Sasha added dinner with Maisy to her calendar then wandered across the hall to see if Naya was making any progress.
Naya swiveled her desk chair around when Sasha opened the door.
“Any luck?” Sasha asked.
Naya shrugged. “I have feelers out with all the agencies. I told everyone the girl might be a witness in a murder case; most places told me to go ahead and email a copy of the picture over and they’d see if anyone recognized her. I gave everyone my cell number and yours, just in case something pops on Sunday, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.”
Sasha knew she was right. But they just had to keep moving, keep turning over rocks, and eventually they’d find something. Or they wouldn’t, but then at least she’d have the certainty of knowing there was nothing to find.
The relentless search for answers was one of the most useful things she’d learned as a young attorney at Prescott & Talbott. The answers were usually out there somewhere. And the victor in any courtroom showdown was generally the person who kept looking for something that helped her case—a published decision, a witness, a piece of evidence—long after it seemed futile. Prescott & Talbott taught its attorneys that whoever was willing to sacrifice more time to the pursuit of an answer won. It really was that simple.
“Huh.”
“What?” Naya asked.
Sasha hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud.
“Oh, I was just thinking, Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine were first years when they handled that pro bono case, right?” She said, moving across the room to sit in the chair across from Naya.
“Right. So?” Naya put down her pen and looked closely at her. “What are you thinking?”
“What’s the first thing new attorneys learn at Prescott & Talbott?” Sasha said.
“To answer a question with another question, apparently.”
“To leave no stone unturned. Research everything, brief everything, review everything.”
Naya nodded. “Sure. But, the second thing they’re taught is to rein it in.” She laughed and went on, “After the first month, when some chucklehead bills three hundred hours to researching some exceedingly minor issue, Marcus gathers all the baby lawyers in a conference room and roars at them that they’re being paid for their judgment.”
“True,” Sasha conceded. “But, one of the reasons Prescott would never let three first years run a case together is that there’d be no seasoned attorney with judgment on the matter.”
“You think they did something stupid?” Naya said.
“Come on,” Sasha responded, “if there was no one reviewing their work? I’m sure they did something stupid. The question is, did it get two of them killed?”
Naya cocked her head toward her windowsill. “File’s over there. You wanna split it up?”
“Yeah. Are you hungry?” Sasha asked, checking the time. It was just past six o’clock.
“I can hold off for another hour or two, if you can,” Naya answered.
“Sounds good.”
They both knew the longer they waited to break for dinner, the shorter their night of work would seem. It wouldn’t be any shorter, but it would seem shorter. And when a woman was staring down the barrel of a twenty-hour workday, she’d play all the mental games she knew to make it less painful.
Sasha stood and retrieved the file. “Let’s take it to my office. We can use the conference table to spread out.”
Naya walked around the desk and held the door for her. As Sasha walked through it, Naya said, “What are we going to do about Martine?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, because she didn’t.
They’d touched on the issue with Larry before he’d left, but they hadn’t reached a consensus as to whether they should contact Martine or not. Sasha didn’t want to rehash the discussion. She figured she didn’t need a consensus: if it became apparent to her that she should contact Martine, she would. For now, the main reason she wanted to hold off was, unless she had reason to believe that Martine was in imminent danger, Sasha didn’t want to scare her.
The secondary, and less charitable, reason was Sasha didn’t want Diana Jeffries to get wind of the existence of the photographs until she sprang them on her at the preliminary hearing on Monday, when it would be too late for her to concoct a story to explain them away.
SATURDAY
CHAPTER 45
Sasha arrived twenty minutes early for dinner with Maisy. Even with the sun setting, the October evening was unseasonably warm, so Sasha gave her name to the hostess, procured a glass of Chilean red wine from the bartender, and escaped to the brick patio nestled between Ibiza and its more formal sister restaurant, Mallorca.
After spending the entire day poring over the ugly details of the unraveling of Jessa and Malcolm Vickers’s marriage, Sasha’s nerves were raw. The buzz of the last happy hour stragglers shouting to make their plans over the music inside had felt like an assault. She sat at a wrought iron table, watched the headlights of cars flowing over the Birmingham Bridge, and let the sounds of the city wash over her.
She pushed thoughts of the Vickers, Nick, and Greg from her mind so she could enjoy the evening air while she had the chance; Maisy would never agree to sit outside and let the exhaust from cars and the grime from the street wreak havoc with her perfect porcelain complexion. Her face was, after all, her business.
Besides, Sasha knew the hostess would take one look at Maisy and seat them in the dead center of the giant window in the front of the restaurant. There was no better advertising for an establishment that catered to urbane sophisticates than having a beautiful local celebrity on display in what amounted to a light box.
Sasha sipped her wine. She was tired. Once she got past the next few days, maybe she’d take a long weekend. Visit Connelly in D.C. and try to figure out what they were doing. The thought of that conversation made her even more tired.
She turned her head toward the couples scattered across the small courtyard at tables for two. She passed the time until Maisy arrived playing “Married or Working It?”
It was a game she and Naya had invented during a two-week trial in Hoboken, New Jersey, back when they’d worked at Prescott & Talbott. Most nights, they worked through dinner, getting the testimony for the next day ready, but every so often they’d find themselves in good enough shape that they could take a break and go to a restaurant.
Unimpressed by the cuisine at the hotel restaurant and the surrounding establishments, they focused, not on the food, but on their fellow diners. They’d surreptitiously watch the couples and try to catch snippets of their conversations to determine if they were married or dating. Checking the ring finger was not allowed.
Eating in silence? Married. Talking about dreams of joining an international humanitarian organization? Working it. Sitting side by side instead of across from one another? Working it. Using a coupon? Married. They got so good at it that they could also reliably spot same-sex couples, long-term cohabitators, newlyweds, and married-but-about-to-be-divorced couples.
Tonight’s crowd was heavy on dating couples, Sasha decided, at least on the patio.
She smiled to herself and picked up her glass. Maisy came rushing in, a filmy pink scarf trailing behind her and the beaming hostess at her side.
“Am I late, sugah’?” Maisy asked, her bright white smile turning into a small frown.
Maisy was big on punctuality.
“Nope, right on time,” Sasha assured her, draining her glass.
The blinding smile returned. “Oh, thank goodness. Look at you! Have you lost weight?”
Maisy, who had been blessed with curves and cursed with a sweet tooth, didn’t seem to understand that Sasha’s natural weight was ninety-seven pounds, most of it muscle, and was forever trying to get Sasha to share an imaginary diet secret.
“Nope, it must just be the lighting,” Sasha told her.
Maisy gave her blond curls a shake. “Well, you look fantastic. And, guess what?” she said, turning her body
to gesture toward the hostess. “We’ve got a fabulous table!”
As Sasha stood to follow them inside, she was distracted by a guy in his early twenties who was negotiating the crowded sidewalk outside the low brick wall with a beach cart loaded with dirty laundry. He was headed, no doubt, to one of the laundromats that sat on the end of East Carson Street.
He had apparently recognized Maisy and must have been a fan, because he was walking with his head twisted over his neck to look at her, not where he was going, and crashed his cart into the pole for a streetlight.
Sasha swallowed her laugh as he turned to meet her eyes. He seemed to be unhurt, but his faced reddened and he hurried away.
CHAPTER 46
Rich shoved his whites into the oversized washing machine with shaking hands. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. Maisy, the adorable noon news anchor, at that hipster tapas bar. A shiver of electricity had run up his spine when he’d realized it was her. Right around the corner from his apartment.
But the thrill had turned into a jolt of fear when he’d seen her companion. It was the little lawyer representing Lang and Costopolous.
He slammed the door shut and fed his coins into the slots. Took large, gulping swallows of air to try to quell his panic.
Why was Maisy talking to that lawyer? She had to be investigating the murders for a story. And that lawyer seemed to know something, something that could prove her clients were innocent.
Rich shook his head at himself. He shouldn’t get distracted from his goal. He needed to follow the rest of his plan. Kill Martine. Deliver the third envelope. Finish what he’d begun.
The soapy water whirled in the window on the door of the machine. Rich felt like his thoughts were whirling just as fast. It couldn’t be helped. He had to find out what Sasha McCandless knew.
He pounded his hand against the top of the washer, which earned him a look from the tired, bald guy manning the snack cart.
The squirrelly Hispanic kid who seemed to be on the same laundry schedule as Rich week in and week out looked up from playing Angry Birds on his phone. “You okay, man?”
Rich gritted his teeth. He was drawing attention to himself. That was not good. Not good.
He exhaled, “Yeah, I’m cool. I forgot the dryer sheets, is all.”
The guy had already turned his focus back to slinging birds at pigs.
Rich forced himself to sit in one of the aluminum chairs that lined the wall and be still. He just had to stay calm. He’d figure out a way to find out how much McCandless knew and would take whatever steps were necessary to stop her from screwing up the rest of his plans.
CHAPTER 47
“How’s Maisy?” Naya asked, lifting her head from a stack of performance reviews, as Sasha walked into the office.
“Appeased. I told her she’ll get an exclusive interview with me if and when Nick and Greg are both found not guilty.” Sasha handed Naya a styrofoam takeout container. “Here, it should still be hot. Eat.”
“Thanks, Mac.”
Naya pushed the files to the side and opened the container. She fetched a set of silverware from her top desk drawer and started to work on the chicken.
“Mmm, this is good. Stuffed with crabmeat?” she said between mouthfuls.
“And spinach, I think,” Sasha answered absently, flipping through the personnel files. “Are you finding anything interesting?”
Naya dabbed at her mouth and took a swallow of water before answering. “Not really. All three of them got uniformly high marks, which is what you’d expect. All three made partner, after all.”
Sasha nodded. “Did any of the reviews specifically mention their work on Vickers?”
“No. And that’s kind of odd, because they billed a ton of hours to it their first year. It was the bulk of their work, and they got a good result, right?”
“If you call terminating a father’s parental rights a good result,” Sasha said.
Naya put her fork down. “Okay, point taken. But, I mean from the firm’s point of view, that’s a good result, right? They were representing the mom. She believed it was in her child’s best interest to have no contact with dad, and her lawyers made that happen.”
“That’s true,” Sasha conceded.
It had been clear to Sasha from reading the client file that, from the very beginning, Jessa Vickers’s goal had been to have the father’s rights terminated. The divorce and alimony were almost secondary. She was adamant Malcolm could not have partial custody or even visitation.
As every lawyer well knew—even three newly minted first years—that was a tall order. Family court judges were required to make decisions based on what would be in the best interests of the child. As a general rule, courts typically found it in a child’s best interests to have a relationship with both of his or her parents. Even going so far, as Clarissa had noted in one early letter to Jessa, to rule that it was in a child’s best interests to have visitation with his father, who had murdered the boy’s mother. Jessa had been unimpressed with the difficult road ahead and had insisted they could find a way.
Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine had written research memo after research memo, summarizing cases and analyzing various strategies. All of the memos were to the file, rather than to a partner. In addition, The Terrific Trio, and not a partner, had signed all the pleadings and client correspondence.
Somehow, with no apparent guidance from a senior lawyer, after devoting nearly one thousand hours of free legal services to the case, the associates had managed to convince a judge that Malcolm Vickers was such a malevolent force in his young son’s life and such a danger to his estranged wife that the court awarded Jessa full custody, with no visitation for the father.
Buoyed by her victory, Jessa pressed for more. She instructed her attorneys to file a petition to have Malcolm’s parental rights terminated. Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine dutifully filed, briefed, and argued the petition. And, again, after several hundred hours, they won.
Malcolm, who had been represented by competent, if outmatched, counsel at every stage of all proceedings, wrote a letter to The Terrific Trio after the order terminating his rights had been issued.
Sasha flipped to the page she’d flagged in the correspondence file and re-read it while Naya finished her chicken.
Dear Attorneys:
I hope you can sleep at night knowing what you’ve done to me and my son. By peddling that sack of lies Jessa fed you, you’ve ruined my life. And his. A boy needs his father’s love and support as he grows, but Richie will become a man with no one to guide him.
My lawyer tells me the court’s decisions to give Jessa full custody and to terminate my rights were bad law and I should appeal.
I wish I could. But, I’ve lost everything in the divorce, thanks to you, and I owe my lawyer tens of thousands of dollars that I don’t have.
Someday, I hope you get to feel the pain of having your child taken from you, tears streaming down his face, and being powerless to stop it.
God have mercy on your souls, if you have them.
Malcolm Vickers
She couldn’t imagine what her reaction would be if she ever received such a raw, wounded letter. Even fifteen years after the fact, she could feel the man’s anguish. She looked up to see Naya watching her.
“That letter is hard core,” Naya said.
“Yeah, I can’t believe it found its way into the official file,” Sasha said.
“And, there was no mention of it in anyone’s performance review,” Naya reminded her.
They’d both logged enough years at Prescott & Talbott to know that something was seriously wrong with this picture.
“Do you think Cinco sanitized the file?” Naya said, finally giving voice to what they’d both been thinking.
“But why? Why take out references to the supervising partner if he was just going to have Caroline destroy the whole file? It makes no sense,” Sasha said.
Her frustration level rose. They were missing something.
/> Naya shook her head, equally peeved. “No, you’re right. So, then, what? The supervising attorney just ... didn’t? And, don’t forget, Ellen wasn’t a litigator and, really, neither was Clarissa. There’s just no way the firm gave them this case and told them to run with it.”
Just then, Naya’s cell phone rang. They both started.
“Naya Andrews,” she answered.
Sasha stood and cracked her back. Naya was listening to whomever was on the other end of the phone; she’d squeezed the phone between her ear and neck and was scribbling notes.
“Not at all,” Naya said to the caller. “I’m glad you called tonight instead of waiting.”
She must have felt Sasha watching her, because she looked up. Sasha pointed to the empty coffee mugs, and Naya nodded, then returned her attention to the call.
Sasha carried the dirty silverware and empty mugs downstairs to the closed coffee shop. Using the key Jake had given her, she unlocked the door to the retail space and walked through the shadowy room toward the kitchen. Her path was lit by the soft glow of the light from the refrigerator cases filled with expensive fruit-flavored waters and bottled teas.
The trip through the dark room reminded her, as it always did, of her run-in with an undercover agent in the space when it had been vacant. She wondered fleetingly whether Agent Stock would have put in a good word for Connelly, if he’d asked. Seeing as how she and Connelly had helped Stock with an investigation that had led to a promotion, he likely would have supported Connelly. Had Connelly even tried to save his job?
She dumped the dirty dishes in the tray beside the sink and stretched onto her toes to pull two clean mugs down from the stainless steel rack on the wall. Then she grabbed the plastic white coffee carafe that Jake filled with fresh coffee for her each night before he locked up.
She took the coffee into her office and waited for Naya to finish her call. While she waited, she poured Naya’s coffee. As she was stirring in sugar and cream, Naya burst into the room.
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