Chapter 1 – The Lights Came On Behind Me
I have told this story to four people, and I always start with the lights.
The motion sensors at Halbrook & Vess click on in sections, one bank of ceiling lights at a time, so the building wakes up behind you while you walk.
That Saturday it was twenty to nine at night, and I had come in for one thing. Monday morning I was opening in Kessler against Vantor Medical, and I wanted the paper exhibits in my hands, not on a screen, because I read differently when I can turn a page.
I had been trying that case for two years.
The guard at the front desk waved me through without looking up from his phone. I rode the elevator to the third floor, badged the outer door, and walked past the copy room with my heels making that sound an empty office makes so loud.
The records area was dark, but the light under the evidence room door was on, and there was whispering behind it.
I remember thinking it was one of the associates being careless at the end of a long week.
I opened the door quietly, which is not like me.
The whispering came from behind the third row of filing cabinets, back where we keep the oversize exhibit boxes.
I walked down the aisle and came around the end of the cabinets, and there was my husband.
Quade had one hand on the back of Brielletta’s neck, and he was kissing her. His suit jacket was folded over the arm of the reading chair, and her lanyard was still around her neck.
For a moment nobody moved at all.
Then Brielletta stepped back and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
There was a flat cart between them and the shelves, and the cart was covered with paper.
I looked at the paper before I looked at either of them, because paper is what I know.
Exhibit logs. Plaintiff photographs in clear sleeves. Bates-stamped pages. Photocopies of my own exhibits, and not good ones.
I picked up the top sheet and turned it over.
It was page four of my exhibit log in Kessler, with my handwriting in the bottom margin and the small check marks I make when I have read something twice.
“You copied my evidence,” I said.
Quade said my name, and then he said, “It’s not what it looks like.”
I asked him again. “You copied my evidence.”
“He said you knew,” Brielletta said.
She said it fast and flat, like a line she had practiced in a car.
I looked at her. “He said I knew.”
“He said you signed off on it,” she said.
I have been a trial lawyer for twenty-three years, and I know what a lie sounds like when somebody has rehearsed it and still doesn’t believe it.
Under the cart, half tucked beneath a box of exhibit folders, there was a padded envelope, already sealed and addressed to nobody.
I opened it with my thumbnail.
Inside was a memory card in a small plastic case.
I put the card on the table and hit it with the flat of my hand, and the sound in that room was very loud.
“Who were you selling this to?”
Quade looked at Brielletta. Brielletta turned her face away and studied the shelf beside her like it had writing on it.
I got my answer without a word being spoken, and I stopped asking questions I already had answers to.
I put the memory card in my coat pocket, and I put the envelope in there with it. Then I took my exhibit binder off the shelf where it was supposed to be and walked out with it under my arm.
I pulled the evidence room door shut behind me and keyed the code so the lock threw. They were still inside.
I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and called building security, and I asked the guard to come up and stand with me. He was there in four minutes, because he had been at the desk doing nothing.
I told him I needed him to see who was in that room and to watch the door while I opened it. He did, and I opened it, and Quade came out with his jacket over his arm and did not look at me.
I told them both to go down to the lobby and stay there, and Brielletta started to say something about the cart.
I said, “Nobody touches that cart.”
Then I called Simone Okafor, who has been my paralegal for eleven years and who knows the exhibit index better than I do.
It was 8:56.
