Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (17 page)

“Come to my hotel?” Eddie half asked, half stated.

Caroline heard the need in his voice.

She told herself to stop. She’d been chased. She’d raced to meet an impossible deadline. She needed to board a flight to New York in less than twelve hours.

Nodding at Eddie, she went in for another kiss.

Moonlight slipped into the hotel room through a gap in the drapes, painting pale lines on Eddie’s arm, which was tossed casually over Caroline’s waist. His body curved around her, his chest rising and falling in sleep.

Caroline commanded herself to get up. She had a flight to catch to New York in a few hours, and she still needed to pack. But her body refused to oblige. She didn’t want to leave the warm tangle of limbs and sheets. She did not want to end this moment, suspended in time, when everything, for once, seemed perfect.

Even the room was perfect. In the dim light, Caroline’s eyes traced the opulent furnishings. She’d expected something modest. Maybe a residence hotel. Something functional and basic. She hadn’t expected a hand-tooled leather headboard. Lilies in a vase. Thick bathrobes embroidered with the hotel’s logo . . . though their night had seen little use for bathrobes.

A smile crossed Caroline’s face at the recollection of the last six hours they’d spent together in the Egyptian cotton sheets. But her smile faded at the recollection of the platinum blonde.

She scolded herself. What Eddie did wasn’t her business. He lived in Atlanta and would return there soon.

So what if he had caramel skin that felt like satin under her touch? What did it matter that his lips were even softer than she had imagined? And who cared if he had strong hands coupled with a feline grace? And if those gentle butterfly fingers felt so fine on her breasts, her waist, between her legs?

As if sensing her gaze, Eddie opened his dark eyes.

In silence, his black eyes traced along Caroline’s face. He reached out a hand and brushed it lightly along the curve of her hip.

Caroline’s body responded, her skin flushing hot at his touch.

She told herself she needed to get up. She needed to leave.

But again, her body refused to oblige.

In fact, it did the exact opposite.

CHAPTER 9

Caroline floated through the airport. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Eddie’s appreciative gaze as he’d leaned against the headboard, one arm behind his head, watching her move around his dimly lit hotel room as she’d dressed. His eyes had tracked her until she leaned forward to kiss him one last time. It had felt good.

Now she walked down the Jetway, pulling her rolling briefcase behind her. Before she’d closed the three-ring binder and shoved it into the briefcase, she’d added the one final, key piece of the puzzle: the Heller article. That had felt good, too.

As she entered the plane, some part of Caroline’s mind whispered that air travel usually triggered anxiety. But another part of her mind told her to stuff it. This flight was different. She was on her way to New York, where they were going to defeat Med-Gen’s
Daubert
motion. The plaintiffs would get their settlement. The danger to her would dissipate. She could stop thinking about getting a gun and learning how to fire it.

Caroline spotted Louis and Dale in first class. Beside Dale sat a portly man with a beard that failed to make him look any older than the twentysomething he probably was.

“How’s everyone doing this morning?” Caroline asked the group. In her ears, her voice sounded almost jarringly chipper. It couldn’t be helped. Nothing could sink her buoyant mood.

From his seat by the window, Louis smiled. “The dogs let me sleep in, so I’m grand this morning, Ms. Auden. Just grand.” Caroline knew the reason for his joy was more than his dogs. “I know I’ve thanked you already,” Louis continued, “but I want to thank you again in person. Finding the Heller article was nothing short of brilliant.”

“Yeah, great job,” said Dale from across the aisle. “I read it this morning, and boy, oh, boy, is that good stuff.” He gestured with his chin toward the man who overflowed the seat behind him. “This is my assistant, Harold. He’s my tech wizard. He’s the one I credit for getting me to step into the twenty-first century.”

Behind Dale, Harold met Caroline’s eyes and shook his head no.

Caroline allowed a flicker of a smile to cross her face in silent kinship with Harold. A fellow digital native trying to lead another digital immigrant into the future.

“Hello, Harold . . . I’m just glad we got it filed,” Caroline said, lifting her rolling briefcase into the overhead bin before sitting down in the aisle seat beside Louis and across from Dale. “Once we add Ambrose’s findings on mitochondrial degradation to Heller’s findings about how SuperSoy affects mitochondria, I don’t know how we can lose.”

Caroline knew she was supposed to hedge. Lawyers hedge. Always. They operate in the gray areas, battling to convince judges to buy their version of events, to believe their narrative over the other guy’s narrative. There’s no such thing as a sure thing in the law. Ever. And yet, Caroline felt bullish about their chances. SuperSoy damaged kidneys. The conclusion wasn’t debatable anymore. It was a fact.

She searched Dale’s face to gauge his reaction to her assessment of Ambrose.

Dale shrugged. “I confess I haven’t spent a ton of time with the articles. The way I see it, the meat of our argument is exactly what prompted us to file suit against Med-Gen in the first place—the proximity in time between the plaintiffs’ ingestion of SuperSoy and their kidney failure. That’s the best thing we’ve got. That a doctor would put SuperSoy on his differential diagnosis if he had a patient who came into his office with renal failure is going to be enough science for this judge.”

“You might be right,” Caroline allowed, “but the scientific literature helps us, too. You read those summaries of the main studies, right? Those short paragraphs I prepared?”

“I skimmed them. They were helpful and I appreciate you putting those together for me.”

With a cold bolt of worry in her chest, Caroline nodded.

“Don’t y’all worry,” Dale said. “We’ve got a solid six hours. Plenty of time for you to get me all up to speed on whatever you think I need to know.”

Sitting down in her seat, Caroline withdrew her laptop from her bag. “I’ve got everything here. We can just start going through the key studies and I’ll—”

Dale frowned at the laptop.

Deciding to take his sour expression as a reaction to technology rather than as a reaction to studying, Caroline retrieved the three-ring binder of articles from the overhead bin. She opened the heavy binder on her lap and flipped to the page of summaries.

“We can talk the science through now,” she said. “Just in case the judge has questions about some of the secondary articles . . .”

But before Caroline could begin, another passenger boarded the plane. A flash of geranium-orange Saint John jacket. Cashmere paisley scarf. The scent of Chanel No. 5.

Even before she saw her face, Caroline knew who it was. Deena. The New York associate’s sheath skirt forced her to mince step her way down the aisle.

Dale’s eyes traveled from Caroline’s binder to Deena’s figure.

Caroline resisted the urge to groan.

Deena stopped one row ahead of Dale and slipped into her seat in front of him just as the doors of the plane closed.

Pivoting around, Deena graced Dale with a large smile.

“You ready to go?” she asked.

“Just about,” he said. “Caroline here’s gonna help me out with my final preparations.” Dale leaned toward his associate. “Open a template, Harold. Let’s make a PowerPoint.”

Then Dale turned back to Caroline, clapped his hands together once, and said, “So, what are we gonna argue tomorrow?”

Despite hours of work, things were looking grim, Caroline admitted to herself.

She sat beside Dale with her binder open in her lap. Across the aisle, in her old seat beside Louis, Harold worked on finalizing the slapdash PowerPoint presentation Dale had prepared with all the attentiveness of a husband being asked to choose between china patterns.

A row of small plastic bottles stood like soldiers along the far edge of Dale’s tray table. The first three were empty. The last two were not.

“After I finish my proximity-in-time-to-injury argument, I’ll give the judge the high points of each of the articles we’ve discussed, then I’ll circle back to Heller one last time, then I’m done,” Dale said. As if to punctuate his sentence, he twisted the top off the next whiskey bottle and emptied the contents into the well-used cup of ice.

“But what exactly are you going to say about each article?” Caroline said. She felt like a broken record. For hours Louis and now she had been trying to get Dale to focus. But Dale’s response had been the same every time. He’d discuss the “high points.” No details. No further elaboration as to what he meant. No chance of persuading the judge, Caroline finished to herself.

Beside her, she could feel the consternation rolling off Louis in waves. She didn’t need to see her boss’s face to know the vertical furrow beside his eyebrow was at least a foot deep by now. She knew that Dale had hired Hale Stern to help make himself look good, but he was making it awfully hard for them to help do that.

“Don’t worry,” Dale said. “I’m a game-day guy. I’ve done this hundreds of times—I get in front of the judge and the magic happens. I’ve got plenty to work with here. Trust me.”

Caroline wasn’t so sure. Even though she’d watched Dale spellbind the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee at the Las Vegas luncheon, she wasn’t consoled. Neither was Louis. He’d taken Dale to the back of the plane to talk. While Caroline couldn’t hear what he’d said to Dale, she’d easily read his expression. He was concerned. When he’d returned, Louis had told her to do her best to break through Dale’s inebriation. As for himself, he needed to prepare for the next set of depositions in the
Telemetry Systems
matter. Unsaid was that Louis had turned his attention to the less hopeless task on the flight.

“Why don’t you just spend a little time with the chart I made?” she began again, forcing patience into her voice. “Then we can talk about how the other articles all support Heller’s conclusions. The flowchart I prepared for you shows how the articles interrelate. The chart is super helpful. I color coded it to make it easy for you.”

“Sure, right, the flowchart,” Dale said absently.

Caroline resisted the urge to smash her head into the seat in front of her. But that would wake up Deena, which would be worse.

“I’ll be right back,” Caroline said, standing up. She needed to regroup. She needed to calm down. She had to find a way to get through to Dale. They were running out of time.

Walking toward the back of the plane, she shot a look at Louis, whose white head was bent over a pile of deposition notes. He glanced up and met her eyes. She considered lamenting her woes to him, but she knew he already knew them. She knew he shared them.

Five minutes later, Caroline walked back toward her seat. She’d come up with a plan. She’d just tell Dale the highlights of each article. She’d read the summaries to him out loud if she had to. Even in his drunken state, he might absorb some pertinent information.

When she arrived at her seat, Caroline found Deena sitting in it.

“I decided to help out,” Deena said, bumping Dale’s shoulder with her own, eliciting a hearty guffaw from the Texan.

“I’ll gladly take your help any time, little lady,” Dale said, bumping Deena back.

“But I need to get Dale ready—”

“Remember, I read those articles, too,” Deena cut Caroline off. “I can take over from here. Just take my seat. There’s a
Vogue
magazine there you can read, if you’d like.” She looked Caroline over with an expression that suggested Caroline could do with a little help from the magazine’s fashion gurus.

Deena handed Caroline’s laptop up to her, then turned back to Dale.

Sitting down in Deena’s seat, Caroline felt tears of frustration welling in her eyes.

Calm. Balance. Equanimity.

These things were difficult for Caroline to find the morning of the
Daubert
hearing. She’d spent the night lying awake with dread in her gut. They were in trouble. Dale might not be ready, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Standing at the bathroom sink of her hotel room, Caroline noted her dark-ringed eyes.

She dashed off a quick text to Louis:
I’ll meet you at court.

Her boss didn’t need to see her like this, before she’d found a way to cover her doubts. Before she’d donned enough armor to convey an impression of calm confidence. Before she’d wiped the exhaustion and despondency from her countenance.

Three coffees later, Caroline was awake. In fact, she was practically vibrating with the caffeine coursing through her veins. Not good for someone with a hair-trigger nervous system and a gut like a colicky child.

Dragging her rolling briefcase behind her with one hand and carrying her laptop bag over her shoulder, Caroline stepped out to the curb to hail a cab.

A gust of wind blew hard down the concrete canyon of buildings, blasting through her suit jacket. All around her, people wore long woolen coats. She’d apparently missed the Appropriate Fall Clothing Memorandum.

Shivering, she lifted a hand.

A cab pulled up immediately and Caroline rejoiced at her luck . . . until she noted the deep gash on the passenger-side door. At least someone else had rammed into the taxi, not the other way around. Right? Right.

She squeezed her rolling briefcase into the backseat, then climbed in after it.

“Where ya going, missus?” asked the driver. The streetlights reflected off his bald black head.

“District court. It’s down on Pearl Street.”

In the rearview mirror, Caroline saw the cabbie scowl.

“I know it’s just a few blocks away, but I just didn’t want to carry all this stuff. I tip well,” she added. “I promise.”

In answer, the cabbie jerked away from the curb with a quick swing of the steering wheel and a flash of erratic acceleration. Caroline reached for the door to steady herself. She hoped the day would go smoothly. Sometimes a day clicked together, each puzzle piece fitting effortlessly into the next. She closed her eyes and sent a wish, a prayer to anyone listening out there that today would be such a day.