need everything, Ron. Files, autopsy, interviews. Everything.”
“I can get you all of it, but I’ve got to put you back on the payroll to do it. Make it official that you’re working again. Then I can get you anything you need.”
Rory went silent again as her eyes took in the scene. So many things were firing in her brain. She knew herself well enough not to attempt to tame the influx of information. She wasn’t aware of everything she was learning. She knew only to take it all in, and then, in the days and weeks ahead, her brain would sort out the things it was calculating and inventory the images it was capturing. Slowly Rory would organize it all. She’d study the case file. She’d get to know Camille Byrd. She’d put a name and narrative to this poor girl who had been strangled to death. She’d see things the detectives had missed. Rory’s uncanny mind would piece together bits of a puzzle everyone else had deemed unsolvable until she had reconstructed the crime in its entirety.
Her phone rang, pulling Rory back from the inner workings of her mind. It was her father calling. She thought about letting it go to voice mail, but decided to answer it.
“Dad, I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”
“Rory?”
She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the call, only that it was female and panicked.
“Yes?” She took a few steps away from Davidson.
“Rory, it’s Celia Banner. Your father’s assistant.”
“What’s wrong? My dad’s number came up on my phone.”
“I’m calling from his house. Something’s wrong, Rory. He had a heart attack.”
“What?”
“We were supposed to meet for breakfast, he never showed. It’s bad, Rory.”
“How bad?”
The silence was like a vacuum that sucked the words from Rory’s mouth. “Celia! How bad?”
“He’s gone, Rory.”
CHAPTER 4
Chicago, October 14, 2019
IT TOOK A FULL WEEK AFTER THE FUNERAL BEFORE RORY FOUND THE time, and the gumption, to enter her father’s office. Technically, it was her office as well, but since she hadn’t handled a formal case in more than a decade, Rory’s involvement in the Moore Law Group was not immediately evident. Her name was on the letterhead, and she drew a 1099 every year for the limited work she did for her father—mostly research and trial prep—but as her role at the Chicago Police Department and Lane’s Murder Accountability Project demanded more of her attention over the years, the work she did for the firm became less obvious.
Besides Rory’s occasional employment, the Moore Law Group was a one-man firm with two employees—a paralegal and an office administrator. With an anorexic staff and a manageable roster of clients, Rory assumed the dissolution of her father’s law practice would require a bit of time and expertise, but would, ultimately, be conquerable in a couple of weeks of concentrated work. Rory’s law degree, something she earned more than a decade ago, but had never truly put to use, made her the perfect and only candidate to take care of her father’s business affairs. Her mother had passed years before and Rory had no siblings.
Rory entered the building on North Clark Street and rode the elevator to the third floor. She keyed the door and pushed it open. The reception area consisted of a desk in front of tan metal file cabinets straight out of the seventies, and was flanked by two offices. The one on the left was her father’s; the other belonged to the paralegal.
She dropped a week’s worth of mail onto the front desk and headed into her father’s office. Her first order of business would be to shuffle the active cases to other law firms. Once the firm’s docket was cleared, there would be the matter of paying bills and settling payroll for the staff with whatever funds were stashed away. Then Rory could close the lease on the building and shut the place down.
Celia, the office administrator and the one who had discovered her father dead in his home, had agreed to meet at noon to go through the files and help with reassignment. Rory settled her purse on the ground, popped open a Diet Coke, and got started. By noon, a mountain of paperwork surrounded her as she sat at her father’s desk. She had emptied the file 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
