“You worry too much,” said Fischer.
“Is that right? Tell me,” said Proffit, “how much do we really know about what she was involved in, here at the firm, I mean? Do you know?”
Fischer stood there, his lower jaw beginning to quiver with disclaimers. “I just meant. .”
“I know what you meant. She was running her own secret empire within the firm. You know it and I know it. What we don’t know are the details of what she was into.”
“As I recall, you didn’t want to know,” said Fischer.
“That was when she was alive,” said Proffit.
Cyril Fischer was Proffit’s number two, managing-partner-in-waiting at the firm, and a man who Proffit knew would never get there. He lacked the instincts for survival as well as the searing coals in the belly that fired ambition. This was the reason Proffit kept him around. He was useful as a pair of eyes and ears, but he was no threat. Fischer ran the Washington office, at least on paper.
“If she had people on the cuff in Congress that she was paying off, you’re damn right I didn’t want to know. If you mean poisoned e-mails from Olinda to keep me in the loop, you’re correct. I had no desire to be on that mailing list.”
It was the kind of stuff a wily lawyer and pillar of the community like Proffit generally didn’t want to know about. He had imagination enough to fill in the blanks. And if Serna got in trouble, Proffit would protect himself like a mobster with at least three or four layers of subordinates to insulate him from accountability. But now that Serna was dead he had no choice. If there were damaging documents lurking in her files, he had to protect the firm, and by extension, himself. They would have to find some lawyerly way to inoculate themselves and disinfect the office.
Serna was the firm’s “juice lady,” specializing in political law and lobbying-“mother’s milk,” political money, action committees, and donor lists-the dark side of democracy. She had no personal life, no family, and seemingly no existence outside of the steaming swamp that was Washington and in which she seemed to thrive. For some time now, from what Proffit could see, her ambition had gotten the better of her. She had turned her job into a launching pad in an increasingly obvious campaign to unseat him at the head of the table within the firm.
“I’ve got two trusted associates and three secretaries auditing her files and checking her e-mails as we speak,” said Fischer. “If there’s anything there, I’m sure we’ve got it contained.”
This is what Proffit expected. They were looking in all the wrong places. “What I’m worried about you won’t find in her files.” Proffit knew that anything in her office files, short of hostage notes or blackmail letters, the firm could probably throw a blanket over under attorney-client privilege or lawyer work product and probably make it stick. “That’s not the problem.”
“What then?” said Fischer.
“Sit down for a minute and let me think.”
Fischer wandered toward one of the client chairs across from Proffit’s enormous mahogany desk, slumped into the deep cushions, and stared at his boss across the shimmering plate-glass surface.
What troubled Proffit was that Serna was a loner. If she had shot a dozen people in a shopping mall they would have said she fit the profile. Usually in a hurry, irritable, always on her own mission, a cipher you couldn’t read if they gave you the code. She was dedicated to her work in the way a zealot is to his ideology. She had her fingers in almost everything the firm handled if it had to do with the gods of politics. She blanketed Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the White House and did it all by herself. At times Proffit was left to wonder if she had cloned herself. If she had posted a sixty-hour day on her billings no one who knew her would have accused her of padding the bill. Her work ethic wasn’t the problem. The fact that she had an ambition to match it was.
More to the point, Serna had her own power base outside the firm, mostly friends on Capitol Hill and in the bowels of the administration. She was a registered lobbyist, one of only three in the firm. She either directly or indirectly ladled campaign money on members of the House and Senate from well-heeled clients, many of them large well-organized trade associations and corporate business groups. It wasn’t her money, but as far as the recipients were concerned, it didn’t matter. She was on the giving end. Otherwise, it would have been an easy task for Proffit and his supporters in the firm to outflank her, undercut her, and send her packing. The problem was, if they did that, they couldn’t be sure of the political or economic fallout.
If deals were made on critical legislation with Serna in the middle and her friends in Congress on the doing end, high-paying clients of the firm might feel more comfortable with her than with Mandella. Especially if they started receiving phone calls or e-mails from Serna’s friends in the Capitol. She had come from congressional staff when they hired her, consultant to the Senate Banking Committee. She had a lot of friends there. It was a delicate problem, not one that was easily or quickly dealt with.
“Where did she live?” Proffit looked off into the distance to the side away from Fischer as he asked the question.
“Somewhere in Silver Spring. We have the address in our records.”
“Has anybody been over there since the accident? Anybody with a key?” Proffit turned and burned two holes through Fischer with his gaze. He didn’t have to wait for an answer. The expression on Fischer’s face said it. Fischer hadn’t thought about this.
“She wasn’t married, had no lovers that we know of. Lived alone, right?”
Fischer nodded. “As far as I know.”
“She didn’t or I would have known about it,” said Proffit.
Fischer didn’t ask how. Clete always had his sources.
“If there is anything we should worry about, it’s not going to be in her files here at the firm. It’s going to be in one of two places,” said Proffit. “She may have stashed documents at her house. That includes her home computer, any thumb drives or other portable storage devices, and paper records. Perhaps a safe-deposit box. Did she have one?”
“I don’t know.”
“The weight of what you don’t know could sink us,” said Proffit.
“What is it exactly that you’re worried about?” asked Fischer. “If you could give me some specifics it might help.”
“I’m worried about whatever it is that I don’t know,” said Proffit. If Serna had been one of their corporate lawyers, even one of their stables of criminal trial lawyers, Proffit wouldn’t have been so concerned. It was the nature of her work that scared him, and her ambition. She was in a position to do real damage both to himself and the firm. They were one and the same as far as Proffit was concerned. From what he could see, she was already in the process of doing that damage when she died.
“Who is her next of kin?” he asked.
Fischer shook his head, shrugged a shoulder.
“Well, goddamn it, find out! See if she had a company life insurance policy. If so, there should be a named beneficiary. That may be it. Did she have any other property besides the place in Georgetown? A vacation hideaway where she may have stored documents?”