Broken (Will Trent 4)

“No wonder your brain is tired.” Sara’s head was starting to ache just thinking about it.

Will took another plastic bag out of his briefcase. “I found this in Tommy’s medicine cabinet. Charlie field-tested it, but he’s not sure what’s inside.”

Sara rolled the pill bottle around to read the label through the plastic. “That’s strange.”

“I was hoping you’d know what it is.”

“‘Tommy, do not take these,’” she read. “I’m not a handwriting expert, but it seems to me that Allison wrote this. Why would she tell Tommy not to take them? Why not just throw them away?”

Will didn’t offer her a quick answer. He sat back in his chair, staring at her. “They could be poison, but if you had poison, why would you stab somebody in the neck?”

“What are these letters on the bottom of the label?” Sara unclipped her reading glasses from her shirt so she could see. “H-C-C. What does that mean?”

“Faith tried to run the initials through the computer, but I’m not sure how effective the search was. The picture I took wasn’t very good and …” He indicated his head as if there was something wrong with it. “Well, you know I wasn’t much help.”

“Have you ever had your vision checked?”

He gave her a puzzled look, as if she should know better. “Needing glasses isn’t my problem. I’ve had this all my life.”

“Do you get headaches when you read? Feel nauseated?”

He gave a half-shrug and a nod. She could tell she wasn’t going to get much more time on the subject.

“You should see an ophthalmologist.”

“It’s not like I can read the chart.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I can shine a light into your eyes and tell if your lens is focused.”

Her endearment hung awkwardly between them. Will stared at her. His hands were on the table. He was nervously twisting his wedding ring.

Sara scrambled to hide her embarrassment. She grabbed the pill bottle and held it up for him. “Look at the small print for me.” Will held her gaze a moment longer before looking at the bottle in her hand. “Now, stay still.” She carefully slid her glasses onto his head, then held up the pill bottle again. “Is that better?”

Will obviously didn’t want to, but he looked at the bottle anyway. He glanced back at Sara, surprised, before he looked at the bottle again. “It’s sharper. It’s still not right, but it’s better.”

“Because you need reading glasses.” She put the bottle back on the table. “Come to the ER when you get back to Atlanta. Or we can go to my old place tomorrow. You’ve probably seen the children’s clinic across from the police station. I used to have special eye charts for—” Sara felt her mouth drop open.

“What is it?”

She took back her glasses and read the fine print on the label again. “H-C-C. Heartsdale Children’s Clinic.” Sara had been considering all the illegal reasons behind the bottle of pills and none of the legal ones. “This is part of a drug trial. Elliot must be running it out of the clinic.”

“A drug what?”

She explained, “Pharmaceutical companies have to do drug trials on medicines they want to bring to market. They pay for volunteers to participate in the studies. Tommy must have volunteered, but I can’t see him meeting the protocols. If there’s one rule that governs these studies, it’s that the participants have to give informed consent. There’s no way Tommy could do that.”

Will sounded skeptical. “Are you sure that’s what this is?”

“The number at the top of the label.” She pointed to the bottle. “It’s a double-blind study. Each enrollee gets assigned a random number by the computer that says whether they get the real drug or the placebo.”

“Have you done a trial before?”

“I’ve done a few at Grady, but they were surgical or trauma related. We used IVs and injections. We didn’t have placebos. We didn’t give out pills.”

“Did it work the same way as a regular drug trial?”

“I suppose the procedures and reporting would be the same, but we were working in trauma situations. The intake protocols were different.”

“How does it work if it’s not in a hospital?”

Sara put the bottle back down on the table. “The pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to run studies so that we can have yet another cholesterol-lowering drug that works about as well as the twenty other cholesterol-lowering drugs that are already on the market.” She realized her voice was raised. “I’m sorry I’m so angry. Elliot knows Tommy. He knows he’s disabled.”

“Who’s Elliot?”

“He’s the man I sold my practice to.” Sara kept shaking her head, disbelieving. She had sold her practice to Elliot so that the children in town would be helped, not experimented on like rats. “This doesn’t make sense. Most studies don’t even involve children. It’s too dangerous. Their hormones aren’t fully developed. They process medications differently than adults. And it’s almost impossible to get parents to consent to their children being tested with experimental drugs unless they’re deathly ill and it’s a last-ditch effort to save them.”

Will asked, “What about your cousin?”

“Hare? What does he have to do with this?”

“He’s an adult doctor, right? I mean, his patients are adults?”

“Yes, but—”

“Lena told me he rents space at the clinic.”

Sara felt sucker-punched. Her first instinct was to defend Hare, but then she remembered that stupid car he’d forced her to look at in the pouring rain. She had seen a BMW 750 in an Atlanta showroom that retailed for over a hundred thousand dollars.

“Sara?”

She pressed her lips tightly together to keep herself from talking. Hare at her clinic pushing pills on her kids. The betrayal cut like glass.

Will asked, “How much money can a doctor make from running a drug trial?”

Sara had trouble forming words. “Hundreds of thousands? Millions if you go around and speak at conferences.”

“What do the patients get?”

“Participants. I don’t know. It depends on what stage the trial is in and how long you have to participate.”

“There are different phases?”

“It’s based on risk. The lower the phase, the higher the safety risk.” She explained, “Phase one is limited to around ten or fifteen people. Participants could make ten to fifteen thousand dollars depending on the trial, whether it’s in-patient or not. Phase two expands to around two or three hundred people who get four or five grand each. Phase three is less dangerous, so the money is lower. They enroll thousands of people for hundreds of dollars.” She shrugged. “The amount of money they make depends on how long the trial lasts, whether they need you for a few days or a few months.”

“How long do the big trials last?”

Sara put her hand on Allison’s notebook. No wonder the girl had been obsessed with recording her moods. “Three to six months. And you have to submit journals on your progress. It’s part of the supporting documentation to track side effects. They want to know your moods, your stress level, whether you’re sleeping and how much. You know all those warnings you hear at the end of the drug commercials? That’s straight out of the journals. If one person reports headaches or irritability, it has to be included.”