Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (3 page)

He paused for any objections.

Resisting the urge to wince, Caroline gave him none.

“Dale, too, is going to want to see everything in hard copy,” Louis said.

“Understood,” she said, still battling her dismay. Just because the Magna Carta had been written on sheepskin parchment didn’t mean it wouldn’t be way more searchable if loaded onto an iPad. But she held her peace. She knew that lawyers loved their paper.

“Depending on how you do with your review of the science, I might let you take on additional responsibilities,” Louis said. “Otherwise, I can pull in one of the partners working on the
Telemetry Systems
matter. That case goes to trial in two months, and we still have much to do, so I’d prefer to leave things as they are . . . but if I need to . . .”

“I can handle it,” Caroline said quickly. She didn’t like hearing her boss making contingency plans in case she failed.

“Good. We don’t have much time.”

“How about I come by your office by five to tell you what I find?” Caroline offered, not knowing whether what she’d promised was actually possible, but determined to make it so.

“Perfect,” Louis said.

“Hey, Silvia,” Caroline greeted her assistant, who had a pierced nose and hair a shade of red only seen on fire trucks. “Can you tell me where the war room is?” The term felt ridiculous in Caroline’s mouth. As if they were soldiers heading into battle instead of paper pushers ensconced in an office building.

Silvia nodded, looking serious. “It’s in the basement. Load the doomsday machine down there with lots of Diet Coke and paper, then set it off. No one will live, but we should win this war.”

Caroline smiled. She liked her assistant. She could tell they’d work well together. Just as soon as she figured out what to do with an assistant.

“It’s on the thirty-third floor, across from the kitchen,” Silvia said. “It’s just a conference room. No weapons in there. Just a bunch of boxes full of scary-looking text and diagrams.”

Thanking Silvia, Caroline hurried toward the elevators.

As she speed-walked toward the war room, her eyes skated across the scene before her. Dark-wood credenzas separated the assistants’ workstations from the outer ring of attorney offices. Assistants sat in cubicles formatting documents or playing Solitaire. Attorneys paced their offices, talking on phones with clients or friends. In every respect, Hale Stern presented just another mundane law firm tableau. Same as every other office. Same as every other building.

Except for the walls.

There, hanging on tension wires spaced ten to fifteen feet apart, were canvases. Farmers laboring in fields. Salisbury Cathedral at dusk. Renaissance portraits of old men in floppy hats. The placards beneath the images read like a who’s who of old masters. Rembrandt. Cézanne. Goya. These weren’t the artists’ top-shelf paintings. These were the sketches and studies the masters had used to produce their great works. Still, Caroline knew that any one of them was worth more than she’d earn in a lifetime.

She came to a stop before a small canvas depicting men wielding swords. In the foreground, a woman in a billowing ivory dress held her hands up to the heavens, beseeching the watching angels for help. The lighting seemed especially designed for the image, the red blood on the soldier’s silver swords vibrating against the dirt-brown tones of the battlefield. The placard beneath it read:
M
ASSACRE OF THE
I
NNOCENTS
, P
ETER
P
AUL
R
UBENS
, 1611 (
STUDY FOR
1613
CANVAS AT
L
OUVRE
,
INVENTORY NO
. 22344).

Out of the corner of her eye, Caroline saw someone stop beside her. Silvia.

“They’re Louis’s,” the assistant said, answering Caroline’s unspoken question.

“Where does he get them?” Caroline asked.

“Auctions, mostly. Sometimes from his clients’ private collections. He’ll take art in trade instead of fees. It isn’t like he needs the money,” Silvia added with a sideways glance.

Caroline nodded. She, like everyone else at Hale Stern, knew Louis’s aristocratic persona. His white-shoe summer parties at his San Marino mansion. His annual trip to the Beaufort Hunt in Gloucestershire. His charity work for the Huntington Library.

“Louis’s curator handles the purchases because the auctions can get stressful. Some people like them, but Louis ‘doesn’t go in for that sort of thing.’” Silvia mimicked Louis’s upper-crusty tone. “He only cares about the art.”

Caroline studied the logo embossed on the small card mounted beneath the Rubens:
F
LEMING
C
URATORIAL
S
ERVICES
. The curator, presumably. Halfway down the hall, she noted an open spot on the wall with a blank placard mounted beneath it.

“He’s got a new one coming in,” Silvia said. “It’s a Picasso. He’s had his eye on it for ages. It finally went up for auction at Sotheby’s about a month ago. When he won it, he tried to keep up that dignified demeanor he’s got going, but you could tell that inside he was jumping up and down and clapping.”

Caroline smiled at the mental image of Louis losing his composure.

“Oh, I have some good news for you,” said Silvia, turning toward Caroline. “There’s a bigger office coming open soon. It’s on the north side of the building. You know, the side with the good views. I can put in a request for it if you’d like.”

Caroline took a mental inventory of the north side of the floor. All the offices were full. She didn’t recall seeing any e-mails about any imminent departures.

“Who’s leaving?” she asked.

“Greg Portos. One of the associates working on the
Telemetry Systems
case.”

Caroline hadn’t met Greg, but she considered his terrible timing. The whole firm seemed abuzz with preparations for the
Telemetry Systems
trial. Losing a member of the team couldn’t be helping those efforts.

“Greg messed up pretty bad yesterday.” Silvia lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He won’t be here much longer . . .”

“I’m okay where I am,” Caroline said quickly.

“Suit yourself.” Silvia shrugged. “You get lost on the way to the war room?”

“Guess I got distracted by the pretty pictures,” Caroline said, smiling. But then her grin faded.

“I think I’m procrastinating,” Caroline said. Despite her determination to climb the mountain that Louis had pointed her toward, she was balking at the foot of it, daunted by the obvious height of the cloud-ringed peaks. Not a good sign.

Silvia gave Caroline a knowing look. “Louis gave you some crazy-impossible task with some absurd deadline, right?”

Caroline resisted the urge to nod.

“Louis takes a keen interest in associate development,” Silvia said, mimicking Louis’s accent again.

The assistant held Caroline’s eyes. “In other words, he’ll kick your ass, and you’ll learn a ton . . . if you can handle it.”

At the unspoken challenge, Caroline squared her shoulders.

“I’d better get going. I’ve got a lot to do.”

CHAPTER 3

Caroline found the war room across from the clatter of dishes and the murmur of voices in the firm’s kitchen. The smell of fresh popcorn beckoned, but she kept her eyes trained on the door of the war room. As it was, she’d be skipping lunch. She had no time for popcorn.

But just as she reached out a hand to grasp the door handle, a woman emerged from the war room, stopping her progress. The woman wore a sky-blue suit with an eggplant-colored silk flower pinned on the lapel. The string of pearls around her neck served as an homage to the traditional, but the rest of the ensemble screamed couture. Her eyebrows had been plucked within a micron of their lives.

“Excuse me,” Caroline said, trying to step around the woman, who now blocked her way.

“Wait,” the woman said.

Caroline stopped.

The woman raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. “You’re the new girl.”

“Yes—” Caroline began to excuse herself, but the woman continued.

“I’m Deena Pensky. From New York. Stuck here for the conceivable future on the bloody
SuperSoy
case. Though at the moment, I’m trying to figure out where to get a decent meal around here.” Deena spoke in a tommy-gun staccato of words that blazed from her mouth at a velocity suggesting she had no time to let the words in her sentences breathe just a little.

“New York?” Caroline didn’t recall Hale Stern having a New York office.

“I work at Wainwright, Callisto, and Phillips,” Deena said. “My boss is Anton Callisto. He’s on the Steering Committee. He sent me out to assist Louis with whatever the court orders. Basically, my boss is loaning me to your boss. Not that your boss is having me do much, unless you count giving me time to surf the Internet for shoes.”

Deena cocked her head at Caroline’s suit. “Secondhand? I’ve gotten some wicked pieces at secondhand stores. But just accessories, not the suit. Never the suit.” She shook her head and made a tutting sound as if such a thing were too outrageous to contemplate.

Heat rose to Caroline’s cheeks. She’d bought the navy suit on sale at an outlet. She thought it worked, that she came off as polished. But seeing herself reflected in Deena’s eyes, she felt like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s mildewed closet of dowdy old looks.

“You’re old for a first-year, aren’t you?” Deena asked. She paused long enough to suggest her torrent of words might have come to an end. Or at least have taken a short break.

“I worked for a few years as a software engineer,” said Caroline.

“Computers? That’s interesting,” Deena said in a tone that made clear it really wasn’t. “Why’d you change to law?”

“To help people,” Caroline said.

Deena crossed her arms and smirked.

“Really,” Caroline insisted. “The law is a great tool for helping people avoid having . . . bad things happen to them. I had an experience once with it . . . once.”

Caroline closed her mouth to stem the flow of information. Deena didn’t need to know about her family’s legal troubles. Or her unforgivable part in causing them.

“What, you get picked up for prostitution or something?” Deena bark-laughed and then made an exaggerated show of looking over Caroline’s suit again.

Caroline stayed silent. The guilt that coiled next to her heart like a constant companion stirred, but she refused to give it voice. This wasn’t the time or the place or the person to spill her story about the sordid reasons she’d left the tech industry.

“Come on. You can tell me. Why’d you go into the law?” Deena asked, her eyebrows arched in prurient curiosity that promised repetition far and wide of whatever Caroline answered.

“To help people,” Caroline repeated. It wasn’t the whole truth, and they both knew it.

After a beat, Deena waved off the nonanswer. “Well, I’m a lawyer because I didn’t want to be a doctor like my mom. She’s head of neurology at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, but she’s spending the month here at Northridge Hospital because my family’s thinking of moving out west, Lord knows why. We’ve already established you people have never heard of a cronut.”

Deena glanced at Caroline, then to the door of the war room, then back to Caroline. She pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Oh my God, don’t tell me Louis stuck you with reading those articles for
SuperSoy
.” Deena began tutting again.

“Yes,” Caroline said, “he wants me to find a link between—”

“SuperSoy and kidney damage,” Deena finished for her. “There’s nothing to find. I’ve looked. Everyone has.”

Deena regarded Caroline with a raised eyebrow. “I suppose it’s a good assignment for the new kid, since you can’t mess up looking for something that isn’t there.”

Caroline weighed her responses. She wanted to tell Deena to go screw herself, but that hardly seemed polite on the first day of work.

“Maybe he wants to make sure you didn’t miss something,” Caroline said finally.

Deena’s face flushed. “Trust me, you’ll find nothing. But if you need some help or whatever, my door’s always open,” she said before walking down the hall to her office and closing her door.

Caroline looked in the direction Deena had disappeared. She found she didn’t care whether Deena or Dale or anyone else had already read the articles. She rarely trusted anyone else’s judgment. In this way, she and Louis were similar, she decided.

She needed to earn Louis’s faith.

The articles inside the war room were her path to doing just that.

Caroline’s plan to fly off to the rescue of
SuperSoy
plaintiffs everywhere deflated at the sight before her. Six bankers boxes sat atop a Carrara marble table that filled most of the conference room’s square footage. A quick look revealed that each box held two large binders of articles. And each binder held up to five articles.

Caroline did the math. Six hours to read sixty articles. It was a dauntingly large elephant for a very small snake to digest in woefully little time.

Her chest tightened. Panic threatened to rise like a thunderstorm in the distance, just below the horizon. It didn’t matter that no one else expected her to find anything in the many volumes on the table before her. Louis did, and his was the only expectation that mattered.

Taking a calming breath, Caroline forced the panic away. She needed to stay focused. Organization was one of her strengths. Reducing tasks into their tiny component parts had helped her conquer law school. It also helped her conquer her nerves.

Now she made a plan. Word searches would limit the universe of articles to those containing certain key phrases applicable to the
Daubert
issues. If she could avoid wading through reams of paper, her review of the science could be fast. It had to be. Evaluating the science in only one day was ambitious, if not “crazy impossible,” as Silvia had called it.

Caroline picked up the phone on the credenza beside the window and dialed.

“Where can I find the links to the articles in the war room?” she asked when her assistant answered.

Caroline got a chuckle in response.

“I have no idea,” Silvia answered. “Louis just uses paper. He’s a dinosaur. A dinosaur with an expensive fountain pen.”

Hanging up the phone, Caroline narrowed her eyes at the boxes.

She’d just have to figure something else out. Fast.

Caroline knew that in all fields, a new hire’s mystique began early or not at all. A shimmer of supernatural speed. A glimmer of supercompetence. Some hint that in hiring you, the company had captured a golden butterfly. Or else you showed yourself to travel down at street level. Land bound and plodding. Just another merely mortal pedestrian.

And Caroline knew that Louis was worse than most bosses in making quick yet indelible judgments about new associates. During her callback interview, junior partners had cautioned her in hushed tones that Louis decided quickly whether someone was worth the effort to train and the expense to pay. He didn’t hesitate to fire people with stellar credentials, great recommendations, and distinguished clerkships.

Caroline had heard the tale of one unfortunate associate who’d misread a case, mistaking dictum for the holding. That had been the end of the poor woman. She’d limped along for another few months before leaving without so much as a good-bye coffee in her honor. Her office had remained empty while Hale Stern searched for the right person to take her place. Louis had insisted on picking the next hire himself.

He’d picked Caroline.

Now she needed to prove he hadn’t made a mistake.

“You read all of them?” Louis asked. Behind him, the late-afternoon sun ignited the particulate matter in the Los Angeles sky a polluted shade of gold. The glow washed across the black-and-white photographs on Louis’s walls, turning them to sepia.

“I only read the abstracts,” Caroline admitted. “But then I circled back and read the complete texts of the most promising articles. I kept notes.” She held up her scribble-covered legal pad to prove it but put it down when she realized it looked like a chicken had stumbled through a puddle of ink before strutting around the paper.

“Did you find anything we can use?” Louis asked, holding her eyes.

“I didn’t find a direct link between SuperSoy and kidney injury,” she said, hating that her initial conclusion echoed Deena’s. “But we might still establish an inferential link.”

Unlike Deena, she hadn’t stopped at the absence of any direct link. In her desperation, she’d gotten . . . creative. She only hoped that Louis would appreciate her conclusions.

“Explain,” he ordered.

Caroline took a breath. Just as in class, Louis would expect a compelling delivery of her pitch. He’d be rating her not only on content but on how clearly and confidently she spoke. That meant pushing past her nerves. Steadying her voice. Staying on point.

“The concept behind genetic engineering is that you insert a new gene into a plant’s DNA to force the plant to do something it doesn’t usually do. For instance, scientists inserted a gene from an anglerfish into the DNA of a potato plant to make potatoes that glow in the dark when they need to be watered. Cool but creepy, right?”

When Louis gave no reaction, Caroline hurried onward. “The problem is that inserting a new gene into a plant can have unintended consequences. One company tried to engineer cotton plants that would resist pesticides, but the new gene made all the cotton bolls fall off the plant. The Hahn article reports on it. Dr. Hahn concludes by expressing concern that a new gene could change a cell’s metabolic processes in ways that would cause an otherwise harmless plant to start producing toxins that hurt people.”

“And that’s what we think happened here.” Louis nodded.

“Yes. That’s the theory. Med-Gen created SuperSoy by inserting a jellyfish gene into soy DNA to increase protein content. But maybe increasing protein isn’t all that the new gene did. Maybe it also prompted the soy cells to create a kidney toxin.”

“We need proof, Ms. Auden, not theories,” Louis said. “What do we have to work with?”

Caroline winced at his tone.

She tap-danced a little faster. “We’ve got an article by a scientist named Dr. Feinberg, who says SuperSoy can thin the membranes of kidney cells in rats. Then we have another article by Dr. Tercero that says the thinning of cell membranes is a precursor to spontaneous cell death. And we’ve got yet another article by Ambrose that tells us that if enough cells die, a kidney will fail. We can put those three articles together to argue that SuperSoy can cause a kidney to fail.”

Caroline studied Louis’s face to gauge his reaction.

Louis shook his head in disappointment. “Others on the Steering Committee have already suggested that sort of inferential reasoning. It isn’t enough. Without a direct link, this is going to be a tough sell. Judges like proof that if you take thalidomide, you’ll get a deformed baby. Cause and effect. Simple and direct.”

“I didn’t see anything like that.” Caroline made her voice strong even though she knew she was delivering bad news. She braced herself for Louis’s displeasure.

But instead of anger, Louis met the news with quiet contemplation. He tipped his head back, studying the ceiling where his antique lamp cast green circles of light. When he met Caroline’s eyes again, his gray eyes held a hint of vulnerability, a look that said Louis Stern, who usually won his cases, might lose this time around.