Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (34 page)

“Good.” Louis smiled. “Then I’ll see you back at the office, Ms. Auden.”

He climbed into the cab and closed the door.

Caroline waved as her boss drove away. She was grateful for the opportunities he’d given her. Unlike the lawyers on the Steering Committee, Louis had never pegged her as too short, too young, too female, or too anything else to handle herself in court. He’d encouraged her and supported her, giving her everything from the firm credit card to the lead role in a major case. There was no way she’d take another job.

A tap on her shoulder made her turn. She found Jasper standing beside her.

“I just wanted to say thanks,” he said.

“Turned out all right, didn’t it?” Caroline smiled.

“It sure did. Thank you.” Jasper’s face transformed, the stiff frown lines abandoned in favor of deep smile lines around his mouth and eyes. Caroline realized this was a man as capable of joy as he had been of sorrow. He just hadn’t had cause to smile in far too long.

“I can’t take the credit,” Caroline said. A brave scientist died on a beach and another made a leap into the abyss to save people she’d never know from injury or death. They were the ones who deserved his thanks.

Jasper nodded, his eyes scanning the courthouse steps.

Caroline knew whom he sought.

“Dr. Wong left right after the hearing,” Caroline said. “She wanted to get back to her son. I promise I’ll let her know you said thanks.”

“I’m much obliged.” Jasper held out a hand to shake Caroline’s. Then he trotted down the steps with a spring in his steps.

Watching him disappear down in the crowd of people on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Caroline hoped his burden would be a little lighter because of what had transpired. She hoped Tom would recover. She hoped the brothers would travel together like they’d planned.

Caroline’s phone vibrated in her purse. She withdrew it and found a text message from Amy Garber with a picture attached to it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
Amy had written.
Here’s a picture Liam drew for you. He wants to give you the real one when you’re back in Los Angeles. We’d love to see you.

Caroline opened the picture. In it, a little figure held hands with a taller figure beneath a rainbow tree, above which floated rainbow clouds against a brilliant blue sky.

A second text message from Amy pinged.

P.S. Liam hasn’t drawn a rainbow since he got sick.

Caroline found herself smiling at the message. It was the best thank-you she could ever hope to receive.

Behind her, the voices thinned and quieted as people on both sides of the case departed for their offices or their hotels or nearby bars.

Suddenly, Caroline’s neck prickled with the sensation of someone watching her.

She turned around. Only one person still stood on the steps. Eddie.

Caroline’s heart sank down through her knees. She cast around for an escape. She didn’t want to talk to Eddie. She didn’t ever want to see him again.

But he approached her, stopping a few feet in front of her.

He opened his mouth to speak.

Caroline held up a hand.

“Don’t,” she said.

Eddie closed his mouth and waited.

“What did Kennedy’s people offer you? Money?” Caroline asked, her chest filling with anger at his betrayal. She wondered if he’d deny it.

“The first time they came to talk to me, they offered me money. But I turned them away,” Eddie said.

Caroline stayed silent. She knew it wasn’t the whole story.

“But then they called me again a couple days ago,” he said, “and offered me my family.” Eddie searched her eyes for understanding. “You know how long I’ve been trying to get papers for my mom and sister. I’ve been trying for years. That woman, she offered to do it overnight. She said her boss knew who to talk to. Something about how information is power and her boss had it. What was I supposed to do? Turn that down?”

A dozen responses rose to Caroline’s lips. She wanted to castigate Eddie for his weakness. She wanted to tell him that he should have held on to his principles, to his integrity. She wanted to berate him for selling the safety and health of tens of thousands in exchange for that of his mother and sister. But she couldn’t.

Even though she wanted to believe she’d have rejected the soul-corrupting choice that Eddie had made, she understood what it felt like to feel impotent to take care of her family. She wondered if she’d pay in her soul’s weight for her mother to be okay. For her uncle to be okay. For her father to be okay. To help save those she loved, would she give up . . . everything?

At Caroline’s long silence, Eddie nodded.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” he asked.

“No, though I suspect I’m not the only one watching who noticed what you were doing. But I won’t be the one to say it. We won today, so there was no harm in what you did. Not to anyone but you, anyway.”

Eddie winced at her words.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice anguished. “I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been trying for so long.”

Caroline had no answer for him. No solace. She knew the well-pressed, easygoing face he showed to the world hid a lonely kid from a poor town who missed his mom. He’d faced a morally ambiguous conundrum and had weighed it so that love came out on top. His own love, to be sure, but still love.

“I figured we couldn’t win without Annie anyway, so I figured it wouldn’t harm anything . . .” He trailed off. Caroline could see his words sounded weak even to him.

“I understand,” she said, “but I’ve got to go now.”

She needed to escape Eddie’s need for an absolution she could not give.

“Can I call you?” he called after her retreating form.

Caroline turned around to meet his eyes one last time.

“No. Not yet,” she said.

She turned away, tears springing to her eyes.

She walked quickly away from the courthouse steps. Away from Eddie. She’d watched him offer up her work in sacrifice to the enemy that had threatened her own family. She’d seen Eddie forget the stakes, the difference the case made for thousands of people like Jasper and his brother. In the end, Eddie had made a deal with those horrible people, just because they knew the right people at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Information was power indeed, she thought bitterly.

Suddenly, Caroline stopped walking. Her eyes ceased to see the people around her. Her ears ceased to hear any sounds. Everything she thought she knew shifted, as if she had only just figured out she’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Oh my God,” she said to no one.

CHAPTER 19

Caroline stood at the threshold of Louis’s office. The early-morning light painted the office buildings in his windows pastel shades. A distant hum of cars on the street far below reverberated softly around the space.

When Louis looked up, his face broke into an uncharacteristically broad grin.

“Ah, the remarkable Ms. Auden darkens my doorstep. I was beginning to think you’d never come back.” He chuckled. “I assume you took a couple days off to sort yourself out after a long and stressful week. Well deserved, indeed. I hope you’re ready to come back to work hard. I’ve got another case ready to go, if you’re up for it.”

Instead of answering, Caroline held out an envelope.

Louis raised an eyebrow.

“My resignation,” Caroline said.

Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he replaced them and met her eyes, his own filled with sorrow.

“Why, may I ask, are you quitting?” he asked.

“I can’t work for a fixer,” she said.

Louis stayed silent.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Caroline held up a hand. “No, don’t answer. You’ll deny it. But I know it’s true. You told me once that you can set a person up to succeed or to fail. Looking back, I can see you set me up to fail.”

When Louis didn’t say anything, she continued, “At the beginning, I wondered why you’d staffed just one lawyer, a first-year associate who knew nothing about anything, on a huge case. But then, my ego liked thinking you trusted me to handle it. Like I was so great or something . . .”

She shook her head at her hubris. “But that wasn’t why you put me on the case. You put me on
SuperSoy
to fail. It was just another way to sabotage the case. In case the hole you’d made in the evidence didn’t kill it.”

She paused, her eyes settling on a photograph on Louis’s wall of a building that looked like an overwrought birthday cake perched atop a hill overlooking the ocean. Beachgoers populated the foreground, their peaked caps and bloomers exotic in their old-fashioned formality. Though the image was black-and-white, the reflections on the wet sand suggested a sunny day . . . a sunny day of people long since grown and dead.

“You weren’t surprised about that hole in the science,” she said, meeting Louis’s eyes again. “Heck, you made it.”

The expression on Louis’s face feigned annoyance.

Caroline admired his acting skills.

“But your true genius showed when you let Dale argue that
Daubert
motion,” she said. “You knew he wasn’t prepared. You knew he’d bomb. You could’ve stopped him. You could’ve argued it yourself. But you didn’t say anything to anyone on the Steering Committee. And when he messed up, there was no harm in letting me take a shot at it. After all, I’m just a first-year associate with no actual court experience. I wasn’t supposed to do that well, was I?”

Still, Louis said nothing.

“I’m going to forgive myself for not catching on so early in the game,” Caroline said. “But what I can’t forgive is that I didn’t figure it out yesterday when Eddie was up there trying to throw the argument. That should have tipped me off. You knew the witness examination notes. You helped write them. You knew exactly what Eddie was supposed to be asking Dr. Ambrose. But again, you just sat there, watching our side go down in flames.”

Caroline held Louis’s eyes. In them she saw the wariness of a shark who knows he’s the biggest thing in the ocean but still makes a habit of watching his back. Just in case.

“The rest is easy to figure out once you realize who’s pulling the strings. You bought off or blackmailed Yvonne, didn’t you? That’s how you got access to Franklin’s computer.”

Caroline grew reflective. “I think Yvonne knew all about the affair between her husband and Annie. She’d seen Nolan. She couldn’t have missed the resemblance. That affair was the worst-kept secret in the world. And she also had to know that her husband’s medical group had bought a house for Annie. Yvonne did Franklin’s books. That house would’ve shown up as an asset on his medical group’s tax returns for years. But Yvonne didn’t really care about the affair. She’s a lesbian, isn’t she? She has her own thing going on with Trina.”

Caroline recalled the easy familiarity of the two women. The two glasses of wine, one intended for Trina, the other for Yvonne.

“I bet all you had to do was threaten to publicize her relationship. Even aside from not wanting to get thrown out of the club or whatever else might have happened to her, Yvonne wouldn’t have wanted to risk jeopardizing her father’s congressional run,” Caroline surmised. “Good-bye, article.”

Louis cleared his throat. “This is all rather interesting storytelling, Ms. Auden, but I have work to do. If you aren’t interested in continuing on at Hale Stern, I suggest you gather your things. But these accusations are, quite frankly, offensive.”

He turned to his mail. It was an obvious dismissal.

Caroline didn’t move. Not this time.

“There were so many other clues that you were the one manipulating things,” she said. “When I was in Mendocino, everything was so calm at first. You thought I’d give up the hunt for Dr. Wong. But then, after I called to tell you I’d found Annie, all hell broke loose. That threat to my uncle . . .” Caroline shook her head. “That was low.”

Louis put his hands on his desk as if to stand up, but Caroline held up one finger. She wasn’t done. Not yet.

“After I called you from Mendocino, it was all about the firm credit card, wasn’t it? You kept track of my charges. You could see where I was.” Caroline considered her good fortune at having driven up to Mendocino. No credit card charge for a plane trip had meant a quiet couple of days to hunt for Annie . . . until she’d charged a meal at a roadside diner.

“You lost us on the flight east. You didn’t know which of the reservations I’d used. But you knew my dad lived near the city, so you made an educated guess about where I’d go . . .” Except that he hadn’t guessed where she’d ended up. Good thing she’d stayed with Joey. If she’d gone to her dad’s house, they’d have gotten to her. She had little doubt what they would have done to her if they’d found her. She shivered at the close call.

Louis sat back in his leather armchair and idly twisted the pig’s head ring on his finger. He gazed unblinkingly at Caroline, waiting for her to finish.

“I do wonder about Kennedy,” she mused aloud. “Is he a coconspirator? Or is he just another lawyer?” She considered what she knew about the defense attorney. “I think he knows what you are. I think he suspects how Dr. Heller died. But he couldn’t prove anything. Plus, he had an ethical obligation to his client, so he couldn’t say anything to me . . .”

She considered Kennedy’s persistent offers of employment in a new light. Perhaps he’d been trying to save her, in his own way. “I think he was just a regular guy caught in a really horrible situation,” she concluded.

Caroline walked to the antique chess set sitting on the small table by the window. Turning her back on the view, she continued to hold Louis’s gaze. “You said long ago that a fixer leaves no fingerprints. That may be true most of the time, but it wasn’t true this time.”

Louis’s eyes widened slightly.

“Did you know Sotheby’s keeps excellent computer records?” she continued. “Well, they do. Like you said, pedigree is everything. Especially for the top-shelf pieces. Like that Picasso. Imagine my surprise when I learned you weren’t the purchaser of that painting. A holding company for Med-Gen won the auction then donated the painting to your private collection. And the timing was fascinating. Med-Gen transferred ownership to you the same week you called Dale to offer your services on this case.”

Louis’s face drained of all color.

“That coincidence got me thinking. What stories did the other paintings in your collection have to tell? Your curator uses a program called Art-Track to track all purchases made on behalf of its clients. All that information. Up in the Cloud. So easily accessed.” Caroline tapped her lip with a dangerous gleam in her eyes. Hacking into Art-Track had been ridiculously easy. Art curators had no reason to erect complex security walls, apparently.

Louis opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

“Guess what I found out?” she asked. “The dates when you got your paintings corresponded to pivotal developments in your cases. The disappearance of key witnesses. Impossible settlements. Data dumps of incriminating evidence. And the way those paintings were purchased is fascinating, too. Cayman Island trusts. The private accounts of drug lords and fraudsters. It’s all an intriguing web, and I’m sure the police will have fun untangling it.”

Caroline thought about the many pictures that hung on the walls of the firm. All trophies of other Franklin Hellers. Other innocent people whose lives Louis had destroyed.

“But the best part of all is the link to your home computer,” Caroline said, knowing she still had one more ace to play. “I won’t bore you with the details, since we both know you’re not a tech guy, but getting inside wasn’t hard. Your wife gave the firm’s IT guy access to remotely troubleshoot your home computer. Getting into the IT system and then accessing your home computer was a cakewalk. Keeping all that info on the firm server probably wasn’t for you. In retrospect.”

“But that’s illegal,” Louis said.

Caroline ignored the weak protest. While her hacking was certainly illegal, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“Unlike you, I’ve covered my tracks,” Caroline said. “When the data flows to the police, no one will know I sent it. It will show up at their doorstep wrapped up with a bow and a tag from ‘ANONYMOUS.’”

Caroline monitored Louis’s face for his reaction. For his devastation.

But instead, his expression calmed. He leaned back in his chair, a small smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Caroline’s stomach sank at the self-assurance in his eyes. He, too, had another card to play, it seemed.

“Before you continue on this course you seem to have set out for yourself,” he began, “I’d like you to consider a proposal that I had hoped to wait to make to you until you were more seasoned.” Louis paused and folded his hands on his ink blotter. “I know some of my techniques are a bit outdated. The rudiments of helping my clients never change, but I will readily concede that your knowledge of technology is useful. It’s why I hired you, after all.”

He held her eyes.

Caroline’s throat clenched at the implications of his words. He knew about her hacking background. He’d been testing her. He didn’t like relying on outsiders to do his work. He wanted someone in-house. And he’d picked her. It was a dark compliment indeed.

“You’ve shown yourself willing to bend the rules to win,” Louis said. “In fact, you’ve proven far more talented in that regard than anyone I’ve ever seen. Hacking. False identities. Trickery. You’re good at this, Caroline.”

Caroline’s cheeks burned at the truth in his words.

“I know that money doesn’t drive you,” he continued, “but think of all the good you could do. You could choose whichever side you liked and put your thumb on the scale however you pleased.”

“And where do you fit into all of this?” Caroline asked, perversely fascinated.

“I’m good at what I do. The best, in fact. Those who need my services always find their way to me. I’ve never much cared about the winners or losers, but I can see that you do. I’m willing to change my business model to accommodate your moral streak.” He shrugged.

“I’m not interested,” Caroline said, louder than she intended.

“Then you’re a hypocrite,” Louis shot back. “I know what you are. Every bit as much as you know what I am, I know what you are.”

“I’m not like you,” Caroline insisted.

Louis smiled a mirthless grin. “You can keep telling yourself that, but you like the game. You impose limits on yourself as to how far you’ll push the envelope—limits that will eventually fall away. The more you bend the rules, the more you thrill at the victories.”

“You’re wrong. I only leveled the playing field. I gave the victims a chance,” Caroline said. “Whenever there’s someone like you out there, I hope there’s always someone like me who can play your game.”

Louis shrugged in a way that told Caroline he didn’t believe her.

“Suit yourself. But you’re putting yourself in a rather difficult position, aren’t you, Ms. Auden,” he said, the confidence never leaving his eyes. “Leaving a firm after only a month? You’re going to have a rather difficult time getting another job. How will you pay off all of those loans you took out to pay for law school? How will you manage to ever move out of that house with your uncle and your mother?”

Caroline said nothing. She hoped he was wrong, that the police would move quickly enough that her departure from Hale Stern wouldn’t be seen by other firms as anything but a completely sensible flight of a smart rat from a badly listing ship. But she knew the risks. She knew the potential consequences of confronting Louis. She loathed the price she might have to pay for what she was doing. But she had no choice.

“You don’t want to work here. Fine, don’t.” Louis’s voice was mild. “We can come up with a mutually agreeable explanation for your departure. Perhaps you realized you’d rather work in government. Or maybe your true calling is at a nonprofit or a defense firm. I have many friends in this city.” He paused. His lips tightened. “But leave things alone,” he finished, an undercurrent of menace entering his voice.

Caroline’s heart began to pound. She was playing a dangerous game.

“Oh, you can rest assured that I won’t hurt you,” Louis said, reading her expression. “I know you’ll have things set up to explode if anything happens to you. Mutually assured destruction.” He smiled slightly. “We need each other. I need your silence. You need my reputation. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? Get a job at a prestigious firm, and all doors suddenly open for you.”

“No,” Caroline said. She shook her head as though a spell had been broken. “I came because I thought you’d be my mentor. Maybe even my friend. But you’re a complete and utter fraud, Louis. In every possible way, you’re a fake.”

She gestured with her chin toward his ring. “I found out you weren’t even in the Porcellian Club. You’re not old money. You’re part of the Stern family of Rhode Island that made a go of it in the steel industry before your great-grandfather lost his shirt in the Depression. I never cared about any of that stupid stuff. I don’t care where you came from or who you are or how much money you have. I only ever cared that you were something special. But you’re not. You’re a fraud. Not to mention a murderer.”