Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,24
inevitable.
She consoled herself that she could go to another firm if things didn’t work out at Hale Stern. But the consolation fell flat. If she left too soon, she’d be seen as damaged goods. Her short stint at Hale Stern—or her gap in employment if she left the firm off her résumé—would be an indictment. She’d be lucky to find another position. And that meant she’d be stuck at home longer. In that house full of ghosts. Full of her uncle . . . She didn’t know if she could stand it.
All of which brought her back to her problem. The Heller article. Because of her inability to find anything else of use in the war room, her success or failure at Hale Stern had telescoped down to a single question: whether she could find Dr. Heller’s missing article. She’d pushed all her chips into the center of the table, gambling on finding it.
But she’d already tried the easy pathways to information about the article. To find it, she might need to try some . . . harder ones.
Her chest grew cold, as if a ghost had passed through her.
She knew the price of information. There were always ways to find things out. Some of those ways were legal. Some were not. She knew the lines of demarcation. After her father had been arrested for hacking, those lines were tattooed indelibly on her soul. Yes, Caroline knew the toll of information. The human toll. To herself. To those she’d loved . . .
She was fairly sure she could find the article through legal means, but the slope was a slippery one. She knew how addicting the hunt for information could become. How difficult it was to stop once she’d started . . . Even when prudence dictated caution, she’d shown herself heedless of the imperative to retreat from the hunt.
Caroline slowed her steps.
Glass windows beside office doors provided glimpses of the Hale Stern lawyers inside. As she passed each one, she studied their faces. Old faces and young. Male and female. Of myriad ethnicities. But all of them practiced at the pinnacle of the legal world. All of them had made a professional home at one of the most well-respected firms in the country.
Their offices reflected their success. Some, like Louis’s, were decorated with antiques. Brass fittings and carved walnut furniture. Persian rugs and elegant lamps. Others had opted for more modern trappings. Caroline idly wondered whether the partners received a decorating stipend or whether they paid for their furnishings themselves. They could certainly afford it.
Caroline stopped before an empty office. A small one. An associate’s office that contained only an oak desk and metal bookshelf holding the ubiquitous Code of Civil Procedure issued to all first-year associates. Beyond the sparse furnishings, a panoramic view of the San Gabriel Mountains rose up in the north.
She read the nameplate on the door: GREG PORTOS.
Pulling back as if touched by electricity, Caroline turned and hurried to her own office.
Before she began, Caroline shut her door. What she was about to do wasn’t forbidden. Subterfuge might be morally reprehensible, but no law barred it. Still, she didn’t want to explain her methods to anyone. People might judge. Even she herself could not escape the pang of conscience that settled in the pit of her stomach, a reminder of the dread she’d experienced the last time she’d dug too far for information . . .
Bringing her fingers to her laptop, she ran a search for Dr. Franklin Heller.
As before, dozens of obituaries appeared on the screen. But this time, she wasn’t interested in the details of the scientist’s death. Instead, she scrolled down until she found the information she sought: Dr. Heller was survived by his wife, Yvonne Heller.
Perhaps the dead scientist’s wife knew something about the article.
There was only one way to find out: she needed a phone number.
She hoped that finding it would be relatively simple.
As expected, she found nothing in the publicly available telephone databases. A general search for “Yvonne Heller” failed, too. It retrieved hundreds of pages. Too many to be useful.
Caroline knew she needed to limit the universe of results.
She restricted her results to Yvonne Hellers who lived in Los Angeles County.
Still, a dozen hits marched down the page.
Navigating back to the obituaries, Caroline skimmed until she found the piece of information she needed: Yvonne’s middle name. It was Ophelia.
Caroline breathed an internal sigh of relief. The letter O was unusual enough to limit her results to probable hits.