The Last Lie Read online

Is he in?” It was 8:00 a.m. Monday morning and I was standing at the reception desk at VTF’s River North office, playing the odds that Seth hadn’t been able to resist getting back to work. And I needed to talk to him.

  I’d spent the balance of the weekend at the hospital with my sister and father pretending I wasn’t scared to death by where my imagination was taking me. Wild theory was the last thing my father needed to hear, so I’d kept the crazy thoughts to myself, but that hadn’t kept me from obsessing on the idea. Michael had done his best to keep me grounded, staying in touch via text and phone, and reminding me that Lane was in great medical hands. I’d also made sure Lane’s doctor was aware of her high caffeine intake, but stopped short of making any connections I couldn’t prove.

  I’d been tempted to call Seth a number of times over the weekend to press him on Cavanaugh, but instead restrained my dialing finger by forcing myself to remember my legal training, waiting until I could grill him in person. Had Seth told me the truth? Was it possible that Luke Cavanaugh’s daughter had died because of something in the VTF drink? And if she had, was my sister next?

  Company signage screamed at me in neon. Vigor. Tone. Force. The tagline for VTF Industries. The receptionist smiled, nodded, and told me to go on back. I made my way down the hall past walls peppered with images of intense faces and tight, sweaty bodies. Marketing images all intended to suggest that VTF could make anyone who drank it look that good. Upbeat dance music played lightly in the back ground.

  The employee population seemed to be made up of pouty young things who all looked to be fitness models. Leggings. Tank tops. $400 sneakers. There was enough Lycra in this building to keep four knitting factories busy. I made my way through the maze of cubicles until I reached Seth’s office, a box tucked away in the back of the brick loft building, one much like the one that housed Link-Media. I rapped on the glass side panel and Seth motioned me in.

  He looked like hell. Pale, sunken eyes, a slight tic at one side of his mouth. At least his arm was still in a sling.

  “Seth, we need to talk,” I said, softening my tone. After a weekend focused on my sister, and letting fear control my emotions, I’d lost perspective. The man was recovering from a gunshot for god sakes.

  He looked at me confused by my unannounced visit but closed his laptop and offered me a chair.

  “If you’re here to lecture me about getting back to work so quickly, save it. No choice.” He patted a stack of files on his desk. “I’m taking care of myself. Only a half-day, I promise.” He shook the bottle of antibiotics he was taking, then lifted a bottle of VTF to his mouth and took a drink.

  Words caught in my throat as it occurred to me to stop him. I held back. If the drink was the problem, wouldn’t Seth and his employees have been affected? Surely they drank more than anyone else? I relaxed a little with that realization.

  “What’s going on? You’re upset.”

  I took a breath and composed myself. Nothing would be accomplished if lashed out irrationally and emotionally. I needed to be logical, detached, to pick up on any inconsistencies, and I couldn’t do that unless I went back to my prosecutorial past.

  “I haven’t been able to get Wednesday evening out of my head. Cavanaugh was consumed with anger and I can’t wrap my head around that. Tell me again about Luke Cavanaugh’s accusations. What exactly does he think happened to his daughter?”

  Seth shifted slightly in his seat and stared down at his desk before responding.

  “I told you the other night. His daughter had a heart condition,” he said, his voice was softer now but I could hear pain in it this time. Pain I hadn’t heard, or hadn’t listened for, in our earlier conversations.

  “It was undiagnosed. And he’s looking for an explanation, grasping at straws and hoping to explain how this poor young woman lost her life when he hadn’t seen it coming. He’s been despondent. Irrational. You saw that. And I completely understand. She was a lovely young woman. She didn’t deserve anything that happened to her. I’m heartbroken myself. As far as I know that’s all there is to what happened at the Drea gala.”

  My logical brain understood how grief changed us. Turned us into versions of ourselves we couldn’t conceive of. Inspired actions that were foreign and strange and hurtful. But Cavanaugh seemed to have targeted his anger and that hadn’t been made from whole cloth.

  “Seth, I saw Cavanaugh’s face. I heard the urgency in his voice. He blames you. I want to understand why.” I shifted my weight but stood firm, watching his face, his body language.

  Seth narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, resting one elbow on the desk. “Obviously there’s something you’re not saying. Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on here so we can get this resolved? I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “Nothing is going on. Just concern,” I said, but I didn’t believe him. My gut was telling me there was more.

  He looked at me angry, or maybe hurt that I was questioning him, but didn’t respond. I couldn’t read his face. Was he stalling? Was he in pain from the trauma of his own injury? Every instinct I had told me there was something he wasn’t telling me. I felt myself getting agitated again, but shook it off. I needed to stay analytical and calm, even though right now all I wanted to do was to jump over the desk and shake him.

  “Is it possible that your energy drink was a factor? Have you considered the possibility? Investigated anything?” I asked, grasping for ways to explain away Cavanaugh’s accusation. And hoping that my friend had done the right thing.

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me these questions. Do you think that I wouldn’t have done everything possible if I thought for a moment VTF contributed? It’s absurd. Cavanaugh’s grief is talking, nothing more.”

  It was a move taught to first-year prosecutors. Watch for deflection. Watch for individuals who pivot around an answer by delegitimizing the question or the person who asked it.

  “My sister collapsed. She’s been in the hospital since Friday night. They don’t know what’s wrong with her.” I knew I’d throw him with my own pivot, but sometimes, surprises were good strategy.

  I watched the confusion wash over his face. “I’m so sorry, but does this have something to do with your visit this morning?”

  “I went to her apartment to pick up a few things. In her refrigerator were a dozen bottles of your drink. Do I have a reason to be worried? Please tell me Seth.”

  I watched a shadow cross his face. He stared off out the window before responding.

  “I’m really sorry about your sister,” he said, his tone now cold and businesslike. “You appear to be jumping to the conclusion that there’s some connection between the death of Luke Cavanaugh’s daughter and your sister being ill. You’re a former attorney, step back for a moment. I’m sure that when you can look at this objectively, you’ll understand that this is pure coincidence.”

  He said the words, but his face was now a mask. I wasn’t looking at my friend, I was looking at a CEO with an IPO on the line.

  “Bullshit! Seth, I can see it in your face.” I got to my feet, leaning over his desk, my eyes locked on his, pleading. “You need to get straight with me. Tell me what’s going on. My sister could die and you’re sitting here worrying about your business. Aren’t you? Have there been others who’ve gotten sick? Do you even know what’s happening?”

  The accusations tumbled out. I couldn’t believe where my head was taking me, but I couldn’t seem to stop the thoughts. Couldn’t seem to focus solely on facts.

  His face crumpled, his body slumped deeper into the chair. Leaning forward, he rested his head in his hands unable to look at me. I gave him a moment. But every fiber of my body wanted to scream at him.

  I softened my tone. “Seth, please talk to me. What’s going on?”

  Finally he looked up. “I think that a batch of my product was tampered with. I think someone is trying to sabotage me.”

  “Tampered with? How?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook h
is head, clearly not having the energy for further speculation. “We had a couple of reports of people getting ill around the same time that Cavanaugh’s daughter got sick. We didn’t see anything at first, couldn’t explain on our end anything that would’ve caused problems. Our standards and our quality control have always been beyond reproach. But we’ve had trouble with one supplier, well, one ingredient really, and had to go to a new vendor. I think maybe a batch of the product may have been tampered with. If there’s a connection, it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  “And who would do that? And for what purpose?”

  “You said it yourself, the IPO. There’s a lot of money on the line. Investment that I’ve already made in the company. And with this IPO, the stock potential is enormous. Anyone with significant holdings is going to be very wealthy. Not everybody wants that for me, for us, for VTF.”

  “Are you saying an employee sabotaged you?”

  Another shrug. “Best guess, I think it was a competitor. Someone who wants me to fail. Someone who wants VTF to be publicly humiliated so that we either cancel our IPO or the exposure will kill us later and we’ll no longer be a threat.”

  “Corporate sabotage?”

  “I can’t think of a better reason. Money and lots of it. There are a number of companies that aren’t happy to be losing market share.”

  “How would they have tampered with the ingredient?”

  He paused, hesitating. “Well, two possibilities come to mind; they’ve got a vendor willing to have his palms greased or one of my employees is helping me fail.”

  We looked at each other. “Cavanaugh?” He shrugged.

  “So, who have you talked to about this? What have you done to ensure safety? Your product hasn’t been recalled, has it?” Surely, he wouldn’t have been able to keep that quiet. I racked my brain but couldn’t remember anything other than glowing press coverage.

  “We were able to isolate the batch and work with our retailers to pull it off the shelves quietly. All of our quality control standards have been re-evaluated. We’ve made sure we’re clean and we’re no longer working with that supplier,” he said. “But I can’t trace every bottle that’s sitting in a retailer’s back stock.”

  “And you didn’t want to make it public if you didn’t have to.” Classic self-preservation. I was disgusted, but understood the impulse given what the company stood to lose.

  “You know I wouldn’t jeopardize people’s health.” He looked at me, his eyes pleading, desperate for me to believe him.

  Did I? “This sounds really far-fetched. Corporate espionage of a small energy drink company? Really? Are you sure it wasn’t just a human error?”

  “Andrea, you of all people know the extent to which people will go for money.”

  He sat back up in his chair and looked at me. Challenging me to argue. Damn. How dare he bring this back to Erik? But despite my flash of anger that much I did know to be true. Greed had no bounds. But what now? Lane’s face just before she collapsed flashed in my mind. There was no room for error.

  14

  I stood outside a red brick Victorian two-flat on Waveland Avenue fear knotting my chest. The weather had turned, and the wind was now fierce and cold and the sky gray with moisture. I could barely feel the temperature given the cold-sweat running down my back. Instinctively I turned up the collar on my wool coat and climbed the stairs. Scanning the name tags, I saw Cavanaugh listed for apartment number one.

  After my meeting with Seth, I’d found myself compelled to speak with Cavanaugh. Tampering, sabotage, a grief-stricken father—whatever was going at VTF revolved around production and that meant Cavanaugh was at the center one way or another. Seth’s speculation, such that it was, of a malicious competitor was a hard one to swallow. It was just too complex to pull off. I could imagine half a dozen ways to damage a company’s reputation that didn’t involve the convoluted maneuvering he was suggesting. The only thing I could safely say I agreed with was that there was a large enough chunk of cash on the line not to dismiss it out of hand. But if the product had been adulterated, my bet was on an angry employee or a dumb mistake, and who better to speak to about that than Luke Cavanaugh.

  Given our last exchange, showing up unannounced was a risky move and possibly one of the stupidest things I’d done recently; after all, the guy did draw a gun and shoot Seth in the middle of a crowded room. For all I knew, he had a full arsenal stashed in his coat closet. My gut said Wednesday night had been a one-off, and therefore the danger minimal, but I had Mace in my pocket and Michael one tap on my phone away. Neither would be helpful if there was a semi-automatic weapon on the other side of the door, but I had to take the bet. With any luck, the worst that would happen is I’d be met with a door slammed in my face.

  My body tense with unease, I pressed the doorbell and seconds later I heard footsteps. Then the door was flung open and Luke Cavanaugh stared at me, looking even more jaundiced in the light of day than he had the night of the gala. Barefoot, sweatpants, a T-shirt covered with paint. His sallow skin hung on his body as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His bloodshot eyes told me he wasn’t sleeping much either.

  “Yeah, what the hell do you want?” he said, looking at me as if I were about to hand him a religious solicitation.

  “Wait, a minute. I know you. You were there the other night, at that fancy party. What the hell are you doing at my house?” He shuffled a bit as the wind slapped him in the face, lifting his hair.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh my name is Andrea Kellner. I’d really like to speak to you about Wednesday night. I’d like to understand what happened to your daughter.”

  “And why the hell would you want that? Clearly you’re friends with that bastard Bowman. He send you over here? Is he trying to shut me up again? Telling you to make me go away?” He gripped the door handle, ready to make his point.

  I backed up slightly, watching his hands for sudden movement. “No, Mr. Cavanaugh it’s not like that at all. I’m not here to shut you up. You’re clearly devastated by your daughter’s death. I want to know what happened. Can you talk to me about her?” I held out a business card.

  He took the card, considering what to do. His eyes told me he was desperate for someone who would listen to him but he didn’t know that I could be trusted.

  “My attorney doesn’t want me talking to you people, but he’s about as worthless as the cops. What the hell, come on in.”

  I followed him into a narrow hallway my eyes running the perimeter alert for danger. Dark stained wainscoting ran the length with burgundy wallpaper above. The walls were lined with coats, winter boots, and stacks of old newspapers. It opened into a cozy living room. Family photos in mismatched frames hung in artful disarray on the walls, crocheted afghans rested on the back of an overstuffed sofa, and an assortment of throw pillows dotted both the sofa and the side chairs, waiting for someone to sink in. Nothing matched. Nothing looked planned. But it all looked loved and comforting. Not a gun in sight.

  Cavanaugh stopped behind a leather La-Z-Boy. I was drawn to the oak fireplace, the focal point of the room. It probably didn’t work any longer, but it was intricately carved, its varnish now crackled and darkened. More framed photos filled the mantle. Photos of Cavanaugh in better days and photos of a young girl.

  “Is this your daughter?” I asked, watching him nervously, and keeping a direct line of sight.

  I was looking at a photo of Cavanaugh with a high-school aged girl. They smiled brightly, arms around each other, posed in front of the entrance to Disney World.

  “Yeah, that’s me and my Kelly. About three years ago.”

  “You both look happy.” I turned and faced him head on. He was staring at the floor struggling to hold back tears.

  “What is it you want?” he said. “You didn’t come here to look at family photos and tell me how cute my kid was. I’ve had enough of my time wasted. Say what you need to say and move on. You don’t really give a shit, anyway. Nobody does.”

  My hea
rt broke seeing his pain, his isolation. Or was this a man wracked by guilt? I let myself relax a little but kept my hand on the mace in my coat pocket.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh, you seemed convinced that Seth Bowman had something to do with your daughter’s death. Can you tell me why you believe that? Can you tell me why you hold him responsible?”

  He looked up at me, his face expressionless except for a slight softening around his eyes. I could feel his urge to talk, to be heard.

  “I understand that you haven’t seen a lot of support,” I said. “I imagine that you’re feeling ignored. You don’t know me. And I’ll be honest, I do find it difficult to believe, that Seth Bowman, a man I call a friend, could be associated in any way with the death of another human being. But Mr. Cavanaugh, I’m also a journalist. You clearly believe that your daughter’s death is going uninvestigated. I commit to you that I’ll listen with an open mind and an open heart. I’m not here at Seth’s request. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  Cavanaugh adjusted his stance. His arms gripped the back of the chair as he clenched his jaw and tried to figure out whether to speak to me. I took his silence as a good sign and continued.

  “I very much want to understand what you believe happened to your daughter. I can’t imagine the pain you’re feeling. I can’t imagine the heartache this is causing for you. But I’m absolutely willing to listen openly to anything that you can tell me about how she died.”

  I stood, silently waiting for him, every word I’d said true and heartfelt. Hopefully, he’d been able to hear that.

  After a moment, he let out a breath and said, “Okay I’ll talk. But if Bowman’s your friend, you’re not going to like a goddamn thing I’ve got to say.” He held out his hand and motioned toward the upholstered chairs flanking the fireplace.

  “Deal. I’m prepared to hear whatever you’ve got to say.” Cavanaugh didn’t appear to be a threat, so I unbuttoned my coat and took a seat. Then pulled out my phone. “Is it okay if record this?”