“Listen, I’m sorry, boss,” Barrow said. “Send my love to Hartley. And to Sara.”

“I definitely will. And thanks,” Jared said as he hung up the phone. Looking across his desk at Hartley, he forced a grin. “Sorry about that – just getting some info on your client. Now let’s get back to those numbers.”

Sara and Guff raced up the hallway. “Let me see it,” Guff said.

“Not here,” Sara said, checking over her shoulder. “In the elevator.”

“Oh, man, I bet it’s a great one. A brutal homicide. No, wait – even better – a double homicide.”

“Can you please try to control your blood lust?” Sara asked.

The elevator was empty when Sara and Guff stepped inside. Guff repeatedly pushed the door-close button: “Close, close, close, close, close, close, close,” he demanded. As the doors finally shut, Sara opened the file and flipped to the section marked Description of Crime. Struggling to decipher the arresting officer’s bad handwriting, Sara read the facts of the case. “Oh, no. This can’t be happening. Please tell me I’m reading this wrong,” she said, handing the file to Guff.

“What? What is it?”

As Guff read the report for himself, Sara said, “I can’t even believe it. It’s not a double homicide, it’s not a single homicide, it’s not even an assault. Some guy named Kozlow was caught breaking into someone’s house on the Upper East Side. The case that’s supposed to secure my future is just an idiotic little burglary. No gun, no knife, no nothing.”

“It’s definitely a loser,” Guff said as the elevator reached the ground floor. “But look at the bright side: At least you have a case.”

“I guess,” Sara said as they headed out of 100 Centre. “I just hope it’s not a whole new headache.”

Victor stood in front of Evelyn’s desk. “There was a case that was supposed to come in for me. The defendant’s name was Kozlow.”

“Kozlow, Kozlow, Kozlow,” Evelyn repeated, flipping through the newest set of booking sheets on her desk. “I don’t see it here. Sorry.”

“What about this pile?” Victor asked indignantly, pointing to Evelyn’s in-box.

Evelyn riffled through the new stack in her in-box. Still nothing. “Sorry. Haven’t seen it.”

“It was a burglary case. Kozlow was the defendant.”

“I heard you the first time,” Evelyn said. “And I still don’t have it. Have you checked with any of the other ADAs?”

“Let me ask you something,” Victor said, his eyes narrowing with anger. “Do I answer to you, or do you answer to me? Or to make it even easier, which one of us is the ECAB supervisor?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“I don’t care what you meant. All I care about is getting that case. So I want you to go through this office, and I want you to find out who has it. Now.”

Chapter 3

“SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” SARA ASKED, SITTING IN her office and staring at the Kozlow booking sheet.

“What do you mean, ‘what do we do?’” Guff asked. “What kind of question is that?”

“I mean, this case is garbage, so how can I get rid of it? Can we return it? Can we go back and get another one?”

“You can’t return a case once you catch it. It’s like buying a pair of pants and having them shortened – once you’ve messed with them, you can’t bring them back.”

“But I didn’t mess with these pants. I just pulled them off the rack.” Waving the Kozlow booking sheet in the air, Sara shouted, “These are perfectly good pants!”

“Well, you still can’t return them. No refunds, no exchanges.”

“Why?”

“Because if we operated on a return policy, the small crimes, which are the majority of crimes in this city, would never get prosecuted. Everyone would be waiting for the good stuff.”

“Guff, I really don’t care what the policy is, I need to find a way out of this. Now let’s back up. Are you telling me I can’t walk right back into ECAB, drop this file on the receptionist’s desk, and say, ‘Sorry, the delivery guy handed me this by mistake’?”

“I guess you could,” Guff hypothesized. “As long as-”

Sara’s phone started to ring.

“As long as what?” Sara asked, ignoring the phone.

“As long as the ECAB receptionist doesn’t know it’s gone. But if she finds out…”

“Hold on a second,” Sara said to Guff as she picked up her phone. “This is Sara.”

“Sara, this is Evelyn from ECAB. Do you have a burglary case for a defendant named Kozlow? If you took it, I need to know. It’s important.”

“Can you hang on a second?” Sara asked. She put Evelyn on hold and looked up at Guff. “We’re in trouble.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand?” Marty Lubetsky asked, his face flushed red with anger. “What the hell kind of settlement is that?”

“Considering the facts of the case, I think we did okay,” Jared explained, trying to put a positive spin on his negotiation with Hartley. “He was originally asking for seven hundred.”

Marty Lubetsky was the partner at Wayne & Portnoy who supervised the Rose Microsystems account. “I don’t give a shit that they were asking for seven hundred thousand – they could’ve been asking for seven hundred million for all I care. Your job is to bring them down to where our client is comfortable. On that endeavor, you failed. Miserably.”

Annoyed at himself for trying to explain, Jared knew that Lubetsky didn’t like explanations. He liked results. And when he didn’t get results, he liked to yell. And when he was yelling, he liked to yell uninterrupted. So for almost ten minutes, Jared stood there silently.

“Dammit, Jared, if you needed some help, why didn’t you ask for it? Now I’m left standing here with my thumb up my ass, looking like a schmuck. And that’s not even including the fact that you agreed to fifty thousand more than Rose authorized.”

“I told them it was contingent on Rose accepting the offer.”

“Who cares what you told them? You can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle.”

Jared again fell silent. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he finally replied. “I gave it everything I had. I wouldn’t have settled the case if I didn’t think it was in Rose’s best interest. If you want, I’ll be the one to break it to them.”

“You better damn well believe you’re going to be the one to break it to them. If they have to empty their pockets for this, I want them to know who’s responsible.”

Unable to face Guff, Sara fidgeted with a pencil on her desk. In front of her was a sketch of a person in the gallows, hanging from a noose. Below the hangman, she made four blank spaces and filled them in with the letters S-A-R-A. After she finished the last letter, she stabbed the hanged man with her pencil, breaking its point.

“Are you done beating yourself up yet?” Guff asked.

“That case didn’t even belong to me.”

“It didn’t belong to anyone. And if it makes you feel any better, if she really wanted it, she would’ve asked for it back.”

“The only reason she didn’t ask for it back was because they realized it was a bum case.”

“Beggars and choosers, boss. Now stop kicking yourself.”

“No, you’re right. We should focus on what our next step is. Enough with the self-pity.”

“Exactly. That’s a far better attitu-”

“Let me just say one last thing,” Sara interrupted. “You know what the stupidest part of this case is?”

“No, tell me the stupidest part.”

“The stupidest part is, I can’t even save my job with it! That’s how dumb I am! I stole the one case in this whole damn building that has no real value! And not only is it worthless, it’s getting me in trouble!” Catching her breath, Sara calmly pushed the Kozlow booking sheet to the side of her desk.

“Case – one. Sara – zero,” Guff announced.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “In that one selfish move, I hurt my career and made an incredible enemy.”