Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (12 page)

Caroline’s eyes settled on the words she’d scrawled across her legal pad: Yvonne Heller’s address. The one idea she’d had since arriving in Las Vegas had been almost alarmingly easy to pursue. Reverse phone lookups weren’t hard. With Yvonne’s cell number, finding her physical address had taken Caroline mere seconds. But now the thought of getting into her car, driving to the widow’s house, and knocking on her door seemed insane . . . but necessary.

Caroline had relegated the dog-eared and marked-up
Scziewizcs
decision to a distant corner of the hotel room’s desk. But she couldn’t avoid its implications. Without some scientific literature establishing a direct link, the judge might very well throw the case out, leaving tens of thousands of people dead or destitute.

Again, her gaze settled on Yvonne’s address, and again, she recalled her conversation with the widow. The stilted, lurching speech pattern. Guarded and awkward, moving in fits and starts from hostility to regret. As if Yvonne had been . . . scared.

A visceral wave of nausea rippled down Caroline’s esophagus.

She mentally cursed Louis. His description of Kennedy’s misdeeds had fed her paranoia until it felt real. But it might not be real, Caroline reminded herself. Indeed, it was far more likely that she’d built a castle of worry in the sky. And then furnished it and moved in.

Turning back to her laptop, Caroline took a calming breath.

The outline was real. Ambrose was real, as were Feinberg and Tercero. And she needed to pull them together into a coherent outline. Now.

Hunting for gems of information she could string together as if on a necklace, her fingers flew across the keyboard and her mind whirred, revving to top speed. A wired and antsy vibration, amped up and electric, hummed through her body and her mind and the pieces came into focus. Bright and useful, each shone with necessity and carried inside it the question that would lead her to the next piece of information. One puzzle piece, then the next. Methodically but quickly she fit one in and moved on to the next. The need to create coherence out of chaos drove her forward. Until time dropped away, and she flew.

When Caroline looked up again, three hours had passed.

She sat back in her chair and gave her work a frank appraisal. The outline was good. As far as it went, anyway. She’d done a lot with a little. And yet it wasn’t the irrefutable piece of logic that she needed it to be. It couldn’t be. Not without a direct link.

Pushing back from the desk, Caroline walked over to the window that overlooked the frenetic, blinking neon landscape below. Dancing fountains and pyrotechnics lit the evening sky.

The display of frivolity and color contrasted with Caroline’s pensive mood.

Maybe Kennedy was right. Maybe the pieces just weren’t there. In all the published science, no researcher had drawn a direct connection between SuperSoy and kidney damage.

Sure, Franklin Heller might have drawn that direct connection, but he’d never published anything. He’d never even submitted his article for peer review. That meant no one had vetted it. For all anyone knew, his methods might have been shoddy. His reasoning might have been weak. It might not even be worth finding. And that meant the plaintiffs’ case might never get any stronger than it was right now . . . which wasn’t very strong.

No, Caroline thought. Just . . . no
.
She would not go gentle into that good night. The words from the Dylan Thomas poem came to her like a soothing whisper. Her mother had played a recording of it daily in the months after Caroline’s dad had left. Maybe Joanne had harbored hopes of luring her husband back. Caroline, for her part, had fought to keep her father in her own life. She’d done what she could to thwart his painful absence. And he’d even started reaching out to her. In recent months, there’d been invitations to come visit him in Connecticut. Finally. Maybe too late. After so much awkwardness for so long.

The point was, she was a fighter. The death of one scientist didn’t have to mean the death of the case. They could still win. With even one article showing a direct link—even an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed article—she could write a persuasive argument. She knew she could. She could take a stained piece of newsprint and fold it into origami.

Caroline returned to the desk and lifted the komboloi beads from where they lay beside the laptop. She ran the beads over her hands. Cool and smooth, they grounded her.

What next?

What of Kennedy?

If he’d really killed Heller, then her assignment had become something far more dangerous than hunting for a missing article. Safety dictated stepping aside. Even if they might lose.

And yet, if Med-Gen had killed Dr. Heller, he must have written something incendiary. His article must have been devastating to SuperSoy. That meant it was a piece of evidence well worth finding. Even if it hadn’t been published or peer reviewed, it might be good. Really good. She just needed to find it.

But that meant visiting Yvonne Heller.

That meant stepping out from behind the laptop, leaving the safety of her ivory tower, and walking into the storm.

Watching the play of lights across the darkness of her room, Caroline made up her mind.

She’d visit Yvonne when she got home.

CHAPTER 6

Yvonne Heller sat in a rouge silk armchair. She wore linen trousers pressed with a confident crease. With unblemished skin the color of milk chocolate, she seemed of indeterminate age, though Caroline guessed she was in her early fifties.

“I don’t have the article,” Yvonne said in her refined alto. “I couldn’t find it anywhere after Franklin’s . . . accident.”

Yvonne’s eyes traveled to the window of the sitting room. Caroline tracked her gaze to the front drive. There was no one there.

“But you’re not sure it was an accident?” Caroline asked slowly.

“The physical evidence at the scene was next to nil. Franklin’s body wasn’t found until the next morning. After the tide had come up and gone back down again . . .” Yvonne winced and Caroline imagined the widow’s residual trauma at having identified Franklin’s hill-battered and sea-scoured corpse for the coroner.

“The medical examiner said the injuries were consistent with a fall down the steep hillside,” Yvonne continued.

“Except . . .” Caroline prompted.

Yvonne shifted in her chair. “Except these biotech companies spend a fortune developing these organisms. And Med-Gen was so . . . aggressive.”

“Aggressive?” Caroline echoed.

“We began getting phone calls from Med-Gen’s affiliated nonprofit entities around the time Franklin began working on that article. And then, when the editor of the
Fielding Journal
signaled to Franklin that he wanted to publish it . . . that’s when we started receiving those calls almost daily.”

“What were those calls?” Caroline asked. “Were they bribes? Threats?”

“Oh, it wasn’t as blatant as all that. They were always unsolicited offers of grant money. They were always couched as interest in my husband’s
scholarly research
.”

“But you knew it was more than that,” Caroline surmised.

“We both did,” Yvonne said. “Franklin always rejected money from the biotech and drug companies to fund his research. He raised his own money from independent private sources. Clean sources. He feared his impartiality would be tainted otherwise.”

“He doubted his own integrity?”

“It’s just human nature,” Yvonne said. “A scientist who takes money wants to avoid conflicts with his patron. You begin to see what you want to see. You don’t do the experiments that will show you the things you don’t want to know. That’s why Franklin always insisted on his own funding.”

Caroline eyed the elegant sitting room. Hand-dyed wool rugs. Roman blinds fashioned of raw silk. It was clear the Hellers liked nice things. Maybe Franklin had been the one doing the decorating. But Yvonne’s appearance suggested that it was far more likely that it was her taste that drove the Hellers’ decor.

“That couldn’t have been easy for you,” Caroline said.

“It wasn’t.” The bitterness in Yvonne’s tone held an echo of past arguments. “Did you know my husband used to be a successful plastic surgeon? His practice was very lucrative. I should know. I did the books. But he gave it all up for research.”

The corners of Yvonne’s mouth curved downward.

“I take it that research was less lucrative?” Caroline prompted.

“Much less. We had to sell Franklin’s medical group’s office building to fund his first research project.”

“That sounds hard.” Caroline inclined her head in sympathy. Even though she’d never lived as lavishly as Yvonne did, she could see the widow’s struggle written on her face.

“I didn’t like the change,” Yvonne admitted. “For years, I resisted it. I only recently came to accept that this was our life together now.”

Caroline lifted her eyebrows, encouraging the widow to elaborate.

“About six months ago, I started winding up the medical group,” Yvonne continued, “closing the old bank accounts, auditing the group’s remaining assets, going through old paperwork. That sort of thing. It’s been an interesting process because my husband stashed assets all over the place.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline asked.

“The medical group held all sorts of property, including several accounts at various banks,” Yvonne said. “Nothing of any significant value.” Caroline could almost hear Yvonne’s unspoken
unfortunately
at the end of the sentence.

“Is it possible your husband stashed the article somewhere, too?” Caroline asked. “Maybe in a safe deposit box at one of those banks?”

Yvonne shook her head. “He didn’t have a safe deposit box. But that article was his proudest achievement. I have to believe he planned for the possibility of . . . of this.” A flash of pain flickered across Yvonne’s strong features. “My husband was always the smartest guy in the room. If he did hide the article, it would be somewhere clever. His text message might have something to do with it.”

“Text message?” Caroline’s hands prickled.

“Franklin and I always did puzzles together. Anagrams. Number games. Decoding messages. We’re both math people. Or he . . . was.” Yvonne paused, her forehead wrinkling, as if in dismay at the past tense that had thrust itself into her diction against her will.

“Anyway, his final text message was just a bunch of gibberish,” Yvonne finished.

“Do you still have it?” Caroline asked.

Yvonne leaned down and lifted up the Gucci handbag beside her armchair. Withdrawing the phone, she scrolled with an elegant finger.

Caroline noted that Yvonne’s nails were well manicured but very short.

“Ah, here it is. ‘B-a-b-c-6-20-16.5-14-9-7-13-1,’” Yvonne said.

“Just a second,” Caroline said, pulling a legal pad from her bag. Louis had asked that she keep track of her research in longhand. She’d comply with that request. Even though it was stupid. Even though it yielded notes that weren’t searchable or otherwise useful in any of the ways digital information could be.

As the ink dried, Caroline eyed the cryptic text. The characters glowed with significance, though she could not yet tell what that significance might be.

“I haven’t figured out that puzzle,” Yvonne said. “Neither have the police.”

“They investigated?” Caroline asked.

“Yes, but they didn’t get very far. The disappearance of first the article and then Annie Wong certainly suggested some kind of wrongdoing. And those phone calls . . . But the police couldn’t find anything. No leads.” Yvonne shook her head. “The coroner ended up ruling it an accident.”

“But what about the text message?” Caroline asked. “Weren’t they suspicious about it?”

Yvonne grimaced. “Franklin’s body wasn’t discovered immediately, so it’s impossible to pinpoint when he died in relation to when he sent his text. In light of our past games with numbers, that text might not mean anything beyond him telling me what he was picking up for dinner that night. Also, the phone had been badly compromised by the ocean. The police couldn’t even fingerprint it.”

Caroline studied her legal pad. Her eyes traced the strange text. Perhaps it meant nothing. Or perhaps Dr. Heller hadn’t been dead when he’d hit the beach. Perhaps he’d told his wife where he’d hidden the article that his wife described as his proudest achievement.

Yvonne opened her purse and withdrew a card emblazoned with a badge.

“The police are looking for any leads,” she said, handing the card to Caroline.

Caroline wrote down the number on the card. As she handed it back to Yvonne, the door of the sitting room swung open to reveal a lithe middle-aged woman with honey-colored skin and close-cropped black hair speckled with gray. The woman pushed through the door with the easy familiarity of one who had passed that way many times before. She held a wine bottle in one hand and the stems of two Bordeaux glasses in the other hand.

“I know it’s early, but I thought we could—” The woman stopped midsentence when she saw Caroline. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—”

“Can I offer you something to drink?” Yvonne said to Caroline with a gracious smile. “This is my dear friend Trina Astin, from the club. She’s been helping me since Franklin died.”

“Nothing for me,” Caroline said, eyeing the wineglass that she knew had not been intended for her. Suddenly the image of a scantily clad barmaid soaring up the wine tower at Safe House appeared in her mind. And the big man standing at the base of the tower in front of a combination lock . . .

“Did Dr. Heller have a safe?” Caroline asked.

“Not here at home,” Yvonne answered, “but he might have had one installed at his office. I wouldn’t know. I never spent much time there.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?” Caroline asked.

“Of course. I could take you there now, if you’d like.”

Stepping into Dr. Heller’s office, Caroline’s first impression was of calm, quiet order. Framed pictures hung on the walls of ships on high seas, placid ports at sunset, playing on the ocean view that Caroline could see through the window. In the center of the room, two chairs sat before a low coffee table covered by a chess set.

Caroline considered possible locations for a safe. There was no rug, and the long-plank wood floors gave no indication of any safe beneath it. Maybe the walls?

She approached the picture of the ship struggling to clear a cresting wave. She lifted the bottom and peeked behind it.

She found nothing.

She moved on to the picture of the sunset-streaked port.

Still nothing.

Stepping back to the center of the office, Caroline put her hands on her hips. She turned in a slow circle, her eyes skating across the room.

Everything was in its place. The books lined up in neat rows on the shelves. The white lab coat hanging on a hook beside the door. A heavy coating of dust lay across the floor and all the furniture, visible in the slanting sunlight.

Something wasn’t right. Something was wrong with the scene.

The answer hit Caroline: the undisturbed space. If Franklin’s death had been a hit, intended to keep him from publishing that article, his laboratory office should have been ransacked. Someone should have scoured it for all copies of the article. At the very least, someone should have stolen his computer . . . or hacked it.

“Do you mind if I take a look at your husband’s computer?” Caroline asked.

Yvonne’s eyes narrowed in distrust.

“I used to be a software engineer,” Caroline explained. “My dad’s a cybersecurity consultant. I might be able to figure out what happened to that article.”

After another second of consideration, Yvonne nodded her assent.

“The password is ‘Turing,’” she said.

“Like the British cryptographer?” Caroline asked.

“Yes. My husband loved all things World War II.”

Caroline sat down in the faded leather armchair and fired up the dead scientist’s computer. His desktop held links to research apps and spreadsheets. No sign of the article.

She checked his documents folder. Still nothing.

Everyone knew the article had once been on Franklin’s computer. The question was: Where did it go? With quick keystrokes, she began probing the possibilities.

“What are you doing?” Yvonne’s voice floated from over Caroline’s left shoulder.

Caroline startled at the sound. She’d forgotten that Yvonne was there.

“When you delete something, it isn’t really gone,” Caroline explained. “It just goes to the unallocated space on the hard drive.”

Yvonne fell silent.

Caroline was glad the widow hadn’t pried into how she had learned to search places most people wouldn’t—or couldn’t—touch. Or why she was so good at it.

Using the GREP utility, Caroline scanned the unallocated space for bits containing three words:
SuperSoy
,
kidney
, and
injury
. So long as those words appeared somewhere on the bits of the hard drive, she’d find them.

When the utility finished running, Caroline sat back, her brow wrinkling. “There’s nothing in Franklin’s unallocated space.” Not only had GREP failed to retrieve anything, but all of the bits were zeroed out.

Eyeing the overwritten bits, Caroline shuddered. No one had yet been able to say for certain that Dr. Heller had been murdered. And yet here, in the zeroed-out bits, was proof that someone had destroyed data on the dead scientist’s computer. It was an ominous sign.

“What’s wrong?” Yvonne asked.

“Someone ran a tool to overwrite the unallocated space. They were very thorough. Whatever was once on this computer is now gone.”

“Did someone hack it?” Yvonne asked.

“Maybe,” Caroline said, moving quickly to check the computer’s event logs. Hackers avoided leaving tracks. They wiped event logs, router logs, and IDS logs to remove all records of remote connections. Empty event logs would bolster the conclusion that someone had accessed Dr. Heller’s computer remotely.

But to Caroline’s surprise, none of the logs on Franklin’s computer had been cleared.

She stared at the intact logs in dismay. If the computer hadn’t been hacked, that meant that someone had sat down in the same chair where she now sat and had deleted the articles, right here on this computer.

“Who had access to this office?” Caroline asked.

“Almost no one,” Yvonne answered. “Franklin. Me. Franklin’s research partner, Dr. Wong. You can’t get in here without going through security.”