Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (7 page)

“Good,” Eddie said, gracing her with a luminous smile.

A phone buzzed in Eddie’s pocket.

He withdrew it and glanced at the caller.

“My boss. Calling me back,” he said, looking at Caroline with an apologetic expression. “This’ll just take a second.”

Caroline stepped back to give Eddie symbolic privacy, but she watched him while he talked. With his well-styled hair and well-tailored suit, he looked the part of a confident young lawyer. But on his neck, just above his perfectly pressed collar, there was a small burn scar, perhaps the size of a cigarette tip. She wondered how he’d gotten it.

Eddie hung up and turned back to Caroline.

“Sounds like this new judge is trouble for us,” he said.

“Why?”

“Paul didn’t say much, but he didn’t sound too happy about the shift to New York. He just said Jacobsen’s a god-awful draw for us.”

“Maybe Louis knows something,” Caroline said, already hurrying toward the elevator.

Caroline sat in Louis’s guest chair with a legal pad balanced on her lap and a pen in her hand, waiting for her boss to say something.

Louis stood silently by the window, his glasses perched atop his head, his neck craned down at the file’s contents. In his gray suit, he looked as monolithic and formidable as the gray buildings behind him. Upon learning the name of the new judge, he’d called Silvia, who’d appeared in his office seconds later holding the file folder with the judge’s name typed across the top. Now he studied the pages. One by one. Deliberate but fast.

When he’d finished the last page, Louis scowled. “Paul Tiller’s right. Judge Jacobsen is a dreadful draw for us. He defended companies against asbestos litigation for decades before being appointed to the bench. He also did some graduate work in molecular cell biology prior to going to law school. By nature and by training, he’s going to be skeptical of the science.”

“Can we get a new judge?” Caroline asked.

“No. Jacobsen’s involvement in asbestos litigation isn’t enough to require him to recuse himself. We’d have to move to disqualify him, and I’m not comfortable with our chances of success. If we fail, we’ll have poisoned the well. If you shoot at a king—don’t miss.” Louis shook his white-haired head. “I’m afraid we’re stuck with him.”

“So what do we do?” Caroline asked.

“We write a singularly compelling brief. We make it impossible for Judge Jacobsen to deny the existence of a link between SuperSoy and kidney damage.”

Caroline nodded. It was a good speech. A great set of aspirations. Unfortunately, reality wasn’t being so cooperative.

“I’d feel better about our chances if we had some science showing a direct link,” she said.

“Agreed,” Louis said, letting the mask slip enough for Caroline to see his concerns. When she’d told him about Dr. Heller’s death and Dr. Wong’s apparent disappearance, he’d taken the news with the grim determination of a cavalry lieutenant facing a wall of cannons.

Now he exhaled softly.

“All we can do is to play the hand that’s been dealt to us,” he said.

“But what if it’s a bad hand?” Caroline asked.

“Then unless you play very well or you are very lucky, you lose.”

Louis’s eyes flickered over to the chess game on the small table by his window. Caroline noted that neither side had moved since her last visit to the senior partner’s antiquated domain. It was a slow, deliberate game that Louis played. But while he might win his chess match, Caroline couldn’t see how he’d win the
SuperSoy
case.

Litigation wasn’t chess. A game of chess always began the same way. The pieces lined up, identical on both sides. Who won and who lost depended on each player’s skill. Litigation was different. Sometimes the evidence just didn’t fall into place. Sometimes you couldn’t win.

The thought depressed Caroline. Still, she waited for Louis to say something inspirational. Something hopeful.

But the only sound she heard was the ambient hum of activity in the firm’s halls. A hum that had nothing to do with SuperSoy.

Caroline studied Louis’s face. She worried she’d started to see traces of disappointment. In the faint tightening of his mouth, in the soft sigh of his breath when she’d told him that she hadn’t managed to locate the Heller article, she feared she saw his interest in her waning like a balloon with a slow leak, its bright sheen growing limp before crumpling into a rumpled heap.

“The transfer of this case to New York is going to create some issues for us,” Louis said finally. “I need you to prepare a pro hac vice application for me so I can appear before the district court there.”

“Will do.” Caroline had googled
pro hac vice
at a stoplight on her way back to the office from the hearing. Wikipedia had provided a superficial description of what the Latin phrase meant. Translated as “for this one occasion,” pro hac vice was a lawyer’s request for permission to appear in a court where he was not licensed.

“New York allows appearances by out-of-state attorneys so long as they’re sponsored by a local attorney and they provide a Certificate of Good Standing from the state bar,” Louis said. “Silvia has my Certificate of Good Standing on file. Please arrange to have Anton Callisto sponsor my application.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Caroline said. She kept her face neutral even as she noted that Louis only planned to request permission for himself to appear. She wondered if he’d even ask her to attend the hearing in New York. Or whether she’d be staying home.

Louis removed his wire-rimmed glasses and placed them gently on his ink blotter. Without his glasses framing his light eyes, his gaze held a pale vulnerability. He looked out the window, his aristocratic features distracted.

“I suppose it might be time to give up on finding that article,” he mused aloud. Unsaid was
since you failed abysmally at finding it
.

Unsure what else she could say, Caroline nodded her understanding and left his office.

As she walked away from Louis’s office, Caroline didn’t notice the staff at the workstations in the halls. She didn’t notice the box of doughnuts laid out on the credenza, a gift from some grateful client. Instead, she chewed the inside of her lip and considered her dilemma.

Hale Stern didn’t hire the usual way, sorting through hundreds of applicants during the on-campus interviews hosted by the law schools, holding back-to-back conversations with candidates in cramped hotel rooms across the street from campuses. No, Hale Stern handpicked its candidates from clinical courses taught by the firm’s partners at the top law schools in the country. It invested substantial time in selecting its new attorneys. And when those attorneys arrived, they were expected to perform. Immediately.

And she wasn’t performing. Not yet, anyway.

Caroline felt like an Olympic diver attempting a trick with a high degree of difficulty. If she pulled it off, she’d stand on the victors’ podium for sure. But if she failed, she risked braining herself on the diving board. At this point, a belly flop seemed likely. Even inevitable.

She consoled herself that she could go to another firm if things didn’t work out at Hale Stern. But the consolation fell flat. If she left too soon, she’d be seen as damaged goods. Her short stint at Hale Stern—or her gap in employment if she left the firm off her résumé—would be an indictment. She’d be lucky to find another position. And that meant she’d be stuck at home longer. In that house full of ghosts. Full of her uncle . . . She didn’t know if she could stand it.

All of which brought her back to her problem. The Heller article. Because of her inability to find anything else of use in the war room, her success or failure at Hale Stern had telescoped down to a single question: whether she could find Dr. Heller’s missing article. She’d pushed all her chips into the center of the table, gambling on finding it.

But she’d already tried the easy pathways to information about the article. To find it, she might need to try some . . . harder ones.

Her chest grew cold, as if a ghost had passed through her.

She knew the price of information. There were always ways to find things out. Some of those ways were legal. Some were not. She knew the lines of demarcation. After her father had been arrested for hacking, those lines were tattooed indelibly on her soul. Yes, Caroline knew the toll of information. The human toll. To herself. To those she’d loved . . .

She was fairly sure she could find the article through legal means, but the slope was a slippery one. She knew how addicting the hunt for information could become. How difficult it was to stop once she’d started . . . Even when prudence dictated caution, she’d shown herself heedless of the imperative to retreat from the hunt.

Caroline slowed her steps.

Glass windows beside office doors provided glimpses of the Hale Stern lawyers inside. As she passed each one, she studied their faces. Old faces and young. Male and female. Of myriad ethnicities. But all of them practiced at the pinnacle of the legal world. All of them had made a professional home at one of the most well-respected firms in the country.

Their offices reflected their success. Some, like Louis’s, were decorated with antiques. Brass fittings and carved walnut furniture. Persian rugs and elegant lamps. Others had opted for more modern trappings. Caroline idly wondered whether the partners received a decorating stipend or whether they paid for their furnishings themselves. They could certainly afford it.

Caroline stopped before an empty office. A small one. An associate’s office that contained only an oak desk and metal bookshelf holding the ubiquitous Code of Civil Procedure issued to all first-year associates. Beyond the sparse furnishings, a panoramic view of the San Gabriel Mountains rose up in the north.

She read the nameplate on the door:
G
REG
P
ORTOS
.

Pulling back as if touched by electricity, Caroline turned and hurried to her own office.

Before she began, Caroline shut her door. What she was about to do wasn’t forbidden. Subterfuge might be morally reprehensible, but no law barred it. Still, she didn’t want to explain her methods to anyone. People might judge. Even she herself could not escape the pang of conscience that settled in the pit of her stomach, a reminder of the dread she’d experienced the last time she’d dug too far for information . . .

Bringing her fingers to her laptop, she ran a search for Dr. Franklin Heller.

As before, dozens of obituaries appeared on the screen. But this time, she wasn’t interested in the details of the scientist’s death. Instead, she scrolled down until she found the information she sought: Dr. Heller was survived by his wife, Yvonne Heller.

Perhaps the dead scientist’s wife knew something about the article.

There was only one way to find out: she needed a phone number.

She hoped that finding it would be relatively simple.

As expected, she found nothing in the publicly available telephone databases. A general search for “Yvonne Heller” failed, too. It retrieved hundreds of pages. Too many to be useful.

Caroline knew she needed to limit the universe of results.

She restricted her results to Yvonne Hellers who lived in Los Angeles County.