“How long—” He stopped. He had to clear his throat. “How long has she been like this?”

The nurse was shouting into the telephone, rapidly and in French. The old woman’s distress seemed to grow. Her rocking turned frenetic, her keening turned to screams.

“How did you get in here?” the maid said, apparently relaying the demand from whoever was on the other end of the telephone. “Are you alone?”

“Yes,” Barrett answered.

As he said it, he realized it was true. There would be no cover for him. There were no wagons to circle. He was completely alone.

Chapter 31

The next morning I found Phoebe in a huddle with Luisa at the reception desk. I stopped and raised an eyebrow at their frantic whispers. “What’s up?”

“We don’t know where Mark is,” Phoebe said.

Luisa was wide-eyed. “He left me a note saying, Clear my calendar today. Cancel everything.”

“He took Lonnie and the limo,” Phoebe said, “and now he’s not answering his phone.”

“Weird,” I said.

We hashed it out: Phoebe would cover the hearing in Mercer; I would handle the conference call in Ralston; Luisa would cancel everything else.

I returned to my office downstairs and logged on to the firm’s server and spent thirty minutes learning the Ralston case, then the rest of the morning poking through the entire file on the Genco case. Like the Palmer case against CDMI, it was a derivative action attacking the incumbent management of the company. Under the terms of the soon-to-be-finalized settlement agreement, Mark would appoint five new members of the board, who would then install new management in the executive suite. I studied that mechanism very carefully.

I changed into running tights and a tank top, and at eleven thirty I dialed into the Ralston conference call. I made Mark’s excuses and wrested a minor concession from opposing counsel. At noon the call ended, but the line remained open for the hour allotted, and I left my extension open. Anyone watching the switchboard or reviewing the phone logs would assume I was still on the call.

Alice would have been happy to go running with me; she also would have been duty-bound to report my movements to Mark. I slipped out the French doors into the garden, then stopped at the back gate. The alley was clear and the surrounding rooftops empty, so far as I could see. I darted out and sprinted around the corner and flagged down a cab. I took it through Central Park all the way to the river, where I stationed myself near the boat basin café and waited for Nelson Ledbetter to appear.

Something I’d learned over the years when taking depositions: you can often glean as much from the witness’s casual off-the-record banter as you can from his actual testimony. One thing I’d learned last week while Nelson Ledbetter shot the breeze with Dick Harrington was that every day at this hour, he left his office at Northstar and took a run along the Hudson River Greenway.