Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (15 page)

Maybe he was trying to avoid working out? Or maybe—

Caroline yanked her legal pad from her bag. She flipped through the pages until she found her notes from her conversation with Yvonne. Franklin’s final text message.

Caroline looked down at the message, then back up at the workout targets.

She pulled out her camera and shot a picture of the workout targets.

Then she turned and ran back to her car as fast as she could.

Caroline sat in the Mustang, oblivious to the handful of other cars in the club’s self-park lot. The car’s ancient cigarette lighter powered the laptop balanced on her thigh. Her phone leaned against the windshield, the picture of Franklin Heller’s workout goals displayed on the screen. On the passenger seat, she had angled the yellow legal pad with Franklin’s final text message toward her—the one he had sent to his wife before he’d died on the beach.

She ignored the view out the window. The waves breaking along the deserted beach. The low hills dotted with chaparral. The sunlight glittering on the surface of the ocean. She had eyes only for the clues laid out in front of her.

She studied Dr. Heller’s workout goals. The key was the first word:
AIM
. If she was right,
AIM
wasn’t a reference to Franklin’s fitness aims or aspirations. It was an acronym for Access Identity Management. Somewhere in the numbers and letters, there was an encryption key. But where?

Cryptology was as ancient as the Egyptians, but it always followed the same basic rules: the security of the encrypted data depended on the strength of the cipher and the secrecy of the encryption key. Caroline believed she possessed both the cipher and the key in the two strings of letters and numbers that Dr. Heller had written—the workout goals and the text message. But which was the cipher and which was the key?

Whatever the answers were, she needed them fast. The clock next to the odometer said it was 11:03 a.m. That meant she had two hours to file the article. Two hours before the doors of the court closed forever on every SuperSoy victim in the country.

With no easy answer presenting itself, Caroline turned her attention to the only piece of plaintext information she possessed:
FERMAT
. In bright-blue ink, the mathematician’s name stood out against the typed black workout targets, as if Franklin had wanted Yvonne to focus on it first. But why?

Caroline knew Fermat had been a mathematician. But Dr. Heller was a research scientist, not a mathematician. So then, what was the significance of Fermat to him?

Caroline typed the name “Fermat” into the search pane on her laptop.

Search results spilled onto the page. Pierre de Fermat had been a lawyer and amateur mathematician. As an inventor of integral geometry, he’d invented a technique for finding the centers of gravity of various plane and solid figures.

Was the text message a mathematical equation Yvonne was supposed to solve?

Caroline shook her head. She was overthinking it. There had to be some more obvious answer here. Franklin wouldn’t have made things so hard for his wife to decipher. He’d intended for her to find the article.

Running another search for the mathematician’s name yielded another wave of Google results. Down at the bottom of the second page, something caught Caroline’s eye. Among his many achievements, Fermat had been an amateur cryptographer.

With blood pulsing in her ears, Caroline ran a search for “Fermat’s code.”

The results were exhilarating. Fermat had invented an encryption method where each number corresponded to the position of the letter in the alphabet.

Caroline’s heart pounded.

She scribbled Franklin’s final text message vertically along one margin of the legal pad. Then she counted which letter each number corresponded to and wrote the letter on the pad: 620-16.5-14-9-7-13-1 became FTP.ENIGMA.

Caroline almost shouted with joy. The text message was an FTP address! That meant Franklin had an FTP site—a secret repository of document files.

To confirm her hypothesis, Caroline typed the words “FTP.ENIGMA” into the URL pane of her web browser. The page instantly changed, revealing that she had, indeed, found an FTP site. A site that now asked for a username and password. Caroline had neither. Yet.

Grabbing her phone, Caroline pulled up the picture of Franklin’s workout targets again. She knew what to do now. She needed to apply Fermat’s code to what she now knew were not aspirational gymnasium targets.

Caroline’s eyes grazed the clock on the dashboard—11:55.

Forcing her hands to stop shaking, she turned back to the workout goals. Fermat had designed a code that only worked on numbers. That meant that the words in the list of Franklin’s workout targets were irrelevant noise. The letters were there just to hide the code.

Just as she had done with the text message, Caroline wrote the string of numbers corresponding to the upper-body workout targets vertically on the legal pad. Using Fermat’s code, the string of numbers in the upper-body workout targets became
OVERLORD
.

Encouraged by the resolution of the numbers into coherent plaintext, she moved on with confidence to the lower-body targets. The numbers became
CHECKMATE
.

Caroline typed the words
OVERLORD
and
CHECKMATE
into the password and username fields on the FTP server’s log-in page. Then she waited an eternity of seconds to find out if she’d gotten it right.

“Come on,” she muttered at her laptop as the password page processed.

Finally, the screen changed. She was in!

Franklin’s FTP site appeared on the screen. There she found three documents.

The first was Heller, F. and Wong, A., “A Comprehensive Analysis of the Damaging Effects of SuperSoy on Human Kidneys.”

“Yes!” she shouted so loudly that anyone within ten feet of her car would have heard her.

As the information unfurled on the screen, Caroline almost cheered again. Dr. Heller’s findings were stronger than she’d hoped. In meticulous detail, he’d described the precise mechanism whereby SuperSoy caused kidney cells to perish. The evidence was irrefutable. Dr. Heller’s studies were larger than those in any of the other articles Caroline had reviewed. His supporting footnotes on methodology were clearly designed to permit others to verify his work.

Dr. Heller’s article was gold. If only she could get it filed on time, it would radically improve their chances of winning.

Moving on to the next file on the FTP site, Caroline discovered the backup data supporting Dr. Heller’s conclusions—159 pages of hospital records, questionnaires, assay results, reports, and other notes.

As she propelled herself down through the data, she recognized its significance. Dr. Heller’s article might not have been peer reviewed, but she had no doubt it would pass muster with even the most stringent publication standards.

Caroline allowed herself a brief moment of joy. She’d found the key that would let thousands of plaintiffs all across the country have their day in court.

In her excitement, she almost didn’t notice the final document in Franklin’s FTP site.

Named “For Yvonne,” the document took up only three kilobytes. Caroline narrowed her eyes at the file. Had Franklin written a final message to his wife? Had he known he was going to die?

Caroline pushed the questions from her mind. She had no time to probe the dead man’s final missive to his wife. The message would have to wait. Right now she needed to get the article and supporting data filed.

The clock on the dashboard ticked down toward the end of the court day in New York. All evidence had to be filed by 1:00 p.m. Los Angeles time. The glowing red digital numbers read 12:02. That meant she had less than an hour to make everything happen.

She needed help.

Grabbing her phone, Caroline dialed her firm’s number.

“I need to talk to Louis,” she said when the receptionist answered.

“He’s not here. Would you like his voice mail?”

“No. How about Eddie Diaz? Is he there?”

“Yes. Hold on.” The receptionist clicked off.

Eddie’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”

“I’ve got the missing article,” Caroline said.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.

“Find the editor of the
Fielding Journal
. Tell him we need him to sign a declaration explaining that he’d arranged to publish Dr. Heller’s article on SuperSoy, that Heller’s disappearance precluded it, but that he believes this is the article he and Heller discussed. We need to do whatever we can to establish that this is a true and correct copy of an article that was on the cusp of peer review and publication.”

“Got it,” Eddie said. “Hold on a sec.”

Caroline could hear the clicks of his fingers on the keys of his desktop.

“The editor’s name is Darren Halsgreth,” Eddie said. “I’ll call him now. I’ll draft the declaration, too.”

“Great. I’m going to get going on the motion to submit the article. If I can log on to the firm system from my car, I can do it from here—”

A tap at the car window jolted Caroline, setting her heart to hammering.

She looked over to find the Filipino valet.

“Are you okay, miss?” the valet asked through the closed window.

“I’m fine,” Caroline mouthed. She pointed at her phone. “I’m on a call.”

The valet gestured for her to unroll her window. When Caroline had done so, he said, “Sorry to bug you, but I had a thought about maybe where you could look for that thing you said you were trying to find.”

“I got what I needed,” Caroline said, turning her body away from the overeager valet, hoping he’d catch a clue. She didn’t want to be rude, but she didn’t have time to chat.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Annoyance flared in Caroline’s chest. Why was he still talking to her? It was like he was trying to stall her or something.

Sudden movement at the far end of the parking lot caught her eye. A van bearing the logo of Ajax Plumbing came rolling through the front gates. Fast.

All at once, Caroline recalled the locker room attendant’s words about the plumbing: the pipes had been perfect ever since the club had fixed them.

Something was wrong now, and it wasn’t the plumbing.

Caroline dropped the phone and threw the Mustang into gear, peeling out of the parking spot, her car fishtailing as the wheels sought traction. Adrenaline coursed through her bloodstream.

The plumbing truck angled toward her, cutting across the empty parking spaces.

Caroline looked for an access road or service entrance. She saw nothing. Instead, she spotted a golf road, narrow and cramped, threading through the trees. It would have to do.

She drove for it, fast, gunning the engine hard. In her rearview mirror, the plumbing truck gained, chewing up the distance between it and her, the lack of open road neutralizing the advantage of the Mustang’s big engine. With a bump and a hiss, the wheels of the Mustang hopped up onto the smooth golf road.

Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Caroline fought to keep the tires on the thin strip of concrete.

Ahead, she saw a tunnel. It wasn’t much wider than her car.

She hit the gas, aiming toward the opening. She plunged into darkness and scraped through the tunnel with a screech of tearing metal and a spray of sparks.

She flew from the tunnel, back onto the golf road, weaving through a grove of fragrant eucalyptus trees. Seconds later, she popped out onto the main road, surprising a group of golfers.

She swerved onto the road and raced for the firm.

No plumbing truck behind her now. But the clock was ticking down.

CHAPTER 8

Caroline found Eddie waiting for her in the office lobby.

“What happened?” he asked as she entered the reception area. “I heard tires squealing—”

“No time,” Caroline said, rushing past him. “How are we looking on the filing?”

“We’ve got a problem,” Eddie said, keeping pace with her. “I can’t find the editor of the
Fielding Journal
. I found his number, but the automated phone system just keeps kicking me to voice mail.”

“I’ll find him,” Caroline said. She pointed a finger down the hall toward Eddie’s office. “You get going on the motion to submit the article. It can be short. Just ‘We respectfully ask the court to consider this critical piece of scientific evidence, blah, blah, blah.’ I started a template for it last week. It’s on the system in my
SuperSoy
file.”

“Got it,” Eddie said, turning on his heel to disappear into his office.

When Caroline reached her desk, Eddie had already e-mailed her the phone number for the editor of the
Fielding Journal
. She dialed it. Just as Eddie had warned, she was diverted to voice mail. She hit zero and a computerized voice came on the line, offering a company directory. Beginning with
A
, she began working her way through the staff, trying to find someone who would answer the phone and then answer her questions. When she got to
R
, a woman answered the phone with the easy cadence of a helpful assistant.

“I’m trying to find Darren,” Caroline started right in. “He’ll know what this is about. He’ll appreciate the urgency.” She wasn’t sure it was true, but she needed the assistant’s cooperation.

“I’m afraid he’s out at lunch,” said the assistant’s voice.

Caroline’s stomach torqued at the unexpected roadblock.

“Do you expect him back soon?” she asked.

“Hard to say. Darren’s usually pretty fast, but today he’s out with his wife at that nice Italian place for their anniversary.”

“Italian place? Which one?” Caroline asked.

“I’m not authorized to say,” the assistant said, a note of suspicion entering her voice. “You can try back in an hour. I’m sure he’ll be back by then.”

“That’ll be too late—”

“I’m sorry. Please call back later,” the assistant said. The line clicked off.

Caroline grabbed the komboloi beads from her pocket while her mind filtered and organized what she knew about the editor’s whereabouts. Darren Halsgreth was at lunch at “that nice Italian place.” The assistant’s phrasing suggested the restaurant was somewhere the staff frequented. Somewhere for special occasions. Somewhere fancy, but local.

Reaching for her laptop, Caroline typed in the address of the
Fielding Journal
.

The search result came up fast: 15700 Von Karman Way, San Diego, California 92107.

With her fingers flying across the keyboard, Caroline typed the
Fielding Journal
’s address into the search pane of Yelp, hunting for listings of Italian restaurants within a two-mile radius.

She found only one: a Tuscan restaurant called Piccolo Ristorante.

She stabbed the phone on her desk for an outside line.

Forty-five seconds later she had the hostess on the line.

“I have to speak to Mr. Halsgreth,” Caroline said.

“Who?”

“Darren Halsgreth. He’s there with his wife. It’s an emergency.”

“Just a moment, please,” said the hostess.

Caroline counted off the seconds. At seventy-two a man’s voice came on the phone.

“This is Darren. Who is this? What’s the emergency?”

“I’m Caroline Auden from Hale Stern. We spoke the other day about the
SuperSoy
case.” When the editor grunted his recognition, she continued, “I found a copy of that article by Dr. Heller that you planned to publish. I just need you to authenticate it for me. It’ll only take a minute, and it’ll save thousands of lives. I’m not exaggerating.”

“That’s great you found it, but why can’t this wait?” Darren said in her ear. His voice held the same annoyance he’d undoubtedly expressed to the hostess of Piccolo Ristorante upon being pulled to the house telephone during his anniversary lunch.

“Court’s about to close.” Caroline glanced at the clock. They had twenty-six minutes to make the filing deadline.

“Please,” she begged. She wanted to jump through the phone to compel the editor of the
Fielding Journal
to cooperate.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t—”

“Didn’t you tell me that you were the little journal that made a big impact?” Caroline pushed. “You publish the articles that make a difference, right? Well, here’s your chance.”

At the editor’s silence, Caroline pushed harder. “Or maybe it’s just a niche for you? The renegade naysayer . . .”

“That’s not fair,” the editor said. “We’ve shown courage many times—”

“Great, then show some now. Please. All I need is your cell number and I can text you everything. This will only take a minute, I promise.” Caroline waited in the painful silence that followed. All of her efforts. All of her work. All of it would come to nothing if Darren Halsgreth refused her now.

Finally, the editor exhaled.

“Fine,” he said, rattling off his cell phone number.

“Thank you,” Caroline said, punching the number into her own cell phone. “Okay, I’ve now texted the article to you. I’ll represent to you that we found it on an FTP site that we have every reason to believe belonged to Dr. Heller. I just need you to look at it and confirm it’s the one you discussed with Dr. Heller.”

There was silence on the line while Darren did as Caroline asked.

“The topic and author appear to be correct,” Darren said finally.

“Good. Are you comfortable confirming in writing that this is, to your knowledge, the same article you discussed publishing for Dr. Heller?”

“I am,” Darren said, “but I don’t have time to write anything. I’m at lunch—”

“You don’t have to write anything,” Caroline interrupted. “You just have to sign the short declaration that I’m going to send to you right now. It will identify the article, describe what you discussed with Dr. Heller regarding its publication, and state that the
Fielding Journal
intends to publish it, assuming peer review approval, of course. All I need is your signature.”

“Fine. I’ll sign it as soon as I get back to my desk after I finish lunch with my wife.” Darren emphasized the word
wife
in a way that made Caroline think that the wife was looking pointedly at Darren now from a red vinyl booth.

“But court will close—”

“Did I mention it’s my anniversary? I’d really like to help you out, but compared to the fate of the world, my wife wins out.”

Caroline stopped pacing. The editor was backing out. She needed to stop him.

Eddie poked his head into her office. “Motion’s done,” he said.

Caroline held up a hand to quiet Eddie.

“You don’t have to go back to your office, Mr. Halsgreth,” she said into the phone. “Just read the declaration I’ve texted to you. If it’s accurate, sign your name on a napkin. Take a photo of your signature with your phone and e-mail it back to me at [email protected].”

Across from Caroline, Eddie raised a curious eyebrow, but she ignored him.

The editor huffed on the line but didn’t hang up.

“All right, I’ve read the declaration and signed the napkin,” the editor said. “I’m sending you the picture of my signature now.”

Caroline watched the corner of her screen, waiting. After a half dozen interminably long seconds, the editor’s e-mail appeared.

“Got it,” she said. “Do I have your authorization to attach this signature to this declaration?”

“Yes, yes,” Darren said, impatience creeping back in his voice.

“Thank you. Please enjoy your lunch. Sorry for the interruption. Happy anniversary.”

Caroline hung up and opened the editor’s e-mail. A photograph of a black signature on a white napkin filled her screen. Little smudges of tomato sauce marred the edges of the fabric, but the signature was clean. Good.

Blocking out the tomato sauce stains and shadows, Caroline pulled a tight square around the black ink, cropping the image. Then she captured the signature and saved it as a JPEG.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asked.

She waved him away. “I need to concentrate.”

Her fingers flew across the keys as she loaded the declaration into a template, then grabbed the signature JPEG and merged the documents.

“Almost there,” she murmured, looking at the now-complete declaration glowing on the screen.

“Wow,” Eddie said behind her.

Caroline glanced back at him. Seeing the appreciation in his eyes, she warmed.

“We’ve got fifteen minutes to upload the article, the declaration, and the motion onto the court’s system,” she said. “This is going to be tight. Let’s hope the courts have fast servers.”

“I’ll load the court’s e-filing page so we can start the upload,” Eddie said, hurrying from Caroline’s office.

Suddenly, something horrible occurred to Caroline.

She leaped up from her desk and gripped the frame of her office door, catapulting herself down the hall after Eddie.

“Don’t file anything yet!” she called after him as she ran the direction he’d gone.

She burst into his office to find him with his fingers poised over the keyboard.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We need a pro hac vice application. I can’t submit the article to the New York court without one, and Louis is out of the office.”

Grabbing Eddie’s phone, she dialed Deena’s extension. Maybe the New York associate could just file the article herself. Or maybe she could sign a pro hac vice application.

No one answered.

Time for plan B.

Pulling up the caption page of the
Daubert
brief, Caroline found Anton Callisto’s phone number and dialed it as fast as her fingers could move.

Fortunately, Anton answered her call.

“Yeah, sure, send it over,” he said curtly once she’d explained what she needed from him.

Hitting “Hold,” Caroline turned to Eddie, who moved off his chair, making room for her to take over.

“I’m going to work up the pro hac application here. Go on the state bar website and download a Certificate of Good Standing for me,” she said. “Use my desktop.”

“I’m on it,” Eddie said and jogged down the hall to Caroline’s office.

With a couple dozen keystrokes, Caroline opened the document she needed and made the necessary modifications. Then she took the phone line off “Hold.”

“Mr. Callisto, I’ve duplicated the pro hac vice application that I prepared for Louis and put my name into it.” She hit “Send.” “Substantively, it’s identical to the one you signed for Louis so that we could file our
Daubert
brief.” She paused. “You should have it now.”

“Signed,” Anton said so quickly that it was clear he hadn’t even looked at it. “PDF version of my signature page coming your way now. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Caroline said, hanging up just as the signed application appeared in her in-box.

At the same moment, Eddie appeared back at the doorway of the office.

“Your Certificate of Good Standing is on the system now. You just have to upload it with the pro hac application,” he said.

“Good,” Caroline said. “I’ve got the signed application ready to go, too.”

With her fingers flying across the keyboard, Caroline brought up the district court’s e-filing page. While she waited for it to load, she met Eddie’s dark eyes.

“Once we file the pro hac vice application and Certificate of Good Standing, we can file the declaration and then the article,” she said. “We’ve got to do it in that order . . .”

Caroline stopped talking as the court’s e-filing page appeared.

A long list of detailed instructions disappeared down to the bottom of the screen. The Southern District of New York had imposed dozens of rules about how to perform an e-filing. The document had to be properly paginated and properly named. Exhibits had to be loaded separately, also named appropriately, and then linked in yet another field to the documents filed concurrently with them. And then everything had to be uploaded to one site, then disseminated to the service list, which also had to be uploaded separately.

Caroline froze. She had hacked the servers of major corporations yet couldn’t even begin to decipher the court’s e-filing protocol.

Before she could give voice to her distress, Eddie turned and ran from the office.

Caroline stared dumbfounded at the door. What a moment for him to bail.

Seconds later, he returned. Behind him, the bright-red hair of Silvia followed.

Without speaking, Caroline got out of Silvia’s way.

The assistant sat down, and, chewing gum in time to her finger strokes on the keyboard, she began uploading the pro hac vice application and Certificate of Good Standing. She named the document, placed it in the queue, and hit “Load.”

The e-filing server began to slowly absorb the first batch of materials. A white bar on the computer’s monitor showed the speed of the upload. It was slow. Possibly too slow.

Caroline checked the time. They had seven minutes to upload the pro hac vice application, the editor’s declaration, the seventeen-page article, and all 159 pages of backup data.

FILED
, the screen read.

Even though the words were flat, unemotional text hovering on a page, Caroline thrilled at the sight of them. They were one step closer.

Without pause, Silvia moved on to the declaration. Named, formatted, and lined up in the queue, it too began the slow journey from Hale Stern’s computers to the server of the Southern District of New York.

Again, the bar on the screen inched along as the document uploaded, and Caroline’s awareness distilled down to the tiny movements of the pixels, willing them to move just a little bit faster.

She glanced at the clock. Five minutes left.

FILED
, the court’s website confirmed.

“I’m going to get the data file set up first,” Silvia said. “It’s going to take time to upload. I’ll prep the article separately at the same time.”