Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy Read Online Free PDF Page A

that passed through our office every year. She didn’t need the complications of our private lives to make her job more miserable, and it was essential to bring her in on details that were likely to surface in the press.
“Alex,” Laura questioned timidly, ‘how about people from the office?
Everybody’s going to come by to check out how you’re taking this. Who do you want to see?“
    “Uh,” I groaned and tried to make a mental barricade between myself and the real world. But it was impossible to ignore that there were at least three colleagues I would simply have to see during the course of the day.
    Rod Squires was chief of the Trial Division, the man who supervised several hundred lawyers responsible for all the violent crime prosecutions in the office, and who reported directly to Battaglia. He was smart and personable, and at forty-five, had come up through the ranks in the office, having tried some of the toughest murder cases the city had witnessed. He had been a generous mentor to me and a great supporter of mine from my earliest days in the office.
    “If Rod asks for me, I’ll go down to his office as soon as I’m done with Wallace’s case.
    “And of course I’ll see Sarah.” My unit deputy was a terrific young lawyer. She was a few years younger than I, married to a former prosecutor who had just gone on to the bench, and she had returned from her first maternity leave to assist me with the operation of Sex Crimes. Sarah Brenner was petite, dark, and as attractive as she was competent.
    I trusted her, I liked her, and I selected her to work with me to oversee the complex and sensitive range of cases that included sexual assault, child abuse, and domestic violence.
“In fact, tell her she’s got to review everything new that comes in.
I’ll be out of commission till I know what’s happening with the murder investigation.”
    Laura screwed up her courage to ask me about the third one: “Patrick McKinney?”
    “Try to keep him as far away from me as you can, Laura,” I snarled.
    “He’ll be the first one sniffing around here, hoping to find me miserable, and I’ll break his fat fucking neck if he says a word to me.”
    Mike laughed: “Whew! Women in the workplace!”
    “Listen, Mike, I don’t know what happens in parochial schools most of the guys survive the nuns and come out with a sense of humor some a little more tasteful than yours, but humor nonetheless. This guy came out like Mother Superior himself, with a stick up his ass that should have punctured his brain by now.”
    Pat McKinney was one of Rod’s deputies. He was senior to me by a couple of years, and as rigid and humorless as any man could be. I’ve never figured what made him such an angry person, but something seethed inside him and most frequently found its outlet when directed at the women professionals in the office.
    “Laura thinks he blames the crab incident on me, don’t you?”
    She nodded as I told Mike the story.
    “Pat refused to sign off on an extradition request for one of the assistants in the Asian Gang Unit, who wanted to fly in a witness from Los Angeles and put the kid up in a hotel during the trial.
    McKinney said it was too expensive and that there was a strong enough case without the witness. I told the assistant that Pat was just crabby that day, and if he wrote up a new request I would walk it in to Rod for approval.
    Rod signed and the jury convicted. You know those fish stores on the corner at Canal Street?“
    Our office was smack in the middle of the part of Lower Manhattan where Little Italy overlapped with Chinatown, and the south side of Canal Street was lined with Chineserun fish stores that daily displayed open crates of live fish on the sidewalks.
    “Well, a few days after the trial ended, Pat arrived to find his office door unlocked. He flew to his desk to call Security to come upstairs, and when he pulled open the top drawer, about forty live crabs came rushing over the lip of the