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Brielle had Becca’s mother’s laptop hooked up to the large wall monitor. Shepherd glanced at Brielle and nodded. “Walk us through what you found,” he said.
“There was a lot to go through in the cloud storage, both from your mother and the documents that were uploaded after her death, presumably by your sister and or her husband,” Brielle began. She clicked a few keys and two documents displayed on the wall monitor. “These are the two MDSs on chemicals or compounds that I believe contributed to the poisoning of their family. I couldn’t find much on either of them when I Google them. I can’t even pronounce either of them. One appears organic, maybe even developed in-house at Well-Life. The other appears petroleum based, which has me confused because of the vision statement Well-Life has out that says they ban all petroleum and other caustic chemicals from all their products.”
Becca and Tessman both stared at the chemical names and then read further down the MDSs. The one that appeared to be petroleum based, held all sorts of warnings regarding inflammation to skin and eyes if contact was made as well as being highly flammable. The other, a more organic compound, although appearing to be plant based, also included the psychotropic drug diazepam.
“Diazepam,” Becca pointed out. “Is that in the same family as lorazepam? That’s what was in their systems per the tox screen, wasn’t it?”
Brielle nodded. “Yes. Diazepam is known as the brand name Valium. Lorazepam is stronger than diazepam. Ten mg of diazepam is equivalent to two mg of lorazepam. The other notable item I found is that lorazepam has the ability to cause short-term amnesia.”
“That’s another argument that Nick DeSoto did not kill his family and then himself, not that we need one. He had access to diazepam in the lab. Why go to the trouble of getting his hands on lorazepam when the diazepam would do the job and he had access to it?”
“Does the use of that drug mean that maybe they didn’t intend to kill everyone, but rather cause short-term amnesia?” Becca posed. “Maybe something went wrong while they were in the house, which caused them to kill everyone.”
“It could be,” Shepherd said. “Until we get a statement from whoever did it or ordered it, we won’t know.”
Tessman knew she desperately wanted to believe that, believe that all of them, including the children, hadn’t been murdered in cold blood. Somehow, that would make it easier for her to accept.
“There was one more thing I found that was odd. It was a sheet on ethyl alcohol, as in grain alcohol used in beer, wine, and other spirits. It’s primarily used in alcoholic beverages, but also as a solvent, antiseptic, and fuel additive,” Brielle said.
“What the hell kind of drug was he developing with those ingredients?” Tessman asked. “I’m no chemist, but combining alcohol and sedatives with something toxic doesn’t sound like a recipe for a cure to anything to me.”
“The last thing I found related to the lab and what was being used in it that had been uploaded was a packing slip for the preservative Thimerosal, which is a bacteriostatic and fungistatic mercurial compound that is approximately fiftypercent mercury by weight. It has been used as a preservative in vaccines since the 1930s,” Brielle said.
“Vaccines?” Becca said. “Well-Life doesn’t hold any patents for vaccines nor were they ever on the trajectory to create them.”
“I did a little research into Thimerosal and discovered it has been banned in vaccines for children because of the heavy mercury content. The other notable thing about it is that Thimerosal is metabolized to ethyl mercury, which can easily cross the blood-brain barrier. I read a lot about neurotoxicity with the accumulation of Thimerosal in the brain.”
“I’m going to send all this to a contact of mine at the FDA, without divulging Well-Life as the source, and see what they make of it,” Shepherd said.
“There was something else I found,” Brielle said. “Kind of unrelated to this.” She instantly appeared a bit nervous.
Becca picked up on it immediately. “What is it, Brielle?”
“Your sister kept a journal of sorts in that cloud file. She made weekly journal entries, a conversation of sorts with your mother.”
“After she was dead?” Becca asked.
“Yes,” Brielle confirmed. “You can read it yourself. Most of it was your sister’s thoughts, working through her grief. But about two months ago is when it got interesting to the case. She wrote about Nick’s disillusionment with his job at Well-Life and he was considering leaving.”
Becca shook her head. “She said nothing about that, not about writing a journal to our mom, nor about Nick thinking of leaving his job.”
“About a week later was the first entry mentioning Nick feeling ill and what she described as him catching hell from his manager, Neil, who she described as that ass-kissing sonofabitch,” Brielle said.
“So he felt ill and caught hell for it?” Jackson recapped.
“This makes no sense,” Becca said.
“Yes, it does,” Brielle said. “Here is your sister’s last entry to the journal.” Brielle typed on the keyboard, and the last journal entry displayed.
I think that Mom and Dad’s accident was no accident. From what I’ve dug up, it looks like Mom was in a power struggle with one of the partners to stop a potentially dangerous drug from being developed, from Nick developing it. She knew the side effects and possible risk of poisoning with one of the ingredients and they pushed it through anyway after Mom was gone. I’m going to talk to the one person who I think is honest and didn’t know. This has to be stopped.
Panic rose inside of Becca as she read it, the full impact of the meaning hitting her. “Nicole would have deemed James Standish as honest over Marvin Ackman if she was going to talk to one of the partners. John was more friendly, the public relations face of the original three partners. Marvin was the money man, the comptroller, the CFO. There’s nothing warm or fuzzy about him.”
“So Nicole confided in James Standish, who was either the one responsible for the dangerous direction the drug development took or Standish told someone else, the person who was responsible,” Tessman posed. “What did the person responsible hope to accomplish by drugging the family and sending people with guns to their house if it wasn’t to kill them?”
“And let’s not forget they’d all been poisoned by something in the lab,” Jackson added. “We haven’t seen anything yet to know if it was fatal or not.”
Shepherd shuffled a few papers in the folder on the desktop in front of himself and glanced through the content of one of the papers. “They were all shot in the head. The coroner reports that the shot to Nicole’s back would have been life ending if the shot to her head didn’t accomplish that quicker.” He paused andglanced at Becca. “Sorry. But I think it’s germane. Were they destroying evidence in their brains?”