Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(26)

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 footprint. 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.

“He worked for a lab that subcontracted for the company I’m looking at,” I said. “Then he got fired and sued them.”

“GT23?”

“How do you know that?”

“Myron. He said you might need help on it.”

“I just need to find this guy.”

She nodded.

“Well, there’s four here,” she said.

I remembered how Hwang was described in the lawsuit.