“You left a file box on my desk?” she said.

“Actually, I left it,” Wendy said. She was seated in the wing chair across from Brice, dressed in head-to-toe pastel-print Lily Pulitzer. “We’ve got a big med mal case heating up and I need you to go through the client’s receipts for the past six years and get everything reconciled. The girls in records are super busy, so while you’re off the Justice Line…”

“I’m off the Justice Line? Since when?”

“Since I determined generating leads isn’t really your strong suit,” Wendy said, looking to her husband for backup.

Brice fidgeted with a chain of paper clips on his desktop but said nothing.

“This is bullshit,” Drue said angrily. “Why don’t you just stick me in the corner of the office and give me a big dunce cap to wear?”

“See what I’m dealing with?” Wendy said, one eyebrow raised.

Zee coughed discreetly. “Ya know, if the kid’s got some spare time, I could really use her for this slip-and-fall I’m working on.”

Drue shot him a grateful look. Today, like every time she’d glimpsed him, he was dressed all in black—baggy black jeans, black polo shirt with the CCK logo and black motorcycle boots, a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans dangling from a cord around his neck.

Wendy rolled her eyes. “The 7-Eleven case? I thought that was dead. The store has our client and her boyfriend, on video, trying to shoplift a fifth of malt liquor. When the clerk chased him, he dropped the bottle, it smashed and she slipped on that. So her injury arose out of her own criminal act, right?” She glanced at her husband for confirmation.

“Wait a minute,” Drue interjected. “That was my case. And it wasn’t malt liquor, it was Smirnoff Ice. I talked to that woman two weeks ago, but when I asked her if either she or the boyfriend were arrested, she hung up on me!”

“I guess she called back and spoke to somebody else,” Wendy said. She looked over at Brice. “Whose lead was that?”

“Hmm. I think it was Jonah’s,” Brice said.

“Not that it matters,” Wendy said. “I really think—”

“Actually,” Brice said, “I kicked it over to Zee. He got a copy of the video from the store which shows that it’s the boyfriend doing the theft. The guy’s got a long record, but our prospective client is clean. And it now appears she’s suffered a traumatic brain injury, not just the broken tailbone she was initially treated for.”

“Looking at the police reports, I found a potential witness,” Zee said. “It’s the old lady who called nine-one-one after our client fell.”

He looked over at Drue. “What do you say to a ride-along?”

“This is a waste of time,” Wendy objected. “We don’t need to invest any more firm resources—”