Page 54

D aisy again refused to climb in the travel case. I got the feeling she was only pretending she didn't understand Human when it suited her, because she'd had no problem with the word breakfast . The twenty minutes it took us to drive to the office left me with a half-inch of dog hair on my skirt and jacket. Between the heat and the dog hair, I felt like I'd been tarred and feathered.

That's probably how I looked, too.

Max met me at the door, looking worried.

"Oh, no. What happened? I'm not sure I can take much more of this," I said.

"What? Nothing happened. I was just worried about the puppy. Remember the fish you had in high school?" She held out her arms to take Daisy, and I tried to brush the dog hair off my clothes.

"That's so unfair," I said. "You didn't tell me they would eat each other. How gross and cannibalistic is that?"

She was too busy making ridiculous cooing and baby talk noises at the dog to answer, so I grabbed my briefcase and followed her inside. "By the way, her name is officially Daisy. Emily's kids named her last night and, since they bought about a thousand dollars' worth of puppy supplies, I figured I owed it to them."

Max held Daisy out and studied her wrinkly face. "She looks like a Daisy. A precious wittle bittle flower."

"Okay, don't make me gag. Remember the deal; you and Mr. Ellison have to keep her occupied during office hours. She snores really loudly, by the way, so move her bed into the file room so she doesn't scare the clients."

The phone rang, and Max answered it, listened for a moment, then handed it to me. "There's furniture news. She doesn't sound happy."

I took the phone. "Yes? You found my driver? Please tell me you found my driver."

The dispatcher's familiar nasal tones grated in my ear. "Well, not exactly."

"Then what, exactly? This is ridiculous!" I grabbed a pen and Max's notepad to take notes. It was time to take some kind of action.

"I know, I know. This is kinda ridiculous. We have some news, though. Your guy got a speeding ticket, so he's in a hurry to get your furniture there, I'm thinking," she said.

"Where?" I asked.

"Where what?"

"Where did he get a speeding ticket?"

"Oh. Um. Houston."

"HOUSTON?" I started scribbling furiously on the page. "Are you kidding me? Can we agree that Kentucky to Texas to Florida is not the most direct route from Ohio?"

"Oh, yeah. We agree. Look, I understand how you might be a tad upset?—"

"A tad upset? Are you kidding? My furniture has been hijacked by a runaway truckdriver and you think I'm a tad upset?" I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. "I'm going to have to take some kind of legal action, you know. No threat, just a fact. I've got to either receive my stuff or else the money to buy new stuff, so you'd better file a claim with your insurance company."

"Well, that's another minor problem," she said.

"What minor problem?"

"We don't have insurance."

R eviewing the day's mail brought another shocker in the Deaver case. BDC had filed a joinder against its distributor. That meant that BDC was, in effect, suing its own distributor. I'd never seen this before in eight years of practice in drug cases. Either Addison was firing blindly, or BDC was absolutely convinced that the insulin defect did not occur in its own production process. I was still staring at the pleading when Max walked into my office.

"Okay, this is weird," I said.

"Everything you touch lately has been weird," she said. "You may want to specify."

I explained about the recent development.

"That does sound odd."

"Charlie's former attorney named the distributor as a co-defendant. This is routine when you file a defective drug lawsuit. You want every possible deep pocket who may have liability in the suit."

I shook my head, tapping my pen on the desk. "But I'm really surprised by this. It's very rare that a distributor remains as a defendant. The tort laws protect those who only act as the transportation, with no opportunity to touch or tamper with the product. Plus, it's extremely unusual that a manufacturer would be suing its distributor. The manufacturers usually indemnify their distributors and retailers through formal agreements early in the case."

"Indemnify means acting as the backup or security in case of a loss, right?"

"Right. BDC must suspect tampering by somebody involved with the distributor."

"Or else BDC is trying to cover up its own negligence by suing other people," Max pointed out.

"No way. That's just not the way things work, and Langley Cowan is no amateur to this type of lawsuit. There has to be a specific reason for this. I need for you to research the relationship between BDC and the distributor. We need to know what kind of business relationship they have. That will help us determine if BDC would risk that relationship unless it had a reason."

Max was already halfway to the door. "You got it. This case is way more interesting than those real estate deals I worked on at my old firm."

"What? You never got to meet a billionaire?"

She laughed but kept going, leaving me to a morning of hard work following up on my other cases. Mr. Ellison came in to mutter dire warnings about the fate of Mrs. Zivkovich's son-in-law Nervil, but Daisy distracted him, and the two of them went outside to commune with nature.

I made him take a plastic bag.

Detective Harris called to follow up on Richard Dack, but I had nothing new to add to the statement I'd given him before. Nor, much to Harris's dismay, did I want to talk about my "drug cartel," so it was a quick phone call. He told me that Orange Grove Productions had confirmed that the date on the invoice was a clerical error – the ads had actually been filmed six weeks after that incorrect date – and that the company officially had no idea why the cameraman would have wanted to meet me.

"So, that's a dead end, Miss Vaughn. Although they did mention that they thought Dack had a minor drug problem going on, which leads me right back to you." His voice turned cajoling. "I can't help you if you don't work with me, December. We can beat this thing together. Just let me help."

"Look, I may not be a criminal lawyer, but I'm still a trial lawyer. Don't bullshit a bullshitter, as they say. Besides, I've seen all those cop shows on TV. If I had a drug problem – which I don't – you'd be the last person I'd tell."

He reverted to his gruff cop voice. "That's unfortunate. You'd be a natural for one of those TV specials. 'Hot Lawyers Behind Bars.'"

I shuddered. "Detective, you have no idea how much that just squicked me out. Thank you so much for sharing your perverted fantasies. I know I'll sleep better with you on the job. Now, if you don't mind?—"

He barked out a laugh. "Actually, I do mind, but I can't see as I have much choice. You think better of this stubbornness, you know where to find me."

We hung up, and I'm sure he was thinking I was a sick and twisted human being, too. Ah, the joys of the justice system. The entire conversation depressed me so much I went out for cheeseburgers.

Sometimes a girl needs french fries.

M ax popped into my office around five, with Mr. Ellison trailing behind her, holding Daisy. "We made it through the entire day with no fresh assaults, threats, or actual crimes," she said, all perky.

"Which is how it should always be around here, considering we're a civil law firm," I said, not perky at all. "The Social Security disability paperwork on some of these pro bono cases is enough to drive a lesser attorney to drink. Since I'm feeling a lot like a lesser attorney right about now, want to go to Mama Yang's?"

Max laughed. "I'd love to, but I can't. I'm taking Daisy to the dog park with a friend of mine who swears that dogs are guy magnets. It's my turn, right?"

Mr. Ellison tried to look disinterested, but didn't pull it off all that well, since he had a lap full of puppy. "Sure, I don't care. It's not like I ain't got nothing better to do than take care of some dog. If I'd wanted all that trouble, I would have kept her for myself."

I nodded. "Okay, then. You don't have to take a rotation on the puppy sleepovers if you don't want to be bothered."

"Forget that! I already have a chart back in the file room with who gets what nights," he said. "That puppy is gonna have the hotties down t'the seniors going all gooey."

I grimaced. "Mr. Ellison, I really don't need to hear about your social life."

He snorted. "Yeah, you're jealous, on account of you don't have one."

Just because he was right didn't mean I had to admit it.

"I've called that Orange Grove Productions over and over, and they won't even talk to me anymore," he said.

Max nodded. "I have had no luck, either. But they did just fax us a corrected invoice that puts the video shoot at a date after BDC reported a problem with the insulin and the recall." She slid the sheet of paper across my desk, and I scanned it.

"It's a new date, all right. But if this is just about a clerical error, why was Mr. Dack so hot to talk to me? Why all the cloak and dagger?"

"And who offed him?" Mr. Ellison asked.

"I don't see how the offing – I mean, the murder – could be connected to this invoice. I mean, that's got to be a coincidence, doesn't it? But the rest of it is still strange," I said.

"Cloak and dagger and offing. This is a weird job, and Miss Daisy and I are leaving you two conspiracy theorists and going to the dog park," Max said, taking Daisy from Mr. Ellison.

"Yeah, I need to go, too. Lots of stuff going on tonight. Don't work too hard, girlie," Mr. Ellison said.

I stood up to pet Daisy goodbye and walk everybody to the door, mostly to reassure myself that it was really locked, then I wandered around the office for a while. The problem was that I was getting that tingly feeling in my head.

Random coincidences don't fit into my "puzzle pieces" view of cases. When it comes to lawsuits, it has been my experience that there are very few coincidences. But – suddenly – I was surrounded by them.

The invoice.

The way Sarah and Addy had both pushed so hard for me to refer the case to Sarah.

Richard Dack.

All oddities on their own, but — combined — they made for an enormous ball of wrong.

I don't like enormous balls of wrong in my cases.

Worse, a hideous suspicion was trying to form in the murky depths of my brain.

What if they knew?

I stopped pacing and blinked, wondering how I'd ended up in the file room, then headed for my office at a dead run. I needed to take some notes.

What if BDC knew earlier than they let on that there was a big problem with the insulin? What if they spent crucial time working on getting their legal ducks in a row – and maybe shredding documents – before they issued the recall?

What if Langley Cowan was in on it? Or, even worse, what if Langley Cowan had advised them to do it?

I grabbed a white board I used for trial prep out of the closet and started diagraming my time line. If I assumed the invoice as originally dated was correct, then somebody was in some serious trouble. I needed to call my friend at the Food and Drug Administration and ask some "hypothetical" questions first thing in the morning.

I wrote SARAH GREENBERG??? in the middle and circled it. I couldn't figure out how she fit into the picture. She and Addy had completely opposite goals in these lawsuits; she wanted BDC to pay as much as possible, while he wanted BDC to get off scot-free.

How did that invoice wind up in the BDC production in the first place?

Was it possible that Sarah was in on it, somehow? Could some terrible coverup be going on that would somehow result in favorable monetary settlements to the S&G clients? That would explain why both of them were so hot for me to transfer Charlie's case to them, but I couldn't bring myself to believe something so awful. From the defense lawyer, maybe. It has certainly happened before that a lawyer helped his client cover something up. But from the attorney on the other side of the case?

I shook my head. "I've been working with Mr. Ellison for too long. Next, I'll be talking about aliens and anal probes," I muttered.

Still, it was definitely time for some non-party production requests to Orange Grove Productions. I wanted every piece of paper that had anything to do with that film shoot. I reached for my keyboard to draft the document, smiling what Max would call my shark smile.

We'll just see how Sarah Greenberg responds to this.

As I opened the computer file, the buzzer on the front door sounded. I yelled for somebody to answer the door, then I realized I was the only somebody still there. I headed for the front, my mind still on my discovery requests. As I walked out of the hallway to the lobby, I could see Charlie Deaver standing at the door. I hurried to unlock the door and let him in.

"Hey, Charlie, I'm glad to see you. How are you?"

He shook my hand, then started twisting his ball cap in his hands. "December, Greenberg and Smithies called. They said my old lawyer told them to call me."

He shuffled his feet a bit and then looked at me. "They told me you were bungling my case."