Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 24

I got back to the office shortly before noon. Fucking Franny hadn’t rolled in yet. I felt like a Finn in one of those wife-carrying contests, with Monsieur Paradis playing the role of the two-hundred-pound bride. I tried to turn down the slow boil building in me and put in a call to Mark Palmer, manager of stock operations at Meissner-Hoffmann Pharmaceutical, one of Canada’s largest drug manufacturers. Winston Chan had suggested him as a possible contact. Meissner-Hoffmann’s office was in an industrial park north of the city in Vaughan, so I phoned rather than subject my aching side to the rigours of driving an hour in each direction.

The way Palmer guarded info at first, you’d have thought the company made weapons-grade plutonium. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“Didn’t Winston Chan tell you I’d be calling?”

“He told me Jonah Geller would call but how do I know that’s you?”

I suggested he look up Beacon Security and call me through the listed switchboard number and he calmed down. I told him what I was looking for without mentioning Jay Silver’s name.

“We make it very difficult for a pharmacist to get more than his fair share of goods,” Palmer said. “Our protocols are very tight. Every process is audited. The raw materials are weighed at the start of a shift and signed by two managers, and we have to have precise reconciliation at the end of the day. What goes in in powder form must come out in pill form. And yes, we weigh anything that spills or is damaged and we reconcile that too. No one is taking anything extra out of here. If you want to come for a tour of the plant, you’ll see, it’s all in a separate area.”

“I don’t understand. Separate from what?”

Palmer laughed into the phone. He had a sharp nasal voice and I pictured someone tall, thin, middle-aged, grey. “Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant the opiates. Narcotics. The codeine-based products. Isn’t that what this rogue pharmacist of yours is up to?”

Rogue pharmacist. Didn’t quite have the same chilling ring as rogue cop or elephant.

“No. I think it’s your everyday prescription medications, the ones that are still under patent.” I rhymed off some examples Winston Chan had mentioned.

“Oh,” Palmer said. “That’s different. The narcotics are really what we watch. The benzodiazepines-sedatives and such-are kept in a caged-off area, but they’re not as closely guarded as the opiates. And the medications that have no mind-altering effects, they’re kept on open shelves like in any warehouse. In other words, not watched closely at all.”

“So what about something like Serentex?” According to Meissner-Hoffmann’s website, this was the company’s biggest seller, an antidepressant with few side effects that still had four years to run on its patent.

“It could go out the front door without too much scrutiny, especially if the pharmacist has a wholesale licence.”

“Which he does. And he used to have an Internet business so big orders aren’t new for him. It’s not like anyone would see a sudden spike.”

“He could stockpile a fair bit before anyone got too wound up about it,” Palmer told me.

An hour on the Internet brought Kenneth Page into sharper focus. According to the Clarion article, which I fished out of our recycling bin, he had owned a large independent store called the Drug Pharm in Etobicoke. I logged onto its website, the centrepiece of which was a tribute to the slain owner, “whose tragic death will not impede the Drug Pharm staff from fulfilling his mission.” The site billed the store as “one of Ontario’s leading retail and wholesale suppliers of health care products.”

So Page, like Jay Silver, had held a wholesale licence. According to his bio, Page had graduated from the University of Toronto School of Pharmacy in 1980 and begun his career as a junior pharmacist with a national chain, eventually working his way up to franchise owner/operator. Five years ago, he sold the franchise and went back to school. Armed with an MBA from the University of Western Ontario, he founded the Drug Pharm “destination store” on Lakeshore Road at Islington. The destination store turned out to be the only store. The rest of the business was online. You could order pretty much any medication for pickup or delivery, as long as your prescription was written by a physician in Ontario.

Drilling deeper, I learned that Jay Silver had also gone to U of T Pharmacy, but had graduated six years after Page. Their paths would not likely have crossed there. But they could have known each other professionally. Both owned large independent stores; they could have met at functions or trade shows. I did another Internet search using both their names.

Several hits came up immediately. The highest probability rating went to the electronic newsletter of the Independent Pharmacists of Ontario, called-I kid you not- IPOthesis. The March 2005 issue featured a story on independent operators using “clicks and mortar”-a combination of retail stores and the Internet-to grow sales at a faster rate than companies that focused on one or the other. Both Jay Silver and Kenneth Page were cited as successful examples.

I returned to the list of hits. The ninth item on the first page of ten was a link to an article written by Kenneth Page when he’d been an MBA student at Western. Published in the business school quarterly, it showed how retailers could drive down operating costs through supply chain improvements that reduced inventory in warehouses and got products straight onto store shelves with minimum handling. “Stores that grow their Internet business will have particular need for just-in-time delivery and door-to-floor replenishment,” Page wrote.

The same publication carried an article written by Jay Silver one year later. It focused on growing revenues through improved forecasting and replenishment models. I flipped back to the website of Silver’s Med-E-Mart and checked his credentials. He had earned his MBA exactly one year after Ken Page.

Now I was sure they knew each other. Two MBA grads whose terms had overlapped. Both independent operators with large stores. No chains to keep an eye on them. No head office to answer to. Both with an interest in Internet sales, especially to the States before the legislation changed.

One dead and the other’s family threatened with extinction.

Ryan thought someone in Buffalo had ordered the hit. From what Winston Chan had told me, the profit motive in smuggling prescription drugs over the river was huge. If Silver and Page had been involved, then people on the Buffalo side might be trying to muscle in. But on whom? Whoever was running the Toronto end, it clearly wasn’t Jay Silver, not the way he got slapped around by Frank. Nor did Frank or Claudio strike me as masterminds, criminal or otherwise. If I knew who they answered to, it might lead to their masters in Buffalo. But how to find this out without exposing Ryan?

I was asking myself this question for the tenth or eleventh time when Clint came out of his office and asked everyone to gather round. His face was grim, closed up like a fist, and I wondered if the company was going under or being taken over by a competitor. Then a worse thought occurred to me: Clint was sick, something awful like cancer or a brain tumour.

It was worse.

“Guys,” he said, clearing his throat. “I… I don’t really know how to tell you this. It’s never happened in all the years I’ve… that we’ve… Christ, I’m just going to say it. We lost one of our own today. Franny Paradis is dead.”

A buzz went up around the room. Clint raised one hand for quiet and got it. Jenn, standing next to me, reached for my hand.

“He was murdered, guys. Shot in his car. Apparently it happened late last night or early this morning on Commissioners Street. I just spoke with detectives from Homicide. They’re still processing the scene and they’ll be talking to family members first, but they’ll be here tomorrow morning to interview me and anyone else who knew Franny well. Jonah, Jenn, Andy-you were his roommates, as it were, so they’ll want to talk to you first. They’ll also want to look at his computer and his files. Until then, no one touches either, is that clear?”

People nodded or muttered their assent. Most looked numb, staring at walls, windows, objects, floors.

“Any help you can give them, people, anything at all, be as forthcoming as possible,” Clint went on. “Maybe his murder is connected to his work here, maybe it isn’t. But anything we can do to help the police, we do. All right. If you’re not working on anything urgent right now, why don’t you call it a day. Go have a drink or go be with your families. Rest up. But tomorrow, people, you come in here ready to do anything, and I mean anything, the detectives ask of us. We’ll do our best to stay out of their way but that doesn’t mean we stay on the sidelines. We’ll share information with them but any leads they don’t pick up, any trails they don’t follow, we’ll be all over it. I’ll work up a plan tonight and hand out assignments tomorrow.”

Clint turned back to his office. I realized that sometime in the last minute I had let go of Jenn’s hand and started rubbing my upper arm. Right where I’d been shot.