LITMIR.BIZ

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cabinets from the reception area, and the contents were now organized into three stacks—pending, active, and retired.

      She heard the front door open. Celia, a woman she’d met a handful of times over the years, appeared in the doorway to her father’s office. Rory stood.

      “Oh, Rory,” Celia said, rushing past the stacks of files to embrace her in a tight hug.

      Rory kept her arms straight at her sides and blinked several times behind her thick-rimmed glasses while the strange woman invaded her personal space in ways most of Rory’s acquaintances knew not to.

      “I’m so sorry about your father,” Celia said into her ear.

      Celia had, of course, uttered the same sentence at the funeral a few days before. Rory had been just as stoic in the dimly lit funeral hall, standing next to the coffin that held the wax sculpture of her father. When she felt the warmth of Celia’s breath in her ear now, and sensed what she guessed were the woman’s tears spilling onto her neck, Rory finally put her hands on Celia’s shoulders and broke free from her grip. She took a gathering breath and exhaled away the anxiety that was rising from her sternum.

      “I’ve been through the file cabinets,” Rory finally said.

      A confused look came over Celia’s face as she looked around the office and recognized the amount of work Rory had done. Celia patted the front of her jacket to collect herself, wiped her tears. “I thought . . . Have you been working on this all week?”

      “No, just this morning. I got here a couple of hours ago.”

      Rory had long ago stopped attempting to explain her ability to conquer tasks like this one in a fraction of the time it took others. One reason she never practiced law was because it bored her to death. She remembered classmates spending hours studying textbooks that she memorized in a single skimming. And others taking months-long review courses to prepare for the bar exam, which Rory passed on her first attempt without opening a book to prepare. Another reason she avoided lawyering was because she had a strong aversion to people. The idea of haggling with another attorney over the jail sentence of some two-bit criminal made her skin crawl, and the thought of standing before a judge to plead her case caused her to wheeze with angst. She was better suited working solo to reconstruct crime scenes, her final opinions coming in the form of a written report that ended up on a detective’s desk.

      Rory Moore’s world was a walled-off sanctuary she allowed few to enter, and even fewer to understand. Which was why this morning’s discoveries were particularly disturbing. She learned that her father had several active cases heading to trial in the coming months that would need immediate assistance. Rory had already considered the likelihood that she’d be forced to dust off her diploma, swallow down the bile, and actually make her first appearance in court to explain to a judge that the lead counsel had died and the case would need an extension at best, a mistrial at worst, and that she’d require some guidance from Your Honor to figure out what the hell to do from there.

      “A couple of hours?” Celia asked, tugging Rory back from the recesses of her mind. “How is that possible? This looks like every case we’ve ever taken on.”

      “It is. Everything I could find in the file cabinets. I wasn’t able to check the computers.”

      This was a lie. Rory had no trouble logging on to her father’s database. It was password protected, but barely, and Rory had quickly hurdled the minor security precautions to cross-reference the cases in the file cabinets with those on the hard drive. Despite that she had every right to access the computer files, being so far removed from the daily workings of the firm made it feel like trespassing.

      “If it’s in the cabinet, it’s in the computer,” Celia said.

      “Good, then this is everything.” Rory pointed to the desk and the first stack of folders. “These are pending cases. Should be simple enough to call these clients and explain the situation. The firm won’t be taking them on and they’ll have to look elsewhere for representation. I think it would be professional to make a list of other firms that handle these types of cases, so our clients have somewhere to start.”

      “Of course,” Celia said. “Your father would want that.”

      “The second stack is the retired files. A simple form letter explaining that Frank Moore has died should suffice. I’ll leave those two piles for you to handle?”

      “Not a problem,” Celia said. “I’ll take care of it. What about those?”

      Rory looked at the final hoard of records she had set on her father’s desk. The sight started her hyperventilating. She felt the walls of her carefully constructed and meticulously cinder-blocked existence vibrating with unwanted trespassers from beyond.

      “These are all my dad’s open cases. I teased them out into three categories.” Rory placed her hand on the first pile. “Currently negotiating plea deals—twelve.” With her spoken words, she felt her underarms warm with perspiration as she touched the second group of files. “Awaiting court appearances—sixteen.” A bead of sweat rolled down her spine to dampen the small of her back. “And finally”—she moved her hand to the last pile—“preparing for trial—three.” Her throat caught when she said “three” and she coughed to hide her fear. The three cases going to trial would need immediate assistance.

      A fearful look came over Celia when she saw the blood drain from Rory’s face, as if the heart disease that claimed her father surely ran in the family and might strike twice in the same month. “Are you okay?”

      Rory coughed again and regained her composure.

      “I’m fine. I’ll find a way to deal with the active cases if you could handle the rest.”

      Celia nodded as she picked up the mound of pending cases. “I’ll start contacting these clients right away.” She carried the stack to her desk in the reception area and went to work.

      With her father’s office door closed, Rory fell into his chair and stared at the files and the four empty Diet Cokes that had fueled her morning work. She clicked the computer to life and searched for criminal defense attorneys in Chicago who would be willing to take the cases.

      CHAPTER 5

      Stateville Correctional Center, October 15, 2019

      FORSICKS WAS HIS ALTER EGO. HE HAD ANSWERED TO THE MONIKER FOR so long now that he wasn’t sure he would respond any longer to his real name. The nickname originated from the number that had been assigned to him the first night he arrived, stamped onto the back of his jumpsuit in large block font: 12276594–6.

      Before prison guards knew an inmate’s name or the crime for which he had been convicted, they knew his number. His had been shortened to the final two digits in the series—“four-six”—which had morphed over the years into what most inmates and some uninformed guards believed to be his last name—“Forsicks.”

      He walked into the prison library and clicked on the lights. It was his home within the walls of the penitentiary. He had run the place for decades. Lifting weights and ballooning his body had never interested him, and joining the animals in the prison yard to colonize into sects of gangs was equally unappealing. Instead, he found the library, befriended the elderly lifer who ran the place, and bided his time. The lifer started wheezing during the winter of 1989 and never saw the last decade of the twentieth century. A guard rapped on the bars of Forsicks’s cell the next morning to tell him the old man was gone, paroled to the heavens. The library was Forsicks’s to run. Don’t screw it up. He wouldn’t.

      For thirty years, the library had been under his control. In total, he had logged four decades on the inside without a single incident. The stellar track record had turned him nearly invisible, like the superheroes he read about in comic books he managed to score every month. He despised comics and graphic novels, but made sure to read them just the same. They gave him a softer persona and helped hide the longings that still loomed in his soul.

      Prior to jail, he had set his life around The

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