Chapter 22

Barrett was on a call with the auditors debating materiality and exactly which of the company’s potential liabilities had to be disclosed. Since the dust had settled from the elevator incident—that was how he was able to categorize it now, as an incident—he had time for the more mundane tasks of his position. He’d even been able to schedule a getaway with his children. They’d each been agitating for some “dad time,” as they called it, and while they wanted it to be one-on-one, there was no way he could manage four separate getaways. Instead they’d all be spending the next seven days together. It would be the first time since the divorce.

He was pushing back against the bean counters and their insistence on red-flagging every little nuisance claim when Ma Belle chimed an alert on his desktop. He received dozens of these every day, and he gave the screen barely a glance. It was only a new filing on one of the dozens of civil case dockets he monitored. Then he looked again. This one was a new filing in a criminal docket. State v. Lambert.

The case had been quiet for weeks, and with Lambert safely out of sight in the county jail, he’d allowed her to fade out of mind, too. But when he logged on to the public access website, he saw that her public defender had filed a motion for the release of her briefcase from the police evidence lockup. It contained documents that were in no way relevant to the charges she faced, the motion argued, but were valuable to her. The motion didn’t say what those documents were.

He ran through the possibilities. She’d been in the office all day that Sunday, but she hadn’t been in the document room, and anyway, Lester Willard was certain she’d never removed a single piece of paper from those files. It was probably nothing. Collection letters from her many creditors, probably, or poetry she wrote on the train. Still . . .

“Let’s pick this up tomorrow,” he told the auditors, and disconnected. “Marcia, get Culligan up here,” he shouted to the ceiling.

“Right away, Mr. Barrett.”

“No, wait. Tell him to meet me in Tech in five minutes. With the video.”

“What video shall I tell him?”

“He’ll know.”

CULLIGAN ARRIVED FIVE minutes late, his face a moist pink. “What’s up?” he puffed.

Barrett looked around the room. A half dozen young men sat at computer stations staring at their screens but probably listening to every word he said. “Which one’s your guy?”

“Jason,” Culligan said, and snapped his fingers. A bald kid in tight pants and high-top sneakers jumped up to join them.

Barrett drew them into a huddle and explained in a whisper: “We need to look at the footage from that night and see what she put in her briefcase before she left here.”

Culligan scratched his chin. “I doubt that’ll show up.”

“It might,” the Tech kid said. He went back to his terminal and inserted the thumb drive Culligan handed him. Barrett leaned in to watch the screen as the file loaded and the playback began. Culligan leaned in, too, and Barrett caught a whiff of Scotch. It was only eleven o’clock.