Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (4 page)

“Are you sure we can’t do better than an inferential link?” he asked quietly.

Caroline didn’t know what to say. She’d already explained her best idea for using the materials in the war room to fashion a coherent argument.

In the silence, a frown formed on Louis’s lips.

Caroline’s face flushed. She could feel the assignment slipping away.

“Actually, I did find one last thing,” she blurted.

Louis raised an eyebrow in silent invitation for her to continue.

“I found a . . . a lead.” She didn’t know how else to describe it. “While I was reading those articles, I did some research. Online.”

Though Louis had forced her to take longhand notes, he hadn’t expected her to completely forgo technology. On her laptop, she’d run dozens of queries. She’d found links to digital versions of the articles. She’d used word searches to skip through the data quickly, sifting studies like a prospector panning for gold. She’d also googled the names of the scientists. She’d read their laboratories’ websites. In other words, she’d done everything possible to broaden the field of information. To find something more than the meager pickings the war room had offered up.

“Feinberg’s study comes closest to saying what we needed it to say,” Caroline continued, “so I looked around to see if he’d ever said anything else about SuperSoy.”

“Had he?” Louis asked.

“Sort of. Dr. Feinberg attended the Pan-Pacific Innovations Conference in Hawaii six months ago. He posted a message just last week on the conference’s chat board about one of the presentations he’d seen. Apparently, some guy named Dr. Franklin Heller gave a talk on flu vaccines. At the end of his talk, Dr. Heller gave the audience a little teaser about a new article he was writing on SuperSoy. Feinberg brought it up on the chat board to see if anyone had heard anything more about that article Heller teased.”

Louis tilted his white-haired head to one side, his lips pursed.

Caroline swallowed. She realized how desperate her efforts sounded.

“And did anyone know anything about this Heller article?” Louis asked finally.

“No, not really. Dr. Heller never published it. But it’s pretty clear he planned to. The
Fielding Journal of Molecular Cell Biology
was going to publish it for him.”

“And you learned all of this from a . . . a chat board?” Louis asked.

Caroline couldn’t tell if his tone held admiration or disbelief.

“Some of it,” she answered. “The rest I got out of Dr. Feinberg himself.”

“He spoke to you?” Louis’s eyebrows rose. “Scientists tend to be fairly closemouthed in my experience.”

“I pretended like I was doing follow-up for the conference’s organizers. I said I was gathering reviews, feedback about the speakers. That sort of thing.”

Louis’s eyes narrowed at her subterfuge.

Concern lanced Caroline’s chest. She couldn’t retract her words. She could only hope that Louis saw merit in her results. If not her social-engineering methods.

“Once Feinberg began talking, it was easy to get more information out of him. He told me that after the presentation, he overheard Dr. Heller talking with the editor of the
Fielding Journal
about publishing his new article. Feinberg said Heller sounded excited about it. So did the editor.”

“This is all very speculative,” Louis said, leaning back in his leather chair.

“I know,” Caroline said, looking down.

“And yet . . . I believe it deserves some further inquiry,” Louis said.

Caroline met her boss’s bright eyes.

“Please make some calls,” he said. “See if anyone has a copy of that article. Don’t waste a lot of time on this, though. I don’t want you spinning your wheels if there’s nothing to find.”

“I could call the
Fielding Journal
,” Caroline offered.

“Good plan.”

“I’ll get right on it,” she said, her tone the equivalent of a sharp salute.

But then she paused.

“Other than trying to track down that article, is there anything else you want me to do?” Caroline fished. Louis had mentioned putting a more senior lawyer on the
SuperSoy
team to take over after she’d finished her initial review of the science. Maybe now he’d do that and she’d sink to third chair. Or fourth.

“Please go ahead and take a shot at drafting the section of our
Daubert
brief discussing the scientific literature. The inferences we can draw from the Feinberg, Ambrose, and Tercero studies aren’t as strong as I’d like, but they give us something to say beyond ‘people who ate SuperSoy got sick soon afterward.’” His tone left no doubt that he put little faith in Dale’s pet argument. “If we find that missing article, it may become the centerpiece of our arguments. But for now, I want you to organize what we have.”

Caroline resisted the urge to cheer. Louis was expanding her involvement in the case.

“I want an outline of your argument on my desk in two days,” Louis finished.

Two days?
Caroline blanched, her nascent celebration rained out.

Louis lifted an envelope from his in-box.

Caroline easily read his body language. The meeting was over. That was fine. She had much to do and little time to do it.

But at the door of Louis’s office, she stopped. She had one more question. A proposal, really. Much as she hated to make it, the tight deadline compelled her to.

“There was this associate, Deena,” Caroline began. “She said she was here to help us—”

“I’d prefer that she not be involved.” Louis’s voice was hard as a mallet on ice.

Caroline’s eyebrows knit. Why was Louis looking at her like she’d just suggested letting a team of baboons into the office to help out?

Louis placed his envelope aside. “Deena’s boss, Anton Callisto, isn’t just a member of the Steering Committee, he’s an ex-marine. Everything’s a war to the man. Make no mistake, his lending of Deena to us isn’t a favor. It’s espionage.”

Caroline stayed silent. She’d assumed that in litigation, the fight would be with the other side. Apparently that was wrong.

“It isn’t just Anton.” Louis folded his hands atop his ink blotter. “The members of the Committee don’t trust anyone. They don’t trust us. They don’t trust each other. They want their own people out here in Los Angeles, where the action is. They want to keep an eye on what we do. I agreed to host these associates because Dale asked me to. But I don’t like it.”

Louis turned his attention back to his mail. “You may use the loaned associates for assistance on minor tasks, spot research projects and the like. But I want one of my own people taking the lead on tracking down that article. And writing up the science.”

“You mean me,” Caroline said. She didn’t need to see Louis’s nod to know the burden remained on her slender shoulders.

Hurrying out of Louis’s office, she formulated a plan. A timetable for completing all tasks necessary to finish the assignment in time. It was Monday evening. She had until the end of Wednesday. Forty-eight hours to corral the science into an outline. She could meet that deadline. Forty-eight hours was a lot of time, she told herself . . . if she didn’t sleep. Or eat. And possibly limited her trips to the bathroom.

But first things first: call that editor and find that article.

Without realizing it, she’d hurried her step until she was jogging toward her office.

“Dead?” Caroline asked into the receiver, even though she’d heard perfectly well.

“Yes,” the
Fielding Journal
’s editor said. “He fell off a cliff in Malibu. The ground gave way under his feet. He broke his neck.”

“That’s horrible.” Caroline pondered the capriciousness of the Fates. You just never knew when a meteor was going to fall out of the sky and pulverize you. She took solace in the fact that a lawyer’s only serious occupational hazard was getting a paper cut.

“Yeah, it was terrible news,” the editor agreed.

“Do you know anything more about what Dr. Heller was working on?” Caroline asked.

“No. When I talked to him in Hawaii, he told me his new paper would blow the walls off SuperSoy. He said we’d save lives when we published. But he didn’t give me a lot of details. He didn’t want to get scooped. That’s the way these scientists are. Until they circulate their papers, they never say much about them.”

“But he never circulated it.”

“Sadly, no. We were really looking forward to shaking things up with that piece.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline asked.

“These big biotech companies make sure the favorable studies get published. No one champions the unfavorable ones,” the editor said. “We try to fight that trend.”

Caroline knew it was true. She recalled that the Hahn and Ambrose articles had both been published in earlier issues of the
Fielding Journal
.

“After Dr. Heller died, we tried to get his paper from his lab, but we couldn’t.” The editor huffed audibly. “Not even from his coauthor.”

“Coauthor?” Caroline’s ears tingled with the news.

“Dr. Anne Wong. She’s kind of a rock star in the world of research science. Her father is a respected biochem professor at Berkeley, but her work has eclipsed his. She’s done some really cutting-edge stuff since she joined Heller’s lab.”

“But she wouldn’t give you the article?” Caroline asked.

“It wasn’t like that. I couldn’t even find her to ask for it,” the editor said. “The lab said she took a leave of absence after Heller died.”

“You mean like bereavement leave?”

“Family emergency is all they’d say. They couldn’t tell me where she’d gone or when she’d be back or anything else, so I gave up on trying to get the article,” the editor said, his voice tinged with resignation.

Caroline thanked him and hung up.

In the silence of her office, the peril of her situation settled around her. Telling Louis about the Heller article had been an act of desperation. The plane had been going down, so she’d tried one last thing to avoid cratering. And it had worked. Louis’s excitement about finding the article had saved what would’ve been a disappointing performance. Failing to find it now might be worse than never mentioning it. In Louis’s mind, she’d become that morally ambiguous associate who’d duped Dr. Feinberg. She needed results to obliterate the memory of her transgressions.

She needed Dr. Wong.

Caroline pivoted toward her laptop. She ran a search for a “Dr. Wong” on the faculty of UC Berkeley’s biochemistry department.

There was only one: Dr. Chao Wong, professor of the Graduate School Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology. Specialization: macromolecular complexes.

Caroline dialed Dr. Wong’s office number.

“This is Dr. Wong,” a man’s voice answered in heavily accented English.

“My name’s Caroline Auden. I’m a lawyer working on an important case that involves your daughter’s research. I was hoping you had a phone number where I could reach her,” Caroline began.

Now there was only silence on the other end. Strange.

Caroline checked to make sure the connection hadn’t been dropped. It hadn’t.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “Your daughter’s lab said she took a leave for a family emergency—”

“I do not know any of this,” Dr. Wong’s voice said in Caroline’s ear.

Caroline chilled at his dismissive tone.

“I do not talk to my daughter in three years,” the elder Dr. Wong clarified, “so I cannot help you with this. I have to go.”

Without waiting for a response, he hung up, leaving Caroline holding a phone full of dead air.

Caroline looked at the receiver, dumbfounded. If the editor of the
Fielding Journal
was correct, Anne Wong was a superstar scientist who’d done her father proud. So then, what could have driven such a wedge between father and daughter that they hadn’t spoken in years?

Caroline turned back to her laptop and ran a search for “Heller Laboratory Dr. Anne Wong.”

The search retrieved nothing illuminating the strained relationship between the older and younger Dr. Wongs. Instead, Caroline discovered hundreds of sites describing Anne Wong’s research achievements. What she found was impressive. Dr. Wong’s innovative methods had led to breakthroughs in cancer research when she’d been a mere research fellow. Most recently, she’d studied the therapeutic effects of cannabinoids on epilepsy.

Caroline considered the information. Science proving that marijuana could treat illness was an area struggling for legitimacy. Perhaps that was why Dr. Wong’s dad had stopped talking to his daughter? It seemed an unduly harsh response to an unorthodox choice of research topics.

Caroline shook her head. Her own relationship with her father wasn’t exactly close. Perhaps Dr. Wong’s father had left his emotionally unstable wife and moved across the country, leaving his daughter to cope with the smoldering wreckage. That could do it. Caroline knew firsthand.

Pushing her own family history from her mind, Caroline skimmed websites, hunting for some hint about Dr. Wong’s family emergency. Her travel plans. The names of her family members. Her friends. Anything suggesting a destination for the missing scientist.