Juan remembered her. A curly-haired woman with thick glasses. “I didn’t socialize with her, but she had an office not far from mine. I know she was pregnant at one point, and then I got the impression something happened to the pregnancy. She’d been pretty smiley before that, and then suddenly I recall her not being pregnant and it was like she had a cloud hanging over her.” He shrugged at the other two men at the table. “Given her change in mood, I guessed she lost the baby, but I don’t know the details of what happened. It’s not the kind of thing you ask someone you barely know.”

“Of course not,” Winslow said. He turned to Paul. “A miscarriage would explain a lot of things.”

“I agree.” Paul nodded. “Let’s set Melody aside for now.” The man pulled open the next file and said, “We have a Steven Chalmers.”

Juan’s pulse quickened. Steve?

“A neurologist. He was focused on treatments for primary-progressive MS. Again, reading from his last performance review: ‘Steve has been away from the lab far too often. Even though the results of the phase-1 human trials were largely successful, Steve has repeatedly missed deadlines for the needed approvals to go to phase two. I told him that he’s giving me no choice but to reassign the trial ownership if he doesn’t get back with it.’”

Juan’s jaw dropped.

Winslow frowned. “Damn that guy. I hired Chalmers myself. I really thought we were going to have something big with his MS research.” He turned to Juan, “Did you know him?”

Juan felt two sets of eyes drilling into him.

“Yeah, I actually knew Steve pretty well. I knew about his MS research, but… I suppose I’m not sure what to make of that. I thought he was doing some phase-2 trial on a cancer treatment.”

“What in the world would give you that idea?” Winslow asked, a puzzled expression plain on his face.

Juan thought back to that meal at Toscano’s when his friend had referred Kathy’s father to the clinical trial to treat his cancer. “I guess maybe I was mistaken. I know someone whose father has bone cancer, and Steve told me about a trial going on. I just assumed he’d been behind the research.”

Paul leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. “Why would you assume that? He’s not a cancer specialist.”