Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken

IRRETRIEVABLY BROKEN

Melissa F. Miller

Brown Street Books

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 Melissa F. Miller

All rights reserved.

Published by Brown Street Books.

For more information about the author,

please visit www.melissafmiller.com.

For more information about the publisher,

please visit www. brownstbooks.com.

Brown Street Books eBook ISBN: 978-0-9834927-5-7

For Sue and Jim,

with appreciation for their support and encouragement
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sincere thanks and appreciation to Curt Akin, Lou Maconi, Gavin Russell, Trevor Furrer, Missy Owen, Al Furrer, and Ashley Davis for reading the drafts and providing comments, suggestions, editing, and proofreading assistance. Any mistakes or errors that remain are mine and mine alone. Special thanks to David, my husband, who cheerfully fills the roles of first reader, child-wrangler, and personal chef when the Muse strikes. Thanks, too, to my children, who have somewhat less cheerfully accepted that when mom is writing, the office is off-limits.

IRRETRIEVABLY BROKEN

MONDAY

CHAPTER 1

The photograph arrived in a white Tyvek mailing envelope bordered by green triangles. It was addressed in elegant script to
Charles Anderson Prescott, V
. Across the bottom half of the envelope, block letters advised that the contents were PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. It bore no return address.

Caroline Masters, personal secretary to Charles Anderson Prescott, V (better known as Cinco, but always Mr. Prescott in her mind), looked up at the courier. He leaned on her credenza, with his head bent over an iPhone, texting away.

As she scrawled her name on the clipboard he proffered, Caroline asked, “Do you know who sent this?”

He looked up and shook his head.

“There’s no return address,” he said.

“I see that. That’s why I’m asking if
you
know.”

Surely, he had a record of the sender. How else would his company bill the person?

He shrugged. “I just deliver the packages.”

He tucked the phone into one of the many pockets of his frayed cargo pants, jammed his earbuds into his ears, and returned the clipboard to his black canvas bag.

As he let himself out, Caroline considered the envelope. Her practice was to open and prioritize Mr. Prescott’s business correspondence for him. She did not open his personal mail.

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of this package. A good ninety-five percent of the mail addressed to the attorneys who worked at Prescott & Talbott—including hand deliveries—was delivered to the firm’s mailroom to be logged and then distributed internally by the mailroom staff.

On rare occasions, a courier would hand deliver a package directly to an attorney if its contents were urgent or otherwise very sensitive. But that sort of delivery was usually prearranged; she couldn’t recall ever having received one without a return address.

No one touched Mr. Prescott’s phone or calendar except for her, so Caroline knew he was not expecting this package. And it
was
marked confidential.This was the sort of package she should take, unopened, into her boss’s office and let him open personally.

And, normally, she would have.

But, as the chairman of the largest law firm in Pittsburgh, Mr. Prescott was having a particularly difficult day. For the second time in less than a year, one of the firm’s partners had been murdered.

Mr. Prescott was hunkered down with his inner circle, trying to craft a public statement. It would have to convey sadness and regret at the loss of Ellen Mortenson, for both her warm personality and exceptional legal skill. At the same time, it would need to reassure Ellen’s clients that, as special as she had been, she was sufficiently fungible that any one of her talented colleagues in Prescott & Talbott’s estates and trusts department could step in to take over her matters in a seamless manner. Caroline knew striking the right balance was no easy task. It had taken Mr. Prescott the better part of a day to come up with a statement when Noah Peterson had been killed.

In the meantime, the press, clients, and friends of the firm had been calling nonstop. Caroline’s strong but polite offers to place callers in Mr. Prescott’s voicemail had become stronger and less polite as the afternoon had worn on.

And, if her patience was thinning, then she assumed his was, too. The last thing she wanted to do was to interrupt him with a package that was probably unimportant while he was dealing with a crisis.

So, she plucked her letter opener out of the crystal vase on her desk, slit open the thin envelope, and shook its contents onto her desk.

A five-by-seven print of three young women in formal gowns, smiling at the bright future ahead of them, fluttered out. She recognized them immediately, even though the picture was sixteen years old: Ellen Mortenson, Clarissa Costopolous, and Martine Landry, the first-year associates of the class of 1996. She even remembered the function. It was the firm’s holiday party, black tie that year, and the three new attorneys had exuded glamour, excitement, and possibilities.

The photograph had been defaced.

A thick red X covered Ellen’s face. Across the bottom of the photo, someone had printed in large, red, block letters “ONE DOWN.”

TUESDAY

CHAPTER 2

Sasha McCandless stared into her empty coffee mug then checked the time. Twenty minutes until she needed to leave for her lunch meeting. Definitely enough time for one last cup.

Out of habit, she started toward the corner of her office where she used to have a coffee station, then caught herself and headed out the door. She poked her head into Naya’s office across the hall.

“Hey, I’m getting some more coffee. You want anything?”

Naya looked up from the discovery requests she was reading and shook her head, her dreadlocks bouncing off her shoulders.

“You need to slow down with the coffee, Mac. For real.”

Sasha looked pointedly at the pack of Marlboro Lights that Naya had mostly hidden under a stack of paper, but said nothing. She still couldn’t believe Naya had finally left Prescott & Talbott to join her. Having a friend and experienced legal assistant to share the workload and the occasional happy hour cocktail more than outweighed the hypocritical nagging.

“Okay, be right back.”

Naya had come aboard at the end of the summer, after her mother had passed away. Once she was no longer shouldering the home health care bills, she’d called to take Sasha up on her standing offer of employment.

The timing had been perfect. Back in April, a bizarre and highly publicized case up in Clear Brook County had landed Sasha on the front pages of Pittsburgh’s two major newspapers and put her face on the evening news for weeks. Even now, months later, every time a local station ran a story on community disagreements over hydrofracking, they showed the footage of her coming out of the county hospital, splattered with someone else’s blood. WPXI, at least, usually had the decency to follow that with a shot of her, clean and unbloodied, at the Governor’s press conference announcing the indictment of the Attorney General.

As a result of her minor celebrity, the Law Offices of Sasha McCandless, P.C., were awash with prospective new clients. Naya’s most important job responsibility was client intake: she weeded out the crackpots and determined whether the sane ones were relatively solvent and had actual legal matters to litigate. Surprisingly few people met all three criteria.

Better her than me, Sasha thought, as she hurried down the stairs for her free coffee.

Free coffee.
The phrase filled Sasha with an undeniable joy. When she had approached the landlord about renting additional space for Naya, he’d informed her he was selling the building to a guy who planned to put in a coffee shop on the first floor. Eager to have a paying tenant while he got his business up and running, the new landlord, Jake, had readily agreed to Sasha’s request for free coffee and had thrown in a ten percent discount on food. She wasn’t costing him much in food, but she figured she easily drank her weight in coffee each month. Good thing for Jake she was just shy of a hundred pounds.

She walked through the cluster of college-aged kids gathered around the bulletin board, amazed that they still read flyers pinned to corkboards. Shouldn’t they all be checking in on foursquare or something?

Kathryn, the Pitt student who worked three mornings a week, gave her pink-streaked hair a toss and laughed when she saw Sasha approaching.

“No way?  You want more?”

“Last one, Kathryn,” Sasha promised, putting her mug up on the counter.

“Last one for my shift, at least. I’m off at noon.”

Kathryn filled the bright orange mug and slid it back to Sasha.

Sasha walked back up the stairs, sipping the hot coffee as she went. She wondered what Will Volmer wanted. He’d been unusually cryptic when he’d called and asked her to lunch. All he would tell her was he had a possible referral for her but he couldn’t discuss it over the phone.

Will, the head of Prescott & Talbott’s white collar criminal law practice, had represented her back in the spring when she’d given the grand jury testimony that had led to the indictment of Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. Will’s unflappable demeanor and quiet calm had seen her through the chaos of that scandal, so she figured she owed him one. She’d show up and listen to what he had to say, but she doubted she’d be interested in the case, whatever it was.

Despite the lack of qualified clients who walked in off the street, Sasha was busy. Really busy. Hemisphere Air—notwithstanding its decades-long relationship with Prescott & Talbott’s litigation department—now used Sasha for all its Pennsylvania trial work. She supposed that was what happened when you saved the life of a company’s general counsel. As the head lawyer at Hemisphere Air, Bob Metz wouldn’t hear of anyone other than Sasha handling a civil matter in the jurisdiction.

In addition to the Hemisphere Air work, Sasha had a decent stream of work for current Prescott clients. They sought her out for corporate litigation matters that were too small to justify Prescott & Talbott fees but sufficiently complicated to require Prescott & Talbott quality. They stayed with Prescott for their larger matters and retained Sasha for the rest. None of those clients had been direct referrals from Prescott, though. Whatever Will had in mind was a first.

Back in her office, she stood in front of the window with her coffee and looked down at the foot traffic on South Highland Avenue. People—students mostly, judging by the flip-flops and pale, bare legs—strolled from shop to shop, enjoying the Indian summer. Seventy degrees in early October was unheard of in Pittsburgh.