Page 56 of Into the Fire: After
“I apologize for the delay,” said the woman leading the group. Light brown hair was twisted into a simple but polished clip at the back of her head, and her deep burgundy suit evoked power and poise in equal measure.
Gail placed her leather folio on the table and pulled out the seat directly across from me. “Deposition ran long. My assistant has been briefing me on the developments of our case on the drive over, however, so we can jump straight to business.”
“Good.” Caine’s voice was rough. His arms were crossed, shoulders tense. I straightened in my seat, folded my hands on the tabletop, stretching for the mask of coolness that had always been in easy reach before.
I nodded once, meeting Gail’s eye across the table. The beta was one of the youngest assistant district attorney in recent years with a reputation for her sharp questions and sharper arguments. She also happened to be a childhood friend of our dear detective friend, Vikki Banarjee.
And, supposedly, was game for taking on the behemoth that was Wainwright Corp., bringing them to account for the hurt they’d done Taryn and so many others.
Yet, we’d been home for two months and had fuck all to show for it. Just a handful of meetings, platitudes and promises that things were spinning behind the scenes.
How about let’s get some shit stirring front and center stage?
“There’s good news and bad news to report,” Gail said, opening her folio while her beta assistant sat a few seats down, already furiously scribbling notes.
I stifled a sigh as best I could. “Bad news first.”
Gail nodded. “My team has exhausted the avenues available to us to make the case against Wainwright,” she said, voice stony. “We’re still short.”
Caine swore beside me. “No, wesawthe paper trail linking Phoenix and Wainwright. Fuck, we have hard drives of evidence of what happened to NovaandTaryn. How can there be no case?”
“Most of what Vikki and Sevrin managed to smuggle out implicates Phoenix Labs alone,” Gail replied.
“It’s on Wainwright letterhead!”
“And all that letterhead shows us is Wainwright commissioned Phoenix Labs decades ago to run clinical trials of a drug they hoped to bring to market.” Gail’s eyes betrayed no emotion. “By all accounts, the drug failed and they scrapped the project. Any further statistical analysis can be explained by either Phoenix going rogue, or Wainwright simply searching the data they legally obtained for salient information.”
The angry alpha inside me wanted to snarl. The angry alpha beside me did so.
“Is this the end of the road, then?” I asked.
Gail swallowed, the only sign she was affected at all. “I want to see Wainwright held responsible for all they’ve done,” she hedged. “I’m not ready yet to give up.”
“So what do we do?”
She pulled out a packet of stapled papers. “We shift gears.” She slid the packet across the table toward me.
I grabbed the paper and held it between Caine and me so we could both look it over. The top page was a scan of a memo on Wainwright letterhead. An old one, dated from before Brooks and I even met.
Attn: Board of Trustees
ProGeneE has failed. H.C. relieved of duty.
B.W.
I shook my head, looking back up at Gail. “What is this?”
“That,” she said, “is the last existing proof of the link between Bertram Wainwright and Heston Callaway.”
I blinked a handful of times. “Corinth’s dad and the Lineage guy?”
“Corinth’s dad and the geneticist,” Gail corrected, “who amassed a fortune with do-it-yourself DNA analysis.”
I’d seen the ads. Spit in a tube, mail it off, get a report back on your genetic background, where your ancestors hailed from, all kinds of fun stuff. Over the years, as other companies picked up their schtick, Lineage branched out—medical, health and diet, fertility. Hell, they had kits claiming that your little tube of spit could tell them if you’d go prematurely bald.
Some people just loved throwing their money away.
“And pro-gene is?” Caine asked.
