“That’s good. Just order me a hamburger from somewhere, and I’m good.” I was dying for a hamburger. I didn’t even know why. I only knew that a burger sounded amazing at that point.
“Okay. Let me go and get the orders from the girls, and I’ll call.”
He went over to Rina and Abby, who excitedly told him what they wanted, and from what restaurant they wanted it from. “PF Chang’s,” they both said. “And I want the orange chicken and Abby gets the sweet and sour chicken. And lettuce wraps. Yum, yum, yum,” Rina said, her little voice getting higher and higher pitched as she spoke.
“Harper wants a burger,” Axel said.
I shrugged. “I’m not married to the burger idea. Just get me some Sesame Chicken and we’ll call it good.”
At that, Axel called on the phone and I flopped down on the couch. I felt a blinding headache coming on. I didn’t usually get headaches, but when I did, they were doozies. This one felt no different.
“Okay,” Axel said. “They’ll be here in about a half hour.” He took off my shoes and started to rub my feet. “Do you want to tell me what is going on, lass?” he asked me as he slowly rubbed my heels, and then my soles, and finally worked his way up to rubbing each of my toes.
“That feels amazing,” I said. “Just amazing. You should do this professionally. No joke.”
“I guess I missed my calling. But you haven’t answered my question. What happened today? You seem…out of sorts.”
“I am out of sorts. I am. I’m just confused. I mean, yesterday, I thought that I was going along on the right track. I thought that I knew what had happened in Judge Sanders’ murder. And now…” I shook my head. “To say that I’m not sure would be putting it mildly. I suddenly am questioning everything. Perhaps that was the plan all along. Throw up a million roadblocks, a million red herrings, so that I never really can figure out what happened. But I don’t know why Michael would do that. I mean, if I can’t figure out what end is up on this case, then how the Hell am I supposed to try it?”
“Wait,” Axel said. “Slow down. Now, what happened?”
“I don’t know. My client is trying to throw his wife under the bus. He started out telling me that he didn’t know who did it, and, now that I’m getting closer to who I thought really did it, he’s stepped up his efforts to throw Christina Sanders under the bus. But Christina is singing a different tune, and somehow, someway, she managed to drag Judge Perez into this mess.”
“Who is Judge Perez?”
“He’s a judge. He was a state court judge up until just recently, when he became a federal judge. He just got on the federal bench with our current Republican President.” My head hurt. “And now he’s the judge who is overseeing the Dowling Chemical case, and the parent company is Stone Enterprises. That was the direction I was going, that Gerald Stone was behind this murder, then Michael threw something up in front of me, and then Christina did, and now I’m just confused.”
“Well, let’s see. Let’s do this. Let’s have our dinner, and then, after dinner, I’ll watch the girls while you go upstairs in your office and try to figure out what’s going on. I know that you want to do that. Unless you’re not in the mood to do that.”
“Oh, I’m in the mood. I mean, I feel nauseated, my head is splitting open, and I have a big, empty pit right here.” I pointed to my stomach. “And a knot that won’t go away. But I do need to do some more research on this. I do. And I have to figure out exactly what happened, and I need to figure that out soon, because if I don’t, Rina and Abby might be in danger.”
Axel looked perplexed. “Why would they be in danger?”
“Because Christina Sanders’ child is in danger. She said that powerful people were behind Judge Sanders’ murder, and that these powerful people would stop at nothing to make sure that she takes the fall. I finally have gotten it through my head that Christina Sanders probably didn’t do it. I mean, I think that I can safely say that, after all that has been thrown up in front of me. I don’t think that she did it. But somebody did. Several somebodies did.”
“And how do you know that it was more than one person?”
“Because Christina kept saying ‘they.’ She kept saying that ‘they’ were threatening her and that ‘they’ were out to get her. I don’t know exactly who the ‘they’ are in this case, but I’m determined that I’m going to find out.”
THE FOOD CAME about a half hour later, and Axel paid and tipped the guy, even though I insisted that I was going to pay. “It’s my idea,” Axel said. “So I’m going to pay. I insist.”
I simply nodded, as I had no energy to fight. “I’ll get it next time. I insist.”
Axel just shrugged and brought the food to the table. “Now, let’s all eat this stuff family style, like you’re supposed to with Chinese food.” He spooned a little bit of everything on everybody’s dish and we all dug in.
The girls started in about their day, and I smiled and nodded along, even though I wasn’t hearing a word of it. Axel was right. I was going to have to go up in my office and try to figure out a few things. I was going to right this ship, and put it in a better direction, because if I didn’t, then I was going to lose.
By losing, it meant that Michael was possibly going to win. I was still determined that he was a part of the conspiracy.
But I also had to get to the bottom of everything that was going on in this case.
I ate everything on my plate and then I got up from the table. “I hope you guys don’t mind if I retire early.”
“Of course not,”Axel said. “I told you, you probably need to go upstairs to your office and try to sort things out. I’ll hang out here with the girls and make sure that they get to bed by a decent hour. By midnight at least.” He smiled and winked, to let me know that he was joking, and I smiled back.
“Thanks.” I hugged the two girls and went upstairs.
I got into my bedroom, intending to change in to my pajamas and then get on the computer, but I lay down on my bed and promptly fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The next day, I was refreshed, and, when I looked at my clock, I knew why. It was 10 AM.
I ran down the stairs, frantic that I overslept and that I needed to get the girls off to school. But they were nowhere to be found.
“Rina, Abby!” I called. I went into both of their rooms, and they weren’t there.
Oh, God. Where were they? Why didn’t they wake me up to take them to school? I couldn’t think straight. The stress was getting to me, yes, but I also was frantic because I remembered Christina Sanders’ warning. Powerful forces were behind the murder of her father, and these powerful forces would stop at nothing to intimidate me.
She also warned me to make sure that Rina and Abby were safe.
My heart was pounding. I was still wearing the suit that I was wearing the day before, as I fell asleep on my bed, fully clothed. My head was pounding, my hands were shaking, and my mouth was dry.
With shaking hands, I called Axel, thinking that maybe he spent the night and took the girls into school. I got his voice-mail, and I left a frantic message. “Axel, this is Harper. I can’t find the girls. I hope that you know where they are.”
I hung up the phone, got my keys, started my car and drove off. I was going to go to the girls’ school and find out if they were there.
But, of course, the best laid plans…traffic was horrendous, and I hit every single red light. I hated hitting the red lights on the best of days, but on days like today, when I was experiencing sheer panic, the red lights seemed to just taunt me. You’re never going to see your girls again, the red lights seem to say to me. Never again.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I screamed at the lights. “I will see them again. I will. They’re safe and sound. They are. Safe and sound. Axel took them to school this morning, and he forgot to leave me a note. But he should have left me a note, the jerk. But he didn’t. He didn’t, and they’re in school, safe and sound. Safe and sound. Safe and soun
d.”
I finally made it to their school and I ran in there. “Hello,” I said to the headmaster, as I stormed into her office without even knocking. “Are Rina and Abby here today?” I was breathless, and, unfortunately, the headmaster had a mirror in her office. I looked in the mirror and saw a woman with wild red hair and streaked makeup.
She looked like a loon. A scary loon.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “They’re in their home room. Are you okay?”
“No. No, I’m not okay. I’m not. Okay. I haven’t been sleeping well, and I slept last night, but then I overslept. And, I don’t know…” The adrenaline that was coursing through my veins, as I panicked over whether or not Rina and Abby were kidnapped, drained away. All I could feel was a deep pool of sadness. That was how it felt. Like my entire body was made of a large pool of tears, and the tears ran infinitely deep.
I sat down on the chair across from Ms. Hayden, and I knew that I was on the verge of crying. She silently pushed the box of Kleenex my way and I took one out of the box and dabbed my right eye. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have scared the living daylights out of you. I look a fright, I know. I’m really not out of my mind. It’s just…”
She nodded. “I know. Sometimes we all get to the end of our rope. I would imagine that it’s hard for you, having to juggle your job of defending criminals with having to care for two young girls. It’s hard enough to care for two young girls, even if you didn’t have a demanding job. So, you don’t have to explain to me how much stress you’re under. How you are feeling. I can just imagine it.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that. I can’t even explain it, except that my biological clock has been going haywire on me lately. It’s almost like…” I closed my eyes, getting the insight that I had been trying to avoid. Trying to avoid for way too long.
“It’s almost like I’ve been manic. Manic. Bi-polar disorder. That was what my Uncle Patrick had. I mean, I was very young when he was institutionalized, but my mother always talked about his symptoms, and his symptoms are my symptoms. I’ve had problems with depression my entire life, but I had never had a manic episode. I have never had one. But that’s it. That’s what’s been wrong with me this whole time.”
I opened my eyes. “But I can’t do anything about it right now. I need mental focus, and I have to admit, I’ve been focused like a laser beam this past week or so. Things have been coming to me, things that I never would have thought of before. I need to keep on this high, this rush, until the end of the trial. Now is not the time to try out new medicines, medicines that might dull my senses. I need to do something about this problem after the trial.”
Ms. Hayden sighed. “Harper, I know something about bi-polar disorder. My sister has had bi-polar disorder for most of her life. And you might think that you have amazing insight. Amazing clarity. But it’s most likely a delusion. Your mind is playing tricks on you. If I were you, I would see a doctor right away. Right away. Because you might end up thinking that you cracked your murder case, when, actually, you haven’t even come close.”
I shook my head, not wanting to hear what she was telling me. “No. You don’t understand. I’m solving this case. I am.” But, deep down, I was afraid of what she was telling me. Was this whole Gerald Stone tie-in a ruse? Was it something that my brain was making up from whole cloth? I mean, whoever really heard of a CEO of a company putting a hit on a judge? I had never heard of such a thing. It was a crazy idea, and I didn’t know if it was a crazy idea that was true or a crazy idea that my crazy mind had cooked up. Because I was crazy.
Ms. Hayden shook her head. “You have to do what you think is right. But I would see a doctor straight away. You don’t want to end up ignoring this issue, because you’re eventually going to break. I’ve seen it happen way too many times with my sister. If she doesn’t take her meds, she ends up in the hospital. I don’t want to see that happen to you. I know that you have that adoption pending with the girls. Just please think of that.”
I sighed. The girls. The adoption. She was right. If I was going crazy…no, bi-polar disorder didn’t mean that you were going crazy. It simply meant that the chemicals in the brain were going haywire. That was all it meant. And medicine could fix that.
“Thank you, Ms. Hayden. The girls will be picked up today at the usual time, but I’m actually going to be the one to pick them up. I’ll take off work early to do it.”
“Okay. Please, Harper, think of the girls. And see your doctor.”
“I will.”
I walked out of the office feeling dazed and confused. She was right. I was going to have to see a doctor. If I didn’t see a doctor, I was heading for a total breakdown.
And one thing I couldn’t afford at that time was a total breakdown.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I got into my office and shut the door. I had tried to call my doctor in my car on the way over, but I couldn’t get in touch with anybody. I left a message for them to call me.
But, for now, I was going to have to do the research I was going to do last night. I had to find out what Christina Sanders meant when she told me about Judge Perez finding that Judge Sanders was the father of her baby. Unfortunately, the court records for that case would be sealed, as it was a paternity case. So, Anna was going to have to come to rescue for me once again.
“Anna,” I said, calling her on the phone. “I need your help. Stat.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Thanks.”
I could barely keep my head up at that point. All the manic energy that had been coursing through my veins had emptied out, and I felt hollow and alone. I hated that feeling. I knew that I wasn’t alone. That was clear. I had the girls, I had Axel, and I had my family. I even had Tammy, even though she hadn’t been around that much lately. She had taken a much-needed vacation, and had been gone for the past two weeks.
But that feeling of loneliness was the feeling that I got when I was about to go into a deep depression. I had to will that away. I now knew that the anti-depressants that I took probably didn’t work as well as they should have, because I probably didn’t have unipolar depression. I probably had bi-polar depression, which was a different beast altogether and demanded different meds.
I wanted my doctor to call me back. I needed to see her. I needed her to change my meds around. I couldn’t afford to lose my mind. Not now. Not when I was in the middle of the case that was threatening to consume me. I either had to let the case consume me, so that I was going to go under, blissfully under, or I had to pop my head up and fight. Fight with everything in my arsenal.
That was what I chose to do. I always chose to fight. And I was going to choose that here, too. This damn case wasn’t going to consume me. It wasn’t. I was going to figure it out.
I went into the suite where Pearl was sitting at her desk. “Harper,” she said. “I found these on the floor.”
I cocked my head and looked at what was in her hands. It was a pair of leather gloves.
“Thanks,” I said. “Michael must have left these. I appreciate your giving these to me. I’ll put them in my desk drawer, and when I see him again, I’ll give them to him.”
“Sure.” She looked at me. “You okay?”
“Oh, right.” I suddenly remembered looking in the mirror at the headmaster’s office and seeing that I looked like I had been dragged by a truck through the mud. “I guess I have to comb my hair and wash my face and reapply my makeup, don’t I?”
She nodded her head, a deeply skeptical look on her face. “You sure do. Here, take some of these.” She handed me some baby wipes that she had stored in her purse and I took them from her.
“Thanks.”
I went back into my office and took the wipes and washed my face. I then got some makeup out of my purse and applied it. I took out a brush and brushed my hair, and put it up in a high pony. I looked in the mirror again and saw that I looked presentable, so I sighed with relief. I had court appearances in the afternoon. I couldn’
t go in there looking like something the cat dragged in. People would talk.
Anna came into my office just as I was applying some lipstick. “Hey, Harper,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Yes. I need for you to get some closed paternity records for me. Here’s the name of the mother - it’s Christina Sanders. The child’s name is Lindsay Reynolds. Find me everything that you can possibly find me on this case. I need the petition and I need all the attachments. Especially the DNA test result.”
“Okay,” she said. “Not a problem. It was filed here?”
“Yes. The judge’s name is Judge Perez. He was a judge here in the state court, but he’s sitting on the federal bench right now. There’s something rotten, and I’m going to find out just what it is.”
She nodded and brought out her laptop. “Do you mind if I do my work right here?”
“No, no. That’s fine. You can keep me company a little. I need that right now.”
As she clacked along on her laptop, she talked to me a little. “Harper,” she said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I feel that I need to. You’ve seemed out of sorts. Not quite yourself. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes. I’m feeling fine. I mean, I’m not entirely fine. I need to see my psychiatrist and get my meds adjusted. I think that I might be manic, or I was manic, and now I’m just depressed. But I really need to figure out what is going on with this case. If I can get a handle on it, then I’ll feel like I can proceed forward. But right now, there are too many loose ends. Too many threads. Every time I pull on a thread, another thread gets loose. I just don’t know…”
She nodded her head. “I’m sending you the paternity case,” she said. “With the attachments. Look at your email.”
“That was fast.”
She shrugged. “Getting into sealed state court records is a snap. A breeze. I mean, come on, Harper. I could hack into the Department of Defense if I wanted to. Do you think that it would be a problem for me to get a simple sealed paternity record?”
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 56
