Irrefutable Evidence Page 4

  She curled her lip. The process sounded painful.

  “Maybe I can get out of it?”

  “Oh, good one, Yim. Who you think’s gonna get you out of it? Your pal Markham, the high and mighty department supervisor? Think again. He’s the one who gave them your name in the first place.”

  “He gave them my name?”

  “Yeah, the way this works is the insured hires a lawyer. The lawyer probably called and tried to convince you to review the claim, right?”

  “Right.” The McCandless lady had hounded her about the denial for days. Then she fell silent. Laura had thought she’d given up and gone away, but apparently she’d just been busy drafting this notice thingy.

  “Yeah, well, after you told him to go pound rocks, he filed—”

  “She. The lawyer’s a she.”

  “Even better. I’m sure she’s a real sweetheart. She filed a complaint and then, real quick, served discovery. The lawyers would have fought it the first time around, but the insured usually move to compel, crying that we acted in bad faith. If that’s what happened, Markham’s probably pissed at you anyway, ‘cause he has to respond to all that crap. One of the questions the lawyer would have asked is what’s the name of the person who knows the most about this case? Markham gave you up, doll. So you’re gonna have to suck it up and be deposed. What kind of claim?”

  “Fire.”

  He shook his head like he was disappointed in her. “Told you. Don’t deny fire claims, Yim. That’s a sucker move. Hope you’ve got a good suspicious origins report from the fire inspector to hang your hat on.”

  “Not exactly,” she muttered under her breath. It wasn’t so much the presence of any physical evidence that had led her to deny the claim as a general feeling that something was wrong. The unexplained fire just happened to break out in space leased by a woefully undercapitalized small business whose rent had just been jacked up by thirty percent. It felt … desperate. But she didn’t want to try to defend that in a deposition.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, ‘thanks for your help.’ I need to get back to work.”

  She turned to walk away, but Jim caught her elbow. “I’m serious about the fire claims, Yim. Not to be corny about it, but you’re playing with fire to deny them. Think about it, huh?”

  She shook his arm off and gave him a frosty smile.

  “Thanks for the advice, Jim.”

  She headed back to her cubicle and tried to ignore the worry that had lodged itself in her stomach like a brick.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Will and Naya stared at her with twin blank expressions.

  “You see it, right?” Sasha pressed them, stifling a yawn.

  Naya narrowed her eyes. “Are you wearing the same dress you had on yesterday?”

  She waved away the question. She was, as a matter of fact, but that was hardly relevant. Just as soon as her law partner and legal assistant confirmed that they saw the pattern, she planned to go home and take a shower and change. Maybe even grab a nap.

  “Did you spend the night here?” Will asked.

  She huffed. “Yes. Okay? I was here all night, and, no, I haven’t changed my clothes. And I could probably stand to brush my teeth. Can we focus, please? Look at the chart.” She pointed toward the graphical representation of the claims approvals, which she’d enlarged to display on the conference room’s Smartboard.

  Will and Naya exchanged a look but turned their attention to the chart. She watched their expressions. Naya’s face tightened and she started to shake her head in a vigorous no gesture. Will wrinkled his forehead in confusion. Neither of them spoke for several moments.

  Then Will pinched the bridge of his nose just above his glasses as if he were trying to stave off a headache. “Well.”

  She waited.

  He sighed heavily and continued, “Well, either you screwed up your data entry or it’s beyond peradventure.”

  “I didn’t screw up,” Sasha assured him.

  “So, let me guess, you’re gonna tell me we have a duty to pursue this, right?” Naya asked in a weary tone.

  “I don’t know.” Sasha rubbed her dry eyes with the backs of her fingers. “The existence of the conspiracy to commit insurance fraud by granting claims doesn’t affect the Maravaches’ coverage case about their denial—at least not in any way that I can see. Do you two agree with that?”

  They both nodded slowly. She forged ahead.

  “So, exposing the fraud wouldn’t hurt their claims. It may not help, but it shouldn’t inure to their detriment. And covering up the fraud makes me complicit. Do I have to take this to the Department of Justice?” Will was the white-collar criminal defense attorney, so she directed the question to him.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he said.

  “Really?” she brightened. The dread that had been fluttering around in her stomach like a manic butterfly ever since she’d dusted off her copy of the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct vanished.

  Will spoke in that methodical way he had. “If I were representing you, I’d say you suspect there may be criminal conduct occurring at the insurance company. You don’t know. Knowledge is a pretty high bar. You don’t have to save the world, you know. Just represent your client.”

  It made sense. And Will wasn’t the sort to try to convince himself something was right just because he thought it was expedient. If he thought she was safe to let it go, she was. “Okay. Great. In that case, I’m going home to freshen up.”

  “If, however,” he continued, “the corporate designee says something at the deposition that confirms your suspicion, then you probably ought to alert the authorities.”

  Naya gave her a look that said ‘I knew it was too good to be true.’

  Sasha just shrugged. “As my nana used to say, we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.” She scooped up her phone and purse and headed for the exit.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “Are you sure?” Connelly repeated.

  Sasha turned off the hairdryer and regarded her husband. She understood: he wanted Will to be right. But he was afraid Will was wrong. And more than that, he was afraid she was going to get mixed up in something that didn’t involve them.

  “Yes.”

  A long silence passed. She watched him in the bathroom mirror. Just when she was about to return to drying her hair, he spoke again.

  “I think we should call Justice.”

  Justice, as in Main Justice—the headquarters of the United States Department of Justice, a teaming hive of federal agencies whose diverse worker bees were toiling away under different umbrellas, task forces, and mandates, all competing for glory, advancement, and, most of all, budget dollars.

  She rested the hair dryer on the counter and turned to face him.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. No offense, G-man, but the last several times—strike that, every time—I’ve turned to your pals in DC for help, it’s turned out poorly.”

  He nodded grudgingly. “Understatement of the year right there.”

  “Right. I know you and Hank have all sorts of shady, secret connections. And if it turns out we need them, then we’ll reach out to them. But for now, I trust Will’s judgment. And if it turns out I do need to do something, I want to handle it locally.”

  “Pittsburgh Police?”

  “No. The current head of the Pittsburgh Organized Crime Task Force is Charlotte Cashion.”

  “You know this person?”

  She did, in fact. She and Charlotte had served as editors on law review a lifetime ago. Sasha would never call Charlotte a friend—as it turned out, a society debutante/Daughter of the American Revolution and a working-class kid/daughter of a Russian stay-at-home mom and an Irish Giant Eagle warehouse driver didn’t have much in common. But they both loved the law—more than that, they both respected the law. She was confident she could trust Charlotte.

  “We went to law school together.”

&nbs
p; “You’re just going to walk in and lay out an arson-for-profit ring for her and tell her you assume there’s an organized crime connection?”

  “No, I’m not going to do anything except take the deposition. But if I do have to do something, I don’t want to involve DC.”

  He twisted his mouth into a disapproving knot. “Who are you deposing again?”

  “Laura Yim, the adjuster who denied the Maravaches’ claim.”

  “You think she has a logical explanation for the data?”

  She shrugged. “I hope she does. I’ll know after I depose her.” She smiled up at him.

  His tense face relaxed and he smiled back. Then he leaned over and planted a soft kiss just above her ear.

  “Handle this however you think is best. But—”

  “I know. No danger. No intrigue.”

  “Exactly. This potential crime ring is somebody’s problem, but it’s not ours. Got it?”

  She tilted her face up for another kiss. “Oh, trust me, I’ve got it. We have a tropical beach waiting for us. Nothing’s getting in the way of that.”

  He smiled down at her then glanced meaningfully toward their adjacent bedroom. “When are Will and Naya expecting you back at the office?”

  “I’m a firm partner, Connelly. I’ll get back when I get back.”

  “Oh really?”

  She shrugged out of her terrycloth bathrobe. “Really.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Laura’s hands were shaking, so she kept them clasped tightly together in her lap under the dark mahogany table and hoped the lawyer couldn’t see. She surveyed the conference room—shelves and shelves of leather-bound books with gilt lettering. She wondered if anyone actually used them. They seemed to have acquired a thin coating of dust. Her eyes returned to Attorney Chadwick. He sat across the table watching her, appraising her. She wet her lips and forced a smile. She didn’t know why she was so nervous—he represented the company, he was on her side.

  He leaned his pointy little chin forward and squinted at her as though he’d read her mind somehow.

  “Now, listen, Laura—may I call you Laura?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, and you go ahead and call me Phillip.” He smiled reassuringly then continued, “I don’t want you to fret about this deposition tomorrow. You hear? It’s my job to prepare you for the questions I think the lawyer is going to ask you. You’ve got the easy part. You just have to listen to me and pay close attention. If you do that, when you walk out of here today, you’ll be more than ready for whatever she throws at you. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, I bet you’re thinking how’s this joker know what Sasha McCandless is going to ask me? Is he psychic? And the answer is no, I’m not psychic, but I’ve been doing this for a very long time, Laura. I probably know the questions she’s going to ask better than she does at this point. But if she comes out of left field with something we haven’t covered or a trick question, I’ll jump in and protect you.”

  She gnawed at her lip. His little pep talk had just begun to ease her fears but the whole trick question bit got her stomach churning again.

  “Um, what do you mean by trick question? All I have to do is tell her the whole truth. Right?”

  He chuckled at that and shook his head. “Oh, Laura, you’re going to be a problem child, eh? No. All you have to do is answer the precise question she asks you if, and only if, you’re sure you know the answer and remember it correctly.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  The last vestiges of his smile vanished from his face. “No. Not in the least.” He spoke in a firm, disapproving voice as if she were a misbehaving puppy.

  “Oh, sorry.” She stared down at her reflection in the highly polished tabletop.

  “Now, now, there’s no need to apologize,” he said mildly. “Let’s start over, huh?”

  She glanced up at the sudden change in his tone and was surprised to see that he’d pasted his smile back on his face.

  “Sure,” she agreed eagerly.

  He cleared his throat and thought for a moment before launching into his lecture. She stared at him attentively, willing herself to pay close attention so she wouldn’t screw up at the deposition.

  “It’s like this. The other attorney, she wants you to think you’re having a friendly conversation. She’ll try to establish a rapport with you, get you in rhythm, and suddenly it’s like you’re telling her a story, just talking conversationally. Don’t fall for that. She’s not your friend. She’s the enemy. The only answers I want to hear come out of your mouth tomorrow are yes, no, I don’t know, I don’t remember, and I don’t understand the question. Got it?”

  She nodded.

  “What are the acceptable answers?” he prompted.

  “Uh, yes, no, I don’t know, I don’t recall, and I don’t understand?”

  “Perfect.”

  She exhaled shakily and relief washed over her. “Can I write that down?” she asked as she reached into her bag for a pen and notepad.

  “I’d rather you didn’t. At the beginning of the deposition, she’s going to ask you a bunch of seemingly innocuous questions, they’ll seem almost like background. But remember this: there are no innocent, throwaway questions in a deposition.”

  “Okay.”

  “One of those questions will be whether you and I met to go over your testimony. She’ll ask if you took any notes and, if so, whether you have those notes on you. The answer needs to be no, no notes. You’ll tell her we met briefly to review the topics covered by the deposition notice. Tomorrow, when you show up in her office for the deposition, bring nothing—no documents, no notes, no datebook or calendar. Nothing. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Now, when are you heading to Pittsburgh?”

  “I’m on the 6:30 flight through Philly.”

  “Good. Go to the hotel, eat dinner, and go to sleep early. No booze, no heavy foods. I want you to be bright eyed and bushy tailed tomorrow morning. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now what are your answers, one more time?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t understand.” She ticked them off on her fingers as she recited them.

  “Perfect. Let’s turn to the notice.” He flipped to the second page of the deposition notice and patted the top of a white three-ring binder, thick with documents. It had to be five inches thick. An identical binder sat beside it. “Now, these documents are the ones we gave the Maravaches’ lawyers in response to the document request. A lot of them—most of them—came out of your claims file.”

  She eyed the stacks.

  “You don’t expect me to have them memorized.”

  He didn’t respond.

  Her pulse fluttered. “Do you?”

  He laughed. “No, of course not. But, just out of curiosity, how many of them do you think you could speak about intelligently without our going over them—ballpark?”

  She thought. “One hundred percent of the documents from my files. And anything related to the overall denial/payment statistics for the past, oh, four or so years. I can’t make any promises beyond that.”

  His eyes bulged out. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Well, I have to have a good understanding of the facts underlying my own claims, obviously.”

  “And the rest?”

  Come on, Counselor. The single Asian woman is the obvious choice for a thankless, numbers-intensive extra chore to be completed outside of her scheduled work hours, Laura thought. But she pushed the grim truth aside and parroted the language from her annual performance evaluation.

  “My facility with statistics makes me uniquely suited to spearhead a department-wide analysis of decisions. So I’m tasked with performing one on a yearly basis.”

  He grimaced. “You get the crap sandwich, huh?”

  “Something like that.” She tried to suppress her
smile. Maybe Phillip Chadwick wasn’t so horrible after all.

  “That sounds terrible, but I have to say it pleases me that you can address this pile of stuff without our going over the documents. For one thing, it’s always great to have a witness who doesn’t seem coached. If you know this stuff cold, that’s perfect. And for another, pardon my French, but it’s as boring as watching piss dry.”

  “Uh, you mean paint?”

  “Nah. Watching paint dry would be a real party compared to walking through these policy riders and stuff.”

  Laura’s stomach picked that particular moment to growl—a loud, long sound that seemed to echo off the book collection and reverberate in the quiet room.

  He burst into laughter then checked his watch. “Eh, I bet you skipped lunch to prepare for this, huh?”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Go get a snack and then get yourself to the airport. We don’t need to worry about the rest of this.”

  Her anxiety about the upcoming deposition far outweighed her desire for a sandwich. “But … we haven’t gone over anything. I don’t know what sort of questions she’s going to ask. Please. I’ve never been deposed before.”

  She pinned him with a desperate, pleading look.

  He sighed heavily and checked his watch. “Two o’clock. I guess we have time. Well, it was worth a shot.” He dragged the top binder over to him and opened it. The hard plastic cover slapped against the table. “Let’s get this over with.”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Laura stifled a yawn and leaned against the elevator car’s railing. She was stiff and achy—like she’d run a 10K or spent a whole day painting her living room. She never would have thought sitting in a leather chair looking at pieces of paper could be so physically demanding. Mentally draining, sure. But she was exhausted. She’d wished she could drag herself home and crawl into bed.