“After that,” Harris said, nodding, “I gave that homicide lieutenant, Jeff Murray, another try and finally got him.”
“He say if there was anything in the suicide note?”
“Yeah. That Han claimed to have been under extreme stress after being pressured to falsify lab findings for NextGen. He listed a number of processes that had been corrupted to meet Benson’s demands. Han said he knew that ultimately the product was not going to work as described, rendering the patent application worthless.”
“And the stock, too . . .”
“Right. But Benson was pushing the narrative that the stock was about to soar any day—he kept banging that drum on the Internet, telling everyone all that was needed was for the patent to be approved. And calling people idiots—whatever—if they could not see these great things coming—”
“Which would increase speculation, trigging more shares to be bought, which would cause the stock to rise.”
“Exactly. Han said he figured out quickly what Benson was up to and that he had been duped into joining the start-up to give it credibility. When he took the leave of absence—Benson suggested that Han’s stress was, in fact, a deep depression—Mrs. Han went public with the charges of corrupting the research-and-development process in the media.”
“Did anyone else corroborate what Dr. Han claimed?”
“That’s a good question, and the answer is no. Because they couldn’t. No device was released for a third party to determine if it did or did not work.”
“That’s right. Benson said he was protecting the intellectual property until the patent was issued. So it’s one’s word against the other’s.”
“Benson argued that it was simply the normal growing pains of a start-up, basically saying research and development is messy because you’re creating something that’s never existed before and it’s expected that there will be mistakes made. The company’s legal beagles fired off a cease-and-desist letter. Han, like all the other employees, had signed an NDA—”
“Nondisclosure agreement.”
“Right. His discussing their methods of research and development violated the agreement—”
“Even though they were bogus.”
“Moot point. In his suicide letter, Dr. Han said he felt shame, and felt he would never regain his good reputation. So, after his wife left for her yoga class, he popped a sleeping pill—an Ambien—then got in his SUV in the garage, started it up, put the windows down, and drifted off.”
“Loss of reputation and feeling ashamed sounds damn depressing to me,” Payne said. “And depressed people kill themselves all the time. I need to bounce this off my sister.”
Harris nodded. “This Detective Murray said the reason the Han woman clammed up was because Benson threatened to sue her for making false accusations. He made it clear that he would pay whatever it took so that the costs of defending those lawsuits would leave her bankrupt.”
“What a miserable sonofabitch.”
“It gets better. Benson spelled it out for her that because Dr. Han was sick and that their income—stock in NextGen awarded as bonuses—was tied to the company, if the company didn’t succeed, she’d be broke. That’s why this Nguyen announced in the media that she would have nothing more to say. She’d become, fearing that threat, complicit. And even with Benson’s death, that didn’t change.”
“Causing her to lose her husband sounds like reasonable motive to me,” Payne said.
“Yeah, and I asked Murray about it. He said he really doesn’t believe she’s capable of that. On a good day, she’s meek. Now she’s frail, and genuinely frightened by the whole ordeal.”
“I wonder how much of this John Austin knows,” Payne said, “and when he knew it.”
Harris shrugged.
“Well, they were old friends since childhood,” he said. “You’d think Benson told him. And you heard Austin. He believes in the company, in the product.”
“Two things,” Payne said. “One, if the company is a sham, and Austin has a significant piece, they could have been working a pump and dump.”
“What’s that?” McCrory said.
“Talk up the product, inflating the stock price, then sell out.”
“That’s fraud, right?” McCrory said.
“Yeah, but hard to prove. And for the investor, speculation isn’t illegal. People lose money in the markets every day. Caveat emptor. Or, as the master con man Phineas T. Barnum put it, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’”
“What’s two?” Harris said.