Picking up a card, Byington asked, “How long do you plan to stay in Philadelphia?”

As long as it takes to find out which of you are involved. “At least another day or two,” Lopez said.

After leaving the boardroom, they rode the elevator down to the lobby in silence. Cohen stood close enough to Lopez that their arms touched but neither made eye contact. Outside, the thin cloud cover intensified the rising humidity. Kilburn hailed a cab and all three climbed into the backseat. Lopez sat between the two men, but her leg touched only Cohen’s to her right.

“What did you think?” Lopez asked as the cab pulled out into traffic.

“Martineau knows a lot more than he’s telling,” Kilburn said. “Not sure about the others. I found Abram and Byington very hard to read.”

Looking out the window, Cohen nodded distractedly.

“Seth?” Lopez asked.

“I was just thinking about Ellen Horton,” Cohen said.

“What about her?” Kilburn asked with a possessive edge.

Cohen turned from the window to look at the others, his face intense. “Do you remember what Ellen wrote in her note to Neil?” He recited from memory: “‘But I didn’t need to be scared of the world. The risk was all inside.’” He thumbed back at the building now receding behind them. “Chances are the ‘risk inside’ was one or more of them.”

58 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

58

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Cohen felt on edge from the moment he left SeptoMed’s boardroom. He had sat through too many interviews not to see through Martineau’s disingenuousness. Byington was harder to gauge. Abram seemed genuinely surprised, but Cohen wasn’t ready to dismiss the CEO just yet. Something niggled at the back of his mind, refusing to surface into consciousness. He sensed he was overlooking a vital link. He also struggled to ignore the pressure of Lopez’s knee against his in the back of the cab. The slight contact conjured memories of their evening together. He hungered for more of her than just the touch of knees. He felt her eyes on him before she spoke.

“Seth, what’s bothering you?” she asked.

Cohen turned to Lopez and Kilburn. “A freak boating accident kills an experienced fisherman. Followed by a suicide, the timing of which makes little more sense than the note left behind. Within one a week, two of the three at SeptoMed who knew the most about Oraloxin’s secrets both die under circumstances that you’d have to say are, at the least, bizarre.”

“Awfully convenient for Martineau or anyone else who didn’t want Oraloxin’s dirty laundry aired, isn’t it?” Kilburn nodded. “Seth, a person could ‘stage’ a carbon monoxide poisoning to look like suicide that would even fool the experts, true?”

“It’s been done before.”

Lopez snapped her fingers. “A boating accident would be even easier to stage, right?”