Unfit to Practice

She loved the part where she walked out the door in the morning, loved the blowing leaves, the smell of wood smoke, and heart-piercing mountains all around. Another day awaited, full of large frustrations and small triumphs and more fresh coffee, if she was lucky. Her office was her second home, and Sandy and Sandy’s son, Wish, were her second family. Her heart felt full; she felt sharp and cool; her son was ready for school; she had a full day ahead.

But that morning when she went out to the driveway all dressed up in navy blue for morning court she stopped cold in her tracks. Two long seconds of unreality struck before she could collect herself and make sense out of what greeted her.

An empty driveway.

Her car wasn’t there.

Stupidly, she walked up the driveway to the street and looked left and right as if it had somehow moved itself in the night. Had it rolled into the backyard? No, she had let the dog into the yard earlier. No Bronco there. She tried to think. Yes, she had definitely driven it home last night, she remembered clearly.

Nikki? Her mountain bike was gone. Anyway, although she bemoaned the fact, Nikki didn’t have a license to drive last time Nina heard. Neither did Bob.

The key! The white plastic key still sat in her wallet. But-

A lost vehicle isn’t like a lost dog. You can’t run around the neighborhood calling for it. Some jerk had stolen her truck right out of her own driveway. Nina went back inside and got Bob, who came out to stare in disbelief at the spot where the Bronco usually sat. Then she called the South Lake Tahoe Police Department and her office. Then she remembered the files.

Her heart fell to her shoes. She had definitely locked the truck, she remembered what a hassle it was with that stupid plastic key…

She counted the files in her mind. Three: the Cruz custody battle, the Vangs and their insurance claim, and-oh no, the new one, the campground-murder case, with the sisters, Brandy and Angel.

Confidential files. Her most sensitive cases, the ones with information no one should see, stuffed inside her briefcase on the floor of the backseat of the Bronco.

Out there somewhere, in someone’s sweaty, thieving paws.

3

W AITING ON THE DRIVEWAY for the police, Nina walked up and down rubbing her neck, and when that didn’t take the rigidity out of it, she rotated it a few times. She had made the mistake that everybody makes once in ten thousand events. Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine correct decisions, one mistake, and with any luck at all, you don’t get called on the mistake. You leave something important in the car, smack your forehead in the morning when you realize it, run outside, and find all is well.

Across the street, her neighbor climbed up a steep ladder to his roof and fiddled with green shingles.

He could fall, she thought. He could die. Every day presented new opportunities for catastrophe.

She decided not to wave at him.

A mud-spattered patrol car pulled up in front. Gleaming pines and firs dripped all around, but the asphalt steamed in the morning sun, rapidly drying. Bob, ready to take the bus, ran up behind her begging for money, lunchless because she had been hunting for the extra copy of the Bronco registration and the title. She shoved several crumpled dollars she had in a pocket toward him, leaning out for a kiss on the cheek as he passed.

“Good luck, Mom,” he said, ru

Two officers, a man and a woman looking like carpenters with all the tools hanging from their belts, hauled themselves out of the car, leaving the police radio on loud to make sure all the neighbors would know there was trouble at the Reilly house. “Counselor. How you doing,” said the tall woman.

“Officer Scholl. Thanks for coming.” Great, Nina thought. Of course they would send Jean Scholl. She didn’t feel thankful, she felt a

Scholl stared at her for a minute, tightened her lips, then looked away. She didn’t offer to shake and neither did Nina. Her gray eyes raked the empty driveway, looking for traces, suddenly all business.

“Good morning,” Dave Matthias said, introducing himself. Newer in the department, he was narrow-jawed and short on hair.

A major drawback of doing criminal-defense work in a small town was that sometimes Nina had to try to discredit the work and the motives of local cops for the sake of her clients. Some cops lied and some were biased. Whatever the negative attitude, they didn’t appreciate being called on it in court. Scholl’s outburst on Thursday showed that. The best Nina hoped for from these two would be wary reserve, so she was pleasantly surprised when they listened intently and worked the information like pros. To her relief, Scholl had apparently decided to put their differences aside for the time being and do her job.

Nina spent an hour with them, retracing her trip home the night before, where exactly she had parked, handing over copies of the truck papers, which she had made on the home fax copier. They all went down to the driveway and looked for bits of glass, footprints in the still-damp pine needles in the cracks in the asphalt, anything. The driveway had no conspicuous clues to yield.

“You’re sure you lost your car key sometime during the day yesterday,” Officer Scholl said at least five times.

Nina had spent the past few minutes reliving the night’s activities in excruciating detail. Her car key was gone. That was a fact. “I can’t find it in my purse or the pockets of the clothes I was wearing.”

“But you don’t think the key could have fallen between the seats. Or something.”

“I don’t know. What I’m saying is that I locked the doors of the Bronco last night with my spare key. So nobody just came up and was searching through an unlocked car and just happened to find my key. Either they broke in and hot-wired the Bronco or they somehow have my lost key.”

“No one could have used your spare key. The plastic one.” The monotonic, carefully nonjudgmental voice made Nina feel worse.

“It was in my wallet in the living room. I always lock the house up tight and turn on the alarm. It was right there. This morning I found it in the wallet where I left it.”

Officer Matthias gave the gate an experimental kick, as though this might make it give up a hint.

Nina went on, “It was the storm. It’s a quiet neighborhood. I meant to go back out right away but I got distracted.” Thank God, the house and office keys hadn’t been on the same keychain. Nina closed her eyes for a moment, recalling a recent conversation with Paul in the Long’s Drug Store parking lot as they had watched a man get out of his car and go into the store, leaving his motor ru

The officers wrote down what Nina told them about the three files. “Legal files,” she said.

“Client files?” Scholl asked, scribbling on a notepad.

She bit her lip. “Yes.”

“Names on the files?”

“Yes. The files were labeled.”

“I get that. But what were the names?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You won’t give us the labels on the files? How are we supposed to identify them if they’re found in a trash can behind some house in Meyers?”

“Call me and I’ll come down and look at any legal-sized manila folders you find.”

“And what if one of the people in your files decided he wanted them back? How are we going to question him if we don’t even know his name?” Scholl asked, putting her pad down for the moment, letting only a glint of irritation enter her eyes.

“I can’t help you there.”

“Kind of a drawback to our investigation.”