Inadvertent Disclosure (7 page)

“Yes.”

“What’s his last name?”

“I don’t know it.”

“Where’s he from?”

Danny shrugged.

“Where’s he staying?”

Another shrug. Russell stepped
close to the smaller man and stared down at him. Waited.

“Uh, he was staying here,”
Danny admitted. “But, he didn’t come back after the . . . uh, incident at the
lot. To be honest, I figured the state police had probably picked him up and
I’d be bailing him out later. What happened after I left?”  He directed this
last part to Sasha.

“After you fled,” she said,
“your new friend took another swing at my windshield, cracking it. I couldn’t
wait for the police any longer, so I disarmed him and beat him with his
branch.”

Danny swung around to Russell.
“Is she serious?”

“She seems to be. Turns out Ms.
McCandless here has some self-defense training. Your buddy probably has a hell
of a headache right about now.”

He was silent.

Russell pointed over Danny’s
shoulder into the house. “You know, I don’t ordinarily try to enter your
premises. I have no interest in harassing you and your merry band of tree
huggers. However, I want to satisfy myself that you’re not harboring a
fugitive, which is what this Jay character is now, just so we’re clear. Plus,
you’re going to need to get your checkbook, Danny. Ms. McCandless will take a
check to cover the cost of her car repairs.”

Danny opened his mouth to
protest then thought the better of it. “Okay. She waits out here, though.”

“Fine by me,” Sasha told him,
sinking into the glider. “The smell of patchouli gives me a headache.”

Russell smirked at the comment
and followed Danny into the house.

Sasha passed the time on her
Blackberry. She texted Connelly explaining why she’d been delayed in Springport
and composed an e-mail to the General Counsel and the Vice President of
Operations at VitaMight to let them know they’d won the motion to compel. She
was just about to call her mother to get some ideas for a birthday present for
her dad, when Russell reappeared.

He was alone and holding a
blank, signed check, which he folded in half and handed to her. “With Danny’s
sincere apologies.”

She stuck it in her jacket
pocket. “No sign of Jay, I take it?”

They stepped off the porch
together.

“Nope. He did leave behind a
duffel bag in the room he was using, but it had no identification or other
items of interest. Just a tie dye t-shirt and a pair of jeans that probably
could have stood up by themselves they were so dirty.”

“No one else knows anything
about him?”

Russell shook his head.
“Danny’s the only one who has any kind of focus. I don’t know if the rest of
them are high or lazy or what, but they couldn’t agree on where this guy was
from, how long he’d been here, nothing. They did say he didn’t have a car. He
claimed to have hitched his way in from somewhere. They were hazy as to where
that was. I find that hard to believe. Not too many folks around here would
stop and give a ride to a stranger. Not these days. But, if he doesn’t have a
ride, he won’t get too far.”

Russell held the passenger door
open for her. “Speaking of rides, let’s go see if Bricker’s has yours ready
yet.”

CHAPTER 7

Carl Stickley was irritated. He
was the
sheriff
, dammit.
He
didn’t need to be running all over
the county serving eviction notices and warrants. For one thing, it was beneath
him. For another, his knees were bad.

But of his two useless
deputies, one had gone missing. Russell had better have a watertight excuse for
this nonsense, he thought.

He’d just returned from serving
a domestic relations warrant on a dirtball out in Copper Bend, and the squalor
of the man’s shack still clung to him. He was going to ream Russell but good
when he turned up.

A light rapping at his door
interrupted his musing about what he’d say to his errant deputy.

The door swung open, and
Russell’s flushed face peered in at him.

“Claudine said you wanted to see
me, sir?”

Stickley waved a hand. “Get in
here.”

The deputy hurried around the
door and pulled it shut behind him. He hung there, right by the door. Everyone
on Stickley’s staff did that: they’d just barely creep into the office and then
hang back by the door. He liked it. Figured it meant they were intimidated.

He narrowed his eyes and glared
at the deputy. “Where you been, son?”

Russell cleared his throat.
“There was an attack on a lawyer, sir.”

Stickley leaned forward. “In
the courtroom?  Why wasn’t I notified, deputy?”

“No sir. A female attorney who
parked in the municipal lot interrupted some vandals who were slashing her
tires. Most of them ran off, but one of them stayed and attacked her with a
tree branch. She called the state police and Maxwell dumped her in our lap. You
were at lunch when he brought her in.”

Stickley shook his head and
gave a low whistle. “She hurt bad?”

Russell chuckled. “No sir, she
gave the guy a whooping, to hear her tell it. She’s just a tiny thing, but she
knows some kinda self-defense that the Israeli Army uses.”

“Krav Maga?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Stickley nodded. “Good on her.
Any id on the attacker?”

“One of Danny Trees’s people.
Goes by the name of Jay. He’s not local. The attorney and I took a drive over
to Danny’s place while Bricker’s Auto worked on her car. Danny claims not to
have seen him since the attack. I took a look around. He left a duffel bag
there, so maybe he’ll be back.”

Russell finished his report and
stood there at attention, waiting for Stickley to dismiss him.

Stickley waved his hand again.
“Go on, get out. Make sure you write it up and send a copy to Dogwood Station.
I swear those troopers get lazier by the day.”

Russell grabbed the doorknob
and raced out of the room. Stickley watched him go and grinned at his eagerness
to escape. Then, he swiveled his chair around and thought. A violent
environmental protester. Seemed like there should be a way to use that to his
advantage. He turned the piece of information over in his mind, examining it
from all angles. He’d come up with something.

CHAPTER 8

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Monday evening

Sixteen hours and twenty
minutes after she’d left Pittsburgh for a twenty-minute discovery hearing,
Sasha pulled back in to her reserved parking spot at her condo. The sun, which
had not yet risen when she’d set out in the morning, had long since set. She
was tired, hungry, and cold.

She trudged through the parking
lot and into the warm lobby. She was tempted to take the elevator instead of
the stairs, just this once. But that was how it started. Take the elevator
tonight because she was tired and her feet hurt from having been trapped in
three-inch stilettos all day, and then tomorrow she’d want to take it because
she was running late. Then, the next thing she knew she’d be taking elevators
all over the place because she got winded climbing stairs. Besides, stairways
gave more options in the event of an assault. Get attacked in an elevator and
you were a sitting duck.

She straightened her back and
adjusted the weight of her bag over her shoulder. Then she pushed through the
metal door to the stairwell. To make up for her moment of weakness, she took
the stairs two at a time.

That small burst of activity
improved her mood slightly. The smell of spices and roasting meat that emanated
from her unit put a smile on her face. By the time she opened the door to see
Connelly waiting for her with a glass of red wine in his hand, she’d forgotten
to be miserable.

It had been six months since
Leo Connelly had entered her life in the oddest way imaginable. Sasha never
would have guessed that her longest relationship to date would be with a
federal air marshal whose nose and finger she broke while disarming him in the
apartment of a murdered stranger. But, as her nana used to say, there’s a lid
for every pot. So here he was, Agent Leo Connelly. Her lid. At least for the
present.

“How are you doing?”  The
corners of his eyes crinkled with concern as he handed off the wine glass and
leaned in to kiss her.

She gave herself a minute to
relax in his arms before pulling back.

“Better now. Dinner smells
amazing.”

She raised her glass in tribute
to his cooking skills before heading up the stairs to her loft bedroom to get
out of the high heels and change into a sweater and jeans.

Over a second glass of syrah
and between mouthfuls of Connelly’s lamb tagine, she filled him in on the
goings on in Springport. He listened without interrupting, nodding along as he
processed the information. She could see him mentally sorting and cataloging it
between bites of food for later analysis.

He put down his fork and raised
a hand to stop her when she got to the part about Danny Trees’s blank check.

“Do you still have it?  You
haven’t deposited it yet, have you?”

“No, I just wanted to get home.
I’m not sure I’m going to anyway. It could be viewed as settling any claim I
might have against Danny and PORE for the cost of the repairs. I think I’ll
give it a day to make sure they didn’t mess with anything else.”

For all she knew, there was
sugar in her gas tank.

He cracked a grin. “Spoken like
a true lawyer. If you give me the check, I can run his bank account through the
database and see what pops.”

The database was Guardian, into
which law enforcement agencies from around the country fed suspicious activity
reports, called SARs. Six months earlier, while investigating a plane crash,
Connelly had accessed the classified database to make a connection between a
dead city laborer and a psychotic technology developer, leading him to the
apartment where they’d met. But that had been official business. This was . . .
not.

She looked at him closely. “Are
you sure that’s a good idea?”

He looked away, but not before
she saw in his eyes that he wasn’t sure at all.

“I’m sure,” he said.

CHAPTER 9

Tuesday afternoon

Sasha’s eyes burned and the
characters on her computer screen swam together in a blur. She checked the
time. No wonder. She’d been staring at the monitor for nearly five hours. She’d
even eaten her lunch at the computer. It was well past time for a break.

She unrolled the purple yoga
mat that she’d stowed under her desk. She worked through the three Warrior
Poses, holding each for several minutes. She willed her mind to be still and
focused only on her lengthening muscles and her slow breathing. She stayed there
until the chimes from a nearby church drifted through the window as the bells
struck three. Then she sank into Child’s Pose.

Connelly had brought yoga
practice—along with home-cooked meals—into her life. Despite his high-risk,
stressful work, he was uniformly placid. He didn’t overreact. He didn’t worry.

She’d noticed that, no matter
the demands on his time, he always managed to fit in a quick yoga session. So
she had decided to find a way to squeeze yoga in between her Krav Maga training
and her running schedule.

The fifteen minutes she spent
on the asanas each afternoon rejuvenated her. She wished she could return the
favor and give Connelly a tool to deal with his borderline obsessive compulsive
need for order.

After rolling up her mat, she
walked over to the coffee station she’d set up in the corner of her rented
office and poured an oversized mug of fresh black coffee. The one-room Law
Offices of Sasha McCandless, P.C., located on the second floor of a storefront
in her neighborhood, were a far cry from the opulent, Class A downtown real
estate her former law firm called home, but she had  taken one play from
Prescott & Talbott’s play book. Fresh coffee was always available. Only
hers was stronger. And no longer free.

Break over, she returned to her
desk, sipping the coffee and turning the information on her computer over in
her head. Early that morning, not long after Sasha had unlocked the door to the
building and gone upstairs to turn on the heat in her office, she’d heard the
tinkle of bells that announced a visitor downstairs. The retail space below was
vacant, so she hurried down the staircase to greet whomever had wandered in.

She’d come face to face with a
UPS guy on his way up the stairs with a delivery for her. It was a slim letter
envelope. Inside she found a CD and a cover letter from Drew Showalter, which
said the CD contained all the documents Judge Paulson had ordered Keystone
Properties to produce. The letter went on to ask VitaMight to agree to an early
close of discovery, since it now had all the documents.

The package was remarkable for
two reasons.

First, it was almost a
certainty that the CD had been prepared in advance of the previous day’s
hearing. Sasha thought it extremely unlikely that Showalter would have rushed
back to his office and spent his afternoon compiling the e-mails to get the CD
burned and out for delivery by the UPS deadline. Given the lack of spark
Showalter had shown at the hearing, she’d go so far as to call it impossible.

Either way, the e-mails were
either already ready to be produced when they argued the issue or were so few
in number that they could be prepared by a lazy man in less than a day. This
raised the obvious question of why Keystone Properties hadn’t simply turned
over the e-mails before the hearing. Showalter had to have known he would lose
his opposition. There was no good reason to keep the e-mails from VitaMight.
So, Sasha surmised, there must have been a bad reason: there was something in
those e-mails that Keystone Properties had wanted to hold back from VitaMight
for some period of time.

Which led to the second reason
the package was remarkable. There was no need to overnight the documents. Judge
Paulson had given Keystone until the end of the week to turn them over. Today
was Tuesday. Showalter could have saved his client some money and put them in
the regular mail or sent them ground. But, instead, he’d paid extra for early
morning delivery. After dragging its heels for months, suddenly, Keystone was
in a big hurry for her to get the documents. Baffling. That was the only way to
describe Showalter’s behavior.

The games Keystone was playing
around the timing of the document production seemed senseless. And, thus far,
her review of the e-mails hadn’t shed any light on the issue. She’d seen
nothing but e-mails that set forth the mundane minutiae of a typical commercial
landlord-tenant relationship: the activation procedure for VitaMight new hires’
access badges; the after-hours heating and cooling policy; a request from the
landlord that no one park under a diseased oak tree so it could be removed from
the lot; an invitation to a pizza lunch Keystone had sponsored for one of the
candidates for county council; the e-mails scrolled across her screen in a
seemingly endless parade of irrelevant information. Whatever was there, she
wasn’t seeing it.

She finished her coffee and
stood looking at the computer screen. Then, she put down the mug and powered
off the screen. Noah used to say when you can’t see the forest for the trees,
get out of the blasted forest.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sasha sat in the
gerontologist’s waiting room and tried to make sense of the magazine selection.
Doctors’ offices, perhaps the last refuge of the magazine industry. She
understood the presence of
Reader’s Digest
, of course, and
AARP
Magazine
. She had to wonder, though, how many of Dr. Kayser’s patients were
fans of
Wired
and
Bride
. Unless those were aimed at adult
children shuttling their parents to appointments.

The door from the outside
corridor opened and an elderly woman shuffled in. She nodded a greeting to
Sasha, then eased herself into the chair nearest the door and placed her large
pocketbook near her feet. She unwound her scarf and folded it into a neat
rectangle but did not remove her jacket. Sasha watched the woman get comfortable
and made a silent bet as to which magazine she’d choose.

The woman ignored the
magazines. She reached into her bag and took out a glasses case and an iPad.
She snapped the case open, put on her glasses, and powered up her tablet. Sasha
smiled to herself. Maybe magazines’ days were numbered here, too.

Sasha checked the time. The
receptionist on the phone had told her Dr. Kayser’s last appointment was at
3:30 and that he’d give her a half an hour after that. It was now close to four
o’clock. If he was running late, she’d come back. Sitting and waiting wasn’t
her strong suit.

“Ma’am, are you here to see Dr.
Kayser?”

The woman looked up from her
device. “No, honey, Dr. Jenner.” She smiled and then bent her head back over
the screen.

Intrigued, Sasha craned her
neck subtly to see the screen. The old lady was updating her Facebook status.

The interior door swung open
into the waiting room and an elderly man came through the doorway followed by a
nurse wearing Scottie dog-patterned scrubs.

“You have a nice evening, Mr.
Chatsworth,” she called to the man’s back in a loud, singsong voice.

She turned to Sasha and spoke
in a normal tone. “Ms. McCandless?  Dr. Kayser asked me to have you join him in
his office.”

Then, her voice rose again and
she addressed the old woman. “Dr. Jenner will be right with you, ma’am.”

“Okay, dearie,” the woman
responded without looking up from her Facebook wall.

“Kids today and their
electronics,” Sasha cracked as she followed the nurse through the doorway and
past two exam rooms. At the end of the short hallway, the nurse delivered her
to the doctor’s office without so much as a fake chuckle at the joke.

Dr. Alvin Kayser set aside his
paperwork and rose to greet her.

“It’s good to see you, Sasha,”
he said, shaking her hand. His eyes were magnified by his round, rimless
glasses. He looked kind, almost jolly, like a balding, beardless Santa Claus.

“I really appreciate your
taking the time to see me today,” she told him.

He waved her into a chair and
shrugged off her thanks.

“It’s my pleasure. Your late
grandmother was very fond of you. And proud of you, I should add. She said for
a tiny thing you really held your own with your strapping brothers from the
time you were a child. And, look where it got you, she used to say.”

Sasha smiled. Her maternal
grandmother had always seemed mildly horrified by Sasha’s tomboy adventures as
a child and her unladylike pursuits as an adult, but Nana Alexandrov was never
shy about bragging about her grandchildren. She’d seen Dr. Kayser for the last
several years of her life—with increasing frequency, as her frail body
deteriorated over time—so, the doctor had probably learned more than he ever
needed to know about the McCandless clan. Especially toward the end, when their
doctor-patient relationship had deepened into a true friendship. For over a
year, the doctor had brought her grandmother a burnt almond torte from Prantl’s
Bakery every Sunday, and the two of them had worked on the crossword puzzle
between bites.

He reclaimed his leather desk
chair and leaned back, folding his hands over his belly. “Now, what can I do
for you?”

“As I told your receptionist
when I called, I’ve been appointed to represent a gentleman at an
incapacitation hearing up in Clear Brook County. Elder law isn’t an area I’m
familiar with, so I’m starting from scratch here. Anything you can tell me will
be a help.”

The doctor nodded. He had
testified in more incapacitation hearings than he could count.

“Okay, now, understand, I am
most familiar with Allegheny County, but the general process should be the
same. Typically, the issue will arise when a family member or friend of the
elderly person raises a concern or if a physician thinks there’s a problem. So,
how did your client come to the attention of the court?”

“It’s not clear. The county
Department of Aging Services is the petitioner. The petition just says they
received a report. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that a local doctor made a
report after my client consulted her informally about a fall.”

Dr. Kayser nodded. “That’d be Dr.
Spangler, I take it?”

Sasha blinked. “Well, yes. But,
surely, she’s not really the only doctor in town?”  She’d assumed Jed had been
exaggerating.

“There are others in the
general area, but I do believe she has the only office in the town itself. In
any case, she seems to be, by far, the busiest general practitioner up there.
There aren’t any geriatric specialists in that county, at least not to my
knowledge, and the handful of other G.P.s up that way are always griping about
the stranglehold she has on the client base at conferences and meetings. I
assume the locals are loyal to her out of a sense of sympathy.”

Sasha stopped him. “Sympathy?”

He sighed, then said, “Dr.
Shelly Spangler is a Spangler by marriage but a Wilson by birth.”

“A Wilson?”

“Yes. Clyde Wilson was a
well-respected businessman in the area until the mid-70s. All before your time,
of course. But, his business failed in spectacular fashion and it destroyed his
family. Shelly is his daughter. From what I understand, after Clyde killed
himself, his wife scraped out an existence. Shelly buried herself in her
studies, and won a scholarship from the local Lions Club to college. She
continued to apply herself and was accepted to medical school. People who know
her story wouldn’t dream of changing doctors. She’s the hometown girl who made
good.

Sasha thought about Dr.
Spangler’s childhood home, condemned and bleak, standing across the street from
Danny Trees’s place and could understand why the townspeople would support her.

“Okay, the county’s petition
failed to provide any concrete evidence of incapacity. What should it have
included?  I mean, what would you have done?”

On comfortable ground, his
answer came quickly and with authority. “Before I would presume to classify one
of my patients as incapacitated, I would do a thorough evaluation, starting
with a complete physical examination. I’d also do a psychosocial information
intake.”

Sasha jotted his answer on her
notepad. “Let’s take those one at a time. What would you be looking for in the
physical?”

“Signs of dementia, primarily.
Any changes in existing conditions that might be caused by a patient’s failure
to comply, for example, a diabetic who stops following an appropriate diet or
someone who stops taking prescribed meds.”

“Okay, say, the patient hasn’t
come in for a physical for years,” Sasha said. “So you have no baseline.”

He nodded. “I’d still do a
workup. But, you’re right. It would be hard to draw any conclusions from the
results. In that case, the psychosocial information might carry more weight.” He
waited until she stopped scribbling. “Ready to discuss that?”