Authors: Gini Hartzmark
Dead Certain
Don't miss these legal thrillers featuring Kate Millholland by Gini Hartzmark!
PRINCIPAL DEFENSE
FINAL OPTION
BITTER BUSINESS
FATAL REACTION
ROUGH TRADE
“When it comes to the legal thriller, Gini Hartzmark’s work is top of the line.” —Les Roberts
Ballantine / Del Rey / Fawcett / Ivy
Praise for Gini Hartzmark’s previous Kate Millholland novels
ROUGH TRADE
“Hartzmark... offers substance with excitement.”
—Publishers Weekly
FATAL REACTION
“Exceptional: Hartzmark paints a fascinating picture of the world of drug research with characters who are believable, varied, and likable (even the villains are the kind you love to hate). The intensity of the complex plot never wavers, and the ending explains just enough to satisfy without being too pat.”
—Publishers Weekly
FINAL OPTION
“A cleverly plotted and convincing inside look at freewheeling financial crooks and wizards... Hartzmark keeps the story moving swiftly to an explosive conclusion.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
BITTER BUSINESS
“A page-turner.”
—People
By Gini Hartzmark
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:
PRINCIPAL DEFENSE
FINAL OPTION
BITTER BUSINESS
FATAL REACTION
ROUGH TRADE
DEAD CERTAIN
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A Fawcett Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2000 by Gini Hartzmark
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-91032
ISBN 0-8041-1900-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: January 2000
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my father, in memory
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank all the usual suspects: Susan Randol, Don Maass, and Lisa Collins for their help in shaping the manuscript; Drs. Heather Raaf and William Morgan for always being happy to help me kill people—at least on paper; Dee Hartzmark and Elizabeth Gardner, who cheerfully answered all questions without asking why; and my husband, Michael, who is always there to help me find the way through my own plots after I’ve succeeded in confusing myself. Finally, special thanks to Steve Garrity, computer wizard, for solving problems real, fictional, and digital.
CHAPTER 1
As a lawyer I’m not usually interested in the truth. I know that sounds appalling. But if it’s absolutes you’re interested in, you’d better stick to physics. At its heart the law is all about human behavior, and human behavior is by definition messy. Which not only explains why lawyers make their living in the gray spaces between differing versions of the truth, but also why there are so many of us. But, that morning I wasn’t interested in truth, physics, or the dark inner workings of the human heart. All I wanted was to make a deal.
After six months of letters, meetings, and conference calls, after months of missteps, frustration, and false hope—it all came down to this: three days and three nights at the negotiating table and still no deal. Not only that, but I was running out of tricks. I was too frustrated to be persuasive, and after being up all night, the lawyers for the other side were too sleep-deprived to be intimidated— which was probably okay, because I was also too tired to care. All I wanted was to make a deal, take a shower, and climb into bed—in that order. Considering that I’d spent the last seventy-two hours in the same set of clothes, I, didn’t think that was too much to ask.
It didn’t help that the air in the conference room was ripe with the scent of yesterday’s sweat and the mahogany table was strewn with the wreckage of midnight coffee and fast-food breakfast. Jackets were off, sleeves were rolled up, and with a one o’clock deal-or-die deadline fast approaching, we’d moved past the point of being polite three ultimatums ago. When one of the Armani-clad wonders for the other side started going through his list of financial sticking points for what felt like the four hundredth time, I found myself alternating between fantasies of crisp cotton sheets and ripping his head off. I had just decided on the latter when my secretary sidled into the room and tapped me gently on the shoulder.
Cheryl was a petite powerhouse of a woman with a neat blond bob and a subversive sense of humor. She was also my rock, unflappable in any crisis and impervious to panic, which is why all it took was one look at her face for me to know that she hadn’t come to bring me good news. As she slipped me a folded sheet of paper, I tasted adrenaline in my throat and scenarios for a half a dozen different disasters sprang full-blown into my head. In my line of work it helps to have a vivid imagination and a sixth sense for disaster, but this time it turns out I wasn’t even close.
In Cheryl’s tidy handwriting, the message was as brief as it was chilling. It said:
“Your mother is here to see you.”
I raised my eyes from the paper and turned in my seat to face my secretary. A look of perfect understanding passed between us. Not only was the timing terrible, but we were both thinking the same thing. There was no way my mother would ever come to my office if she could possibly avoid it.
I scrambled to my feet and whispered something about an emergency to the lawyer sitting next to me. Then I started mentally running down the list of possible reasons for my mother’s visit.
None of them were good.
As I made my way down the hall I tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear and prayed that I didn’t look as awful as I felt. The weight of my mother’s disapproval is a burden under even the best of circumstances. The last thing I wanted to do today was give her fresh ammunition. Lately my personal life had been keeping her more than adequately supplied.
The love lives of corporate lawyers aren’t usually a source of gossip-column fodder, but being Astrid Mill-holland’s daughter has always made me something of an exception. Of course, splitting publicly with Stephen Azorini, Chicago’s most visible and eligible bachelor, was hardly a move destined to avert the spotlight. Even so, I was completely unprepared for the months of lurid speculation my decision seemed to have fueled.
Mother, accustomed to the respectful worship of the society pages, made no secret of her mortification.or the fact that she blamed me for it. In the meantime, I did what I always do, buried myself in work and prayed that someone prominent would turn up in bed with a barnyard animal, if only to give the gossip columnists something else to write about and get my mother off my back.
At Callahan Ross the room where clients cool their heels is everything you’d expect from a law firm where the letterhead reads like the passenger list of the
Mayflower.
With its clubby leather furniture and somber paintings of dead partners, it could have easily doubled as a stage set for a play about the establishment. Needless to say, Mother looked right at home there.
She also looked stunning. At fifty-three my mother had a face that most women would still kill for. Her signature dark mane was swept back from her forehead, framing her now-famous classic features. She was, as always, exquisitely dressed, this time in an elegant suit of charcoal wool subtly trimmed in black. It was just the sort of thing Coco Chanel might have designed for professional women, provided she could have found any willing to drop that kind of money on something to wear to the office.
At the sight of me an all-too-familiar flicker of disappointment crossed my mother’s face. I tried not to let it bother me. It had taken a long time, but I’d finally come to terms with the fact that I am not merely a younger version of my mother, but a plainer one, and therefore doomed to forever fall short. The only consolation is that, of the two of us, it undoubtedly troubled her more.
“Mother! What a pleasant surprise,” I lied, kissing the air beside her powdered cheek and smiling for the receptionist’s benefit. In a place where minutes were reckoned, movements recorded, and absences noted, news of my mother’s extraordinary visit was no doubt already crackling along the firm’s synapses. I had absolutely no intention of giving anyone any more to talk about.
As I led the way back toward my office I did my best to make small talk, always tricky in our case since even neutral subjects had a way of quickly shifting to more dangerous ground. Playing it safe, I fell back on the usual attorney-client patter, prattling on about how we now had six hundred attorneys in Chicago alone and were in the process of opening a new office in Delhi. Mother, having been trained to feign interest practically since birth, listened politely. But I knew that my world, the world of people who work for a living, held little interest for her.
As I ushered her into my office I noted with silent amusement that Cheryl had made a whirlwind effort to tidy up my usual chaos. Not only had she carted off as many files as she could carry, but she’d shoved the rest underneath my desk so that when I sat down, there was barely enough room for my legs.
“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” I asked brightly.
“I didn’t know that I needed a reason to visit my own daughter,” announced Mother.
“Of course you don’t need a reason,” I replied sweetly. “But that still doesn’t mean you don’t have one.”
“If you must know, I’ve just come from the hospital,” she declared, “and you and I have an important matter to discuss.”
I felt my heart sink, but not for the reasons you might think. In my family, the word
hospital
meant only one thing—Prescott Memorial, the charitable institution founded by my mother’s great-grandfather and supported by every generation of Prescotts and Millhollands since. But that didn’t mean that Mother had dropped by to discuss medical care for the poor. The Founders Ball, the hospital’s annual fund-raiser and the charity event that traditionally marked the end of Chicago’s gala season, was this coming Saturday night. Having jettisoned Stephen from my life, my choice of escort had become the subject of seemingly endless debate. Mother, no longer content to plague me over the telephone, had apparently decided to intensify her efforts and begin harassing me in person.
“Mother, please,” I began, appalled by how quickly I had been reduced to pleading, “this really isn’t a very good time.”
