“What was it?” Sasha said.
Caroline reached into her bag and removed a large white envelope. She handed it across the table to Sasha.
“See for yourself,” Caroline said.
Sasha tore open the flap, which had managed to retain some stickiness, and shook out a photograph. She recognized it instantly. It was The Terrific Trio, resplendent in their formal gowns—the same picture that Ellen had displayed in her home office. In this copy, however, Ellen’s face had been obliterated with a heavy red X. Along the bottom of the photograph, someone had written “ONE DOWN” in thick block letters.
Sasha’s pulse sped up. She passed the picture to Naya, who stared down at it.
“That’s sick,” Naya said and handed it to Larry.
“That’s Ellen Mortenson,” Sasha explained to Larry, “the woman whose face has been crossed out.”
“And next to her?” Larry asked without looking up from the photograph.
“Clarissa Costopolous,” Sasha said.
Larry dropped the picture on the table as if it were hot. He peered down at it again, then he said, “Who’s the third woman?”
“That’s Martine Landry,” Naya said. “She used to be a lawyer at Prescott & Talbott, too.”
“Is she still alive?” Larry asked.
“Yes,” Sasha and Naya answered in unison.
Sasha turned to Caroline for confirmation. “She is, right?”
“Yes. I mean, as far as I know.”
Sasha pulled her eyes away from the picture.
“You gave this to Cinco?” she asked.
“Yes. I ... well, I was shocked and sickened when I saw it. So, I stuffed it back into the envelope and took it in to Mr. Prescott.”
“Did you talk about it with him?” Naya asked.
Caroline shook her head. “No. He must have known I’d seen it; the envelope had been opened. But, he didn’t mention it to me, and I was feeling queasy about it. I didn’t want to bring it up. I guess I assumed he wouldn’t want to discuss it.”
She finished in a soft voice and stared down at her hands.
“What did he do after you gave it to him?” Sasha asked.
“He met with the management committee again. After that, he told me to get Will Volmer for him.”
“And then?” Sasha asked.
Caroline looked up. “And then, Will came out of Mr. Prescott’s office and asked me to find your phone number.”
Everyone was silent while that sunk in.
Then Caroline cleared her throat. “I need to use the ladies’ room.”
Naya showed Caroline to the bathroom and returned with a pitcher of water and an armful of glasses. While they waited for Caroline, Larry and Naya bent their heads over the picture and spoke in low tones. Sasha stood at the window, looking out over the tops of the low buildings across the street.
Her heart thrummed in her throat. Prescott & Talbott was using her to cover something up. Sasha wanted to scream. Run wind sprints until she wore herself out. Or unleash a flurry of fists on a heavy bag. Instead, she focused on breathing deeply and deliberately.
She had to keep her anger in check and gather information. And she had to take care of her clients. She’d deal with Prescott & Talbott later.
She returned to the table as Caroline entered the room.
Caroline walked them through the rest of it. How she’d arrived at work Thursday morning to find a second envelope, identical to the first, on the floor inside the door. How she had resisted the urge to open it.
She paused and retrieved the second envelope from her bag. Inside was another defaced copy of the photograph. This time, both Ellen and Clarissa were covered with red Xs and the chilling message read “TWO DOWN.”
They stared at it while Caroline explained that she’d given it to Cinco, who told her to have Clarissa see him when she got in.
“But, of course,” Caroline said, her voice shaking, “Clarissa never made it to work yesterday.”
“Did Mr. Prescott tell the police about either of these photographs?” Larry asked.
“No,” Caroline replied immediately. Then, her years of working at a law firm kicked in and she corrected herself. “I mean, not to my knowledge. I suppose he could have. I doubt it, though, considering they were in the stack of the documents he told me to shred.”
Naya raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips. Sasha read the look to say Naya wasn’t surprised by Cinco’s behavior. Sasha had to admit she was surprised. Not shocked, but surprised. Cinco had to know the consequences for destroying evidence. His secretary certainly did.
“How did that all go down?” Sasha asked. “The shredding, I mean.”
Caroline poured herself a glass of water from the heavy pitcher. Her hands were steady.
“Yesterday, after he met with the police in the garage, he came back to the office and started rifling through the filing cabinets. He was obviously looking for something but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.” She paused and took a sip of water. “Finally, he gave up and told me he needed some old personnel files. They were so old that they were archived in off-site storage. I had them sent up and he took them into his office.”
“Was it unusual that he would want to see old files?” Sasha asked. Cinco was the chairman of the firm. Presumably, he would need access to all sorts of historical information.
Caroline took another long drink and considered her answer. “I take no pleasure in denigrating Mr. Prescott. We’ve worked together for a long time, and he’s a fair boss and a decent man. He’s not what I would call a detail person, though. He’s never gone digging around in the files before. He reads his mail, holds meetings, and that’s pretty much it.”
“Fair enough,” Sasha said.
“Yesterday afternoon, he came out of his office with a redweld stuffed full of documents. He told me to shred them. At first, I assumed he wanted me to do what I always do: leave them in the tray for the office services team to pick up and shred, but then he explicitly said he wanted me to shred them personally.” Caroline traced a circle with her finger on her drink coaster around the outside of her water glass. “He’d never done that before. We send everything to shredding—salary information, draft settlement agreements, all sorts of sensitive documents. But, he wanted me to handle this myself.”
“Did he tell you what the documents were?” Naya asked.
“No.” She looked up. “But, the two Tyvek envelopes were on the top of the pile. I could see them sticking out of the redweld. I took them out to see if it was just the envelopes, but the picture of Ellen with her face crossed out was inside the first envelope. So, I looked inside the second one and saw the other picture.”
“And you knew you shouldn’t destroy them, right?” Larry said, trying to prompt her gently.
She was silent for a long time. Then she said, “They’re important, right? They could be evidence of a crime, right?”
Sasha nodded.
“And that gave me pause. Why would he have me shred pictures that would be helpful to the police?” She tapped the edge of the glass with a polished fingernail. “I didn’t want to distrust him, but I thought I should look through the rest of the documents.”
“And?” Sasha asked.
Caroline met her eyes with a steady gaze. “There were three complete associate personnel files—Ellen’s, Clarissa’s, and Martine’s. All of their professional development plans, self-assessments, annual evaluations and performance reviews for their years as associates. There was also an entire official client file. I’m not sure how he got that, because it was very old, too, but I hadn’t ordered it for him.”
Sasha knew that, with few exceptions, Prescott & Talbott’s document retention policy specified that official client files were maintained indefinitely. Destroying an archived client file might not be a crime, but it was certainly a breach of firm policy. Presumably the same was true of human resources records.
“What was the client matter?” Naya said.
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�It was a pro bono family law matter. Vickers v. Vickers. I flipped through the correspondence file. It appears that Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine all worked on it together as first year associates.”
“Who was the supervising attorney?” Sasha said.
Caroline just shook her head. “I didn’t see a partner’s name on the signature block. But, that can’t possibly be right, can it?”
No, Sasha thought, it couldn’t possibly. A large international law firm like Prescott & Talbott was built on layer after layer of management, supervision, and oversight. New attorneys were paid extraordinary sums, but they weren’t permitted to cross the street without someone more senior holding their hands to make sure nobody was hit by a car. A junior associate at Prescott was forbidden to sign a letter without having a partner review it. Sasha couldn’t imagine a scenario where the firm permitted three first year associates to run a case with no oversight.
“It’s certainly highly unusual,” Sasha told her.
Caroline reached once more into her shoulder bag and pulled out a heavy redweld. Its accordion bottom was stretched to the limit. She heaved it onto the table.
“Well, it didn’t sit right with me, either. So, I didn’t shred them, but now I don’t know what to do with them. I guess that’s where you come in.”
CHAPTER 43
Rich hurried from the kitchen to the laughably small living room area of his cramped apartment. He carried his lunch in one hand and his Ziploc freezer bag in the other. One perk of working for Andy was that he didn’t care if Rich drove home for lunch.
The way Andy put it, it was no skin off his dick if Rich wanted to burn his time driving back and forth on the Miracle Mile all day. Rich didn’t know why old-timers called Monroeville’s William Penn Highway, where Andy had his office, the Miracle Mile. The highway was a stretch of ordinary retail stores, strip malls, big box stores, and chain restaurants that sat just outside the city limits. Maybe back in the day the availability of so much commerce in one place had seemed like a miracle, Rich often thought to himself when he was inching along in the brutal bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic that had become the highway’s claim to fame. As far as he was concerned, the only miracle available on that road was catching a wave of traffic that actually flowed.
But, Rich gladly braved the bottlenecks so that he could escape to his apartment and eat his turkey and cheese sandwich with the local news for company instead of sitting in the break room at Andy’s office listening to the secretary gripe about her lazy husband while she microwaved her disgusting salmon cakes, curried rice, or popcorn. It seemed to Rich that she deliberately chose the most noxious foods available for her lunches.
Rich arranged his plate and the bag on his snack tray and hit the power button on the remote. He checked the time. The broadcast had already started. While his ancient television roused itself to life, he unzipped the bag and removed the picture from its envelope. He stared at Martine’s face until a picture developed on the screen, then he set it aside and picked up his sandwich.
He ate with his eyes glued to the set. The new lunchtime anchor, Maisy Farley, was his favorite. She had a softness and an innocence under all her blonde beauty that was a nice contrast to the sharp, overly toned anchors on the other stations. He’d always been drawn to her. He used to get up early and turn on the Channel 11 morning news just to watch her do the weather.
Rich thought she seemed tense today. Her green eyes looked worried and her smile was distant. She leaned forward and said, “And now, let’s go to Seth Champerton, for an exclusive interview with the attorney representing both of the Lady Lawyer Killers.”
The anchor’s face was replaced by a shot of the field reporter hustling after a girl in a parking lot. Rich turned his attention to his sandwich.
When he looked up again, the reporter had caught up with the person, who was not a girl after all. According to the caption across the screen, the tiny figure was Sasha McCandless, attorney to the two men accused of killing their lawyer wives. Rich leaned forward and listened to her tell Seth Champerton that her clients were innocent. Something about the way she said it chilled him, like she knew.
But, she couldn’t know. She was just being a lawyer, lying and tricking everyone, he told himself. She couldn’t know, could she?
Rich pushed his half-eaten sandwich away. He stared at the picture of the three lawyers and tried to think of what mistakes he might have made. What did she know?
CHAPTER 44
Sasha’s office was blessedly quiet. Larry had left, hurrying to get home in time to help Bertie prepare their evening meal before the Shabbat’s prohibition on working kicked in. He’d promised to stop by the office on Sunday to help out. Caroline was also long gone, with instructions to put the whole mess out of her mind and spend the weekend gardening with her husband—advice that Sasha knew she would disregard, judging by the worry lines framing her eyes.
And Naya was behind her closed door with a copy of the picture of Nick and the girl, working the phones. She was going through the phone book calling local modeling agencies. It was a long shot, but the girl was a knockout and, if Nick’s story was true, Sasha suspected the killer had hired the girl to trap Nick. Then he’d stolen Nick’s hammer and bludgeoned his wife. If they could find the girl, they could find the killer.
Sasha stared at her laptop screen, scanning the newspaper articles her search had returned. Although a preliminary hearing was not typically the time to defend a case on the merits, it had been, and could be, done in Pennsylvania. That’s what she was going to have to do—convince the Municipal Court Judge to throw out the District Attorney’s case against Nick right then and there. And, then, with that concession in her pocket, she would oppose Greg’s bail revocation as being part and parcel of a failed investigation into the Lady Lawyer Killers.
It was a plan. Not a good one, she knew. But, it was something.
She checked her to do list. She’d crossed off ‘research news articles, case law, and procedure.’ She’d also already called and broken the news to Greg about both Nick’s weekend accommodations and Greg’s own upcoming hearing. He’d taken it about how she’d expected him to: badly, with a lot of yelling. All she had left to do was ‘come up with brilliant plan.’ That was all.
She clicked the button to power down the computer. Then she stood to stretch her tight back and get some oxygen flowing to her overtaxed brain. She moved through a series of yoga asanas to clear her mind and relax her body. She finished in Child’s Pose and stayed there, kneeling on her floor, stretched forward, waiting for inspiration.
Think.
Larry’s parting words to her were to resist the urge to be Perry Mason. After Googling Perry Mason, she’d decided Larry’d meant that she didn’t need to prove who did kill Ellen and Clarissa; she just needed to convince the judge that the District Attorney couldn’t prove it, either. But how?
Think.
Before she could have an epiphany, her phone rang. She caught herself wondering if it was Connelly calling, as she unfurled herself and raced to answer it.
“Sasha McCandless,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound breathy.
“Sasha, ah’ve been told you’re representin’ the Lady Lawyah Killers. Tell me it’s not true, darlin’ girl?”
Maisy’s syrupy accent did nothing to sweeten her words. Sasha’s neighbor across the hall was a television journalist who had made the jump from early morning weather girl to noontime anchor in record time. She’d then parlayed that into the anchor job on a competing station. Her Southern belle act had evidently lulled her colleagues into making the fatal conclusion that she was not a threat.
“Hi, Maisy.”
“Sugah’, you didn’t answer my question,” Maisy prodded.
Although Sasha knew not to be taken in by Maisy’s soft exterior, she also knew that her neighbor’s love for hard-hitting journalism was tempered by a wide romantic streak. Sasha decided to let the truth work for her, even though it was manipulative.
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“Oh, I was hoping you might be Connelly calling,” Sasha said. She waited for Maisy to take the bait.
“And how is sweet Leo?” Maisy asked.
“Gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
Sasha exhaled. “He’s taking early retirement from Homeland Security to become the chief security officer for some pharmaceutical company outside D.C.”
“Y’all are movin’?”
Sasha blinked at the assumption that she’d just pick up her life and follow Connelly.
“He’s moving. Or ... I guess, he’s moved. He was supposed to go down for the weekend to look for a place to live, but he’s decided to stay.”
Maisy was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her sweet tea and magnolia accent had disappeared, replaced by an accusation. “Why? Sasha, what did you do?”
“Mom? Is that you?” Sasha asked.
Maisy laughed, a lilting noise, and the accent returned. “I’m sorry, honey. That wasn’t fair. Did you do sumthin’ to upset him?”
“I guess so,” Sasha admitted.
“Which was?”
“He asked me to come with him. And then he tried to give me this ring, but I had to leave—”
A squeal rose from Maisy, and she interrupted, “An engagement ring?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, he left without saying goodbye, so I just thought you might be him.”
“Oh, sweetpea. We’re gonna get some supper tomorrow and talk.”
Sasha shook her head, as if Maisy could see her. “I can’t. I have to work.”
“You have to eat, too. Let’s do Ibiza. We can drink too much sangria and pick at tapas. Seven o’clock?”
Sasha was about to resist, but thought about the weekend of drudgery and solitude that stretched out in front of her. A dose of Maisy would break it up nicely.
“Sure. That sounds good.”
“Perfect,” Maisy said. “And, Sasha?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you go thinkin’ I’m gonna forget you didn’t answer my question.”
Maisy hung up with a laugh before Sasha could respond.
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