Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(27)
“Lives in L.A.,” I said. “He’s got a master’s in life sciences from UCLA.”
She started looking at the pedigrees of the four Jason Hwangs, shaking her head and saying “Nope” each time.
“Strike four, and you’re out. None of these are even from L.A.”
“Okay, thanks for looking.”
“You could try LexisNexis.”
“I did.”
I went back to my desk. Of course, I had not run Hwang’s name through LexisNexis as I should have. I now called the law office and quietly asked Sacha Nelson to do the search. I heard her type it in.
“Hmm, only the lawsuit comes back up,” she said. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”
After hanging up I continued the search for Jason Hwang. I knew I could simply call the attorney who had filed the lawsuit on Hwang’s behalf but my hope was to get to Hwang without his lawyer sitting on his shoulder and trying to control the flow of information. The attorney was useful, however, in that he had listed Hwang’s credentials and experience in the claim, noting his receiving the master’s degree from UCLA in 2012 before being recruited by Woodland Bio. That told me that Hwang was a young man, most likely in his early thirties. He had started at Woodland as a lab technician before being promoted to regulatory-affairs specialist just a year before he was fired.
I conducted a search for professional organizations in the DNA field and came up with a group called the National Society of Professional Geneticists. Its website menu had a page labeled Looking for a Lab, which I took to be a help-wanted section. Hwang claimed in his still-pending lawsuit that he had become a pariah in the genetics industry because of the accusation made against him. In the #MeToo era, just an accusation was enough to end a career. I thought maybe there was a chance Hwang had posted his résumé and contact information in an effort to land an interview somewhere. He could have even been instructed to do so by his lawyer to help prove his inability to get work in the field.
The résumés were listed in alphabetical order and I quickly found Jason Hwang’s curriculum vitae as the last entry under the letter H. It was the jackpot. It included an email address, phone number, and mailing address. The work-experience section revealed the responsibilities of his GT23 job as a quality control specialist and liaison between the company and any regulatory agencies that kept watch on the various aspects of DNA analysis. The primary agencies were the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission. I noticed Hwang had also listed several references. Most were personal or academic supporters but one was a man named Gordon Webster, who was described as an investigator with the Federal Trade Commission. I wrote the name down, thinking that Webster might be useful to interview.
I wrote Hwang’s details down as well. I was in business and keeping my momentum. If Hwang’s mailing address was his home, he lived just over the hill in West Hollywood. I checked the time and realized that if I left the office now I could probably get through Laurel Canyon before it became clogged with rush-hour traffic.
I put a fresh notebook and batteries for my tape recorder into my backpack before heading to the door.
11
The winding two-lane snake that was Laurel Canyon Boulevard took nearly a half hour to pass. I relearned another object lesson about Los Angeles: there was no rush hour because every hour was rush hour.
The address on Jason Hwang’s CV corresponded to a home on Willoughby Avenue in a neighborhood of expensive homes with high hedges. It seemed too nice for an out-of-work biologist in his early thirties. I parked and walked through an archway cut into a six-foot-thick hedge and knocked on the aquamarine door of a two-story white cube. After knocking I rang the doorbell, when I should have done just one or the other. But following the doorbell I heard a dog start to bark inside and then the sound was quickly cut off by someone yelling the dog’s name: Tipsy.
The door opened and a man stood there cradling a toy poodle under one arm. The dog was as white as the house. The man was Asian and very small. Not just short but small in all dimensions.
“Hi, I’m looking for Jason Hwang,” I said.
“Who are you?” he said. “Why are you looking for him?”
“I’m a reporter. I’m working on a story about GT23 and I would like to talk to him about it.”
“What kind of story?”
“Are you Jason Hwang? I’ll tell him what kind of story.”
“I’m Jason. What is this story?”
“I’d rather not talk about it standing out here. Is there a place we can go to sit down and talk? Maybe inside or somewhere nearby?”
It was a tip my editor Foley had given me when I started out in the business. Never do an interview at the door. People can shut the door if they don’t like what you ask.
“Do you have a card or some sort of ID?” Hwang asked.
“Sure,” I said.
I dug a business card out of my wallet and handed it to him. I also showed him a press pass issued six years earlier by the Sheriff’s Department when I was regularly writing crime stories for the Velvet Coffin.
Hwang studied both but didn’t mention that the press pass was dated 2013 or that the man in the photo looked a lot younger than me.