Irreparable Harm (34 page)

She figured she might as well try to manage her client’s expectations given that she fully intended to lose.

She was about to hang up when Vivian added, “You do realize I fought to have you made the responsible attorney on this matter after Noah died?”

“I do. Thank you for the opportunity, Vivian.”

“Don’t thank me; prove me right. From everything I’ve heard, you’re a younger version of me, a rising star. Act like it. I’ll meet you at the courthouse.”

Vivian hung up.

Sasha was left with two thoughts. One, she hadn’t considered that Vivian might want to attend the argument. And, two, she wasn’t like Vivian. Not at all. Or, at least, she hoped she wasn’t.

“Did you print?” she asked Connelly.

“Yeah, it’s not that much. Two hundred pages, maybe less. Where’s the printer?”

“It’s on our way out. We’ll grab them and read them while we wait for the argument to start. We need to go now.”

“Do you want to bring this?” Connelly gestured toward the thumb drive, still inserted in her laptop.

Sasha considered it.

“No, leave it there. Who’s going to notice a thumb drive in a law firm?”

Chapter 40

Sasha and Connelly huddled in the first row of the gallery in Judge Cook’s courtroom, paging through the printout from Warner’s thumb drive. Connelly had shown his identification to the security guards in the lobby, who called up the U.S. Marshals Service and confirmed that an air marshal could bring both cell phones and a gun into the courtroom.

They were skimming the pages, looking for whatever was in the files that had Irwin so hot to get them back. So far, it had  all been pretty mundane. Calvaruso’s job application, the consulting agreement, his benefits package. Sasha flipped the pages in frustration. Nothing worth killing Warner over.

“We must have missed something.”

She stacked the papers into a pile and moved up to the counsel table to look over her notes until Mickey arrived.

He hustled in, tossed his briefcase on the table for plaintiff’s counsel, and headed straight for her. He gave her a big smile, but she could see the strain wearing through it.

“You okay, Mickey?”

“Fine, fine.” His eyes darted around the room and his movements were jerky and frenetic.

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you nervous?”

“What? Nervous? By lunchtime, I’m gonna be the guy who went up against Prescott & Talbott on a long-short TRO and won. I can probably cancel my Yellow Pages ad; I’m gonna be beating off clients with a stick.” He grinned at her.

He was right, if everything went according to plan, he’d be the man of the hour and she’d be the associate in over her head who lost an important argument.
That
would do wonders for her partnership prospects, she thought. Strangely, that fact evoked no emotion in her. She simply did not care.

He was also lying. He was nervous, no doubt about it. It occurred to Sasha that Mickey probably hadn’t spent much time in court in recent years. He found good, sympathetic plaintiffs, wrote decent papers (for a plaintiff’s attorney), and then got defense counsel to the table to settle. She tried to remember the last case Mickey had actually taken to verdict. She drew a blank.

Mickey was out of practice and about to perpetuate a fraud on the court. Of course he was nervous.

The door leading from the judge’s chambers opened, and Brett entered, followed by the court reporter, carrying her stenography machine.

Brett placed a stack of papers on the judge’s bench, probably copies of the motion, and walked over to the counsel tables.

“Mickey, Ms. McCandless,” he said. “I don’t suppose you fine barristers have worked out an agreement that obviates the need for the judge to hear this motion?”

“I’m afraid not,” Sasha said.

“I’d be afraid, too, if I were you,” Brett told her. “The judge is not going to be happy to see your firm in his courtroom two days in a row; but he’s really not going to be happy to see you. No offense, of course.”

“None taken.”

Sasha and Mickey were counting on Judge Cook reacting badly to her.

The deputy clerk fixed her with a look, but he didn’t say anything further. Just turned on his heel and retreated to his desk.

Sasha walked over to the bar and beckoned Connelly with a small wave. He came and stood at the rail, gripping the top with his good hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, leaning in close so they could whisper.

“Mickey’s a ball of nerves.”

Connelly blinked. “Is he going to hold up?”

“I don’t know. Look at him.”

Their fierce whispers drew Mickey’s attention and he waved a hello to Connelly, then pointed to himself, seeing if he should join them.

Connelly shook his head no, and Mickey went back to unpacking his trial bag. He dropped his pen and it clattered and rolled across the floor. He chased after it, cursing it aloud.

“He’ll be fine once he gets going.”

She hoped so.

“Listen,” Connelly continued, “I’m going to check in with the Marshal’s office. See if anything’s going on with their case against Gregor. Will you be okay while I’m gone?”

Sasha looked over at the Special Deputy U.S. Marshal standing against the wall. He was watching Mickey chase his pen with a bemused half-smile.

“I doubt even Irwin is crazy enough to try something in open court with an armed federal agent present,” she answered.

“Good point. I won’t be long.”

The court reporter looked up from her machine. “Ms. McCandless, I’ll just use your information from yesterday. Mr. Collins, do you have a card on you?”

He pulled one from his breast pocket and walked it over to her. Sasha noticed he remembered to skirt the well. Maybe Connelly was right. Once Mickey got going, he’d probably be fine.

She was about to find out. As Connelly walked out the doors in the back of the courtroom, Judge Cook walked in through his private entrance. He looked sour.

“All rise. The Honorable Cliff Cook presiding.” Brett sounded like he would rather be anywhere else.

The judge reached his seat but did not sit. Instead, he locked his elbows, pushed his palms against the table in front of him, and glared down at Sasha and Mickey.

“Counselors. The Court is not pleased, not pleased at all, to see the two of you here on an emergency TRO.”

He started with Mickey. “Mr. Collins, has Ms. McCandless had an opportunity to review your papers?”

“She has, your honor. And it is my understanding that she has read them very closely, perhaps even more closely than I have.”

Sasha shot Mickey a look.

“Well, Mr. Collins, they
are
a notch above the usual slapdash job you foist upon the bench. Perhaps she found them a better read than expected.”

The judge turned to Sasha. “Ms. McCandless, having read Mr. Collins’ papers, are you prepared to tell me your client does not consent to the relief he’s seeking?”

Sasha opened her mouth to answer.

Apparently, the question was rhetorical, because Judge Cook kept going. “Hemisphere Air is willing to risk the lives of, hundreds, thousands, who knows how many, Americans rather than ground a tiny percentage of its fleet to rule out a mechanical error that could have caused Monday’s crash? Is that what you’re saying, counselor?”

“Your honor, if I may …”

“Answer my question. Yes or no.”

“Hemisphere Air does not consent to grounding eleven planes with no known or suspected mechanical problems, your honor.”

Judge Cook glared at her. She braced herself for his reaction, but his attention shifted to the back of the room. Sasha risked a peek over her shoulder, thinking Connelly hadn’t been gone for very long. But, instead of Connelly making his way up the aisle, she saw Vivian Coulter slipping into the last row of seats.

She recognized Vivian from photographs she’d seen in the
Business Times
and on the
Post-Gazette
society page. Vivian was close to six feet tall, with a strong, square jaw and broad shoulders. She wore her light brown hair in layers to her shoulders. She reminded Sasha of Kathleen Turner. Old, depraved Kathleen Turner from
Californication
, not young, hot Kathleen Turner from
Body Heat
.

She just hoped Vivian didn’t belong to Noah’s country club. Sasha didn’t mind arguing to an angry judge, but an apoplectic one would be distracting.

The judge returned his attention to the lawyers standing before him.

“I haven’t got all day. Let’s get started. Mr. Collins, I’d like you to focus on the irreparable harm requirement and its interplay with the public interest prong of the test.”

He lowered himself into his chair and nodded at Mickey.

So far, so good. The judge had given Mickey the blueprint for his argument. All Mickey needed to do was follow it and he should win.

Sasha started to sit, too, but remembered the Simon Says rules from the previous day and straightened back up to standing.

The judge held up a hand to stop Mickey before he began. “Ms. McCandless, if you’ve finished your deep knee bends, kindly sit down. You’re distracting the Court with your antics.”

Warmth spread across Sasha’s face and she sat. The deputy clerk flashed her a quick smile. He remembered, too.

“Your honor,” Mickey began, “the plaintiffs, on behalf of the putative class, seek an order grounding eleven planes until the cause of the crash can be determined or, at a minimum, testing confirms that these eleven planes are free of defect.”

Mickey might not have been much of a writer, and his offices may have left something to be desired aesthetically, but he was a master storyteller. He settled into a rhythm right away, and his tone was grave and full of authority.

Sasha listened with one ear as she scanned the printouts from Warner. There had to be something incriminating in the papers. She just had to find it.

“The plaintiffs seek this extraordinary relief, not only to preserve evidence that could explain why their daughter and her fellow passengers died, but also to protect the interests of the flying public. At present, there is no explanation for Monday night’s crash other than the plane stopped responding to the pilot’s controls and
flew itself into a mountain.

Now, Ms. McCandless will argue this was a fluke, a one-off anomaly. Should travelers be required to take that on faith? If she’s wrong and another plane crashes, well, the harm will be, not just irreparable, it will be inexcusable, because it is so avoidable. Right now, today, Hemisphere Air can decide to protect the public. The real question, your honor, is what is the harm to Hemisphere Air in doing the right thing?”

Sasha looked up. The judge was nodding along with Mickey, who was gesturing broadly as he moved through his points.

She went back to the papers in front of her. Behind Angelo Calvaruso’s consulting agreement, there was an identical agreement between Patriotech and someone named Harold Jones. Whoever had created the document had copied it from Calvaruso’s and neglected to change the footer, which still read “Calvaruso IC Agreement.”  Warner’s key word search must have tagged it as a hit based on the footer.

Sasha felt a rush of adrenaline. She took the agreement from the stack and put it aside. Harold Jones. With any luck, she had just identified the second cancer patient.

“The relief requested by the plaintiffs is extremely narrow and minimally intrusive to Hemisphere Air’s business,” Mickey was saying. “By taking just a small number of planes out of service, they could safeguard the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of fliers, as well as countless other innocent citizens. Flight 1667 happened to crash into a mountain, but the next plane to crash could collide with another plane or fly right into a building, killing many more people than those onboard.”

Mickey paused here to let an image of the September 11th destruction develop in the judge’s head.

Sasha pulled a spreadsheet from the stack. It was a draft expense report for the current month, set out in tiny font. She held it up close to her face to read. The equipment category had two entries for smartphone. Each listed a ten-digit number that began with 301, the area code for Bethesda. Presumably, these were telephone numbers. One was labeled Calvaruso; the other one, Jones.