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  Don't miss these legal thrillers featuring Kate Millholland by Gini Hartzmark!

  PRINCIPAL DEFENSE

  FINAL OPTION

  BITTER BUSINESS

  FATAL REACTION

  ROUGH TRADE

  “When it comes to the legal thriller, Gini Hartzmark’s work is top of the line.” —Les Roberts

  Ballantine / Del Rey / Fawcett / Ivy

  Praise for Gini Hartzmark’s previous Kate Millholland novels

  ROUGH TRADE

  “Hartzmark... offers substance with excitement.” —Publishers Weekly

  FATAL REACTION

  “Exceptional: Hartzmark paints a fascinating picture of the world of drug research with characters who are believable, varied, and likable (even the villains are the kind you love to hate). The intensity of the complex plot never wavers, and the ending explains just enough to satisfy without being too pat.” —Publishers Weekly

  FINAL OPTION

  “A cleverly plotted and convincing inside look at freewheeling financial crooks and wizards... Hartzmark keeps the story moving swiftly to an explosive conclusion.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  BITTER BUSINESS

  “A page-turner.”

  —People

  By Gini Hartzmark

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:

  PRINCIPAL DEFENSE

  FINAL OPTION

  BITTER BUSINESS

  FATAL REACTION

  ROUGH TRADE

  DEAD CERTAIN

  Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2000 by Gini Hartzmark

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-91032

  ISBN 0-8041-1900-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition: January 2000

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my father, in memory

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank all the usual suspects: Susan Randol, Don Maass, and Lisa Collins for their help in shaping the manuscript; Drs. Heather Raaf and William Morgan for always being happy to help me kill people—at least on paper; Dee Hartzmark and Elizabeth Gardner, who cheerfully answered all questions without asking why; and my husband, Michael, who is always there to help me find the way through my own plots after I’ve succeeded in confusing myself. Finally, special thanks to Steve Garrity, computer wizard, for solving problems real, fictional, and digital.

  CHAPTER 1

  As a lawyer I’m not usually interested in the truth. I know that sounds appalling. But if it’s absolutes you’re interested in, you’d better stick to physics. At its heart the law is all about human behavior, and human behavior is by definition messy. Which not only explains why lawyers make their living in the gray spaces between differing versions of the truth, but also why there are so many of us. But, that morning I wasn’t interested in truth, physics, or the dark inner workings of the human heart. All I wanted was to make a deal.

  After six months of letters, meetings, and conference calls, after months of missteps, frustration, and false hope—it all came down to this: three days and three nights at the negotiating table and still no deal. Not only that, but I was running out of tricks. I was too frustrated to be persuasive, and after being up all night, the lawyers for the other side were too sleep-deprived to be intimidated— which was probably okay, because I was also too tired to care. All I wanted was to make a deal, take a shower, and climb into bed—in that order. Considering that I’d spent the last seventy-two hours in the same set of clothes, I, didn’t think that was too much to ask.

  It didn’t help that the air in the conference room was ripe with the scent of yesterday’s sweat and the mahogany table was strewn with the wreckage of midnight coffee and fast-food breakfast. Jackets were off, sleeves were rolled up, and with a one o’clock deal-or-die deadline fast approaching, we’d moved past the point of being polite three ultimatums ago. When one of the Armani-clad wonders for the other side started going through his list of financial sticking points for what felt like the four hundredth time, I found myself alternating between fantasies of crisp cotton sheets and ripping his head off. I had just decided on the latter when my secretary sidled into the room and tapped me gently on the shoulder.

  Cheryl was a petite powerhouse of a woman with a neat blond bob and a subversive sense of humor. She was also my rock, unflappable in any crisis and impervious to panic, which is why all it took was one look at her face for me to know that she hadn’t come to bring me good news. As she slipped me a folded sheet of paper, I tasted adrenaline in my throat and scenarios for a half a dozen different disasters sprang full-blown into my head. In my line of work it helps to have a vivid imagination and a sixth sense for disaster, but this time it turns out I wasn’t even close.

  In Cheryl’s tidy handwriting, the message was as brief as it was chilling. It said:

  “Your mother is here to see you.”

  I raised my eyes from the paper and turned in my seat to face my secretary. A look of perfect understanding passed between us. Not only was the timing terrible, but we were both thinking the same thing. There was no way my mother would ever come to my office if she could possibly avoid it.

  I scrambled to my feet and whispered something about an emergency to the lawyer sitting next to me. Then I started mentally running down the list of possible reasons for my mother’s visit.

  None of them were good.

  As I made my way down the hall I tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear and prayed that I didn’t look as awful as I felt. The weight of my mother’s disapproval is a burden under even the best of circumstances. The last thing I wanted to do today was give her fresh ammunition. Lately my personal life had been keeping her more than adequately supplied.

  The love lives of corporate lawyers aren’t usually a source of gossip-column fodder, but being Astrid Mill-holland’s daughter has always made me something of an exception. Of course, splitting publicly with Stephen Azorini, Chicago’s most visible and eligible bachelor, was hardly a move destined to avert the spotlight. Even so, I was completely unprepared for the months of lurid speculation my decision seemed to have fueled.

  Mother, accustomed to the respectful worship of the society pages, made no secret of her mortification.or the fact that she blamed me for it. In the meantime, I did what I always do, buried myself in work and prayed that someone prominent would turn up in bed with a barnyard animal, if only to give the gossip columnists something else to write about and get my mother off my back.

  At Callahan Ross the room where clients cool their heels is everything you’d expect from a law firm where the letterhead reads like the passenger list of the Mayflower. With its clubby leather furniture and somber paintings of dead partners, it could have easily doubled as a stage set for a play about the establishment. Needless to say, Mother looked right at home there.

  She a
lso looked stunning. At fifty-three my mother had a face that most women would still kill for. Her signature dark mane was swept back from her forehead, framing her now-famous classic features. She was, as always, exquisitely dressed, this time in an elegant suit of charcoal wool subtly trimmed in black. It was just the sort of thing Coco Chanel might have designed for professional women, provided she could have found any willing to drop that kind of money on something to wear to the office.

  At the sight of me an all-too-familiar flicker of disappointment crossed my mother’s face. I tried not to let it bother me. It had taken a long time, but I’d finally come to terms with the fact that I am not merely a younger version of my mother, but a plainer one, and therefore doomed to forever fall short. The only consolation is that, of the two of us, it undoubtedly troubled her more.

  “Mother! What a pleasant surprise,” I lied, kissing the air beside her powdered cheek and smiling for the receptionist’s benefit. In a place where minutes were reckoned, movements recorded, and absences noted, news of my mother’s extraordinary visit was no doubt already crackling along the firm’s synapses. I had absolutely no intention of giving anyone any more to talk about.

  As I led the way back toward my office I did my best to make small talk, always tricky in our case since even neutral subjects had a way of quickly shifting to more dangerous ground. Playing it safe, I fell back on the usual attorney-client patter, prattling on about how we now had six hundred attorneys in Chicago alone and were in the process of opening a new office in Delhi. Mother, having been trained to feign interest practically since birth, listened politely. But I knew that my world, the world of people who work for a living, held little interest for her.

  As I ushered her into my office I noted with silent amusement that Cheryl had made a whirlwind effort to tidy up my usual chaos. Not only had she carted off as many files as she could carry, but she’d shoved the rest underneath my desk so that when I sat down, there was barely enough room for my legs.

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” I asked brightly.

  “I didn’t know that I needed a reason to visit my own daughter,” announced Mother.

  “Of course you don’t need a reason,” I replied sweetly. “But that still doesn’t mean you don’t have one.”

  “If you must know, I’ve just come from the hospital,” she declared, “and you and I have an important matter to discuss.”

  I felt my heart sink, but not for the reasons you might think. In my family, the word hospital meant only one thing—Prescott Memorial, the charitable institution founded by my mother’s great-grandfather and supported by every generation of Prescotts and Millhollands since. But that didn’t mean that Mother had dropped by to discuss medical care for the poor. The Founders Ball, the hospital’s annual fund-raiser and the charity event that traditionally marked the end of Chicago’s gala season, was this coming Saturday night. Having jettisoned Stephen from my life, my choice of escort had become the subject of seemingly endless debate. Mother, no longer content to plague me over the telephone, had apparently decided to intensify her efforts and begin harassing me in person.

  “Mother, please,” I began, appalled by how quickly I had been reduced to pleading, “this really isn’t a very good time.”

  “It never is, Kate,” she countered archly. “Perhaps you would have preferred it if I’d called ahead and made an appointment with your secretary?”

  I was tempted to say yes, but I would have been lying. What I really would have preferred was to not have this conversation at all. However, I knew the look on my mother’s face all too well. Barring paid assassins coming through the door and killing us both, nothing was going to get her out of my office until she’d said what she had come to say.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked, trying not to think about what was happening in the conference room in my absence.

  “There was an emergency meeting of the Prescott Memorial board this morning. The trustees have voted three to two in favor of selling the hospital.”

  Mother waited in silence as I grappled with the news. I’m sure she was pleased not only to have caught me off guard, but to have finally captured my complete attention.

  “To whom?” I demanded, when finally I managed to find my voice.

  “Some company named Health Care Corporation of America that’s apparently going around the country buying up hospitals.”

  I leaned back in my chair and considered what I knew about Health Care Corporation, which wasn’t much. HCC was one of those companies that was much admired on Wall Street but reviled nearly everywhere else. They’d burst onto the scene a couple of years ago declaring themselves the messiahs of for-profit medicine and began making money hand over fist.

  “Can they really do that?” I demanded, still trying to master my disbelief.

  “Do what?”

  “Can they vote to sell the hospital just like that?”

  “They not only can,” replied my mother, “but they did. As soon as the motion passed we signed the papers.” She brushed a piece of imaginary lint from her sleeve. “Four generations of philanthropy sold off like it was so much old furniture.”

  “What exactly did you sign?” I inquired, ever the lawyer.

  “Only a letter of intent and a confidentiality agreement,” she replied, as if these were documents that routinely passed through her hands. “The sale itself won’t go through for another ten days.”

  “I can’t believe the trustees would vote to sell,” I muttered incredulously. Over the years the hospital’s board had been deliberately kept small—just five seats. Two were held by family members—my mother and her younger brother Edwin—while the other three board members were individuals with close ties to both the family and the hospital. They were Kyle Massius, the president of the hospital; Carl Laffer, Prescott Memorial’s chief of staff; and Gavin McDermott, the hospital’s world-renowned chief of surgery. All were lifelong friends of the family.

  “Naturally, Edwin and I tried everything we could think of to persuade them not to do this,” continued my mother. “But we might as well have been talking to ourselves.”

  My mother was a very bright woman, but she was so used to getting her way as a matter of course that I wasn’t sure if she could have persuaded a stranger to give her a glass of water if she were dying of thirst. On the other hand, just the thought of Uncle Edwin attempting any kind of higher level mental function was enough to give me chest pains. Edwin was a handsome ne’er-do-well who owed his board seat to the accident of his birth and the family’s desire to give him something to do. His only talent, as far as I could tell, was for bad marriages and even worse divorces.

  “But why? What reasons did they give that could possibly justify selling the hospital?”

  “Oh, it was just all the usual rubbish about the hospital losing money and the skyrocketing cost of medical care,” replied Mother. For once I thought her right to be dismissive. Money was always short at a charity hospital, and there would always be more patients than beds at an institution that didn’t turn away people who could not pay. “Kyle Massius actually had the nerve to sit there and lecture me on the realities of the marketplace,” she continued in a tone of voice that indicated that if he’d ordered her to get up on the table and perform a striptease, she would have been no less offended.

  “So who gets the money?” I asked, wondering about the mechanics of buying and selling something that wasn’t actually owned by anyone.

  “The foundation will get the proceeds from the sale,” Mother reported.

  The Prescott Foundation was a family vehicle, an organization nominally headed by Edwin that existed primarily on paper. Through it, family funds were channeled to charitable causes.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Cheryl standing in the hall tapping the face of her watch to indicate that it was time to get back into the conference room.

  “Well, I’m sure the family will have to put some serious thought into how best
to redirect the money,” I ventured, wondering how on earth I was going to manage to finesse my mother out of my office.

  “I did not come here to discuss the relative merits of worthwhile causes,” snapped Mother. “Prescott Memorial is not one of these companies that you seem to spend all your time buying and selling. It happens to be one of the finest teaching hospitals in the country and a place where poor people receive first-rate care. Not only that, but every brick, every piece of equipment, every dollar ever paid out in salary was a donation—a gift.

  “When your great-great-grandfather Everett decided to donate the money to build the hospital, poor people were literally dying in the streets from influenza. There was no place else for them to go. And once it was built, he didn’t stop. He convinced everyone he knew, his family and all the other prominent Chicago families, to open up their wallets and adopt his cause as their own.

  “When your aunt Eleanor’s baby died, the family donated the money for the neonatal intensive care unit. When Freddie VanCott developed kidney disease, his children endowed the dialysis center. Now, suddenly, some big corporation rolls into town and figures it can use those gifts to make money! There is a reason that the donors’ names are on those buildings.”

  On some level I knew that she was right, but I couldn’t help wondering whether my mother would feel quite so passionately about it if it didn’t happen to be her name, too.

  “Everyone always says that Everett Prescott was a man of tremendous vision,” continued Mother, warming to her subject, “but I can tell you one thing for certain. There is absolutely no way that he could ever have foreseen this.”

  I was tempted to point out that I didn’t think he could have predicted cable TV, the AIDS epidemic, or cell phones either, but I held my tongue. The Prescotts all looked upon Everett as if he were a god and not just the source of their wealth and position. But I knew that, like most robber barons, my great-great-grandfather’s reputation had been rehabilitated over time. While the family was busy pointing to the hospital, there were still those who remembered that Everett had started out as little better than a pirate, running guns and opium into China. I had even heard it whispered that he’d murdered a business rival in order to take over his trade, and it was well known that he’d been quick to champion any cause that benefited his own purse.