Irretrievably Broken

Book 3: Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller

by Melissa F. Miller

Genres: Mystery; Legal Thrillers

Synopsis

The venerable law firm of Prescott & Talbott is reeling from the murder of partner Ellen Mortenson—purportedly at the hands of her estranged husband—when a photograph of the dead woman arrives, her face Xed out and "ONE DOWN" scrawled across the bottom. Within days, a second partner is murdered, her husband also accused. Sasha doesn't practice criminal defense, so she's suspicious when her former firm asks her to represent Ellen's husband. Owing Prescott a favor, she takes the case and soon finds herself representing not one, but both, of the so-called Lady Lawyer Killers.

The long hours jeopardize her relationship with Leo Connelly when he needs her most. That's the least of Sasha's troubles, though, because what she doesn't know is that the real killer is waging a vendetta for a past case gone wrong. And there's one more lawyer on his list.

Release date: June 28, 2012

Publisher: Brown Street Books

Print pages: 505

Sample

Chapter 1

 

MONDAY

 

 

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.”

 

“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.”

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

TUESDAY

 

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.

 

A thin guy with dreadlocks ran across the street arm-in-arm with a tall, red-haired girl and ducked out of sight. She heard them laughing as the bell on the door of the coffee shop below tinkled to announce their arrival to the staff.

 

She checked the clock: it was time to go. Will was famously punctual. She shrugged a pale blue cardigan on over her sleeveless dress, poked her head into the next room to say goodbye to Naya, and headed out to the restaurant across the street.

 

* * *

 

Sasha arrived at Casbah before Will and asked the hostess for a table in the basement. Sasha wasn’t surprised that she’d beaten him there, considering the restaurant was less than a one-minute walk from her office and a solid twenty-minute drive from his.

 

She’d offered to meet downtown, but Will had insisted on coming to her. Casbah’s food merited the trip, but she’d gotten the impression that Will didn’t want anyone to see them together.

 

The cloak and dagger business was decidedly not Will’s style. He’d begun his career as a federal prosecutor, but the prospect of putting three sons through college had driven him into Prescott & Talbott’s affluent arms. As the partner in charge of the firm’s small, but lucrative, white collar criminal practice, Will hadn’t had any trouble funding his boys’ stints at Yale, Stanford, and Duke. He did, however, seem to have trouble fitting in with his partners.

 

Sasha’s mentor, the late Noah Peterson, used to say that a stench of earnestness clung to Will. Every year, after the firm’s holiday party, while his colleagues were being poured into cabs, Will boxed up the leftover food in the cargo space of his ancient Subaru and delivered it to the Jubilee Soup Kitchen downtown.

 

Will came hurrying down the stairs behind the hostess. Tension painted his lean face.

 

“Sasha, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.”

 

She stood and accepted his kiss on the cheek.

 

“Don’t be silly, Will. I haven’t been waiting long.”

 

He bobbed his head fast, and sat down.

 

“Oh, good. How’s Leo?”

 

“He’s well.”

 

“Has he taught you to boil water yet?”

 

Sasha smiled at the gentle jab but didn’t bother responding. Will was making small talk but his mind was elsewhere, judging by the distracted frown he wore.

 

She waited until the hostess had handed him a menu and gone off to get them glasses of water.

 

Then she said, “You look worried, Will. Everything okay?”

 

Will’s eyes came up from the menu and met hers. He closed the menu and folded his hands over it.

 

“Not really.” He blinked and cleared his throat. “I didn’t want to just launch into this without any niceties—” he trailed off.

 

“But?” she prompted.

 

“But maybe it’s better if I just get right to it. This is weighing on me.”

 

His hands plucked at the menu absently.

 

“What is?”

 

“Ellen Mortenson.”

 

Ellen had been a partner in the trusts and estates department. She’d been at the firm for over fifteen years and was a newly-minted equity partner, having paid her dues—first as an associate and then as an income partner for several grueling years.

 

Over the weekend, Ellen had been killed. Her murder had been splashed all over the news. The media attention was to be expected: Ellen had been a successful lawyer at one of Pittsburgh’s largest and oldest law firms. And her death had been gruesome. As the breathless KDKA reporter had put it, Ellen’s throat had been slashed “ear to ear.”

 

Will swallowed and went on. “Did you hear her husband’s been charged?”

 

“I did.”

 

According to what Sasha had read in the papers and picked up through Naya’s still-active connections to the Prescott & Talbott grapevine, Greg Lang, Ellen’s husband, had found her body. At first, he hadn’t been a suspect. Then it came to light that the two were estranged. Ellen had recently filed for divorce, and rumor was that the split had been nasty. As it turned out, Greg had no alibi and Ellen’s wounds were consistent with Greg’s straight razor, which was found, smeared with Ellen’s blood, in the trash bin. It wasn’t exactly a shock when the grieving soon-to-be-ex-husband was arrested for homicide.

 

Will cleared his throat again. Then he said, “Well, Greg fired the attorney who represented him at his preliminary arraignment and has approached the firm to represent him.”

 

Sasha cocked her head and looked at him.

 

Will continued, “The partnership has grown very fond of Greg over the past fifteen years and considers him a friend, just as Ellen was a dear friend.” His eyes dropped to the table.

 

Sasha said nothing.

 

He fussed with the edge of the tablecloth and said, “Of course, we had to explain that our criminal practice is limited to white-collar crime.”

 

White-collar crime. It sounded so respectable. As if the fact that someone was wearing a suit while they looted their employees’ pensions or bribed government officials to let them bring to market some medication with dangerous, unreported side effects somehow made the resultant devastation better.

 

She fixed him with a look. “I imagine you also explained it would be a conflict, not to mention in incredibly poor taste, to represent the man who killed one of your partners?”

 

Will winced but leaned across the table and forged on. “Sasha, Greg maintains his innocence. And based on what we know of his case, we believe him. Which is why we want to help him secure excellent counsel. That’s where you come in.”

 

Sasha signaled for the waitress and thought about her response.

 

The waitress came over, all smiles. “Yes, ma’am.”

 

Not caring if Will judged her for it, Sasha said, “I need some wine. Just whatever merlot you have by the glass, okay?”

 

Not only did Will not judge Sasha for ordering a glass of wine, he one-upped her and suggested they get a bottle. Will Volmer. Drinking in the middle of the workday.

 

They sat in silence until the wine arrived.

 

Finally, after the waitress had taken their orders and retreated, Sasha said, “If the firm wants to help Greg Lang, as sick as I think that is, perhaps you should try to find him an attorney who has experience defending a homicide case—or, at a minimum, someone who’s appeared in criminal court at least once.”

 

Sasha’s practice focused on business litigation, but she took on matters in other areas, with two exceptions: divorces and criminal cases.  She didn’t do divorces because, as far as she could tell, it was a practice area filled with nothing but misery and pain; she didn’t do criminal cases because everything she knew about criminal law she’d learned from watching Law & Order reruns.

 

Will sipped his wine and considered his response.

 

“When I was a prosecutor, my biggest concern in the courtroom wasn’t the celebrity criminal attorney defending some splashy case. It was the nervous junior associate from the big law firm who’d never set foot in court before defending some lost cause as part of his firm’s pro bono program. You know why?”

 

Sasha shook her head.

 

“Because a seasoned criminal defense attorney is a realist—no matter the facts, he’ll likely cut a deal if the client lets him. If the client insists on going to trial, he’ll give it his best shot, but both the lawyer and the client accept that the deck is stacked against them,” Will explained.

 

He paused and tore a chunk of bread in half. As he mopped it around the dish of olive oil, he continued, “But a big firm lawyer who hasn’t been ground down by criminal practice? He’ll charge ahead, maintaining the client’s innocence. And he won’t spend every day in court handling misdemeanors, entering pleas, or negotiating bonds in the weeks leading up to trial. He’ll have the luxury of focusing on the trial exclusively, working hundreds of hours, and come up with arguments a prosecutor would never anticipate.”

 

Sasha supposed that could be true. At Prescott & Talbott, the criminal pro bono program—through which lawyers provided free representation to indigent accused criminals or already-convicted criminals who wanted to appeal—was serious business. Associates who took those cases were told to treat them like bet-the-company civil litigation, and they did. As a Prescott associate, Sasha had pitched in on some appeal briefs for a death penalty case. Eventually, twenty-two years after the firm had taken the case, a team of Prescott attorneys had exonerated the defendant through DNA evidence and he’d been released from death row.

 

She said, “Maybe so, but I’m not a big firm associate anymore. I’m building a practice, Will. I can’t ignore my caseload to give a homicide trial the attention it would need, even if I could figure out what I was supposed to be doing. “