Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unfit to Practice

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know how I did it. Years of handling my alcoholic dad, I think. Anyway, I threw him out.”

“Did he go peaceably?”

“He broke a porcelain lamp that was on the secretary’s desk.”

“How did he do that?”

“Knocked it down. He was yelling. Very angry.”

“After he left, what did you do?”

“Moved in with a friend.”

“Why?”

“As he was leaving, Stinson taunted me. Said he knew where I lived.”

“You were frightened?”

“Very.”

“Did you tell anyone where you were?”

“Not for a couple of days.”

“You didn’t call your fiancée?”

He stretched his neck uncomfortably. “We were-having a hard time, but I tried to reach her. Didn’t have much luck.”

“After a few days, you made contact?”

“She found me. I knew she could if she wanted to badly enough.”

“What effect did this incident have on your business?”

“I couldn’t work. I didn’t take calls. It cost me money and made it hard for me to complete the work I had at hand. It had a distinctly negative effect on my business.”

“And on you personally?”

“I suffered tremendous emotional distress. I had to see a doctor. It exacerbated the problems with my fiancée.”

Jack, taking a different tack, stood when he talked to Ford, although he stood behind the table. He moved his weight from one side to the other, his compact body swaying like a tree in a wild wind as he thought on his feet. “Mr. Ford, why didn’t you know about Cody Stinson in the first place?”

“I hadn’t talked to my fiancée, Brandy Taylor, for a couple of days.”

“And why was that?”

“She was out of town.”

“But you were on speaking terms.”

“Of course.” But the eyes behind the green tint blinked.

“Did she later tell you that she had been instructed by her attorney to contact you?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Did she say she tried to reach you before Cody Stinson ever came to your office to tell you what was going on?”

Ford had a toothache, judging from the tortured crook to his mouth. “Yes.”

“Why couldn’t she reach you to warn you?”

“My cell phone was out.”

“Why couldn’t she find you at the office?”

“She left some messages,” he admitted. “I was upset. I didn’t call her back. Believe me, I regret that very much now. I was wrong.”

“Mr. Ford, isn’t it true that you moved in with your friend several days before Cody Stinson showed up at your office?”

He was silent.

Busted, Nina thought. Jack hadn’t told her about that.

“You were having some problems in your relationship and moved out. You weren’t taking calls from your fiancée at home or at the office, isn’t that so, Mr. Ford?”

The tongue went back to work the bad molar again. “I’m not proud of how I behaved. I hate fighting with her. I guess the timing of the whole thing got confused in my mind,” he said.

“I guess it did, Mr. Ford. So any harm to your business, aside from a lamp that may have been broken accidentally, is really due to the problems you were having in your relationship, isn’t it?”

“Listen, that guy scared me. He threw me off my stride. He threatened my fiancée! He had no business doing that. She was scared to death. I felt so horrible when I found out.”

Ford didn’t come off too badly, just as a protective boyfriend, but his indignation no longer carried the heft of righteousness. The judge lost interest. He turned toward the clerk and said something. The clerk nodded, then focused harder on the mysteries unfolding on her computer.

“How did you know about that?” Nina whispered to Jack.

“I read it in his eyes.”

“You did?”

He took pity on her bewilderment. He whispered, “Paul just found out. He called me late last night. Just when you write him off as useless, he comes up with something.”

The next witness, Brandy Taylor, brought a breeze through the door with her, rushed up to the witness stand, and said “Sorry” when she almost tipped over the bottle of water on Nolan’s table.

Brandy wore a red jacket over a flowing chiffon skirt. Judge Brock gave her his full attention.

She gave her vital statistics, then began her story, her attitude apologetic. “I didn’t want to complain, but my boyfriend was so upset. He’s a lawyer and he said that it was like a civic duty, that what Ms. Reilly did to us was harmful. We could have died. You know, the truth is, we were all scared.”

Pushing her gaudy rims up tight to her eyes, Nolan straightened her padded shoulders and brightened all around. She laid on the sympathy lightly, as if knowing a heavy hand might twist things the wrong way. She didn’t say outright, “Poor you,” but a warmth under her questions carried the implication with every sentence. “Tell us, in your own words, Ms. Taylor, what happened.”

Brandy told the court at great length about their trip to the campground, angling around her troubles with her boyfriend, emphasizing the fun of a visit with her sister, Angel. She said the arguments at the tent next door escalated after Cody Stinson arrived, and she described the arrival of the park ranger and how relieved they felt. Then, she said, they couldn’t sleep anyway. “We got up in the middle of the night to use the-uh-bathroom.”

“You and your sister both?”

“We both went, yeah.”

“Tell us what happened then.”

“Well, it was super late at night and really dark. Even though the campground’s lit and you can see the lights reflecting on the lake through the trees, it’s not like daytime. On the other hand, it’s not so dark you can’t see. It was also quiet. When we got to the bathroom we waited a minute for this other woman to finish, then we were quick. It was on the way back that I saw Cody Stinson leaving Phoebe’s tent.”

“Which caused you to consult with Nina Reilly?”

“That’s right. We were frightened and didn’t know what to do.”

Brandy wasn’t enjoying this. In spite of Jack’s admonition, Nina scribbled on her notepad, the mindless doodles she hoped looked like serious note-taking to anyone who happened to notice. The doodling helped her think, as if the stick figures and their little randomly generated activities freed up her mind for more logical paths.

She doodled an outhouse with a half-moon cut in the door, a woman walking away, two shadowy figures waiting.

Hmm, she thought, the woman in the washroom, out and about in the middle of the night. Brandy and Angel had mentioned her on their first visit to Nina. Could that mean anything? The campground had been crowded.

Could be anyone.

Could be someone?

When Brandy got to Cody’s attack, she became teary. Gayle Nolan, entirely pleased with the girl’s performance, egged her on, but Brandy wiped her eyes quickly, saying it was months ago now, and nothing had happened since Stinson was put in jail. She even put a plug in for Paul’s role in Stinson’s capture, which Nina appreciated, even though Jack seemed unmoved.

Nolan didn’t let Brandy go before detailing the injury to Brandy and her sister. They had been menaced, attacked even, by this man who should never have had the information he had, which came straight out of Nina’s confidential client file.

When Jack’s turn came to question Brandy, she uncrossed her legs and pushed her back against the chair, as if recoiling from what she expected to be an unpleasant scene. Instead, he gently prodded her about the things Nina had done to prevent any harm the information in the file might have caused.

“She hired an investigator, who followed you even though you didn’t request protection. He was there when Cody Stinson confronted you at the beach, correct?”