Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020)

by Connelly, Michael

  This was not the way it was supposed to be.

  I finally found my voice.

  “You going to put his name on the door?”

  “I don’t think so. We’ve already done the branding with RAW Data and it works. So … what brings you here?”

  “Well, I was hoping maybe I could pick your brain and get some advice on a story I’m working on.”

  “Let’s move over here.”

  She gestured toward the seating area and we shifted there, me sitting on the couch and Rachel taking the armchair across a coffee table from me. The wall behind her was hung with photos from her time with the bureau. I knew it was a selling tool.

  “So,” she said when we were seated.

  “I have a story,” I said. “I mean, I think. I wanted to run it by you, see if anything pops for you.”

  As quickly as I could I told the story of Tina Portrero’s murder, the connection to three other deaths of women across the country, and the rabbit hole it had led me down. I pulled the printouts from my back pocket and read her passages from the GT23 informed-consent pages and some of the quotes from Bolender and Tina’s mother.

  “It feels like there’s something there,” I concluded. “But I don’t know what the next steps would be.”

  “First question,” Rachel said. “Is there any indication that the LAPD is going the same way with this? Do they know what you know?”

  “I don’t know but I doubt they’ve come up with the three other cases.”

  “How did you find out about this in the first place? It doesn’t feel like the new you. The consumer reporter.”

  I had conveniently left out the part about the LAPD coming to me because I had spent a night with Tina Portrero the previous year. Now there was no way around it.

  “Well, I sort of knew Tina Portrero—briefly—so they came to me.”

  “You mean you’re a suspect, Jack?”

  “No, more of a person of interest, but that will get cleared up soon. I gave them my DNA and it will clear me.”

  “But then you have a big conflict of interest here. Your editor is letting you run with this?”

  “Same thing. Once the DNA clears me there is no conflict. Yes, I knew Tina, but that doesn’t preclude me from writing about the case. It’s been done before. I wrote about my brother and before that I knew an assistant city manager who got murdered. I wrote about the case.”

  “Yeah, but did you fuck her too?”

  That was harsh and it led me to realize that Rachel had a conflict of interest herself when it came to me. Though our decision to part three years before was mutual, I don’t think either of us had gotten over the other and possibly never would.

  “No, I didn’t fuck the assistant city manager,” I said. “She was just a source.”

  I realized as soon as I said the last line that it had been a mistake. Rachel and I had had a secret relationship that blew up publicly when she revealed that she was my source on the series of stories exposing Rodney Fletcher’s misdeeds.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay, Jack,” Rachel said. “Water under the bridge. I think you’re right about this DNA stuff. There is something there and I would pursue it.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “You said it’s a self-regulating industry. Remember when it came out that Boeing was essentially self-regulating and self-reporting when they had those airliner crashes? You could be onto something just as big here. I don’t care what it is—a government, a bureaucracy, a business. When there are no rules then corruption sets in like rust. That’s your angle. You have to find out if GT23 or any of them has ever been breached. If it has, then game over.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “You need to ask yourself where the vulnerability is. That part you read to me: We cannot guarantee that a breach will never happen. That’s important. If they can’t guarantee that, then they know something. Find the vulnerabilities. Don’t expect the media flack to just give them to you.”

  I understood what she was saying but I was on the outside looking in. The weaknesses of any system are always hidden from the outside.

  “I know that,” I said. “But GT23 is like a fortress.”

  “Weren’t you the one who told me once that no place is a fortress to a good reporter? There is always a way in. Former employees, current employees with grievances. Who have they fired? Who have they mistreated? Competitors, jealous colleagues—there’s always a way in.”

  “Okay, I’ll check all of that—”

  “The collaborators. That’s another vulnerability. Look at what GT23 is doing, Jack. They are handing off data—they’re selling it. That is the point where they lose control of it. They don’t control it physically anymore and they don’t control what’s done with it. They do their due diligence on the research application and then trust that that is the research that is actually conducted. But do they ever double back and check that it is? That’s the direction you have to take this. What did the mother say?”

  “What?”

  “The mother of the victim. You read me her quotes. She said Tina was never married, never wanted to be tied down to one man, was boy crazy from the start. What is all of that? It’s a nice way of saying she was promiscuous. In current society, that is considered a behavioral problem in females. Right?”

  I was seeing all of her profiling instincts come into play. I might have had ulterior motives in coming to see Rachel Walling again, but now she was using her skills to give direction to my reporting and it was beautiful.

  “Uh, right, I guess.”

  “It’s the classic profile. A man pursues sex with multiple partners, no big deal. A woman? She’s loose. She’s a whore. Well, is it genetic?”

  I nodded, remembering.

  “Sex addiction. At least one of the GT23 collaborators is studying risky behaviors and their genetic origin. I saw that in a story. There might be others.”

  Rachel pointed at me.

  “Bingo,” she said. “Sex addiction. Who is studying the genetic relation to sex addiction?”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Man, I wish we had this stuff when I was working bureau cases,” Rachel said. “It would have been a huge part of both victimology and suspect profiling.”

  She said it wistfully, remembering her past work for the bureau. I could tell that what I had brought to her excited her but also served as a reminder about what she once had and once was. I almost felt bad about my motives for coming.

  “Uh, this is all fantastic, Rachel,” I said. “Great stuff. You’ve given me a lot of angles to look at.”

  “All of which I think a seasoned reporter like you already knew,” she said.

  I looked at her. So much for my motives. She had read me the way she used to read crime scenes and killers.

  “What did you really come here for, Jack?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s just it,” I said. “You just read me like an open book. And that’s what I came for. I thought maybe you’d want to take a shot at this, maybe profile the killer, profile the victims. I have a lot of victimology and on the killer I’ve got times, locations, how he staged things—I’ve got a lot.”

  She was shaking her head before I finished.

  “I’ve got too much going on,” she said. “This week we’re backgrounding candidates for the Mulholland Corridor Planning Board for the city, and I have the usual backlog from our steady clients.”

  “Well, I guess all that pays the bills,” I said.

  “Besides … I really don’t want to go down that path. That was the past, Jack.”

  “But you were good at it, Rachel.”

  “I was. But doing it this way … I think it will be too much of a reminder of that past. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve let it go.”

  I looked at her, trying to get a read now myself. But she had always been a hard nut to crack. I was left to take her at her word but I
wondered if the past she didn’t want to return to was more about me than the job she had left behind.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess I should let you get back to it, then.”

  I stood up and so did she. The shin-high coffee table was between us and I leaned across to engage in an awkward hug.

  “Thanks, Rachel.”

  “Anytime, Jack.”

  I left the office and checked my phone as I walked down Main Street to the lot where I had left the Jeep. I had silenced it before going in to see Rachel and now saw that I had missed two calls from unknown numbers and had two new messages.

  The first was from Lisa Hill.

  “Stop harassing me.”

  Short and simple, followed by the hang-up. This message led me to accurately guess who the second message was from before playing it. Detective Mattson used a few more words than Hill.

  “McEvoy, if you want me to put together a harassment case against you, all you have to do is keep bothering Lisa Hill. Leave. Her. Alone.”

  I erased both messages, my face burning with both indignation and humiliation. I was just doing my job, but it bothered me that neither Hill nor Mattson viewed it that way. To them I was some kind of intruder.

  It made me all the more determined to find out what had happened to Tina Portrero and the three other women. Rachel Walling said she didn’t want to venture into the past. But I did. For the first time in a long time I had a story that had my blood moving with an addictive momentum. It was good to have that feeling back.

  10

  FairWarning did not have the budget for such niceties as the LexisNexis legal search engine. But William Marchand, the lawyer who was on the board of directors and reviewed all FairWarning stories for legal pitfalls, did have the service and offered it to our staff as just one of the many things he did for us gratis. His office, where he served most of his paying clients, was located on Victory Boulevard near the Van Nuys Civic Center and the side-by-side courthouses where he most often appeared on their behalf. I made my first stop there after leaving downtown.

  Marchand was in court but his legal assistant, Sacha Nelson, was there and allowed me to sit next to her at her computer while she conducted a LexisNexis search to see if GT23 or its parent company and founding partners had ever been the subject of a lawsuit. I came across one pending action against the company and another that had been filed and dismissed when a settlement had been reached.

  The pending case was a wrongful-termination claim filed by someone named Jason Hwang. The cause-of-action summary on the first page of the lawsuit stated that Hwang was a regulatory-affairs specialist who was fired when another employee claimed that he had fondled him during an encounter in the coffee room. Hwang denied the accusation and claimed to have been fired without the due process of a full internal investigation. The lawsuit stated that the sexual-harassment complaint was trumped up as a means of getting rid of Hwang because he had demanded strict adherence to company protocols regarding DNA testing and research. The lawsuit also stated that the alleged victim of the unwanted sexual contact was promoted to Hwang’s position after he was fired, a clear indication that the termination was unlawful.

  What stood out to me in the filing was that Hwang did not work directly for GT23 at the company’s Palo Alto lab. He was technically an employee of Woodland Bio, an independent lab located in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles. Woodland Bio was described in the lawsuit as a GT23 subcontractor, a lab that handled some of the overflow demands of the mother company’s genetic testing. Hwang was suing the mother company because they had ultimate control over personnel decisions and that was also where the money was. Hwang was seeking $1.2 million in damages, saying his reputation had been ruined in the industry by the false accusation and no other company would hire him.

  I asked Sacha to print out the lawsuit, which included a notifications page with the name and contact information for Hwang’s attorney, who was a partner in a downtown L.A. law firm. Sacha sensed my excitement.

  “Good stuff?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “If the plaintiff or his lawyer will talk to me, it could lead to something.”

  “Should we pull up the other case?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  I was sitting on a roller chair next to Sacha’s as she worked the keyboard. She was in her early forties, had been with Marchand for a long time, and I knew from previous conversations that she was going to law school at night while working in the office by day. She was attractive in a bookish, determined sort of way—pretty face and eyes hidden behind eyeglasses, never lipstick or any sign that she spent much time in front of a makeup mirror. She wore no rings or earrings and had an unconscious habit of hooking her short auburn hair behind her ears as she stared at the computer screen.

  It turned out that there had been six Stanford men who had originally founded GenoType23 to cater to the burgeoning law-enforcement need for DNA lab work. But Jenson Fitzgerald had been bought out early by the five other partners. When years later GT23 was founded, he filed a lawsuit claiming that he was owed a piece of the GT23 action because of his standing as an original founder of the mother company. The initial response to the lawsuit said Fitzgerald had no claim to the riches generated by the new company because they were separate entities. But the LexisNexis file ended with a joint notice of dismissal, meaning the two parties had come to an agreement and the dispute was settled. The details of the settlement were kept confidential.

  I asked Sacha to print out the documents that were available even though I did not see much in the way of follow-up on that case. I believed that the Hwang case could be far more fruitful.

  After finding no other legal action regarding the company, I had Sacha enter the names of the five remaining founders one by one to see if there was ever a legal action personally filed by them or against them. She found only a divorce case involving one of the founders, a man named Charles Breyer. His marriage of twenty-four years came to an end in a divorce petition filed two years earlier by his wife, Anita, who made claims of intolerable cruelty and called her husband a serial philanderer. She settled the divorce for a lump-sum payment of $2 million and the home they had shared in Palo Alto, which was valued at $3.2 million.

  “Another happy loving couple,” Sacha said. “Print it?”

  “Yeah, might as well print it,” I said. “You sound pretty cynical about it.”

  “Money,” she said. “It’s the root of all troubles. Men get rich, they think they’re king of the world, then they act like it.”

  “Is that from personal experience?” I asked.

  “No, but you see it a lot when you work in a law office.”

  “You mean with the cases?”

  “Yes, the cases. Definitely not the boss.”

  She got up and went to the printer, where all the pages I had asked for were waiting. She tapped them together and then put a clip on the stack before handing it to me. I stood up and moved around from behind her desk.

  “How is law school?” I asked.

  “All good,” she said. “Two years down, one to go.”

  “Think you’ll work here with Bill, or strike out on your own?”

  “I’m hoping I’ll be right here, working with you and FairWarning and our other clients.”

  I nodded.

  “Cool,” I said. “Well, as always, thanks for your help. Tell Bill thanks as well. You two really take good care of us.”

  “We’re happy to,” she said. “Good luck with the story.”

  When I got back to the office, Myron Levin was closed up in the conference room. Through the glass I could see him talking to a man and woman but they didn’t look like cops, so I assumed it had nothing to do with my pursuits. I looked over at Emily Atwater in her cubby, caught her attention, and pointed at the conference-room door.

  “Donors,” Emily said.

  I nodded, sat down in my cubicle, and started the search for Jason Hwang. I found no phone number or social-media footprin
t. He wasn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. I got up and walked over to Emily. I knew she was on LinkedIn, the professional networking site, and I wasn’t.

  “I’m looking for a guy,” I said. “Can you do a quick check on LinkedIn?”

  “Let me finish this line,” she said.

  She kept typing. I checked on Myron through the glass and saw that the woman was writing a check.

  “Looks like we’ll get paid this week,” I said.

  Emily stopped typing and glanced at the conference-room window.

  “She’s writing a check,” I explained.

  “Six figures, I hope,” Emily said.

  I knew FairWarning’s biggest financial support came from individuals and family foundations. Sometimes there were one-to-one matching grants from journalism foundations.

  “Okay, what’s the name?” Emily asked.

  “Jason Hwang,” I said, and spelled it.

  Emily typed. She had a habit of leaning forward when she typed, as though she was diving headfirst into whatever she was writing. With powder-blue eyes, pale skin, and white-blond hair, she seemed just a few genetic ticks away from being full albino. She was also tall—not just for a woman but for anyone, at least six feet in flats. She chose to accentuate this signature feature by always wearing heels. On top of that she was a damn good reporter, having been a war correspondent, followed by stints in New York and Washington, DC, before heading west to California, where she eventually landed at FairWarning. Her two separate postings in Afghanistan had left her tough and unflappable, great attributes for a reporter.

  “Who is he?” she asked.