“The pizza’s not here yet and she can wait.” Gail Shipton can. “What I’m most concerned about at the moment is you,” I say to Lucy, “and I do care what I hear even if you don’t. I don’t want either of us compromised. Or anyone else.”
She stares at me and I can tell she knows I’m referring to Benton.
“Compromised?” She pulls out a plastic chair.
“I don’t want to know anything illegal.” I’m that blunt.
“There’s nothing to know.”
“By whose definition?” I carry my coffee to the table and sit across from her. “I have some idea what you’ve been doing. Marino is aware that whatever was on Gail Shipton’s phone isn’t on it now. He’s told me that and maybe told other people.”
“It’s not her phone.” Lucy props an elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand and the table rocks because the plastic legs aren’t even. “I should say it wasn’t. And what happened to her has nothing to do with what in fact is an extremely unique device and Marino has no right to it because it wasn’t hers,” she repeats.
“Then whose?”
“The technology’s mine but I’d gotten to the point I didn’t care anymore.” She wraps her hands around the coffee.
“You don’t sound like someone who doesn’t care.”
“I didn’t care about what the technology should be worth because I wanted to end the partnership and it was one of the things Gail and I talked about yesterday, not that it was the first time or all that friendly. She wins her lawsuit and buys me out.”
“There’s never a certainty anyone will win a lawsuit.” It surprises me Lucy would be that naïve. “Juries can be unpredictable. Mistrials happen. Anything can.”
“She felt sure it would settle at the last minute.”
“I can’t imagine Carin Hegel would assure her of such a thing.”
“She didn’t. She was ready for court and still is. But there won’t be a trial.”
“It would be difficult with the plaintiff dead.”
“There’s no case and there hasn’t been one for a while. That’s why there won’t be a trial.”
“Does Carin Hegel know she doesn’t have a case?” I’m baffled and disconcerted by what Lucy is saying.
“I was going to tell her when I could prove it, which would have been soon. Gail was sure she’d get money from Double S and her mistake was telling me that and promising to buy me out. I wasn’t asking for much but I had to ask something or it would have looked suspicious,” Lucy says dispassionately, coldly. “It was important to extricate myself from her with surgical precision in a way that didn’t draw attention. I was almost ready and now she’s dead.”
“It’s a good thing you were out of town when she disappeared.”
“I’m sure they’d say I had something to do with it.”
“With the way you’re talking right now I’m sure they would.”
Lucy has a reputation and Marino knows it all too well. He knows her history and capabilities in exquisite detail. While I’ve never known her to hurt someone gratuitously or because she has a grudge, she’ll do things other people won’t.
“The fact is I wasn’t here when she disappeared. I wasn’t here when she was killed,” Lucy says. “I’d just landed at Dulles and then was at a hotel and that can be proven.”
“You certainly don’t have to prove it to me.”
“You worry too much,” Lucy says. “I didn’t like Gail and ultimately had no respect for her but I certainly didn’t hurt her. But I would have eventually.”
“At the very least you sound more like a witness for the defense.”
“I didn’t want to be a witness for anyone but in a case like this it’s all about manipulation and big money. They found out we’d started working on a project together and next thing I was subpoenaed to be deposed.”
“That’s interesting. What you do isn’t exactly public information. Even I didn’t know about your relationship with Gail, professional or otherwise. So how did Double S’s attorneys find out?”
“That’s what lawyers do. They find things out.”
“Someone had to have given them information,” I reply. “Is it possible Gail did without intending to?”
“No. She didn’t do it without intending to. It was deliberate,” Lucy says.
“What did Double S want from you?”
“To be my friend.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Rage makes her hard and Lucy has no trouble hating if she decides it’s earned.
When she trusts there’s no limit to what she’ll do for someone, but once crossed she won’t stop until she’s annihilated whoever it is. She has to because she can’t go after the worst offender in her life, her mother, who has sovereign immunity. Lucy would never harm the person who has damaged her the most, my ungrateful, loveless sister who sinks her teeth into the hand that feeds her and does so without warning or provocation. I’ve watched the syndrome for years and it makes me rather crazy. Dorothy commits her petty acts of cruelty because it gives her pleasure.
“When I was deposed I was asked a lot of personal questions about my work in computers and my law enforcement background, why I left the FBI and ATF and what I wanted in life,” Lucy is saying. “Their attorneys were kidding around with me, being nice. I played into it because I had a sense about what was really going on.”
“Does Carin have this same sense?”
“She thought they were being manipulative assholes.”
“Maybe they were hoping you’d take their side against Gail.”
“That’s what Carin said.”
I ask Lucy why she ever trusted Gail Shipton. “Because it doesn’t sound like it lasted long,” I add.
“In the beginning I thought she was one of these smart people who’s stupid in business and got screwed because she got tangled up with the wrong people, which I didn’t completely understand,” she says. “But I figured she was a techie with poor judgment, someone naïve as hell about the real world. If you really dig, the stories about Double S should give you pause although someone must be full-time PR for them, making sure anything negative is buried, and I suspect they pay freelancers to write fluff and spin whatever comes out.”
“You suspect it or you know?”
“It’s obvious they do. I don’t know it for a fact.”
I’m reminded of Lambant and Associates, of Haley Swanson.
“She didn’t check them out before she turned over everything, some fifty million, and then they supposedly lost all of it on bad investments,” Lucy says. “Unlike their other former clients, Gail decided to fight. She wasn’t a brave person or remotely confrontational, yet she didn’t back down when everybody else had in the past. You have to ask why.”
Lucy has gotten more animated as she talks, gesturing with her hands, light winking from the rose-gold signet ring she wears on her left index finger. Oversized, with a flying eagle and nature scenes, the vintage heirloom has been in her partner Janet’s family for more than a century, from what I understand.
“How long was Gail with Double S?” I ask.
“About the time she started grad school. She’s always worked since she was a kid, not just R-and-D but basic programming, engineering, and database design. Double S hired her two and a half years ago to build a new database management system for them and that’s how it started. During the course of things they convinced her to let them take care of her money, and in hardly any time at all?” She wiggles the table, testing which leg is the problem. “She fired them and hired Carin Hegel.”
“They lost fifty million dollars that fast?”
“Yes, almost all of it, and Carin didn’t take the case on contingency. So you also have to ask how someone who’s lost almost everything could afford the legal fees. Maybe at first but not for long. By now the fees are well into the millions.” Lucy folds her paper towel into a small square, leans down and wedges it under the offending table leg. “Did it ever occur to you that in the world of white-collar crime technology is a valuable commodity? Take drones, for example. Imagine sophisticated surveillance devices in the wrong hands.”