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Chapter Nineteen

  I hit the ground running the instant I got into the firm. Conference room? Booked. Records? Checked. The most important document? Tracked down and filed with the judge. Emails to Julio, Fatima, and Casey (if he wanted to join after any morning classes)? Sent. Trial binders?... actually, where did I put those things? Uh… oh, wait, there they were. Trial binders? Acquired.

  Oh, and an order for coffees, we would need those; the coffee pot was almost out, and I was not wasting my time brewing more of this shit, bleh.

  Hours upon hours of experience meant it only took me thirty minutes to get the conference room set up the way I liked it, complete with a cork board and spare copies of every exhibit we planned to present, sorted by which witness’s testimony would let us admit it to the record. I’d only just pinned a photograph to the board when the conference room door shifted slightly, my ears swiveling that direction before the rest of me joined.

  “Oh, Julio, good, you’re here. Come on, work to do, grab one of those stacks and start picking out anything that we wanted to have Mrs. Banks’ testimony introduce into evidence.”

  I didn’t wait for a response and just turned back to my pile, flicking through five more pieces of paper before I got to another one that I’d have to pull out — actually, hm, wait, could… maybe? I set it to the side, and went back to my pile.

  “Uh… is she?...”

  “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

  “How much coffee has she had?”

  “Four cups since three in the morning,” I said, interrupting the back-and-forth that apparently started once Fatima showed up as well. “Lots of cream and sugar ‘cause it was the cheap coffee that doesn’t taste as good as it smells. Oh, and a strawberry matcha latte that was to die for, remind me to take both of you by Yumi’s at some point, bit of a schlep but definitely worth it, now come on and get a pile we’ve got tons to do.”

  “Naomi?” Fatima’s voice was full of concern. “You… you do remember what happened yesterday? Right?”

  “No shit I remember, why else would I have been up since three in the morning two days in a row?” I flicked an ear down in question, then looked up at the two of them. Nope, neither had grabbed their pile. Eh, screw it. I walked around the conference table to pick each of them up, then pressed one into Fatima’s hands and the other into Julio’s. “Come on, we’ve got shit to look through, figure out what we can’t get in anymore and what we could get in through someone else, we only have a little bit of time to revamp our entire trial strategy and—”

  “Naomi!” Julio yelled, interrupting me. I paused briefly, frowning as I tried to figure out where my train of thought had just gone — right, trial strategy, needed to remember that — then put a pin in it and turned to face him.

  “I can hear you just fine, Julio.” I wiggled my ears a little bit for emphasis. “You don’t have to yell.”

  “Well clearly I do, ‘cause you apparently forgot that the client is dead!” Julio exclaimed, slamming his stack of papers down on the conference table in exasperation. “And in case you forgot, no client, no case!”

  “And usually, you’d be right!” I exclaimed with a smile, drawing a combination of anger and confusion from the pair at my apparent joy. “And to be honest I’d forgotten all about this to begin with and neither of you are in a position to know this yet, hell I probably wouldn’t for another few years if not for being basically a one-woman boutique firm inside of another one because realistically speaking nobody else is going to be as knowledgeable on Moonshot issues as I am—”

  “Naomi!” Fatima yelled this time, slamming down her pile to punctuate Julio’s. “The point! Get to it! Please!” She turned towards her junior. “Julio, can you take the pot back to the kitchen? She’s gonna have a heart attack if she drinks any more coffee, I swear.”

  “I think we need poison control instead,” he muttered. “Isn’t the caffeine why chocolate’s poisonous to dogs?”

  “Okay, excuse you!” I rounded on Julio. “One, you don’t get to talk, mister ‘double fisting nitro cold brew at lunchtime’!” Julio had the good grace to look sheepish at that. “And two! I am not a dog! I am a fox, which is a canid, yes, but they’re not the same thing! And still mostly human to boot, so coffee is both perfectly safe and an absolute necessity in this line of work!”

  “Oh come on, I don’t sleep well one night and—”

  Fatima’s whistle pierced the air, silencing the both of us. My ears folded down low at the sudden loud noise, and only once it stopped did I hesitantly tilt one in Fatima’s direction.

  “We’re off topic,” Fatima said. “Naomi. The point. Please.”

  “... right, sorry,” I muttered, marching over to the first stack of papers I’d gone through earlier to get the key document. I grabbed the manila folder that held it and passed it to Fatima, who flipped it open with an exasperated roll of her eyes, then froze dead as her eyes fell on what I presumed to be the document header.

  “We…?” Fatima trailed off before saying anything more, and just looked at me to confirm. I could only smile and nod, though my grin was probably more manic than I’d intended, given the way she seemed to lean back and away.

  “Oi, lemme see that!” Julio tugged down on one edge of the document, only for Fatima to just hand it over to him. “What’s so important about… uh?” This time it was his turn to look up at me in surprised shock. “You serious? This for real?”

  “For real, sent to Judge Friedman, already filed for probate,” I said, a bit of that classic foxy smugness creeping back into my voice. “Lady and gentleman, say hello to the firm’s glassbreak plan for sufficiently large or scandalous cases.”

  Julio and Fatima just stared at me, utterly dumbstruck. My grin grew even wider, and I couldn’t help the manic giggles that threatened to—

  “We had this the whole time,” Fatima yelled. “The whole time! And you didn’t say anything!?”

  “I… uh.” I blinked, trying to formulate a response. “I forgot?”

  “You forgot.” Fatima threw her hands up in frustration. “She forgot, she says! The one in charge and she forgot!”

  “Okay, in fairness, this is the first time I’ve ever had to actually use it!” I exclaimed, ears limp as I wilted. “Now come on, that’s enough ‘beat up on the stupid fox’ for now, let’s get to it. I’ll explain while we work.”

  Julio opened his mouth to say something, but barely a sound came out before Fatima elbowed him in the side. He took the hint, thankfully, and set about grabbing his stack of papers and taking a seat, muttering under his breath in Spanish as he did. But thankfully, that was the extent of it, and soon, the two of them joined me in analyzing our evidence, setting aside what we couldn’t use anymore and what we’d be able to keep.

  Then Casey showed up, we all needed more coffee, and my stomach loudly exclaimed that I needed food, so we ordered lunch, and I explained the situation again while we ate.

  Speaking of…

  So. Glassbreak protocol.

  Have you ever seen those fire extinguisher cases that say ‘in case of emergency, break glass’? Yeah, it was in the same vein: a contingency plan that you hope to never need, but you keep around just in case the worst should happen. In the case of those fire extinguishers, it was a fire.

  And in our case? We ensured our client had a will on the off chance they died.

  The contingency arose at Bierman Viskie & Schotz after a case from the early 2000s ended in a catastrophic loss that could’ve taken the firm with it. I wasn’t privy to the exact details, and the files had since been deleted or burned, so all I’d learned was from word of mouth. Apparently, my boss Alice and one of the other named partners, Tess Viskie-Davis, were bringing a lawsuit from a Senate chief of staff… against a sitting senator. They filed their complaint, they got partway through discovery, they got a ton of absolutely scandalous information that would probably destroy the senator’s political career, and his marriage, and some or other business he’d transferred ownership of to his kids.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Then, on the day their client was supposed to be deposed by the other side… she never showed up. Tess and Alice eventually found her dead in her bathtub. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide, but their plaintiff had died of a bathtub electrocution, and no visible appliances or electric devices were close to the tub when they got there. But it wasn’t like there was anything they could do to protest. Their plaintiff was dead, discovery was far from over, and there wasn’t shit they could do with the evidence they had collected, particularly when the senator’s lawyers showed up at the office the next day demanding every document they’d previously handed over be given back.

  So the senator got away with it, apparently only just retired from politics in 2014 (the year I started at the firm), and both Alice and Tess resolved that This Could Not Happen Again.

  Hence: glassbreak protocol. Prior to accepting any case that threatened to be enough of a scandal (or worth enough money, because losing a contingency case this way would be a massive red number in the firm’s ledger), the firm demanded that a will be written or updated to ensure that we could keep the lawsuit going if they died.

  “Wait, how does that work exactly?” Casey asked around a mouthful of pad thai noodles — mild, from how little chili I could smell… what a shame. I gave him an unimpressed look, half-lidded eyes and lowered ears.

  “Please don’t speak with your mouth full,” I said, my voice as tired as I’d started feeling in the last hour.

  “S-sorry!” Casey stammered after he swallowed. “But, um, I’m only just taking Trusts & Estates this last semester, so, uh. How does the client having a will mean we can keep going?”

  “I wanna know this too,” Julio said, then went back to slurping down his tom kha soup.

  “Right, so!” I said, putting the lid back onto my food while I spoke (drunken noodles, very tasty) so it stayed warm-ish. “Say you die. Your heirs go and file for an estate, and the court appoints what’s called a Personal Representative. The PR of your estate essentially stands in for you in any legal matters. As far as the law is concerned, they are speaking for you, and are responsible for continuing your affairs. Hell, even without a will, we could’ve gone and filed to have an estate opened anyway, but we would’ve run into a pair of problems very quickly.”

  “The cost and the who,” Fatima added in between bites of her green curry.

  “The huh?”

  “Well, it’s like this,” I began, tapping the case file I had next to me. “Normally, unless you have a will, a surviving relative gets appointed as the personal representative. But then you have what’s called a surety bond: the person you appoint needs to pay a certain amount of money to guarantee that they won’t mismanage any assets the estate has. And in Mrs. Banks’ case, the court would consider that her PR will likely assume her role as plaintiff and keep the lawsuit going. Which means they need to operate under the assumption that she wins, and value the assets of her estate accordingly.”

  “And she lived in Section 8 housing,” Julio muttered. “Ten bucks says anyone she has left couldn’t afford it.”

  “Surety bonds tend to start at $1,000 and go up from there,” I confirmed. “Not a chance. Beyond that, our client has no surviving family.”

  “So instead you got her to write a will?” Casey asked.

  “The will lays out that one of her attorneys is to be appointed as the personal representative for her estate, that we may continue the case on her behalf,” I confirmed. “Which means we’re back in it. But more importantly, this whole kerfuffle changes our game plan a bit.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for starters?” I said, looking at Julio with a cheeky grin. “Our main objective is no longer ‘win the case’.”

  That statement was met with a trio of confused expressions. Fatima, Julio, and Casey all just glanced at one another, trying to figure out what this crazy fox was up to, and I took the opportunity to take another bite of my lunch and chug half of my sixth cup of coffee. Although, was it really still coffee when it was half cream and sugar by volume?

  “Wait, Julio, didn’t you take the coffee pot back to the kitchen?”

  “I did! She must’ve gone and got another cup while none of us were looking!”

  “Wouldn’t we have heard the door?”

  “Fatima, she can teleport!”

  “And I can reheat my coffee in the process!” I added brightly, interrupting the bickering pair of attorneys.

  “Why can’t you just use the microwave like the rest of us,” Julio mumbled.

  “No, no we are not getting off topic again!” Fatima half-yelled, leveling her fork at me. “You! What the hell do you mean, ‘we don’t want to win anymore’?”

  “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, we still want to win,” I said, letting my ears tilt back and low a bit in a slightly placating gesture. “But let’s be real here: you don’t kill the plaintiff if you think you’re going to win.”

  Looks of understanding dawned on all three of them. Interestingly, Casey the 3L rebounded from that realization the fastest, and adopted a pensive look as he tapped his chopsticks on his carryout container.

  “So if victory isn’t the important part, what is?” he asked.

  “That’s a good question, hun! Here, toss me that marker?” I pointed at a blue dry-erase marker in front of Casey. He blinked once, pulling himself from some apparent stupor, and tossed the marker my way. I grabbed it with both hands and closed my lunch container back up, then stood and walked to the dry-erase board in the room. “Okay! So!”

  I wrote out the… well, not names, but rough classifications of our defendants on the board:

  BUILDING OWNER

  PROPERTY MANAGEMENT CO.

  CONTRACTOR

  “We’ve got three separate defendants here,” I began, tapping each of them in turn as I spoke, “and in some way, each of those three is responsible for the deaths of Mrs. Banks’ sons. And that’s roughly where we stop caring. We’re suing all of them at once because they’re too intertwined to separate out from our perspectives. But!”

  I drew lines from all three of them to a trio of dollar signs, and circled it.

  “Now, I’m kinda operating on the assumption that we’re going to win, and I’m only comfortable with this because of how badly these guys have wanted to settle. And, well—”

  “Because like you just said, people who think they can win don’t kill the person suing them.”

  “Yes, that, thank you, Fatima,” I told her with a nod, which she returned. “Anyway. We win. We get a massive monetary award, because let’s be real, the jury will have a field day with the punitive damages here. All three parties are jointly and severally liable, so we can just get the money from whichever of them has the most to spare. And then our job is done. We stop there, wash our hands clean of this whole mess, follow the will’s instructions for what to do with the money. But while we may be done, this case is not, oh no, not by a long shot.”

  I drew another trio of lines out from the dollar signs, and this time wrote out more, with question marks next to them.

  “The three defendants will now need to sue each other to determine who owes how much of the amount that was paid out. Now, whichever of the three was most at fault for the deaths here stands to lose the most amount of money. Not necessarily from paying for the judgment, either,” I added. “Realistically speaking, they have something they don’t want anyone to see. And while we may not necessarily know what that something is, their co-defendants do.”

  “Which means they’re the one that would’ve wanted our client dead the most!” Julio exclaimed.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Winning isn’t even the secondary objective; it’s the tertiary. The secondary objective is making this lawsuit hurt as much as possible, because that makes their damages determination that much uglier, messier, and nastier. But the main goal? Care to guess, anyone?”

  “It’s PR,” Fatima answered. “We make enough noise with this case, and people start looking at our client. Then they look and see that she died in a building that shouldn’t have been affiliated with any of our defendants. And then they start asking questions.”

  “Bingo.” I closed the marker and set it down on the table with a thud. “We have a lot of noise to make, and two weeks to get ready for it, so we want to make that count. Julio, Fatima; do you have any professors from law school that you’ve kept in touch with?”

  “A few, yeah,” Julio said. Fatima nodded, as if to say the same.

  “If they teach property, admin, government contracts, or civil rights law, reach out to them ASAP,” I told them. “Even if they don’t, it’s still worth reaching out. Casey? How about you?” I asked.

  “Um, m-my real property professor wrote one of the rec letters for my application here?”

  “You’re at Georgetown, right?” I asked, and he nodded. “Did you get Shaw for property?”

  “Madeleine Shaw, yeah,” Casey confirmed. “And I was in her seminar on housing and public policy last semester.”

  “Perfect,” I grinned. “Reach out, let her know your externship has you helping on a case that hints at cartel-like behavior among Section 8 landlords, that you have permission from the supervising attorney to discuss it, and namedrop me. When she wants to know more, loop me in on the email chain. I’ll set up a time for us all to talk within the next two weeks, preferably in person, but a video conference is okay. Phone call as last resort.”

  “What about you?” Fatima asked.

  “Let’s just say it’s time to put the NMR’s thumb on the scales,” I said with a grin. “That’s two buildings burning down in a year. Their superheroes’ perfect PR almost took a hit with just the first, and ‘almost’ is still too big of a risk for them. And since it happened twice, they’re not gonna wait around to see if the third time’s the charm.”

  After all, the NMR’s superheroes may not be able to punch systemic issues in the face… but they were more than capable of throwing money and manpower at the problem until it went away.

  I just had to hope that this time, ‘went away’ properly meant ‘gone’.

  do have a few things planned to fill the time between Book 1's last chapter being posted and Book 2 starting up, including (as I've mentioned) polishing off the initial draft of Foxfire and reworking it into a little novella set between books 1 and 2. But if you want an idea of why it's taking longer, uh...

  was tempted to write an April Fool's not-chapter, but given that y'all are coming off of a break week, that would have just been MEAN.

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