“You don’t think, if he changed his name, that Beth would have said something about that?” Camila said.
Hannah shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. She might not know. He could stil be Uncle Neil to her. Or I could have it al wrong. It’s only a theory.”
“Okay,” Parekh said. “Wel , I guess we’re going to find out one way or the other shortly.” He clapped his hands together. “Great work, girls.” He looked at his watch. “I have a lot to get through today, so I need to wrap this up. Are you up for another road trip? To check out this address?”
“I can’t,” said Camila, shaking her head. “I have a test this afternoon, and my mom has some stuff going on at work. She needs me to check in at home.”
“I can go,” Sean said.
“Hannah?” Parekh asked.
Hannah nodded. Her reaction to the request confused her. She was worried about the outcome of the trip—it was always possible that they would uncover something that could help Dandridge in court—but she also felt an unexpected little boost of happiness. She could go to North Carolina without worrying about Laura’s routine or thinking about anyone but herself. That felt good.
“Okay, wel , that might be better anyway. I think I’d like Sean along in case Prosper reacts badly.”
Hannah looked at Sean, and wondered exactly what Parekh expected him to do in the event that Prosper got aggressive.
“Sean, I’d like you to squeeze in a visit to Michael too, if you can.
Maybe on the way back from North Carolina. He’s getting antsy with the hearing coming up next week, and I’m needed here. Introduce yourself. Spend some time with him, al right? Boost his confidence a little. Bring Hannah with you if you like. It would be good for you to meet him too, Hannah.”
Before Hannah or Sean could respond, the door to Parekh’s office burst open and Jim Lehane and Marianne Stephenson came in in a flurry of anxiety and paperwork.
“Rob, the goddamn filings are messed up,” Lehane said. He tried to thrust some papers into Parekh’s hands. Parekh was slow to take them.
“What?” he said.
“The filings. The motions,” Lehane said. “In the Dandridge case, I mean. We filed the wrong motions and now the deadline has passed.”
“I can’t understand it,” Marianne Stephenson said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“The document numbers were al mixed up,” Lehane said. “We filed electronical y and we just picked up the motions through the document management system. I filed most of them myself and I made damn sure I had the right document name and number. But I just happened to open a document today—I was going to crossreference a section in a motion I’m writing today—and I realized it was al wrong. We’ve filed a bunch of old motions from the federal case.”
Parekh stood up. His fury was unmistakable but he kept it in check. Barely. “How. The fuck. Did this happen,” he said.
“Marianne?”
“I’ve cal ed in IT,” Marianne said, her face and voice tight with anxiety. “But it’s the col ege system. It wil take them days to look at it. I’ve tried to figure it out myself. We run backups on the system every night. I was going to go back over them to see when the document naming system went wrong, but the backups seem to be corrupted. I can’t load them.”
“Christ,” Parekh said. “This is . . . unforgivable. We have to be better than this.”
“We are better than this,” Lehane said.
Marianne was wringing her hands. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. You know that. I am so careful. I don’t understand . . .”
“We have no backups?” Parekh asked. “We’l have to rewrite the damn things from scratch.” His face lost color, and he sat back on the desk. “That’s days of work. We’l never get the judge to accept them.”
But Lehane was shaking his head. “It’s not quite that bad,” he said. “I’ve got versions on my laptop. Most of them, at least. They’re not final versions, but I think they’re pretty close. We’l have to go through them al , check them, make final edits again, I guess. Then see if the court wil accept late filings.”
Parekh stood up. “Bring in your laptop, Jim. Let’s get to work. I’l cal the clerk. See if I can sweet-talk her into al owing a late filing. But I’m not holding my breath.”
Lehane left the room. Marianne Stephenson stayed.
“I’m so sorry, Rob. I don’t understand . . .”
He held up a hand. “We don’t have time for this, Marianne. Just see what you can do about getting to the bottom of what went wrong, okay? And from now on the Dandridge files stay off the main system.”
Marianne swal owed. She looked like she was close to tears, but she left the room with purpose in her step and her head held high.
Parekh seemed to realize in the same moment that Hannah, Sean, and Camila were stil sitting there, frozen.
“Let’s go, people,” Parekh said, irritated, and they hurried out of his office.
“MAN, I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. IT’S NOT LIKE MARIANNE TO SCREW
UP like that,” Sean said, once they were out of the office and walking down the corridor.
Camila was frowning. “You’re assuming it was Marianne. It might have been Jim. Just because he went in there shouting the loudest doesn’t mean it wasn’t him.”
“Right,” said Sean.
“Or maybe it wasn’t anyone. Maybe it was just a glitch.” Camila’s frown deepened. “If it was a glitch, it’s not going to be isolated to one case. I’d better go and check my stuff. As if I didn’t have enough to do today.” She sighed. “Do you have anything you want me to look at for you, Sean? If you’re going to be on the road today?”
He shook his head. “I’l bring my laptop, check it tonight. But thank you. That’s a nice offer.”
“Do you think they’l get permission to file late? In the Dandridge case, I mean,” Hannah asked.
Camila shrugged. “Who knows? I guess we don’t have any friends in Yorktown right now. There’s a lot of politics with this case.
But Rob Parekh is pretty smart. Maybe he can find a way to put pressure on the judge.”
They were quiet for a moment before Sean spoke again.
“Do you mind, Camila? Not going to North Carolina, I mean. It was your lead. Yours and Hannah’s.”
She shook her head. “Not real y. Taking another day or couple of days would be hard right now. I just wish Parekh wouldn’t cal us girls. It’s patronizing.”
“I’m not sure he means it the way it sounds,” Sean said. Camila cast him a look, and he held his hands up. “Okay, okay.”
“I think you might be right,” Camila said to Hannah. “About Prosper changing his name, I mean. It makes sense.”
“Do we have any pictures of him?” Hannah asked. “In the files? If we track him down, but he’s going by a different name, how are we going to know it’s him?”
“There’s the yearbook Camila found. But he was eighteen in that.
Maybe there’s something more recent in the case file,” Sean said.