Act of God (8 page)

“If I’d wanted to be a cook,” she often grumbled to herself, usually during the frenzy of getting a meal on the table at the
last minute, “I’d have gone to cooking school instead of law school.”

Dana was every inch her father’s daughter, from her height and her striking features, to her keen intellect and her single-minded
determination to succeed as an attorney. She had cut her teeth on the law in Port Townsend, Washington, watching how it was
practiced by the dedicated crusader for individual rights who was both her idol and her mentor.

“The law is the only thing that keeps us civilized,” Jefferson Reid told her from the time she was old enough to understand.
“Without it, we would have destroyed ourselves a long time ago.”

The eldest of four daughters, and in many ways the son her father never had, Dana was a double graduate of Stanford University,
her father’s alma mater. She began her career by spending two hectic years in the King County prosecutor’s office before joining
the small but prestigious Seattle law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace.

“I don’t have to take this job, you know,” she told her father when she called to discuss the offer with him. “I can come
back to Port Townsend. We could set up that partnership we talked about when I was a kid. Remember—Reid & Reid?”

“Yes, but you’re not a kid anymore,” he replied wisely. “You wouldn’t be happy practicing small-town law. It might suit me
to a tee, but not you, my girl. Not yet, anyway. Right now, there are big-city lights in your eyes and dreams in your head,
and you have to follow them wherever they take you. From everything I hear, Cotter Boland is a top-level firm, doing first-class
work, and it sounds like an offer that’s probably too good for you to pass up.”

She could always count on him to know her better than anyone, probably better even than she knew herself. Port Townsend was
a fine place to have been raised. Dana treasured
the years she had spent there, growing and learning, and she would always think of it as home, but it was undeniably provincial,
and to be honest, dull. Seattle, on the other hand, was the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, and it offered all the
excitement, sophistication, and opportunity she could hope for.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she persisted.

Jefferson Reid, who was very good at reading people, especially his daughter, smiled into the telephone. “I’m sure,” he said.

She took the job.

Eight years later, having devoted herself to her work, at the expense of almost everything else in her life, she was invited
to join the partnership of Cotter Boland and Grace; the first woman to whom such an offer had ever been tendered. She was
thirty-five years old.

“A healthy dose of feminine perspective ought to do this stuffy old place some real good,” Paul Cotter told her. He was then
fifty-eight, and the managing partner of the firm that had been started by his great-grandfather more than a century before.

The first time that Dana took her place at the foot of the huge mahogany conference table, she knew she had achieved what
she had dreamed about since the days when her father had let her play hooky from school and had taken her to court with him,
sat her down in the first row, right behind the defense table, and let her soak it all up.

“Your mother’s a wonderful woman, who has no head for the law,” he would tell her. “So I will share it with you.”

Two years after joining Cotter Boland, Dana married a young attorney who had followed her to Seattle after law school. They
rented a lovely little place near Green Lake and had Molly. But when her husband realized that he had quietly been shuffled
from a dubious first to second and then to third place in Dana’s affections, he headed back to California with an aerobics
instructor who was all boobs, and butt, and teeth. Neither she nor Molly had heard from him since.

It was difficult for Dana, trying to balance the demands of her job with the requirements of single-parenthood, knowing that
Molly usually came out on the short end of the stick. Then one day, when she could no longer avoid thinking about her parents’
roomy house in Port Townsend, and the significantly less hectic schedule of a small-town practice, Sam McAuliffe came into
her life. Sweet, solid Sam, who took over the care and feeding of her and her daughter as though he had been doing it from
the beginning.

He wasn’t handsome, as her first husband had been, nor was he an attorney, which didn’t bother Dana at all. He was a violinist
with the Seattle Symphony, and gave music lessons during the off-season to supplement his income.

It was crazy because they were so very different, and yet they fit together in ways she would never have thought possible.
Best of all, he accepted her ambition and her drive and her passion for her work.

“You need me,” he told her one day when they had known each other for six months. “I can be there for you, and I can be there
for Molly, too, when you have to be somewhere else. I know it could work for us, and I really don’t think you can afford to
pass me up. Besides, I’m in love with both of you.”

His brown hair was thinning at forty-one, he was seriously myopic, and he was what would have been called homely back in her
grandmother’s time. But he had the most beautiful hands she had ever seen and a lopsided grin that spread all over his face
when he was happy. Dana always said it was the grin that got her. But in the end, it was Molly who persuaded her to accept
Sam’s proposal; the girl was only three and she needed a father.

In the six years that had passed since the three of them had married, Dana never once regretted her decision. The little
house they bought on 28th Avenue West in Magnolia was always filled with warmth and laughter and music, and Sam didn’t seem
to care what place he held in her affections.

By the time his forty-seventh birthday came around, Dana was convinced that she had it all perfectly balanced—career, child,
and marriage.

The telephone rang right in the middle of the pancakes.

“Something’s come up,” Paul Cotter said without preamble or apology. “We need you down here right away.”

Cotter Boland and Grace was eminently successful at the practice of law. A modest office by general standards, its seven partners
and nine associates were rarely idle. The firm had long ago earned a reputation for being brilliant, conservative, and pragmatic,
and for honoring diligence over flamboyance. The managing partner and his two-man executive committee, made up of senior partners
Elton Grace and Charles Ramsey, chose their clients with scrupulous care, and rarely accepted a retainer for a case they did
not feel was either possible or appropriate for them to win. They won far more cases than they lost, and few of their clients
ever regretted the high price tag.

The firm worked out of a modest suite of offices on the seventeenth floor of Smith Tower, once renowned for being, at forty-two
stories, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. A number of prominent firms in the city had since relocated to newer,
more fashionable quarters, but Cotter Boland had chosen to stay. The eighty-five-year-old structure boasted marble walls,
an exquisitely carved Indian head ceiling in the lobby, and ancient copper elevators manned by operators who knew every tenant
by name.

Paul Cotter’s office was a spacious corner rectangle that overlooked Puget Sound from one set of windows and the King County
Courthouse from the other. By the time Dana arrived,
speeding all the way down from Magnolia, the rest of the partners were already assembled.

“Glad you were able to join us,” Cotter said, as though his summons had offered a choice, and steered her to the empty chair
beside his own, in a grouping around an exquisite Oriental coffee table. “We waited, of course. We didn’t want to begin without
you.” There was a general murmur of assent.

Dana sat, but with the distinct impression that whether they had waited or not, she was the only one in the room who had no
idea what this was all about. Reacting to Cotter’s tone of voice over the telephone, she had not taken time to change, and
now noticed with some discomfort that all six of the men wore suits and ties as though this were a regular business day. She
tucked her legs in their casual slacks under her chair, and brushed a hand across her flour-streaked nose.

“As I’m sure you’ve already heard, a young naval officer by the name of Latham has been arrested in connection with the bombing
of Hill House,” Cotter continued, turning to her. “We’ve agreed to represent him, and we’d like you to take first chair.”

Dana blinked, clearly stunned. She had of course followed the story from the very beginning, or more accurately, the speculation
in lieu of facts that surrounded the tragedy. And when news of the arrest broke, she found herself listening with a real sense
of satisfaction, even going so far as to offer a private little prayer that the prosecution would be swift and the punishment
totally appropriate. It never dawned on her that her law firm, much less she, herself, might be involved.

Cotter Boland and Grace was a practice that, at least during Dana’s tenure, had always resisted this sort of high-profile
case, far preferring to operate in the background rather than the limelight.

“I wouldn’t have thought this was our kind of thing,” she murmured.

Cotter shifted in his seat. “Normally, it isn’t,” he conceded. “But we’re doing it this time as a favor to a friend.”

Dana nodded slowly, filing this bit of information away for the moment. “And the Navy isn’t grabbing it?”

“Apparently not.”

“So, why do I get the honor?” she inquired with unusual bluntness. “Because abortion is arguably, if not accurately, a woman’s
issue, and I’m the only woman on the letterhead?”

“No, because you’re a first-rate attorney who can do the job,” Cotter replied smoothly. “Of course, I admit we do think having
a woman up front on this one will play a lot better with a jury.”

Dana felt the first stirrings of uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. “I have a relationship with Hill House,” she informed
them. “I’ve been a patient there for over a decade. For goodness sake, my doctor was almost a victim.”

“Almost?”

“He wasn’t injured. He got to the scene just after the explosion. But he’s also a client.”

“In regard to the bombing?”

“No,” Dana conceded. “He’s being sued by a couple over a fertility procedure.”

Cotter took a moment or two to digest this. “I don’t think that constitutes a conflict of interest,” he said at length. He
turned to the other partners. “Do any of you?”

There was a general shaking of heads, and Cotter looked at her and shrugged.

Her stomach stepped up its complaint. “Well then, is this the time to tell you that I’m not exactly pro-life?” she felt impelled
to inquire, looking around the room. “Or that I think the son of a bitch who blew up all those people should burn in hell?”

The six men exchanged startled glances. They had always known Dana to be a well-bred and soft-spoken woman. Paul Cotter cleared
his throat.

“Do you think your personal views would prejudice your client?” he asked.

Yes, she wanted to shout, of course they would. So would any rational person’s. “They never have before,” she said instead,
as her stomach protested.

The managing partner folded his hands in his lap. “Then I see no problem.”

T
he King County Jail was an eight-minute uphill walk from Smith Tower. And Dana walked it as often as possible. In her high-pressured
life, staying in shape was something she had to fit into her schedule.

A solid concrete structure that fronted on Fifth Avenue and occupied the entire city block between James and Jefferson, the
jail reflected an architectural style that could most kindly be described as functional. To add insult to injury, the city
art commission, for some ghastly reason, had thought it appropriate to install a fanciful mosaic tile playground at the building’s
entry, entitled, of all things, Freedom Park.

The twelve-story, full-service facility, completed in 1985, had been designed to house just under eleven hundred inmates.
It was currently operating with more than twice that number.

Dana crossed the absurd park, and with a deep sigh, pushed her way through the entrance doors. At the security gate, she exchanged
her bar card for an ID pass, and was directed to the Number 2 elevator, which took her nonstop to the eleventh floor, and
from there to a private interview room.

The room, which more closely resembled a closet, was an irregularly shaped, windowless space with concrete block walls, one
of which was painted a garish purple for no discernible purpose, and a steel door with one vertical, four-by-twenty-four-inch
tempered glass opening. The cramped area held a small metal table, connected to a chair on either side of it, and bolted to
the floor.

Ordinarily, attorneys and their clients met in the public visiting room, and spoke to each other by telephone from either
side of a thick Plexiglas panel. But certain law firms that had influence in the city, or were handling a particularly high-profile
case, could arrange to meet with their clients separately. Cotter Boland had both, and had no problem obtaining the private
room.