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  Betsy nodded her head. “Well, it’s worth a shot.”

  “Yes. At any rate, this genetic test thing might bolster my case against the anesthesiologist. There’s the possibility that Austin might have been cured by gene therapy. If that’s the case, then we might be able to sell the jury that Austin had a chance to go on to realize his NASA dreams. That would make the award much greater, but it’s still an uphill climb.”

  “Does that mean that you aren’t going to take the case?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “No. I’ll go ahead and file the case. I just don’t know if I’m the man to try this case. Maybe you would be better off with one of the big guns in town. There are firms that try these medical malpractice cases by the hundreds. They’re familiar with the defense attorneys on the other side. They can probably get you a settlement, where I probably wouldn’t be able to. That might be what you need.”

  Betsy stared at the TV, which still had the still image of the bloody tampon wedged in the English Muffin. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t want to become a number to somebody. I want somebody who gives a crap about me. Somebody who knew Austin and gives a crap about him. I want you to have this case, not some asshole in a thousand dollar suit. If you don’t want the case, I understand. You’ve explained it all to me, and I know that the case might not be worth much money because Austin’s life expectancy was so short. But if you don’t want the case, then I guess there’s not going to be a case. I don’t want to deal with those other assholes like you see on TV all the time.” She shook her head. “It’s you or nobody.”

  I smiled and I put my arm around her as she hung her head and grabbed a Kleenex and sobbed into it. “I appreciate your faith in me,” I said. “I just don’t know if it’s warranted.”

  “If it’s not warranted, it’s not. I think it is, though. You’re my friend. You and I bonded. I pray for your daughter every night, at the same time that I’m praying for Austin’s soul. You know what I’m going through. You understand. That means a lot to me. It has to be you taking Austin’s case.”

  “No pressure,” I said lightly, hoping that she laughed at my little joke.

  To my relief, she smiled when I said that. “No pressure.” Then she glanced at the TV. “Oh, God,” she said. “I just realized that I paused that show at just the wrong scene. Gross.” She clicked play on her remote and the scene came to life. Piper, the lead character on the show, looked at the English Muffin in horror and then ran out of the room to get sick. I smiled as I realized that I knew how Piper was feeling.

  I felt a little sick myself.

  No pressure.

  Chapter 11

  The next day, I went to meet Garrett. He told me that he had a preliminary report on our Vic, Shelly McMason, and he told me that I was going to be interested in what he found out about her.

  I brought Harper along with me to the restaurant where Garrett wanted us to meet. It was called the Grand Street Café, a restaurant that was right off the Plaza. It was tucked away off the street, so it was difficult to even know that it was there, but it was, right behind Winstead’s. Winstead’s was a hamburger joint that was on the corner, and, I had to admit, it had the best damned hamburgers I had ever eaten. Grand Street was right behind Winstead’s, and I hadn’t actually been there before. Harper assured me that the food was excellent.

  “Garrett has good taste,” she said. “If he picked this place out.”

  We went in and saw Garrett waiting for us at the front of the restaurant. We followed him and our hostess to a back table that was right next to a window. This place didn’t have much of a view, but that was fine. We weren’t there for the scenery.

  “So,” I said to Garrett. “What did you find out about Shelly?”

  “Well,” he said. “I found out something very interesting about her. Very interesting indeed. Now, I told you about Wells Armstrong, the CEO of Armstrong Pharmaceuticals, and how Shelly was his mistress. At the time when I found out that piece of information, I wasn’t aware of how Shelly met him in the first place.”

  The waitress came around and took our orders. I got the filet mignon, Harper got the cornbread encrusted trout, while Garrett ordered the pork chop. “Everything is fantastic here, I can assure you,” Garrett said. “Anyhow, where was I?”

  “You were about to tell me about what you found out about how Shelly met Wells Armstrong.”

  “Yes. Shelly met Wells Armstrong in Los Angeles about a year ago. I talked to Wells’ wife. She told me that Wells is one of those businessmen who gets call girls when he’s away on business trips. She knows all about it, and she apparently doesn’t care. Personally, I get the feeling that Mrs. Armstrong is a lesbian, but I can’t be sure about that. At any rate, I have the feeling that the marriage between the Armstrongs is strictly one of convenience.”

  Harper nodded her head. “Sounds about right. Go on.”

  “I asked Mrs. Armstrong about Wells and about his call girls. Mrs. Armstrong, her name is Naomi, she tells me that she thinks that Shelly was one of Wells’ call girls out in LA. Like she was a regular girl for Wells when he went on business trips one summer.”

  Harper’s eyes started to get wide as she started to understand what Garrett was telling us. “She worked there for a summer?” Harper asked. “Last summer, I would imagine?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she was obviously living in Columbia, Missouri, for the school year. I checked out her school records, and there wasn’t any indication that she ever took a leave of absence from school or anything like that. She was very active in her sorority as well. I interviewed some of her sorority sisters, and none of them seemed to have any clue that Shelly had any kind of a double life. They all described Shelly as being a prankster, fun-loving, and somebody who was always on the different committees to make floats and house decs and was active in putting together their winter and spring parties. Attended all the football games, dated fraternity dudes, you know the drill. She was apparently the quintessential sorority girl. Her little sister in the sorority apparently idolized her.”

  I nodded my head. “So, in other words, there wasn’t anything about her university or sorority life that gave anybody pause.”

  “Right. Shelly apparently kept her moonlighting activities very secret. I know why she did it. I managed to get my hands on her bank account, and I also managed to get a printout of her expenses, and she was paying for her college completely out of her own pocket. Her parents really didn’t contribute anything to her tuition or room and board or her sorority expenses or any of that.” Garrett shook his head. “All over her dating a Muslim man. Well, I guess it didn’t help that she was also dating Wells Armstrong, but still. Some people.”

  I had to smile. Garrett did have a sense of outrage for injustice, and he obviously thought that it was an injustice for Shelly’s parents to just cut her off financially like that.

  “So, Shelly was a call girl in Los Angeles one summer,” Harper said. “Are we sure that she met Wells that way?”

  “Yes,” Garrett said. “I’m sure about that. I actually found her Madame, if you will. Her name is Irina Kovokosky, and, as you can tell from her name, she is a Russian national.”

  “And you spoke with Irina?” Harper asked, stirring her drink with her straw.

  “I did. I spoke with her, and she told me that Wells was one of Shelly’s regular clients. Wells apparently traveled to Los Angeles on a regular basis, and, that summer, Shelly and Wells were together quite often. Irina went through her books and she told me that Shelly and Wells met in Wells’ hotel room 12 times that summer. I guess that Shelly must have been pretty good at what she did. Either that, or the two actually started to like each other. Considering the fact that Shelly and Wells started an actual relationship after that summer tells me that the two of them hit it off on different levels, not just sexually.”

  Harper rolled her eyes. “It’s a regular Pretty Woman story. Successful businessman, prostitute, the two fall in love. Guess fairy tale
s really do come true.” Her tone was sarcastic and she shook her head to emphasize the point.

  I smiled, thinking that Harper was sounding like me about love at that point. She seemed just as cynical about it. I wondered if all was okay between her and Axel.

  “So, I wonder if any of this is significant,” I said. “Irina is a Russian national. Does she have any mob ties? To the Russian mob or maybe the Armenian mob?” I knew that the Armenian mob sometimes worked with the Russian mob. Irina might have some connection to Erik or even to Sargis. Most likely she would have a connection to Sargis if she was out in Los Angeles.

  “I’m working on that angle,” Garrett said. “She told me that she didn’t have any organized crime connections, but she’s going to say that to cover her ass. I’ll have to uncover whether or not she is actually involved in organized crime. That will be my next step.”

  “Figure that out,” Harper said. “And get back to us about what you have found. In the meantime, find out more about her relationship with Wells. Go through her financials, find out if he was paying her here in Kansas City. I somehow get the feeling that we’re really onto something.” Harper was looking intense at the moment. Her green eyes were focused on Garrett’s face and her fingers were stirring her drink faster and faster. “And see what you can find about any other clients she might have had out in LA. This is a good lead, but we need something more concrete. Not to mention the fact that her hacker background might have put her in contact with some people who literally want to kill her. She was a criminal hacker, underground, which meant that she was involved in stealing people’s identities and was also probably involved in other activities that would piss somebody off. Maybe she stole from the wrong person. Find out about her activities in that regard.”

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked Harper. “What kind of theory are you working on in your head right now?”

  “I don’t really know,” Harper said. “Sargis paid me a visit yesterday. And he insists that he didn’t know that Shelly was a journalist who was trying to get a story. Obviously, either he is lying or his son is. I don’t know which one at the moment. I’m just trying to figure out if this Irina person might have been involved with Sargis. She’s Russian, she’s shady, but does she have mob ties? And, just because she might have mob ties to the Russian mob, does that mean that she also knows Sargis? It’s kind of a six degrees of separation type thing at the moment, but I need to get the thread to connect somehow.”

  I nodded my head. “At any rate, it’s interesting information. It’s information that we didn’t know before. I don’t even think that the media knows this story. They’re obviously running the hacker background, but they didn’t know about the call girl thing.”

  That was an odd thing, I was thinking. Shelly was a call girl and she was a hacker. Yet, somehow, the media hadn’t yet figured out that she was a call girl. I wondered about this Irina Kovokosky person – I wondered how many girls she was managing, and why none of the girls had come forward about Shelly’s activities. That was usually what happened in situations like this – the media would figure out that the popular blonde sorority girl was screwing men for money in her spare time, and they would be all over that like flies on shit. They would be talking to everybody Shelly knew in Los Angeles. Yet, the media never found out about it, and neither did the prosecutors or the cops here, apparently. Why would that be?

  “Find out more about Irina,” I said to Garrett. “Find out what kind of girls she manages, and whether or not these girls were tight with Shelly. There’s something about this whole situation that’s not sitting right with me.”

  “I’ll find out,” Garrett said. “I’m working on that, anyhow. Irina is supposed to give me a list of Shelly’s clients, but she hasn’t yet. I suppose that will happen any time now.”

  “Well,” Harper said. “If Irina doesn’t want to give you the list of clients, we can always issue a subpoena for them. And, if that doesn’t work, I have my own hacker who can find this out for us. Her name is Anna, and she’s amazing. There’s nothing that she can’t find. She doesn’t do it criminally, though. I mean, she does, in that she finds out information that she’s clearly not supposed to. But she doesn’t steal and she doesn’t plant viruses and nonsense like that. I like to think of Anna as being more of a white hat hacker as opposed to a black hat hacker like Shelly was.”

  Our food came around, and I realized that I was starving. “And what about the other case that I have you working on? The med mal case? You find out anything more about that one?”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “I did find out some more information about the anesthesiologist. Dr. Kim has apparently been involved in multiple cases over the years. I suppose that’s probably not a huge surprise to you.”

  I shook my head. “No, not a surprise at all, unfortunately. It’s usually my experience that doctors who screw up once like this, and I mean really screw up, tend to have left a trail of settled malpractice claims in their midst. I was pretty sure that Dr. Kim would be much the same.”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “He’s been sued more than once, that’s for sure. He’s settled a lot of cases, though. That might be a good thing for you. It means that he’s willing to settle, as opposed to dragging this case into trial.”

  “At this point,” I said, “I hate to say it, but I’m probably going to bite at any kind of settlement offer they float to me. As I’ve been telling Betsy, it costs much more to try these cases then the money we’re going to make off of this. Keep digging, maybe we can find that perfect angle that will give us the right leverage to make Dr. Kim and the Menorah Hospital settle the case. In the meantime, I have a mandatory mediation meeting with Angela Hughes in two months. That will be after the discovery period has ended. The judge in this case has ordered this mediation, so I have to go.”

  I felt good that I had a fruitful path to possibly go down on the Dr. Kim case. I had the feeling that he had been involved with other cases over the years, so I was going to have to hammer him about these cases when I finally got to depose him. I had sent out discovery requests to the other side – request for production of documents and interrogatories – but I hadn’t yet gotten them back. I had the feeling that when I got them back, I was going to have even more areas that I could cover with Dr. Kim.

  The waitress came around and served our food, and the three of us just chatted throughout the rest of the evening. By the end of the evening, however, Harper asked if I would like to come for dinner and meet her two girls and her boyfriend, Axel. As I understood it, Axel and Harper had been dating for a number of years. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was a police detective for the Kansas City Police Department and had been for a number of years. And Harper also said that Axel was from Australia. Other than that, I was flying blind.

  Yet, I was looking forward to meeting her family. I was starting to feel that Harper was warming up to me just a bit. At first, when I came to work for her, she was just a little bit stand-offish. She had explained to me that she had been going through a battle for her sobriety in the past few months, and she was having issues with coming to terms with some dark parts of her past.

  Her past couldn’t possibly be darker than mine, however. I wondered when I was going to get the gumption up to tell her about my stint in prison, and all that I had to go through to get to the other side. I wondered if she would judge me when I told her that my three best friends growing up were all serving prison sentences. Connor’s life sentence was without the possibility of parole. The others were actually up for parole next year. They had served 17 years of their sentence, and I knew that all three of them hadn’t caught any other cases while they were on the inside. I knew that all three of them had been model citizens on the inside. I thought that the three men would have a decent chance of making their parole, but I had mixed emotions about that. Connor would be devastated to lose them. I felt the most sorry for him, because he was literally a kid when that all went down. A kid. It
didn’t seem fair to me that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars for something he did when he was only 16.

  I wondered if there was a story there. If the other guys managed to get their parole, I wondered if I could get my Innocence Project attorneys on the case to try to free Connor. Not that Connor was innocent. He wasn’t. But he was a completely different man. He was no longer the wild kid who idolized his older brother Jack. That was part of the reason why he brought the gun into the robbery – he wanted to impress Jack. Jack was always telling Connor that he wasn’t allowed to do much whenever the four of them would rob people. Connor had insisted on coming along, but Jack would always tell him that he had to stay in the car. Connor was assigned the permanent position of lookout guy, and he didn’t like that. That was why he ended up in that liquor store with a gun. He wanted to show Jack that he could be useful.

  That was the irony. He wanted to please Jack and show Jack that he was adult enough to be in on the jobs. That was the reason why the four of them went down so hard for that robbery. If only nobody was killed, the guys probably would be gotten a sentence of 10 years, out in 8. The prisons were overcrowded, so guys were getting out after serving 20% of their time. But for a Rob One, there’s a mandatory minimum of 85% of the prison time served. The guys had a clean adult record, though, and their Juvenile Records were sealed and couldn’t be used against them.

  Connor only wanted to help. Instead, he signed their death warrants. Not literally, thank God. I think that the jury took pity on the guys because they really never meant to hurt anyone. That was why the jury chose to sentence the guys to life in prison with the chance of parole.

  I was going to have dinner with Harper the following evening. But first, I was going to have to visit Amelia and tell her the bad news about her mother. That was something that I wasn’t at all looking forward to.