Mark Clayton cradled his head in his hands. This seemed to be something people did when they suffered from hangovers, and he could see why. But he was rethinking the wisdom of following convention. Listlessly, he surveyed the brief he had written. It might buy Wayne a couple of weeks while the court wrote an opinion. And to a condemned man a few weeks were surely priceless. He scowled, unconvinced. If Wayne even understood what was happening to him. They were going to lose this appeal. Then, presumably, the state would set an execution date, and he’d file some last-minute motions, and the clerks at the Supreme Court would report the votes and sit around waiting for the all-clear. Mark opened a bottle of aspirin. All suggestions welcome.
It was hardly a surprise to see the familiar concerned face at his door. “I thought you might want to talk about the panel,” Gerald said.
Mark shrugged. “I’ve got half an hour before I have to leave for court,” he said. “Why not?”
Katja cast her eyes over the boxes of documents on the floor of the conference room. Fortitude and dedication were what she’d always had to offer, and now the firm appreciated them. It had told her so, in person, or at least through the person of Peter Morgan. He had told them all. It was a critical time, an unsettling time, but above all an opportunity to show their clients how Morgan Siler lawyers responded to challenges. Katja felt an astonishingly forceful indifference to the firm’s reputation. Let’s get them out by the end of the week, Harold had said. She would.
She lifted a document and inspected it. “Discoverable,” she said, placing it in a pile. “Privileged.” Another pile. “Irrelevant. Why did we bring this back?”
Ryan Grady looked up from his seat on the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. “Part of Harold’s bury-them-in-paper strategy, I guess.”
Katja bit her lip. Her mind betrayed her, as it did so often now, returning against her will to Harold’s earnest sweating face, the sudden pain in his eyes. She’d known what he was going to say, all right. Known and felt she had to stop him, because she saw danger to herself. But what was it she had fled; what had she outrun? Harold was, in what way he could, however vain or awkward or inappropriate, trying to make a connection. To become human again, to live outside the law. To which she had said: It’s not us, it’s the job. There is nothing but the job, not for you, not anymore. And this Harold knew, or suspected, and at any rate could not bear the confirmation. That was the truth he had lived by, the truth that had killed him. She could have given him hope; she could have acknowledged his struggle. She could have let him say it.
She shook her head more vigorously and picked up another sheaf of papers. “Discoverable,” she said. She paused. In her hand were the records of Parkwell’s five-million-dollar capital contribution. “Have you seen these before?”
Ryan Grady looked them over. “Sure,” he said. “They were on Peter Morgan’s desk.”
“What were you doing in his office?”
Ryan hesitated. “Well, I kind of woke up there. It was an act of God.”
Katja snorted. “Yeah,” she said. “Bacchus, I bet. But you saw these on his desk?”
“Definitely,” said Ryan. “There was a memo too,” he offered. “More like a note.”
“What did it say?”
“Just to put them in the discovery file. It was to Anthony Streeter. Do you know who that is?”
“He’s a partner,” Katja said, distracted. “I did a securitization deal with him once. We went over budget and he made me write off my hours.” Annoyance surged at the memory. “It was his fault. He was doing some higher-profile thing and I had to basically run the deal myself. Of course, it took me longer. So I work hours I can’t bill and he gets on 60 Minutes.”
“Partners make the calls,” said Ryan. “They have to keep the clients happy.”
Katja closed her eyes and breathed evenly. “Why don’t you finish this? I’ll check it over later. I have something else that needs to get done today.”
“You’re not senior to me,” Ryan said. “But if you have other work, you can go. I have this under control.”
Katja nodded, unconvinced.
Back in her office, she inserted the disk with Virginia’s brief into her computer. She stared at the screen, frowning. This means something. But what? It didn’t matter at this point anyway. Mark had driven across the river to Arlington to wait for his case to be called, looking approximately the way she felt. But Harold had asked her to take a look at the brief. It was a meaningless gesture at this point, and she was starting to think that as gestures went, throwing herself into work wasn’t the most appropriate. But it seemed to be all that was left.
“How’s it—” Gerald began, and caught himself. “What are you working on?”
Katja turned her head. “Harper,” she said. “Harold … Harold asked me to take a look at the electronic version of the state’s brief.”
“How does it look?”
“There’s something I can’t figure out. The program their forensic expert used has all this metadata in it, tells you who wrote a document, when it was changed, what the earlier versions looked like. Some firms got very embarrassed by it a couple of years ago, so now there’s a privacy feature you can use to strip it out. One of those upgrades the tech support people inflict on us to prove how much we need them.”
“So?”
“So the DNA report has it all in there. It was even highlighted when I opened the file.”
“You mean the test was changed?”
“No, it’s all the same. Wayne’s a match. But the date is different. The first report was prepared before the HLA DQa test, the one that got the seven-point-eight percent match. Now it says it was done afterward. And the author is different. The original one was written by someone named Roman Fleischer.”
“What?” asked Gerald.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually go pale before, Katja thought.
Gerald opened his mouth, then closed it. “I’ve got a little bit of a science background,” he said. “Why don’t you let me take a look?”