“I don’t understand,” my partner says.
“They’re going to kill us,” Kimberly says, her eyes filling with tears. “And Phillip’s children.”
“More death threats?” Susan asks.
Kimberly nods. “But these are serious.” She reaches into her Louis Vuitton handbag, pulls out an envelope, and slides it across the table. Susan and I take turns reviewing its contents.
“Pictures of Kimberly leaving the gym,” says Baldwin. “And of my twin daughters, taken at college. They’re only twenty years old, for God’s sake.” As he speaks, Baldwin’s handsome face contorts, overpowering the Botox that normally keeps him wrinkle-free. “And this,” he says, handing me a note with letters cut out of magazines, the kind kidnappers write in movies.
It reads: You rot in jail or they rot in boxes.
“You’ve had death threats before,” I reiterate.
“But now they’re threatening me,” says Kimberly, forgetting Baldwin’s children. “And so are those government lawyers.”
I see Baldwin stiffen at the mention of the US Attorneys’ Office.
“The feds are threatening you?” Susan asks.
“They say they just want to talk . . . ,” Kimberly begins. “God, I’m so confused.”
“Confused?” Baldwin’s face turns scarlet. “What’s there to be confused about? The government is the enemy. You’re my wife. You don’t talk with them. Ever!”
“Let’s everyone take a breath,” Susan says.
“Just call the feds and get me a deal, Mick,” says Baldwin.
“You realize the least you’d be facing is ten years.”
Baldwin stiffens again. “Just get the best deal you can. Maybe in one of those places like they sent Martha Stewart or Michael Milken.”
“Federal prison isn’t the country club everyone thinks it is,” says Susan.
But it’s no use. The meeting drags on for another hour, until just after eleven, Baldwin refusing to change his mind.
Susan and I escort the Baldwins to the lobby, telling them they should sleep on it, then walk together to Susan’s office. Susan flops down into her beige leather chair. I sink into one of the visitors’ seats on the other side of the expensive glass-top worktable Susan uses as her desk. She takes off her artsy black-framed glasses and fastens her long ash-blonde locks with a hair tie. Her strong jaw and aquiline nose appear sharper without her hair hanging down to soften them.
“If my math is correct,” I say, “half a million dollars just walked out the door.”
“It’s not the death threats Baldwin’s afraid of, you know.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“He’s afraid of her. Kimberly. That she’ll turn state’s evidence against him.”
“You think she knew about the scam?”
“Sweet little trophy wife is smarter than she looks.”
I consider what Susan said. “Why would the feds even bother with her? They have more than enough to convict him. What else could she tell them?”
Susan gives me a rueful smile. “She could tell them where he’s hidden the money.”
I nod. Thieves like Baldwin always squirrel away a chunk of their ill-gotten loot in case the government ever comes knocking on their door.
Susan sinks back in her chair and sighs. “How much do we have in the operating account?”
“Not much,” I say. “About eighty thousand.”
Running a small law firm is a lot like being the bunny on a greyhound track. The greyhounds represent all your overhead: payroll, rent, electric, insurance premiums, phone and Internet, advertising, postage, plane fare, mileage, paper costs. The partners who own the law firm are the rabbit: always running as fast as they can, trying to stay ahead of the dogs.
“We should have paid the line down last year, when we got the money from the Lynch case.” Susan’s talking about the fee we received on a defective-product case we referred out to another firm. Though we’d talked about exactly that, in the end we decided to take the money as a distribution. I’d used part of my share to build a pool behind my house. Susan used hers to remodel the kitchen in her condo. The rest we spent upgrading our offices.
With the Baldwin case coming to trial, Susan and I had put most of our other cases on the back burner. That would have to change.
“Everyone’ll have to start burning the midnight oil on our other cases,” I say. For a second, I question whether taking on the Justin Bauer case was a good idea. But only for a second. The Phillip Baldwins of the world may be how we keep the doors open, but the Justin Bauers are why.
Susan shakes her head, looks up at the ceiling. “Not a good day for McFarland and Klein.”
I walk to my office, sit for a minute, then turn my chair to look out the window, toward City Hall and, in the distance, the Delaware River. The clock at City Hall reads 11:40 when I sense a presence behind me in the doorway.
“Hey.”
I turn around. It’s the firm’s lead investigator, my younger brother, Tommy. At five ten, Tommy is the same height as I am, but his broad shoulders and thick chest make him a far more powerful physical presence. The buzz-cut hair and prison tats peeking above his shirt collar imply a roughness not disguised by his expensive sport coat and precisely creased slacks.
Tommy walks in and takes a seat across the desk from me.
“What’s up?” I say without enthusiasm.
Tommy raises his eyebrows. “What’s eating you?”
I shake my head, wave him off. Tommy holds my gaze for a moment, and I am amazed, as always, that I can stare straight into his flat brown eyes and have no more sense as to what’s behind them than if he were wearing Blues Brothers sunglasses.
I’m about to say something when Angie buzzes me on my speaker. “There’s a call for you. She says she needs to talk to you right away.”
“Who is it?” I ask, glancing at my watch. 11:45.
“It’s that reporter, Jennifer Yamura.”
Yamura recently broke an enormous police-corruption story, disclosing that the district attorney’s office was running a grand-jury investigation into a well-organized ring of cops conspiring with local drug dealers to sell heroin and cocaine. The grand jury proceedings were, of course, meant to be confidential. In fact, the grand jury’s very existence was supposed to be secret. And it was, until the young Channel 6 reporter divulged the proceedings on the six o’clock news. She claimed to have learned about the investigation from unnamed sources who were both privy to the investigation and somehow involved in the ring.