine lawsuit nagging at me like a sore tooth. As soon as I got in I had to spend a couple of hours putting out fires in the Nuland Petroleum deal. After that I devoted the rest of the day to a series of thirty-minute meetings with the various associates to whom I was delegating my routine cases. It was nearly four o’clock before I finally found myself with five free minutes for the corned beef sandwich that my secretary had brought me as either a very late lunch or an early dinner. I had managed to wolf down half of it when Cheryl buzzed to say that Elliott Abelman was in reception wanting to know whether I had time to see him. I told her to go ahead and bring him on back, while I quickly consulted the mirror in my top drawer to make sure I didn’t have mustard on my chin.
    “Sorry to just barge in,” said Elliott a few minutes later as he appeared, grinning, in my doorway. He was wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants, radically casual attire for the suit-and-tie environs of Callahan Ross. If it weren’t for the bulge from the Browning automatic he wore holstered under his arm he could easily have been mistaken for a trust-fund brat dropping by to pick up his check. After six months of deliberate avoidance I found it dis-concerting to find Elliott suddenly, even casually, appearing at my office.
    When he stepped aside to let Cheryl usher in Joe Blades, I sprang to my feet. Blades was a homicide cop and a good friend of Elliott’s from his days in the state’s attorneys office when they had worked the gang crimes I unit