Andi looks dubious. Fair enough, as Lu is totally bullshitting her. Prosecutors tend to like attention. And Lu is more of a showboat than most.
“There will be plenty of work to go around,” she promises. She can’t, of course, guarantee that Howard County’s generally genteel citizens will start killing each other at an accelerated rate. But there are other felonies, other crimes that matter. There’s even been some gang activity in Howard County, although most of those cases end up with the feds. “And by the way, I’ll tell you first: there’s a new protocol. Someone from this office is going to go to all major crime scenes. I’m talking to Biern over at homicide today, telling him to make sure they alert us ASAP when they do catch a case.”
“So you’ll send one of us, then decide if it’s going to be your case?”
“No, it applies to me, too. I’ll go, if it sounds like a case I’m going to end up trying. Fred was too checked out. There were some sloppy investigations, which made our jobs harder. Better we be there sooner rather than later, you know?” Lu smiles. “And now you know most of what I’m going to cover today at the staff meeting.”
“I’ll try to act surprised,” Andi promises. She’ll do the opposite. Lu knows Andi. She wants people to think she has special access. It always bugged Andi, when Lu first started in the office, that Lu went so far back with Fred. Andi’s initial overtures of friendship probably stemmed from her desire to keep her enemy close. Then she realized Lu was, in fact, capable of being a good friend. Loyal and discreet. Extremely discreet.
“Now let me have thirty minutes to unpack a few things, okay?” Lu watches Andi saunter out, notes how streaky her legs look from the back. Self-tanner. If she’s going to insist on a year-round glow, maybe she should spring for the kind you get at a spa.
Meow, she thinks, shaking her head and smiling at herself. Cattiness is a waste of good energy. Lu doesn’t feel competitive about other women. Lu feels competitive about everybody.
She studies her office, hers for the next four years, maybe beyond. Her father held it for two terms—no, more than that, he was appointed before he ran for office in 1978. Not this physical space, though, a bland, characterless rectangle with a few pieces of cheap furniture and faded squares on the beige wall where Fred’s plaques and pictures had hung. Lu takes a small, tissue-wrapped object from her purse and walks over to the bookcase. Lady Justice emerges from the paper, blind as usual, but in the form of a robed skeleton, a Day of the Dead piece that Luisa’s husband gave her when she started working as a prosecutor in Baltimore City. It’s hard not to wonder what Gabe would think about today. He would have been proud, of course. But Gabe made so much money, first as a founder of a file-sharing company that was acquired by a bigger player in that field, then consulting in tech, that her state job always seemed like a hobby to him, especially after the twins were born.
“Why work?” he asked her.
“How can I not?” she asked back. “I love the law.” She did not dare tell the terrible truth that she found straight-up motherhood boring.
“Okay, but it’s on you to make it work. Spend whatever it takes and let’s hope it’s a financial wash, state salaries being what they are.”
Gabe had started a second company by then and they had so much money that they were building castles in the air that could be real castles if they could just pick a location. A castle rising in Spain, as their favorite song, “My Romance,” had it. They talked about buying or building a second home. Nova Scotia. The Outer Banks. Or the west coast of Ireland, which seemed almost more accessible than the Outer Banks, given that Aer Lingus had daily flights to Shannon out of BWI at the time. The world was their oyster. Better, Gabe said, they were going to sit at that place outside Galway, where the oysters were so fresh that it seemed as if they had been harvested minutes after you placed your order.