Page 139 of A Dead End Wedding

"And who offed him?" Mr. Ellison asked.

"I don't see how the offing – I mean, the murder – could be connected to this invoice. I mean, that's got to be a coincidence, doesn't it? But the rest of it is still strange," I said.

"Cloak and dagger and offing. This is a weird job, and Miss Daisy and I are leaving you two conspiracy theorists and going to the dog park," Max said, taking Daisy from Mr. Ellison.

"Yeah, I need to go, too. Lots of stuff going on tonight. Don't work too hard, girlie," Mr. Ellison said.

I stood up to pet Daisy goodbye and walk everybody to the door, mostly to reassure myself that it was really locked, then I wandered around the office for a while. The problem was that I was getting that tingly feeling in my head.

Random coincidences don't fit into my "puzzle pieces" view of cases. When it comes to lawsuits, it has been my experience that there are very few coincidences. But – suddenly – I was surrounded by them.

The invoice.

The way Sarah and Addy had both pushed so hard for me to refer the case to Sarah.

Richard Dack.

All oddities on their own, but — combined — they made for an enormous ball of wrong.

I don't like enormous balls of wrong in my cases.

Worse, a hideous suspicion was trying to form in the murky depths of my brain.

What if they knew?

I stopped pacing and blinked, wondering how I'd ended up in the file room, then headed for my office at a dead run. I needed to take some notes.

What if BDC knew earlier than they let on that there was a big problem with the insulin? What if they spent crucial time working on getting their legal ducks in a row – and maybe shredding documents – before they issued the recall?

What if Langley Cowan was in on it? Or, even worse, what if Langley Cowan had advised them to do it?

I grabbed a white board I used for trial prep out of the closet and started diagraming my time line. If I assumed the invoice as originally dated was correct, then somebody was in some serious trouble. I needed to call my friend at the Food and Drug Administration and ask some "hypothetical" questions first thing in the morning.

I wrote SARAH GREENBERG??? in the middle and circled it. I couldn't figure out how she fit into the picture. She and Addy had completely opposite goals in these lawsuits; she wanted BDC to pay as much as possible, while he wanted BDC to get off scot-free.

How did that invoice wind up in the BDC production in the first place?

Was it possible that Sarah was in on it, somehow? Could some terrible coverup be going on that would somehow result in favorable monetary settlements to the S&G clients? That would explain why both of them were so hot for me to transfer Charlie's case to them, but I couldn't bring myself to believe something so awful. From the defense lawyer, maybe. It has certainly happened before that a lawyer helped his client cover something up. But from the attorney on the other side of the case?

I shook my head. "I've been working with Mr. Ellison for too long. Next, I'll be talking about aliens and anal probes," I muttered.

Still, it was definitely time for some non-party production requests to Orange Grove Productions. I wanted every piece of paper that had anything to do with that film shoot. I reached for my keyboard to draft the document, smiling what Max would call my shark smile.

We'll just see how Sarah Greenberg responds to this.

As I opened the computer file, the buzzer on the front door sounded. I yelled for somebody to answer the door, then I realized I was the only somebody still there. I headed for the front, my mind still on my discovery requests. As I walked out of the hallway to the lobby, I could see Charlie Deaver standing at the door. I hurried to unlock the door and let him in.

"Hey, Charlie, I'm glad to see you. How are you?"

He shook my hand, then started twisting his ball cap in his hands. "December, Greenberg and Smithies called. They said my old lawyer told them to call me."

He shuffled his feet a bit and then looked at me. "They told me you were bungling my case."

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"Ishould have shoved Sarah overboard when I had the chance," I muttered.

"What?" Charlie was chewing on the corner of his lip, and he looked moderately freaked out, so I tried to tamp down the steam boiling out of my ears.

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