The 5th Horseman

Chapter 16

MAUREEN O’MARA FELT HER PULSE beating in her temples. Was that possible? Well, that’s how pumped she was. She pulled open one of the massive steel-and-glass doors to the Civic Center Courthouse and entered the cool gray interior.

Goddamn.

Today was the day. She owned this place.

She handed her briefcase to the security guard, who put it on the X-ray machine and checked it as she cleared the metal detectors. He nodded good morning and returned her seven-hundred-dollar “lucky” Louis Vuitton case with a smile.

“Best a’ luck today, Miss O’Mara.”

“Thanks, Kevin.”

O’Mara showed the guard her crossed fingers; then she cut through the milling crowd in the lobby and headed toward the elevator bank.

She was thinking as she walked — about how her stuffy, know-it-all partners had told her that she was insane to take on the huge, well-defended hospital, to try to weave twenty individual claims into one gigantic malpractice case.

But she couldn’t have turned it down. This one was too good.

The first patients had found her — then she’d seen the pattern. The momentum had built rapidly, then snowballed, and soon she’d become the go-to lawyer for patients with serious grievances against Municipal.

Putting this case together had been like corralling wild horses while standing on the seat of a motorbike and juggling bowling balls. But she’d done it.

Over the last fourteen months, she’d slogged through the discovery process, the endless depositions, lined up her seventy-six witnesses — medical experts, past and present employees of the hospital, and her clients, the families of the twenty deceased who were all finally in accord.

She had a personal reason for her total, unwavering commitment, but no one needed to know why this case was a labor of love.

She definitely felt her clients’ pain — that was reason enough.

Now she had to convince a jury of their peers.

If she could do that, the hospital would feel the pain, too, in the only way it could — by kicking out a gigantic payout, the many, many millions her clients richly deserved.