Damned If You Don't (19 page)

She watched him grin at her quip. No, she decided. She missed the grin more. “Point taken.”

“Okay,” he continued. “So you gave your presentations. Everyone went gaga over your findings and then they leaked the information and they all started painting dollar signs on their office doors. Is that about the size of it?”

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right.”

He kept thinking out loud. “Good. Now, some time had to pass, right?”

Morgan tried to think back. “About three months or so.”

“And then you found out the process didn’t work.”

“Yes.”

“So you cried foul, and they didn’t like that.”

“Very much so.”

“All right. Then the first important question is who notified you they were taking the project away?” he continued.

“My direct boss, Dr. Ralph Bernecky, the VP of R&D.”

“When?”

“A few days after my last project meeting.”

“What was the reason he gave you for taking the project away?”

Morgan lifted a brow that asked if this was the third degree, but he just rolled his eyes. “He said it was too big for one person and one team to handle.” She sighed, trying hard not to remember how much that had hurt. “Reading between the lines, he was telling me, ‘you failed so we’re going to find someone else to handle things.’”

“Did he know about Pinky and Louie?”

“Of course. He was one of the first people to know.”

“What happened then?”

“I begged Ralph to let me continue. To let me sort out what went wrong.”

“What was his answer?”

“That two heads and two teams were better than one.”

“Did you believe that?”

“Not a chance.”

He raised a brow at the force of her answer but kept on going. “And that’s when he told you this other guy, what was his name?”

Her stomach knotted with bitterness. “Anton. Anton Dvorak.”

“That Anton was getting the project?”

“Yes. Ralph tried to tell me it was only temporary, but I knew. I’d gone from hero to zero in less than a week. They were going to find someone else who could fix the problem. By any means necessary. That was when I went ballistic. I already knew they were going after the bankers. Now they were just being stupid, and someone was going to get hurt.”

“What did you do next?”

“After realizing the Arctic was warmer than my office? I backpedaled. I apologized. Profusely. So I could keep the project. But it didn’t seem to matter. I took that to mean that they wanted me out of the way so they could make the data work any way they could. That the bankers were more important at that point than reality.”

“Probably were. What happened after that?”

“I overheard a conversation, in the ladies’ room of all places, that my days at BioClin were already numbered. That was when I realized doing the right thing meant nothing to these people.” Morgan sighed. “Ralph fought for me to a certain extent, I suppose, but not really.”

Morgan remembered the disbelief, the shock, picking up the broken glass from the beaker she’d thrown in the sink. “Helluva lesson to learn. Lose your temper and end up killing someone.”

“Un-unh, kitten. No pity party allowed. Keep thinking. You’re on a roll. Keep going.”

“At that point, I knew something was wrong. Kind of like driving along on the freeway and then missing your exit. All of a sudden you wake up and everything is out of kilter, out of focus. Someone had been stealing my notes from my notebook. Then I got pulled off the project. Now I was going to be fired. As if each piece was being engineered or choreographed.”

She watched Jack nod. “They were.”

“Yeah, well, they underestimated their opponent. I knew I didn’t want anyone else working on the project but me. So I took my personal laptop with me to work the next day, not my work computer, by carrying it in my work computer case so no one would know. Then I downloaded all of the files from the server and took my personal computer home with me. The next day I called in sick. I spent the day copying every file onto the memory stick, and then I deleted the files from my personal laptop. When I got in the next morning, I deleted the files from my work computer. Not long after that, they confiscated it. I left the office before they found out I’d deleted the files and never went back.”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t you also tell me you deleted all the files from the server after you’d copied them?”

She smiled. “I’m not that good. I had help.”

He raised a brow, seeming to wonder if she was going to elaborate.
Not yet.

“Very well, we’ll get to that later. Right now I think we need to talk to Ralph,” he decided.

Morgan smiled. A real smile. One from the heart. “You know something? I do too. How many minutes do you have left on your phone?”

“Enough.”

“Good. I’m going to call him and have him meet us. And I know just the place.”

He turned serious. “Somewhere very public, okay?”

Morgan nodded and threw him a look. “Of course.”

* * * *

O’Donnell’s was a small Irish pub. If they hadn’t already just had lunch, Morgan would’ve insisted they eat again. The shepherd’s pie was to die for. And she knew Ralph would feel comfortable meeting here.

Portly, balding, Ralph didn’t fit the physical profile of a highly respected PhD. He looked more like a kid’s little league coach. And he was one, for his son. But the man knew his science, and he managed to orchestrate multiple projects by multiple project teams at one time. Which could be called art rather than science.

As Ralph sat down, he hesitated and shook his head at her. “Jesus, Morgan. You look…different. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Morgan watched Ralph’s gaze flip to Jack. “Jack, this was my boss, but since I left the company before I was ever officially fired, I have no idea how to introduce him. Dr. Ralph Bernecky. Ralph, this is Jack Kent.”

“Pleased to meet ya,” Ralph replied, shaking hands with Jack.

“Likewise.”

“Thanks for coming, Ralph,” Morgan said.

He grimaced back at her. “Puts me in a bad position, ya know. But I had to come. You need to make peace with the company. If you give me the files and walk away, I can help. I’m sure I can get the company to let bygones be bygones. They won’t press charges.”

Relief washed through her as Morgan realized Ralph had no idea what was going on with the rest of it. Ralph was working from the point of view that she’d committed industrial espionage, nothing else. Yet she couldn’t help feeling sad. She’d hoped for little more loyalty. But hell, she didn’t have two kids, two car payments, and a mortgage. Just integrity. Which that meant more to her than all the mortgages in the world put together.

“That’s not why I called you, Ralph.”

Confusion creased his forehead at the flat tone in her voice. “I don’t understand. You mean you’re not turning yourself in?”

Morgan flicked her gaze to Jack. His features appeared neutral, but she could tell he was judging and processing Ralph’s every word, his every expression.

“Let’s just say, there’s a little more to the story. So no, not yet. The reason I called you was to ask you some questions.”

“Questions?” her ex-boss asked, his tone guarded, and his gaze not quite meeting hers. “What kind of questions?”

Ralph’s mistrust hurt big time. Obviously, he’d known some of what was going to happen. “Oh, like when you knew they were going to take the project away from me.”

“I didn’t until right before I told you.”

Morgan felt Jack stiffen. She watched him lean forward against the table and stare at Ralph for several long seconds. She wasn’t sure how he knew Ralph was lying, but he did. “The lady asked you a fair question, Ralph. I suggest you answer her honestly. I’m not in the mood to dick around with anyone from BioClin right now.”

Ralph’s gaze shot to hers. “He knows? How much? Do you know what kind of trouble you’re both in?”

“More than you’ll ever know, Ralph,” Morgan replied, her tone sad.

But Ralph wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at Jack. “Just who the hell are you, anyway? Are you a cop?”

Jack simply smiled. “Something like that.”

Ralph didn’t look at either of them. He stared at the table and started shredding a cocktail napkin. His fingers shook ever so slightly. “Can I have a beer?”

Jack stopped their waitress and ordered one. Once it arrived, Ralph swallowed a healthy draught. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Except for sticking a knife in my back, Morgan thought bitterly. “You sold me out.”

“Sort of.”

At least he had the decency to look her straight in the eyes when he said it. “What do you mean, sort of?” she asked, dread growing in the pit of her stomach.

“It was all internal politics. You should have paid attention. But you didn’t want to know about that kind of stuff, you just wanted to be left alone to do your job. In a way, I admired you for that. But in another, you were incredibly naive if you thought you were going to be able to get away with that kind of behavior.”

“Dog eat dog,” Jack muttered, his tone suggesting he was none too happy about her treatment.

“I tried to warn you, Morgan. But you wouldn’t listen. The moment you walked out of that project meeting, you killed the goose. They were already counting the money, don’t you see? They were already trying to figure out who they could hire with the biggest name that would garner the most prestige. They were looking at this as the biggest breakthrough since Viagra. And then you went and blew it all to hell and back again.”

“Tell me about it,” she answered bitterly. “I need to know more, Ralph. Did they say anything else to you?”

Ralph frowned back at her, not quite understanding the question. “You mean, about your test mice? About the process?”

“Yeah, that teensy-weensy little problem that was going to end all those lovely dollars for BioClin. Did they tell you anything more?”

“More? I’m not sure I follow.”

Jack laid a gentle hand on her arm before she could explode. When she looked up, he gave a slight shake of his head. It was obvious Ralph didn’t know the process had been used elsewhere.

All right. There were other questions she could ask. “Did anyone ever talk to you about Gateway, one of our distributors in Europe?”

Ralph looked a bit astonished. “In regards to this project? Of course not.”

So that meant Ralph truly had no idea of anything else going on. Funny, though, how this piece of his innocence didn’t make her feel much better. Maybe asking the one question that was burning a hole deep in the pit of her belly, would.

“How much did they pay you, Ralph? To keep quiet about the process not working? To keep their plans alive?” she asked, learning from Jack. Her tone betrayed little of the turmoil that raged inside her.

“They didn’t. I—”

“How much?” Jack asked again, cutting him off.

“It was a bonus.”

Morgan was certain she was going to get sick. The one person she’d thought she could trust. “How much?” Morgan cried, slamming her palms on the table.

“Enough to put one of my kids through college. Private college.”

“Bastard,” she hissed. Then she felt Jack’s hand tighten on her arm. She didn’t want to make a spectacle that would be remembered. “You’re the one who sold me out.”

Ralph looked up, and she could see the misery warring with remorse in his gaze. She almost felt sorry for him. “No I didn’t! Honest!”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand, Morgan. You’re smart. You get it. You have the ability to think outside the box. I don’t. I just barely got my doctorate. I’m a people person. I can manage things, but I’m not good in the lab. You are. So I rode your coattails. And when the fountain stopped flowing, I took the money. I’m sorry.”

Morgan swallowed, not trusting herself to answer. She let Jack do that for her instead. “How sorry, Ralph?”

“Sorry enough to know that I don’t want Morgan going to jail on my account.”

“Good.” Jack gave her arm a light, reassuring squeeze. “Then you can help Morgan stay out of jail by telling us if anyone else who was in that meeting and knew that the process didn’t work, came to you after the meeting.”

“Yes.”

Morgan whipped her gaze up to stare at Ralph. Ralph dropped his gaze. And then Morgan realized. “You don’t work for BioClin anymore, do you? You took the bonus check and you ran.”

“I got an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Jack caught her gaze with his, and she realized there was a “we” in Ralph’s prior statement. “Who, Ralph?”

Ralph didn’t answer; he just kept staring at the table making more and more shreds of his napkin. Morgan didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Was integrity truly dead?

Morgan shivered turning cold inside. Someone she knew, someone she’d worked side by side with for two years screwed her over. But that didn’t matter. That same someone had used the process to kill.

A part of her didn’t want to ask the question. Because that would mean she would have to know the answer. The other part of her knew she’d never sleep until she did.

“Who gave you the job, Ralph?”

He didn’t answer. “Who gave you the job, Ralph?” she asked again, her tone tight and brittle with anger. “I’m not going to ask again.”

Ralph lifted his anguished gaze from the table and said, “Anton Dvorak.”

Chapter Eighteen

Morgan was certain she’d never be whole again. As soon as they reached their hotel room, Jack wrapped his arms around her and refused to let go. She fought him. She fought herself. A huge emptiness gaped before her. He didn’t say anything. He simply let go, made her lie down on the bed, and tucked her in under the covers.

“Make the pain go away, Jack.”

“I’d like to, darlin’. But I’m on the wrong side of everything right now.”

Honesty. When she’d least expected it.

Integrity. When she’d least expected it.

Morgan slid onto her side and scooted over so Jack could lie down and wrap his arms around her. His chest labored with furious abandon against her back. “Why, Jack? Why?”

“Because people feel they have to do what they have to do to survive. There’s no justification to it, just fact, I guess.”