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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Taylor dropped into the chair in her cubicle.
It was six-thirty, Saturday morning. The gods of the furnace had decided that not even Type A attorneys would be in the office yet and so Hubbard, White &r Willis was cold as Anchorage.
She shivered both from the temperature and from exhaustion too. She and Thom Sebastian had arrived back in the city late last night. The lawyer had been subdued. She'd sensed that he was worried she'd ask about Callaghan and he wouldn't be able to come up with a credible story. But there was something else troubling him. His jokey self was gone. And once she caught him looking at her with an odd, troubled expression on his face.
She had an image of herself as a condemned prisoner and him as a prison guard, distancing himself from someone about to die.
Ridiculous, she thought. Still, she could hear his words in her head.
Well, don't get too interested in her.
What did that mean?
And how the hell had he known she was a musician?
She noticed a flashing light on her phone, indicating that she had a message. She picked up the receiver to check voice mail.
Reece had called again to remind her about di
There was one other message.
Beep
"Hey, counselor, how you doing? Saw an article about your shop in the Law Journal. About the merger. You've probably seen it but I'm faxing it to you. Always stay on top affirm politics.
If you only knew, Dad, she thought.
"We're pla
Supreme Court Samuel Lockwood never did anything without a purpose. What did he have in mind? Was the di
Or his? she appended cynically.
Taylor found the fax her father had sent about the merger of the firms, sca
An idea occurred to her.
She wrote on the top, "Thom, FYI". And signed her name.
Using this as an excuse, she hurried to his office, propped the article on his chair and, with a glance into the deserted corridor, proceeded to search the room like an eager rookie cop on crime scene detail.
In his desk she found condoms, Bamboo paper, an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal, matches from the Harvard Club, the Palace Hotel and assorted late-night clubs around town, dozens of take-out menus from downtown restaurants, chatty letters from his brother and father and mother (all neatly organized, some with margin notes), brokerage house statements, checkbooks (Jesus, where'd he get all this money?), some popular spy and military paperbacks, a coffee-stained copy of the Lawyer's Code of Professional Responsibility, assorted photographs from vacations, newspaper articles on bond issues and stock offerings, the Pe
Nothing about the note, no information linking him, Bosk or Callaghan to Hanover & Stiver.
On Sebastian's bookshelves were hundreds of huge books, bound in navy and burgundy and deep green. They'd contain copies of all the closing documents in a business transaction that Sebastian had worked on. They would be great places to hide stolen promissory notes and other incriminating evidence. But it would take several days to look through all of them. She saw Sebastian's name embossed in gold at the bottom of each one.
It was then that she noticed the corner of a piece of paper protruding from beneath Sebastian's desk blotter. Another glance into the corridor – still no signs of life – and she pulled the paper out.
The jottings were brief and to the point.
Taylor Lockwood 24 Fifth Avenue.
Her age, schools attended. Home address in Chevy Chase. Phone numbers at the firm and at home. The unlisted one too.
Father Samuel Lockwood. Mother housewife. No siblings. Applied to law school. Employed by HWW for two years. Merit raises and bonuses at top levels.
"Musician. Every Tuesday Miracles Pub."
The son of a bitch, she whispered. Then replaced the sheet exactly where she'd found it.
She left his office and returned to the chilly corridor, hearing echoes of footsteps, hearing the click of guns being cocked and the hiss of knives being unsheathed.
And hearing over and over Thom Sebastian's words Well, don't get too interested in her.
In the firm's library she logged on to several of the computer databases that the firm subscribed to, including the Lexis/Nexis system, which contains copies of nearly all court decisions, statutes and regulations in the United States, as well as articles from hundreds of magazines and newspapers around the world.
She spent hours trying to find information about De
There wasn't much that was helpful. Bradford Smith had been admitted to the New York and federal bars and currently practiced at a Midtown firm, which didn't, however, seem to have any co
De
But still no co
The information about Sebastian – found in alumni magazine archives and legal magazines he'd contributed articles to – wasn't incriminating either, though she found, interestingly that the Upper East Side preppy image was fake. Sebastian had grown up outside of Chicago, his father the manager of a Kroger grocery store (hence, she realized, another reason for the fu
The Yale Law School certificates she'd noticed on his wall must have been for continuing education courses, he'd gotten his law degree from Brooklyn Law at night while working as a process server during the day – serving subpoenas in some of the toughest parts of the outer boroughs.
So, there was a different Thom Sebastian beneath the jokey party animal. One who was driven, ambitious, tough. And, Taylor knew, recalling the conversation in Ada 's downstairs den, also a thief – fucking the firm that fucked him.
More associates were filing into the library now and she didn't want anybody to see what she was doing so she logged off the computer and went to the administrative floor.
There she walked into the file room Carrie Mason had told her about, a large, dingy space filled with row upon row of cabinets. It was here that the billing department kept the original time sheets that lawyers filled out daily.
Making certain the room was empty, Taylor opened the "D" drawer – where Ralph Dudley's sheets would reside – and found the most recent ones. They were little blue slips of carbon paper filled with his imperial scrawl, describing every ten-minute period during working hours. She read through and replaced them and then did the same in the "L" drawer for Lillick and the "S' for Thom Sebastian.