Mistress of Justice

.
    “Who is this guy?” the CEO asked. “The witness?”
    “That’s the problem. He was working at St. Agnes when they brought the plaintiff in. He didn’t treat the patient himself but he was in the room the whole time.”
    “One of our own people? Testifying against us?” The CEO was dumbfounded.
    “Apparently he was a visiting professor from UC San Diego.”
    “Can’t we object?”
    “I did,” LaDue said plaintively. “Judge overruled me. The best he did was give us a chance to depose the witness before he goes on.”
    Reece said, “I’ll do that in a half hour. The guy goes on the stand at eleven.”
    “How bad do you think his testimony’s going to be?” the administrator asked.
    “From what the other side’s lawyer said,” Reece explained bluntly, “it could lose you the case.”
    Burdick, who realized he had been squeezing his teeth together with fierce pressure, said, “Well, Mitchell, perhaps it isn’t as hopeless as you’re painting it.”
    Reece shrugged. “I don’t think it’s hopeless. I never said it’s hopeless. But the plaintiff’s lawyers’ve upped their settlement offer to thirty million and they’re holding firm. That means that this witness is the smoking gun.”
    LaDue sat and stewed. The doughy man was as pale as always though at this particular moment his waxen complexion was largely due to the fact that he’d done a very clumsy job at the trial so far.
    Burdick played with a manicured thumbnail. He was furious that Clayton had probably spent thousands of dollars to track down this witness and had anonymously sent his name to the plaintiff’s attorney.
    “What do you have in mind, Mitchell?” LaDue asked. “How’re you going to handle the cross?”
    Reece looked up and started to answer but then Burdick’s secretary walked into the doorway. “Mr. Reece, your secretary said you’ve just got an important call. You can take it in the conference room there.”
    “Thank you,” he said to her. Then glanced at his watch. “I’ll be busy for the rest of the morning, gentlemen. I’ll see you in court.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    If she hadn’t been initiated, Taylor Lockwood would never have known she was watching a trial.
    She saw a bored judge rocking back in his chair, distracted lawyers. She saw clerks walking around casually, no one really concentrating on what was going on. She saw dazed jurors and few spectators—a half dozen or so, retirees, she guessed, like the unshaven men who take trains out to Belmont or Aqueduct racetracks in the morning, just for a place to spend their slow days.
    She’d found Reece in the hall at the firm earlier and wanted to update him on what she’d learned—the fingerprints and the erased files. But he was jogging from the library to his office, two huge Redweld folders under his arms. He paused briefly to tell her that he’d been called in to handle an emergency cross-examination and that he could see her at the courthouse on Centre Street later, around noon.
    Taylor had decided to sit in on this portion of the trial and catch him in the hall afterward. Maybe they could have lunch.
    She now looked around the courtroom in which
Marlow v. St. Agnes Hospital and Health Care Center
was being tried and located the plaintiff. Mr. Marlow sat in a wheelchair, pale and unmoving. Unshaven, his hair disheveled. His wife was nearby, with her hand resting on his arm. Taylor’s father, a trial lawyer himself, had instilled enough cynicism in his daughter to make her believe that, while undoubtedly the man had suffered a serious injury, the wheelchair might just be a prop and there was no need for him to be looking as destroyed as he did here.
    The door opened, and in walked a man she recognized from the firm. It took her a moment to place the name. Randy Simms—either the III or the IV. She recalled that he was a protégé of Wendall Clayton. He sat in the back row, by himself, putting away a cellular phone. He put his hands in his lap and sat perfectly still, perfectly upright.
    She scanned the rest of the visitors and was surprised to find Donald Burdick himself in the gallery. He too glanced at Randy Simms, a faint frown on the old partner’s face.
    Finally, papers were sorted out and the judge pulled off his glasses. In a gruff voice he told the plaintiff’s counsel that he could present his witness.
    The lawyer rose and called to the stand a handsome, gray-haired man in his mid-fifties. He gazed pleasantly out at the jury.