Pulse

85

Penny had a difficult time conversing with Fedderman, the way he was lying on his stomach, with half his face mashed into his hospital pillow. The nurses, with cunning expertise and Velcro restraining material, had made it impossible for him to turn over.

“Thish p’low mush have a thread count about three,” he said.

It struck Penny as odd that Feds would complain about the pillowcase’s roughness on his face rather than the holes left by the pellets that had penetrated his right back and shoulder when he’d instinctively turned away from Schueller’s shotgun. One of the pellets had almost lodged in his spine, and possibly would have paralyzed him. As it was, he should completely recover but for a peppering of scars on his back.

“I guesh you were right about the rishk factor,” Fedderman said.

Penny had been crying intermittently since hearing from Quinn that her husband had been shot. Shock had become relief, then anger, then

… something else. The crying she did now was for relief if not actual joy.

She leaned close to Fedderman. “You’re an idiot, Feds.”

He knew that tone of voice. He smiled.

“No,” she said, “ I’m the idiot. You don’t marry someone intending to change him. And now you’ve made me realize how much I’d miss you, and I’m trapped.”

“But you don’t mind?”

She kissed him. “The question doesn’t apply,” she said. “I’ve got you. We have each other. As close to forever as we can make it.”

He smiled into his pillow. “Shwell,” he said.

“I’m not going to buy a gun,” she said.

“Shwell.”

Huh?

While Enders and Coil sometimes served as legal consultants to Waycliffe College and its faculty, there wasn’t enough evidence to indict the law firm. The Waycliffe conspirators, along with mid-level Meeding Properties executives, received guilty verdicts on counts of fraud, insider trading, and impeding an investigation. They were found not guilty as accessories in all six homicides; Chancellor Schueller, in death, bore all the guilt.

Enders and Coil knew how to sweep up after their clients, and themselves.

Sarah Benham, a decorated former Marine who was in the employ of Meeding Properties to help facilitate the eminent domain case and eviction of Mildred Dash, was also convicted.

Though Sarah was a troubleshooter in Meeding Properties Security, she did in addition insure art, which was the basis for her relationship with Waycliffe College. It had led to her acting on behalf of the co-conspirators in the Meeding Properties-Mildred Dash dilemma, and to sharing in their mutually supportive lie.

While free on bail and awaiting sentencing, she was found in her bathtub with six empty martini glasses nearby and her wrists sliced.

Not only was the defendants’ legal team supremely skilled at speaking untruths without lying, they knew how to deflect. They had managed to have the recording made at Chancellor Schueller’s house declared illegally obtained and inadmissible in court.

And inaccessible to the public.

Waycliffe College would survive the storm of damaging truth and innuendo, so the respected institution could sever itself from its past.

For everyone involved, nothing was cheap

Jody was terminated at Enders and Coil before Mildred Dash’s family filed suit claiming Mildred’s death was premature and caused by Meeding Properties and the law firm harassing her in a campaign of terror to try forcing her illegal eviction.

Jody became a friend of the plaintiffs, and in her room above Quinn and Pearl in the brownstone prepared herself to testify for Mildred Dash’s family in court.

Quinn and Pearl would sit on the sofa with after-dinner drinks and listen to her, though they couldn’t quite understand what she was saying.

“It sounds as if she’s talking to herself and answering,” Pearl said.

“She is,” Quinn told her.

“Is that healthy?”

“Not for anyone who gets crossways with her.”

“Should we be worried?”

“No,” Quinn said. “She’s asking the right questions, and I suspect her answers are good ones.”