The Letter Of The Law

CHAPTER 24

When Casey awoke, Taylor was standing over her, glowering.

" Taylor?" she said sleepily. The afternoon was gone. From the angle of the light falling through the windows, she knew she'd slept all day.

"Where have you been?" Taylor said in a poisonous tone of voice.

Casey got her bearings and thought of everything she'd been through in the past forty-eight hours. She didn't know how or where to begin.

Taylor interpreted her confusion as a play at deception. He was enraged.

"Goddamn you, Casey!" he growled.

He had discovered the flannel shirt Sales had given her. It was in the laundry basket when he emptied the suitcase from his trip. He held the shirt up for her to see and threw it violently at her face. Casey instinctively flinched away, but Taylor grasped her by the upper arm and yanked her toward him until his face was only inches away, his eyes searching. He'd done plenty of cheating in his day, but he had sworn it would never happen to him in reverse. It was one of the reasons he'd married Casey. He'd never in a million years imagined she would do that to him. The hot flame of hatred and jealousy seared his insides, and he squeezed her hard.

"Let go of me!" Casey shrieked. He had never dared to get physical with her before. No man had. "Let me go!"

Casey struggled to free herself from his grip.

"Where were you last night, Casey?" Taylor demanded, unaffected by her malignant stare.

"Who is he?" he shouted. "Who?"

"You don't even know what you're talking about. Let me go!" Casey shrieked. Finally she snapped her arm free and scrambled to the other side of the bed.

"I know what I'm talking about!" he yelled. "You know! I called here last night. I called here this morning. You were out all night! And now, here you are, sleeping at six o'clock! His shirt was in the fucking laundry bin! Who is it? Goddamn you, Casey! I can't believe you did this to me!"

"You?" she shouted. "You? You who went out to San Francisco to be with that slut of yours! You wouldn't marry her, but she's still glad to sleep with you whenever you get the itch. Well, she's trash and so are you!"

"I wasn't with her!" Taylor shouted, but even to his own ears it sounded false.

Emboldened, Casey hissed, "I know. I had you followed by a private detective."

It was a lie, but she wanted him to know that she knew, and she knew as certainly as if she did have someone following him. "I know what you were doing, and if I had a man," she continued scornfully, "then it's too bad for you. How do you like it, Taylor? How do you like having the person you're married to fucking someone else?"

"You bitch!" he snarled. "It's over. You're just a white trash whore from a hick town. That's all you ever were. That's all you'll ever be! Everyone told me. They told me you weren't good enough and you're not even close."

"Ha!" Casey scoffed bitterly. "I'm not good enough? I'm not good enough? Look at you. You're not a man. A man marries a woman and that's enough. A real man makes his way in the world, and he's too busy doing things to go sleeping around. You never did anything. You couldn't even make it in the world if everything wasn't handed to you on a silver platter. The only way you think you can prove yourself is in the bedroom by screwing around with any woman that would have you, and from what I know, you're not even any good at that.

"Yeah," she said caustically, "you're a real accomplished man, Taylor. I bet you feel real good about all the things you've done with your life."

"Get out," he said flatly. "Get out of my house."

"This is my house as much as it is yours," she said. "You get out."

Casey marched past him, and he raised his hand to strike her. She turned on him and caught his eye with a hateful stare.

"If you touch me again, I'll have the police on you so fast you'll think you were hit by a train."

He stood there shaking, his hand in the air. Casey waited, her eyes shining with defiance until he slowly brought his hand down to his side. Without a word, she went downstairs and sat in the living room with her arms folded tightly as she listened to the faint sounds of him packing his bags. Finally, she heard his footsteps on the stairs. He walked past the living room without a word and into the garage. When she heard his car pulling out, she took a deep breath and set her jaw.

She felt a great sense of relief, as if she'd just come through a long-drawn-out illness. That's what her marriage had been, an illness. As she thought about the things that had prompted her to marry Taylor in the first place, she realized that her whole life had been sick. Her priorities were all wrong. She had wanted a husband who was rich and privileged, a man who would give her universal social acceptance. She had gotten what she wanted, but she had also gotten a husband who was untrue and selfish and who didn't appreciate any of the truly good qualities she had. To him, she was nothing more than a pretty ornament.

She had wanted to be a famous lawyer, too, and look where that had gotten her. She was recognized by many, but she was also reviled. She had also wanted to win at all costs, and look what she'd done. She'd bludgeoned an innocent father, besmirched his reputation, salted his deep, bleeding wounds. Worse yet, she had almost single-handedly turned a diabolical killer free.

Casey twisted a long piece of her wavy red hair until it hurt.

She felt like she had no one now. Her whole life had been her career. It was such an empty feeling to suddenly face the fact that her husband, the person who was supposed to be closest to her in the world, was emotionally miles away. Casey picked up the telephone. She hadn't spoken to her sister in months. She'd been too busy. She hadn't taken her calls, and she hadn't even thought of her. There was a time when they'd been close, but only when they were little girls. By the time Casey was a teenager, her ambitions had been clear in her head, and her younger sister Shelly's lack of the same were just as evident.

"Shelly?" she said at the sound of the familiar voice.

"Casey? Is that you, girl?" came the response in a backcountry drawl that made Casey involuntarily wince. It had taken her years to eradicate the same accent from her own speech.

"How are you?" Casey asked tentatively.

"Me? Oh, I'm just the same as ever," her sister said, talking as if they'd spoken only yesterday. "The kids are growing like weeds, and Gabe's losing his hair faster than you could think of, but I'm just the same. How are you, though? I seen you on the news during that trial. That's all everyone talked about 'round here my famous sister God dawg you should of seen Momma and Daddy. They were ready to bust at church, everyone crowding around them and asking about you…"

"What did they say?" Casey asked, with the sudden realization that she hadn't spoken with her parents in a good long while, either.

"Well, you know Daddy, he don't say nothing, and Momma, she just chattered on like a jay bird about Casey this and Casey that, telling stories about when you was young. You know, stuff you did that let all us know you was gonna be something special…" Shelly's words were completely ingenuous. She was one of the rare few who go through life without a hint of jealousy, and the goodness of her sister and the life she led gave Casey a sharp pang of dismay.

"I'm not the special one," she said seriously. "You are, Shelly. Look at you, a husband and three kids…"

"Oh, that ain't nothing," her sister said bashfully. "I didn't even get a four-year degree, and you got a husband, too.

"A handsome one with hair," she added with a giggle.

"No, I don't have a husband," Casey said.

There was a painful silence, and then Shelly said sadly, "I'm sorry, Casey. I didn't know. Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," she said, falling back lamely on her habit of indefatigable optimism. "I'm really okay."

"Once means you are, twice means you aren't," Shelly said quietly. It was an adage of their father's, and Casey had never known it not to be true.

"Well, I'll be fine," Casey said.

"How about you come for a visit?" Shelly suggested pleasantly. "It'd be good to see you. I'll get Gabe to watch the kids, and you and I can go out and have a dinner and go to a movie like we did last time you come home. You remember that? Lord, how the men followed you around town."

"They were following you," Casey said kindly.

Shelly laughed out loud at the thought until her mirth was mixed with the wail of a baby.

"Oh, honey, I gotta feed this baby," Shelly said apologetically. "Can I call you back?"

"No, I've got to go anyway," Casey said.

"You come see me," her sister said gently. "I love you, honey."

"I love you, too," Casey said, choking on her words. She hung up the phone and burst into tears.

After a good cry and a deep breath, it was Sales's words that suddenly filled her head. He was right. There was nothing she could do about what already was, only what would be, and her life wasn't going to go on the way it was. She was going to change it. It would take time, but she would change. She would go see her sister. She'd go for a good long visit.

There was a place in life where she knew she belonged. It was somewhere between where she was now and where Shelly was. She could never live on a farm outside Odessa, but maybe she could have a family and children. She knew if nothing else she could do good things with her life instead of striving for empty aspirations of money and fame.

And she was going to start now. She was going to do something that heretofore had been unthinkable, to use privileged information against a client. Strictly speaking, it was wrong. But Casey wasn't going to run her life by strictly interpreted legal codes anymore. She was going to listen to her heart. She was going to find out what was on Lipton's computer disk, and if it could help bring him to justice she would use it. She would somehow get it to the police. She picked up the phone.

Tony was at home.

"I'll meet you at the office," he told her somberly after hearing the bulk of her bizarre story.

As Casey drove to the city, she paid little attention to the traffic around her. She was exhilarated at the thought of turning her life around, of purging everything she'd been and thinking of what she would be. Things weren't all bad. She'd done good work for people, pro bono work, work for free. She could do more. She could stop seeking celebrity and begin to seek justice. She could stop running around the country at the beck and call of the rich and famous and use the gifts she had to protect the innocent. She could represent the unjustly accused who didn't have the money or the power to defend themselves against the awful machine that, once set against you, could grind your life to dust.

Casey realized she was almost there. Remembering Lipton, she looked nervously in her rearview mirror. The traffic of people heading downtown for a night of music and drinking on Sixth Street even on a Sunday night was enough to make it impractical for her to pick out anyone who might be following her.

She certainly wasn't going into the parking garage. It would be dark and abandoned on a Sunday night. Instead, she found a spot on the street. The night was warm, and the damp breeze promised rain. Casey looked up at the churning gray clouds, then cast her eyes suspiciously up and down the street. The only other person in sight was a tall bum whose grocery cart rattled and squeaked stridently as he pushed his way up the street. Casey hurried across the sidewalk and up the steps of the midrise office building where she worked.

A night security man was sitting wearily at his desk by the door. With a smile and a nod, Casey stepped into a vacant elevator. Tony was waiting in her office, looking out of place in a triple X pink short-sleeve polo shirt. He was sitting on the small conference table in the corner, and he waved a pudgy hand to her from behind his own portable PC.

"Thanks for coming, Tony," Casey said, sitting down beside him. "Did I keep you waiting?"

"No, just long enough for me to get the layout of Lipton's hard drive." Tony spoke without looking up at her. He didn't want to reveal the range of emotions he was feeling, and he knew better than to try to console her. That would be the last thing she would want. The next-to-last thing would be advice, so he kept to the business at hand.

"The files I've found aren't what we're looking for," he said.

"But most likely, anything he didn't want people to find is in some hidden files somewhere. I just need to find them."

"Can you do that?"

"That's what this is for," he said. He held up a gray box with some wires hanging from it. "It's called a Norton Utility."

Tony began connecting the box to the back of his computer. He typed frantically for a minute or two to set the program in motion. When he'd finished, he looked up at Casey and really saw her for the first time.

"You want to talk?" he said.

She looked at him. "No. I'm fine."

"Okay," he said. "I don't know if I totally believe you, but okay."

"Why don't you believe me?"

"You were kidnapped and estranged from your husband all in the same weekend," he said calmly. "Most people wouldn't be completely fine…"

With a smile he said, "I don't want to pry and I don't want to drag it out. I wasn't going to say anything, but I just want you to know I care…"

"I know you do, Tony," she said with her beautiful smile. "I appreciate it. But I really am fine. What happened with Sales… Well, I almost feel like I deserved it," she said. "I know that sounds strange but that's how I feel. After what I did… I don't know. It doesn't bother me. That's all. And what happened with Taylor was a good thing… It made me realize what's important and what isn't. What I don't feel good about is Lipton and getting him off."

"There was a jury-" Tony began to protest.

"No," she said, holding up her hand. "Don't, Tony. Don't rationalize it. I know what I did and so do you. I know the line. It was my duty as a lawyer to do everything within the law to protect my client. Yeah, I can justify it to myself and you and every other lawyer in the world, but in the big picture I was still wrong. Now if I can help to make it right, then that's what I'll do."

Before Tony could say anything more, the computer emitted a high-pitched two-toned beep, and he looked automatically at its screen.

"I found them," he said.

Casey leaned toward him. "Can you get in?"

"Let's find out," he said, rapidly pounding away.

Several minutes went by, then Tony said, "Got it! Hang on. Let me transfer them to some regular files…"

Casey watched and waited while he hammered away.

Tony said, "Good."

Casey looked with anticipation at the screen. A full-color graphic of some beige fluted columns surrounding the scales of justice filled the screen with a crimson backdrop. The bold title THE LETTER OF THE LAW jumped out at them. Tony moved the mouse down to the menu across the bottom of the screen. Listed was everything from outlines and contacts to schedules and expenses. Apparently, everything to do with Lipton's seminar business was there.

"What's this?" Casey said, pointing to an icon labeled SWANK.

Tony selected the icon, and the computer whirred away until a page came up that was lined with school photos of women from law school yearbooks. Casey's heart raced as Tony scrolled down through page after page. Next to each photo was a vita on the girl that included a physical description, where she lived, and a lewd account of her personality that linked each characteristic to a graphic depiction of a specific sexual act that she was most fond of performing. Much of it was sadomasochistic.

"This stuff can't be true," Casey said, looking at Tony with disbelief.

"I don't know," he said as he typed in a command, "you tell me."

Casey followed his eyes to the screen. There was her picture. At least it was a youthful resemblance of her. There were apparently hundreds of women in the file, but Tony had stopped scrolling and gone right to the letter W for Woodgate, her maiden name. Casey read what it said. It disgusted and horrified her at the same time. More than anything, it made her feel terribly unsafe.

"But he never did anything to me," Casey heard herself saying weakly.

Tony searched to the letter S. Marcia Sales's picture appeared before them.

"But he did something to her," Tony said solemnly. He went to the menu again and chose to search through the women by location. Atlanta, Georgia, produced four. Casey recognized one of the names as belonging to the girl who had been killed there only a few months before Marcia Sales's death.

"And her," Casey said.

"The question is," Tony added, "how many others?"

"My God," Casey said. The horror of the whole thing was almost too much. "My God."

"He's a sick son of a bitch," Tony said disgustedly. "He's everything the DA said he was, worse even."

"I know that, Tony," Casey snapped. "But it was a big case, remember?"

Tony shot her a nasty look.

"We lost the rock star so we took the law professor," she said in a voice laced with sarcasm. "We were going to get a lot of media coverage for this one, so we jumped all over it."

Tony continued to stare at her.

"Go easy," he said.

"No, Tony," she snapped. "I'm not going easy. It's wrong. The whole thing is wrong."

Calmly he said, "You were a kid out of law school doing minor-league rape cases for the DA before you met me. Now you get six-figure retainers for people in the news, and they call you to do interviews on CNN. That's what you wanted and that's what I got you. So don't get nasty with me. You wanted this kind of practice as much as I did."

"Well, maybe I don't want it anymore."

Tony glared at her, then stood up and started for the door.

Casey sat there alone for a long time. The small noises of the empty building were amplified in the silence of the Sunday night. Her mind spun this way and that like a broken kite in a stiff wind, going back and forth on what she had been and what she would now be. She wondered if Tony would even want to be a part of the new Casey… Woodgate. She thought about all the things she could have done differently until she could bear it no longer. She had to do something now. She ejected the disk from the Norton Utility and flicked off the computer before turning for the door.

The code of ethics proscribed disclosing the information she had to the police. The privilege between a client and his attorney prevented that. But what if it was to turn up on Bolinger's doorstep anonymously? It was unethical. Then again, what Lipton had done with her had nothing to do with ethics. The way he had manipulated her to represent him, to help set him free, was a despicable misuse of the law, and she had not only been a party to it, she had been the prime mover. She tucked the disk into the pocket of the light coat she'd taken as a hedge against the coming rain and made for the elevator.

It took several minutes for the car to reach the top floor. Only one elevator was operational after hours, and Casey presumed that one had to come all the way up from the basement, where Tony had taken it to get to his own vehicle. When it finally arrived with the familiar ding, Casey peered warily inside before stepping aboard and pushing the lobby button. She wasn't usually skittish, but after the last few days, she wasn't ashamed of being apprehensive.

Anxious to get off, Casey watched the numbers above the door as they hopscotched their way toward the lobby. But when the car reached the second floor, there was none of the typical slowing that preceded a stop. Casey's heart jumped into her throat and her blood began to race. The L button on the panel was no longer lit. She'd pushed it. She was sure she had. She stabbed at it again, but the button only illuminated momentarily before going dark again. She pushed it repeatedly to no avail. The car went right past the lobby. It was as if someone else was in control of the elevator.

P1 was the first level of parking below the street. That floor lighted above the door, but still the elevator continued its descent. It ran past P2 as well, but then began to slow. At P3, the lowest level in the building, the elevator came to a halt. The car was quiet until the doors began to heave themselves open with a mechanical rumble. Casey stabbed at the lobby button once again. The light went on, but as soon as she removed her finger, it went dead dark. She stabbed at it frantically, over and over, while at the same time pounding repeatedly on the Close Door button. Then everything went black.

Casey could hear the dying whine of the elevator motor somewhere below her in the pit of the shaft. Terrified, she pressed herself into the corner of the darkened car and peered out into the yawning gloom of the subterranean garage.