Lawyer Trap

41





DAY SEVEN–SEPTEMBER 11

SUNDAY AFTERNOON


Technically they weren’t breaking into the law firm, since they worked there, but Aspen felt like a criminal nonetheless. She and Christina Tam entered on the 44th floor, since that’s where their offices were, and then walked up to the 45th floor where the dead-files room was located.

No one seemed to be around.

Still, they walked down the hall cautiously, watching for office lights, listening for even the slightest whisper of a sound.

They made it all the way to dead-files room, closed the door quietly, and turned the lights on. Thousands of neatly labeled legal boxes sat on metal racks.

“The mother lode,” Christina said.

It didn’t take them long to find the box containing Rachel’s law firm items. Using a ladder, they pulled it off a shelf near the ceiling and muscled it down to the floor.

“Heavy sucker,” Aspen said.

Inside, among other things, they found Rachel’s Weekly Planners going all the way back to her first year with the firm. They pulled out the one from this year. On the exterior they found a yellow post-it: “Copy given to investigators 4/6—JAM.”

“JAM means Jacqueline A. Moore,” Christina said.

They opened it to early April, when Rachel had disappeared, and worked their way back in time. It turned out that Rachel kept a hodgepodge of handwritten information in the book, including appointments, phone numbers, client-billing start and stop times, things to-do, and whatever else that needed to be jotted down for whatever reason.

Christina laughed.

“What?” Aspen asked, curious.

“I’ll look for the entry that says, Screwed Blake Gray silly this afternoon, and you look for the one that says, Christina Tam is the best associate attorney I’ve ever seen. That girl should get a raise.”

Aspen smiled.

“Deal,” she said. “I’ll also look for the one that says, If I ever turn up dead, Jacqueline Moore did it.”

Unfortunately, they found nothing of use.

Then they got to February 18. “This is weird,” Aspen said. “It’s a Monday and Rachel has no billing recorded for a period of three hours.”

Christina studied it.

“It’s over the lunch hour,” she said. “And look, she drove to Grand Junction later that afternoon, for a trial starting Tuesday. So she was probably packing or doing errands or something.”

“Or,” Aspen said, “she knows she’s not going to see Blake Gray that evening, since she’ll be out of town, and they decide to grab a quickie at the no-tell motel.”

Christina laughed.

Then suddenly grew quiet.

Voices came down the hallway.

They froze, perfectly still. As the voices grew louder Aspen recognized them. The female voice belonged to Jacqueline Moore. The other one belonged to Derek Bennett, the senior attorney who was in the meeting with Blake Gray and Jacqueline Moore on Thursday night, when they summoned Aspen to the firm in a limo and interrogated her about why she was on the news.

She pulled up a mental picture of him.

Forty-something.

Slightly pot-marked.

Eyes too far apart.

Thinning hair.

Tall and muscular.

As the voices approached, Aspen began to make out strings of words.

“A person’s dead and we’re in it up to our asses, is what I’m saying,” the female said.

“And like I keep saying, there’s nothing we can do about it now, so let’s just move on,” the male said.

Then the voices disappeared down the hall.