Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,13
when a meteor was going to fall out of the sky and pulverize you. She took solace in the fact that a lawyer’s only serious occupational hazard was getting a paper cut.
“Yeah, it was terrible news,” the editor agreed.
“Do you know anything more about what Dr. Heller was working on?” Caroline asked.
“No. When I talked to him in Hawaii, he told me his new paper would blow the walls off SuperSoy. He said we’d save lives when we published. But he didn’t give me a lot of details. He didn’t want to get scooped. That’s the way these scientists are. Until they circulate their papers, they never say much about them.”
“But he never circulated it.”
“Sadly, no. We were really looking forward to shaking things up with that piece.”
“What do you mean?” Caroline asked.
“These big biotech companies make sure the favorable studies get published. No one champions the unfavorable ones,” the editor said. “We try to fight that trend.”
Caroline knew it was true. She recalled that the Hahn and Ambrose articles had both been published in earlier issues of the Fielding Journal.
“After Dr. Heller died, we tried to get his paper from his lab, but we couldn’t.” The editor huffed audibly. “Not even from his coauthor.”
“Coauthor?” Caroline’s ears tingled with the news.
“Dr. Anne Wong. She’s kind of a rock star in the world of research science. Her father is a respected biochem professor at Berkeley, but her work has eclipsed his. She’s done some really cutting-edge stuff since she joined Heller’s lab.”
“But she wouldn’t give you the article?” Caroline asked.
“It wasn’t like that. I couldn’t even find her to ask for it,” the editor said. “The lab said she took a leave of absence after Heller died.”
“You mean like bereavement leave?”
“Family emergency is all they’d say. They couldn’t tell me where she’d gone or when she’d be back or anything else, so I gave up on trying to get the article,” the editor said, his voice tinged with resignation.
Caroline thanked him and hung up.
In the silence of her office, the peril of her situation settled around her. Telling Louis about the Heller article had been an act of desperation. The plane had been going down, so she’d tried one last thing to avoid cratering. And it had worked. Louis’s excitement about finding the article had saved what would’ve been a disappointing performance. Failing to find it now might be worse than never mentioning it. In Louis’s mind, she’d become that morally ambiguous associate who’d duped Dr. Feinberg. She needed results to obliterate the memory of her transgressions.
She needed Dr. Wong.
Caroline pivoted toward her laptop. She ran a search for a “Dr. Wong” on the faculty of UC Berkeley’s biochemistry department.
There was only one: Dr. Chao Wong, professor of the Graduate School Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology. Specialization: macromolecular complexes.
Caroline dialed Dr. Wong’s office number.
“This is Dr. Wong,” a man’s voice answered in heavily accented English.
“My name’s Caroline Auden. I’m a lawyer working on an important case that involves your daughter’s research. I was hoping you had a phone number where I could reach her,” Caroline began.
Now there was only silence on the other end. Strange.
Caroline checked to make sure the connection hadn’t been dropped. It hadn’t.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Your daughter’s lab said she took a leave for a family emergency—”
“I do not know any of this,” Dr. Wong’s voice said in Caroline’s ear.
Caroline chilled at his dismissive tone.
“I do not talk to my daughter in three years,” the elder Dr. Wong clarified, “so I cannot help you with this. I have to go.”
Without waiting for a response, he hung up, leaving Caroline holding a phone full of dead air.
Caroline looked at the receiver, dumbfounded. If the editor of the Fielding Journal was correct, Anne Wong was a superstar scientist who’d done her father proud. So then, what could have driven such a wedge between father and daughter that they hadn’t spoken in years?
Caroline turned back to her laptop and ran a search for “Heller Laboratory Dr. Anne Wong.”
The search retrieved nothing illuminating the strained relationship between the older and younger Dr. Wongs. Instead, Caroline discovered hundreds of sites describing Anne Wong’s research achievements. What she found was impressive. Dr. Wong’s innovative methods had led to breakthroughs in cancer research when she’d been a mere research fellow. Most recently, she’d studied the therapeutic effects of cannabinoids on epilepsy.
Caroline considered the information. Science proving that marijuana could treat illness was an area struggling for legitimacy. Perhaps that