Acts of Malice Read Online Free PDF Page A

put Strong’s check into the depleted trust account, looked at her watch, grabbed a file, and headed down the hall of the Starlake Building, toward her Bronco and the snowy outdoors.
    The music followed her:
    Snow falls upon this dream of mine

This dream we had together

Oh why can’t happiness endure
    As she warmed up the truck she thought about Jim Strong. His brother was dead and his wife was missing. He had turned to her for help.
    As simply as that, she had taken on his burden. They were lawyer and client, a relationship that sometimes becomes closer than wife and husband or sister and brother.
    Had she jumped in too quickly? His problems had such blurry edges. . . .
    Out here, clarity everywhere, the mountains sharp above the town, pines dripping, clouds in battalions marching across the new blue sky . . .
    And back at the office, a brand-new file. ‘‘I know what you did to Alex,’’ Nina repeated under her breath as the Bronco bumped out onto the boulevard.

2
    AT THE COURTHOUSE, Nina put Jim Strong out of her mind.
    Love the one you’re with. It’s a lesson lawyers learn early.
    Her client was waiting with her husband, Mr. Geiger, in the hall outside the Superior Court main courtroom. Mrs. Geiger had hurt her back eighteen months before in a car accident caused by the other driver, but his insurance company didn’t like the amount Nina requested as damages.
    The problem was that Mrs. Geiger, a tiny lady who wasn’t supposed to lift more than ten pounds due to her injury, had been videotaped by an insurance company investigator soon after the accident, carrying in groceries from the car, hauling trash bags out to the can, and lugging her toddler grandson around her modest yard out in King’s Beach, all in a single disastrous afternoon.
    This video had aroused such righteous indignation in the insurance company camp that not only was Nina’s settlement offer rejected without a counteroffer, but the District Attorney’s office was called in. Nina had arrived at her client’s deposition a few months before to find Barbara Banning, the new deputy D.A. assigned to the Tahoe office, sitting in a chair next to the insurance lawyer, one perfect calf crossed above the other, on patrol for fraud.
    For a few months, it had looked like Mrs. Geiger not only would lose her case, but might lose her liberty as well. This reflected badly on Nina, who had made the big damages claim, and it also seemed unfair to Mrs. Geiger, who really did have a bad back, although they all had to admit the video seemed to indicate otherwise.
    Nina needed some new ammo. So, shortly before the time when all doctors’ reports had to be completed, she visited the treating doctor again, bearing a copy of the video.
    He hadn’t liked having his professional judgment questioned or his patient ridiculed. He went through the video in slow motion, stopping now and then to look at Mrs. Geiger’s movements frame by frame. He pointed at various frames and snapped things like, ‘‘Don’t you see how she’s grimacing in pain there? And there? See how she’s compensating? She’ll never be pain free again. She needs another MRI. I think I missed something. She’s worse off than I thought.’’
    So Nina called a last-minute follow-up deposition of this doc, and he muttered darkly about hip replacements and chronic pain syndrome down the road, which would probably necessitate expensive surgery. By the time he finished, opposing counsel was on the phone to his boss in some fifty-story building somewhere, whining for a bigger reserve.
    On the third day before the trial was to begin, this lawyer made a reasonable offer, which Nina, biting her fingernails even as she spoke on the phone, rejected. An endless afternoon later, the lawyer called again and made a more than reasonable offer. Nina wrote the figure on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk to Mrs. Geiger, who wrote, ‘‘Take it! Take it!’’
    But now, just at that tricky moment