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.
“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.