The Insider (2 page)

Determined to find a quiet place to work and escape the phone, Will picked up a notepad and went down the hallway to the firm's law library to review some Delaware Chancery Court cases on fiduciary duty. Will doubted that Ben would find him there. In this age of online research, hardly anyone visited the law library.

He pulled a musty
Delaware Reporter
from the shelf and was halfway through
Axelrod v. Titanium Investments
when he heard a door slam on the other side of the floor. Will wasn't the only early riser today. Probably some first-year associate desperate to impress.

Will heard heavy footsteps, possibly more than one person. He tried craning his neck to peer down the hallway, but he didn't have the proper angle to see who it was.

A half hour later, Will went back to his office to locate some notes. After finding the notepad in one of the many piles of paper on the floor behind his desk, Will looked up and saw Ben Fisher.

Outside his window.

Thirty-eight floors up.

Plummeting.

He recognized Ben immediately by his lanky frame and close-cropped red hair. He even recognized the yellow striped tie that fluttered behind Ben like a cry for help.

The figure passed by the window so fast that he thought for a moment that he might have imagined it.

Will spun around reflexively in his desk chair, searching in vain for someone to confirm what he had just seen. Then he dashed out of the office, pausing only to fish the security card from his jacket pocket so that he could open the secure doors. Will ran through the empty lobby to the elevators. As the elevator descended, Will stared at the floor numbers as they ticked down like a launch sequence.

It didn't seem possible that Ben had committed suicide. After all, he was a tax attorney. Far too buttoned down for such a melodramatic gesture. On the other hand, it was difficult to erase the split-second image of Ben, like one of those Robert Longo paintings of men in business suits writhing in empty space, ripped out of context. The Falling Man.

But maybe he had not really seen Ben at all. Maybe his subconscious had taken a familiar image from that morning, prompted by the annoying phone calls, and slapped it on a bit of visual input that was otherwise incomprehensible. But even if it wasn't Ben, Will knew that he had seen someone falling past his window.

When he reached the lobby, a crowd had already gathered on the sidewalk around the splayed figure. His pants were shredded below the knee by fractured shinbones, which had torn through the fabric in sickening white and red. He must have hit the sidewalk feet first.

Ambulances arrived and the crowd was pushed back, widening the perimeter. A paramedic turned the body over, and before a blanket was drawn over the face, he saw smashed, bloodied features that were still recognizable. It was Ben.

The paramedic went through the motions of checking for a pulse. Heralded by the blurt of a siren, two uniformed policemen arrived.

Why aren't they taking away the body?
Will thought. The paramedics and the police now seemed to be concentrating their energies on crowd control.

He heard people sobbing around him. A couple of secretaries from his firm were crying into their cell phones. Soon the crowd was filled with Reynolds Fincher attorneys and staff.

Someone touched him on the shoulder. “Are you okay?” Will snapped out of his daze to see Peggy Loo, who worked in the firm's Office Services department, standing next to him.

He then realized that three different people had asked him that question in the past ten minutes. Apparently, he looked like someone who was not okay.

“Yeah, I guess,” Will replied. “Are you okay?”

Peggy nodded, a little uncertainly. “Did you know him very well?”

“Not really.” Will knew only a few things about Ben, despite years of making small talk: he was single, a marathon runner, and a film buff.

“Why would he do this?” Peggy asked, as if she expected an answer.

“Just last week he told me that he was planning to run a marathon in Seattle. He was trying to break three hours,” Will said.

“I saw him yesterday in the hallway,” Peggy said, her voice starting to break. “I didn't even know him, really. He just . . . He just seemed . . .” Peggy started to cry.

Will put his arm around her as she sobbed. After a few minutes, a secretary who was one of Peggy's friends led her away, saying, “We should go. We need to go.”

Will drew a little closer to the edge of the crowd around the body. Part of him wanted to run away from the crumpled man in the suit, from the bright red blood and the jagged shards of exposed bone. But he found himself staring nonetheless, trying to understand something that refused to be understood.

Then he saw it.

Next to Ben's bloodied right hand on the pavement lay a white plastic security access card for the office building. A cord woven with blue and green strands was threaded through a hole in the card. That was how Will knew that Ben had been holding Will's own access card. The blue and green cord had once held his name tag at a corporate law conference. The card was slightly warped—Will had once left it in a pants pocket and run it through a dryer.

Will had used the card that morning, swiping it on the pad at the front desk in the building's lobby. How could Ben have gotten it?

Then Will remembered that when he had gone to the library, he had left the card in the pocket of his suit jacket, hanging over a chair in his office. The blue and green cord had been dangling from the pocket.

As he stared at the access card, the full implications of what he was seeing came to him. Each access card was registered to an employee and created a record of where workers went in the building. Sooner or later, the police would figure out that Ben was using Will's access card as they attempted to track Ben's movements before his death. Will had clearly used that access card when he entered the building at six thirty—the guard at the front desk would verify that. Given those facts, anyone would assume that Will and Ben had met that morning in the office. If Will told the truth, that he had never seen Ben, no one would believe him. His story would seem even more implausible when the police learned that Ben had placed two calls to Will's office in the half hour before his death.

It dawned on Will that Ben's death might be a murder, not a suicide. Worse yet, someone seemed to be trying to cast suspicion on him.

As Will reached into his pants pocket, he already knew what he was going to find there. He removed the white plastic access card that he had used in his hurried exit from the building. There was no doubt in his mind that it had belonged to Ben Fisher.

When he returned to his office, Will placed a phone call to the police to report the switched access cards. The officer taking the call seemed distracted at first, but was quite attentive by the time Will had finished his story. “We'll send someone to your office to take your statement,” the officer said. “Don't go anywhere.”

Part of him had wanted to keep quiet because he knew that the police would immediately view him as a suspect. But he figured that they would eventually figure it out anyway, and, after all, he had done nothing wrong. While waiting for the police to arrive, Will tried to resume his work, hoping to put some psychic distance between himself and the events of the morning.

Within three hours of Ben's death, an e-mail appeared in his inbox from Don Rubinowski, the firm's managing partner:

Will replied that he would begin reviewing the files immediately. He was not about to say no to the managing partner when he was on the brink of partnership, especially not on a deal like this one. Jupiter Software was the world's leading encryption software company, and it was being acquired by Pearl Systems, the top maker of desktop computers, in a transaction that would change the landscape of the technology industry. It was the sort of deal that could make or break an attorney's career.

Around two P.M., he looked up from a conference call to see a tall man in a baggy blue-black sport coat standing in the doorway to his office. With a quizzical expression and a bit of sign language, the man asked if he could enter. Will nodded, and the visitor took a seat in front of his desk. Will gestured to indicate that the call was winding up.

If this was what a police detective looked like, it was not quite what he had been expecting. The stranger had a long, oval face, heavy eyelids, close-cropped black hair that was graying at the temples, and a mouth that seemed to naturally twist into a frown. He was unself-consciously examining the contents of Will's desk and bookshelves.

After waiting a couple of minutes for Will to extricate himself from his phone call, the visitor removed something from his jacket and slid it across Will's desk. It was the gold badge of a San Francisco Police Department detective.

“I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call you back,” Will said, hanging up without waiting for a response.

“Sorry for the interruption,” the visitor said in a rumbling baritone that, if it were one octave lower, would have been subsonic. “Detective Lazlo Kovach, San Francisco Police Department.”

Will hoped the panic didn't show on his face. “No problem, Detective. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No problem.” Detective Kovach once more glanced at the books on Will's shelves. “You're a corporate attorney?”

“Yes, that's right.” Will braced for the next question, which he was certain would involve Ben Fisher.

“I have a question for you, if you don't mind. I have a little business I operate on the side, selling first-edition books on eBay. My specialty is crime and detective fiction.”

“Very appropriate.”

“I know, I know. I found a nearly pristine first edition of Ross McDonald's
The Galton Case
at a garage sale last month—you could have knocked me over. So, now my little business is starting to take off. I've even bought a climate-controlled storage locker for the books because there wasn't any more room in my house. So what I wanted to ask you is . . . do you think I should incorporate?”

“I wasn't expecting that one,” Will said with a nervous laugh. “Incorporating is probably a good idea. It sounds like it's more than a hobby for you at this point. Having a corporation will protect your personal assets if there's a lawsuit or the business becomes insolvent.”

“Thanks. I appreciate the free advice. It is free, right?”

“On the house,” Will said, growing more comfortable, despite his knowledge that this was an obvious ploy to put him at ease.

“So we should probably get to it. My partner and I are here today talking to several of the people who worked with Ben Fisher. I understand that you called in.”

“Yes. I actually saw him fall past my window.”

“Horrible,” Detective Kovach said with a shake of his head. “It must be hard to carry on with your day after something like that.”

“Yes, it is. So what can I do to help?” He suddenly felt like one of those cheesily suave criminal masterminds in an episode of
Columbo
, a role that would be played by Jack Cassidy or perhaps Robert Culp. They always tried to appear so casual when Columbo arrived at their offices to ask a few questions, yet they all met the same fate by the final commercial break. He had to remind himself that he had no reason to feel guilty because he had not committed any crime.

“How long had you known Mr. Fisher?”

“About six years. We came up through the ranks together at the firm. Worked together pretty regularly.”

“And you were both up for partner, weren't you? Were you competitive?”

“No. We were friends. Maybe not really close friends, but friends.”

“But not everyone can make partner. That must have caused some tension.”

“Not really. There are other associates here that are very cutthroat about that sort of thing, but Ben wasn't one of them.”

“Were you currently working on any projects together?”

“Ben was providing the tax advice on a merger transaction that I was working on.”

“Which one?”

“I'd prefer not to say, if that's all right. The transaction involves a public company and it hasn't been announced.”

“I understand, but this is a homicide investigation, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist. Don't worry, cops don't make enough money to invest anyway.”

“It was the merger of Boston Technologies with Davionics. They make navigation systems for the aviation industry.”

“And did you see Ben this morning?” The detective paused. “Other than when he was falling from the roof.”

“No.”

“Did you talk to him on the phone?”

“No, but he tried to call me twice this morning. He probably knew I was in the office early and wanted to talk about the Boston Technologies deal.”

“How do you know it was Ben who called?”

Will pointed at his phone. “There's a display. I saw his name flash both times.”