Bodily Harm (8 page)

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull the plug, Anne.”

LeRoy continued to flip the pages, searching for the section in which she quoted the expert from Cleveland. “He was extremely helpful—”

“Anne.”

LeRoy stopped flipping the pages and looked up. Specks of dry skin and dust covered the lenses of Payne’s glasses.

“More budget cuts have left us with just no money to be doing independent investigations.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“But . . . but you told me to do it. And I’m nearly done. All I have to do is finalize it.”

Payne shook his head.

“The expert in Cleveland said the danger isn’t in a child swallowing one magnet. The danger is if they swallow more than one. He said—”

“I need you to work on a potential enforcement action against TBD.”

LeRoy knew TBD to be a manufacturer of detergent, and that there had been recent reports of the product causing chemical burns.

“TBD? That’s a waste of time; it will go nowhere.” She caught herself, not believing what she had just said to her boss.

But if Payne was upset he didn’t reveal it. He looked almost bored. “Nevertheless.”

“I’ll finish it on my own time; I’ll write it up at home.”

He shook his head. “I know you worked hard on this investigation.”

“Hard? I’ve spent three solid months on it. I thought it was going to be part of the congressional hearing? How can you just pull the plug? What about Senator Tovey?”

“It’s out of my hands, I’m afraid.”

“Is it Maggie Powers?”

“I’d like you to provide me with all of your research and any drafts you have on your computer. If we get the funding in the future perhaps we can pursue it further.”

“But it will be too late. The problem is already out there, and the Senate hearing will have passed. Most doctors don’t even consider X-rays because eighty percent of the things a child swallows will just pass through their system. But when you have two—”

“I’m sorry,” he offered again.

She became more adamant. “Don’t you want to hear what the doctor in Cleveland said? There is a significant danger to American consumers, to children.”

“I’ll need all of your files on my desk by this afternoon.”

“We could take it to the media.”

Payne pounded the desk, a burst of anger that caused LeRoy to jump back in her seat.

His gaze focused and his face had flushed an even darker shade of red. “You will do no such thing. Do you understand me?” He tapped the desk with his finger as he spoke. “You work for me. That means you do what I tell you. Your work here belongs to this agency. It’s proprietary. If you release an unauthorized report I will see that you are fired and that the Justice Department prosecutes you to the fullest extent of the law. Do you understand me?”

LeRoy’s lower lip quivered, but she fought back the tears. A stabbing pain pierced her, exactly where she would have expected, just between the shoulder blades.

LEROY HURRIED BACK to her cubicle and began to dump the contents of her desk drawers into the cardboard box she found in the supply closet, pausing briefly to dab her eyes with a tissue. She wasn’t bothering to organize her belongings. She didn’t care. Pens and pencils mixed with paper clips and scraps of paper. She grabbed the picture frame with the photo of her former boyfriend, over which she had drawn a bull’s-eye in permanent marker, and tossed it in with a snow globe from Fort Lauderdale. A tear trickled from the corner of her eye but she quickly wiped it away, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction.

“You’re upset, Anne. Take a minute to think about this.” Peggy Seeley stood outside her cubicle, alternately trying to calm LeRoy and to ask her further questions.

“There’s nothing to think about. This is a waste of my time.”

“Did he say why he was pulling the plug?”

“He said they didn’t have the funds.”

“Well, that’s probably true,” Seeley said.

LeRoy stopped what she was doing. “Then why did he bother to have me pursue it at all?” she countered. “What a colossal waste of time. It’s exactly as everyone said it would be.”

“Calm down. Don’t make any rash decisions.”

LeRoy didn’t want to hear it, especially not from Seeley, who didn’t even like to order food in a restaurant unless she could see the cook making it. The two had little in common except their jobs. Seeley was overweight and didn’t care. LeRoy worked out daily to try to keep her weight at an even 120 pounds. At twenty-nine, Seeley wore no makeup, wire-rimmed glasses, and did little but brush her light brown hair that extended to the middle of her back. LeRoy wasn’t a fashion princess by any stretch of the imagination, but she did take a few minutes each morning to apply basic makeup. She suspected their friendship would fizzle after she had left the agency.

“‘Rash’? The only rash decision I made was taking a job at this shithole in the first place.”

“Thanks for that.”

“We don’t get paid squat. We’re not appreciated, and he just confirmed that we serve no purpose. What’s the point?”

“This isn’t exactly the best economy to be out looking for a job.”

“I don’t care. I’ll work in a restaurant again before I stay here another day.”

“Give it a day or two. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“Trust me; he’s not changing his mind. When I pushed him on it he pounded his fist on the desk and—”

“
Albert
pounded his fist? Are you sure you were in the right office?”

The staff had often joked that Payne’s bland demeanor and passive nature were the result of twenty-five years of boredom
that had desensitized him. The man had to be desensitized to put up with all the bureaucratic bullshit for so long. LeRoy wasn’t about to suffer the same fate. Though she had been optimistic about the new administration, she wouldn’t sit around and wait to find out if things really would change.

“He looked like a thermometer popping out from a cooked turkey. I thought his head was going to explode.”

LeRoy pulled out a memory stick from her backpack, shoved it into a UBS port on her computer, and sat at the keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Seeley asked.

“I’m not done with this, not after all the time I’ve invested.”

“You can’t take your work; it’s proprietary.”

“They’re not going to get away with this.”

“Who?”

“The agency, Powers, whoever is behind pulling the plug.”

“You’re going to get yourself in trouble, Anne, and for what? Didn’t you learn anything working around here? You just said it, people don’t care. Nobody cares.”

“I care.”

Seeley’s eyes widened. “Well, whatever you’re going to do, you better do it fast because Payne just walked around the corner in this direction and he’s bringing a security guard with him.”

LEWIS COUNTY COURTHOUSE
CHEHALIS, WASHINGTON

PERPLEXED, SLOANE DOUBLE-CHECKED the spelling with the article clipped in Kyle Horgan’s file and retyped the name, but the computer again indicated no match.

He approached the clerk’s window of the Lewis County Courthouse, located about twenty minutes from Mossylog. A
middle-aged woman with reading glasses dangling from a colorful beaded chain around her neck sat behind the glass.

“I was wondering if you might be able to help me. I’m a bit of a computer dinosaur,” Sloane said.

“I’m with you,” the woman replied, smiling up at him. “But I can try.”

“I’m looking for the name of the attorney who represented a young boy who recently died in Mossylog.”

“Mateo Gallegos,” the woman said without hesitation. “It was in the papers. He got an infection from a rusted nail. It was so sad. Cute little guy.”

“A rusted nail?”

“That’s what I heard. The family didn’t have insurance, so they waited to bring him to the hospital, and by that time it was too late. We get that here with the migrant workers.”

The information puzzled Sloane further. “So do you know if there was a lawsuit?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, “but I heard that Dayron Moore was their attorney.”

Sloane retrieved a pen attached to a chain glued to the counter and wrote down the name. “Darren?”

“Day-ron.” She wrote the name on a slip of paper despite three-inch-long red nails adorned with stars and moons and handed it to him. “Day-ron.”

“Interesting name.”

“Wait until you meet him.”

“You know him?”

“Everyone knows Dayron around here. He’s here so often he could do my job.”

“He files a lot of lawsuits?”

“He files his share.”

Which made it even more perplexing that Moore had
apparently not filed a lawsuit in this particular instance. “Does he handle a lot of personal injury cases?”

“Dayron does anything that walks in the door, has a heartbeat, and can pay fifteen hundred dollars up front.”

Sloane pointed to the computer terminals. “So I gather that if I type in his name it will bring up a list of his cases?”

The clerk smiled back at him. “Sure. But be prepared to sit there for a while.”

HALF AN HOUR after leaving the courthouse, Sloane got out of his car and walked the block but could not find the address on State Street in Mossylog. He stepped into Smokey’s House of Billiards on the corner to ask for help. The man behind the bar pointed to a small sign on the wall at the back of the building that said
LAW OFFICE
. A bent arrow directed anyone interested up a narrow staircase. Dayron Moore likely didn’t get many walk-ins.

As the clerk had warned, Sloane’s search using the attorney’s name pulled up a long list. Scrolling through the cases, Sloane had quickly deduced that most of Moore’s clients had Hispanic surnames. Clicking on a few of those particular cases he found a paucity of pleadings after the initial complaint. That meant Moore routinely settled, and quickly, which gave Sloane a pretty good idea about Dayron Moore the lawyer.

At the top of the stairs Sloane stepped into an office and instinctively ducked. He estimated the rectangular tiles and fluorescent lighting to be about a foot lower than a standard eight-foot ceiling, though it felt just inches from the top of Sloane’s head and made the man who stood from his seat behind a laminated wood desk look even more peculiar. Perhaps five six and dressed in a light blue, short-sleeved polo shirt and black slacks that bunched
at his shoes despite being hitched well above his waist, Dayron Moore was as round as a Kewpie doll.

“Can I help you?” Moore looked and sounded surprised to see someone in his office. He spoke in a high-pitched voice from behind a bushy white mustache that extended over his upper lip.

After confirming the man to be Dayron Moore, Sloane said, “I’d like to speak to you about a potential legal matter.”

Rather than offer Sloane a chair, Moore asked, “You from around here?”

“Seattle, actually.”

Moore ran a hand through a shock of white hair, wisps of which stuck out over his ears. “What brings you down here, Mr. . . . ?”

“Sloane, David Sloane.” Sloane motioned to a chair. “May I?”

Moore’s eyes narrowed, but he wobbled back behind his desk, much of which was taken up by an antiquated computer screen that matched the office decor, which had not been upgraded since the 1960s. The desk, credenza, and walls were a cheap wood laminate, and Sloane sat in one of two matching lime green cloth chairs. Two diplomas hung framed on the wall behind Moore, but Sloane did not recognize either school.

“I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time,” Sloane said. He detected a recently applied coating of very strong aftershave which, along with blotchy red cheeks and a bulbous nose traced by several broken blood vessels, indicated Moore had just drunk most of his lunch and likely did so often.

“What can I do you for?” Moore asked.

“I have a client in Seattle who has something in common with one of your former clients,” Sloane said, telling the truth.

“You’re an attorney?” Moore sounded immediately deflated.

“Your client was Mateo Gallegos.”

Moore’s eyebrows inched closer and the suspicion returned to his voice. “What about him?”

“My client’s son recently died after running a very high fever and suffering flulike symptoms. The family kept the boy home and tried to hydrate him, but by the time they got him to the hospital the kid had a massive infection and died.”

Moore offered no condolences. “What’d the coroner say?”

“There wasn’t an autopsy. The boy was older than five so the state didn’t mandate it.”

“Was the body cremated?”

“No.”

Moore sat back, rubbing his mustache but offering nothing further.

“I just spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Gallegos,” Sloane said, continuing to tell the truth. “I wanted to talk to you about Kendall Toys.”

Moore flushed beet red. “They weren’t supposed to say anything about that. All of that is confidential.”

Sloane had played a hunch and Moore’s response confirmed that the lawyer had settled the Gallegos case without ever even filing a lawsuit. Sloane had no idea why Kendall would settle a suit in which a boy had fallen on a rusty nail, but then he had been skeptical of the clerk’s understanding of the case. Recalling something else the clerk had told him, Sloane said, “I’d be willing to put up a retainer if that helps. I just want to see the family taken care of.”

Moore calmed at the mention of money. “You don’t want to represent them?”

“It’s not really my area of expertise. Besides, I don’t even know if they have a case; it sounds like you’ve already gone down this road.”

“Did they get one of the toys?”

The question caught Sloane momentarily off guard but he recovered to ask, “Metamorphis?”

“That’s the one.” Moore perked up considerably, retrieved a business card from his desk drawer, and held it across the desk. “Have the family give me a call to set up an appointment. Ordinarily I work strictly contingency, but for this I’ll need a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

Sloane whistled. “That much?”

“This is a big case.”

“You think?”

Moore nodded. “Of course you know that I can’t breach the confidentiality of a settlement agreement.”

“Of course.”