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“I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee,” Natalie said, turning toward the kitchen. She needed just a few more minutes to prepare herself for what was coming.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Casey asked.
“No, I’ve got it. You might see if Buddy needs to go out before we start.”
“He’s a nice dog,” Aaron said, watching as Casey opened the door for Buddy to go out. “Have you had him long?”
“Actually, he’s a stray,” Natalie replied. “He showed up here a few days ago and Casey and I sort of took him in. I have inquiries out to find his previous owners, but so far no one’s called.”
“Hey, maybe Andy needs to investigate the dog, too,” Aaron quipped. When no one laughed, he sighed and sank into a chair.
A few minutes later they were all sitting around the living room with cups of coffee. Natalie held hers because it gave her something to do with her hands, but she barely tasted the hot beverage.
Taking a deep breath, she haltingly told the story of how she’d been fired from her position in Nashville. She confessed that she’d been a workaholic who’d spent nearly every waking moment either at the office or working at home. That she’d seen her efforts pay off when she began to move up in the firm, sometimes ahead of other associates who’d been there longer.
“I didn’t deliberately climb over anyone on my way up,” she added quickly, “and I tried not to make any enemies during the process. But in a fiercely cutthroat and ruthlessly profitable firm like Bennings, Heaton, Schroeder and Merkel, there are always going to be those who resent any accomplishments made by the people the associates regard as competitors.”
“Did you know about the tabloid leaks?” Andrew asked.
She shrugged. “Everyone knew that certain things were showing up in the press that shouldn’t be public knowledge. Everyone was beginning to whisper, wondering if anyone we knew was behind the indiscretions. Some people claimed the leaks couldn’t possibly have come from inside the firm, that the tidbits were being released by outside sources with connections to the clients, themselves. That was what I wanted to believe.”
And then one day three weeks ago, she continued, she had been called into a senior partner’s office and summarily dismissed for “flagrant indiscretions.” Despite her stunned protestations of innocence, she’d been presented with evidence of her guilt. She was fired with the warning that if she said anything about the firm or her reason for leaving, information that would be very embarrassing to the company that prided itself on the privacy it offered its wealthy and high-profile clients, they would aggressively pursue having her publicly disbarred.
She had tried to tell the story without emotion, keeping her voice steady, her expression blank, but apparently she hadn’t hidden her tumultuous feelings from Casey. Sitting beside her on the couch, he reached out to lay a hand on her thigh, just above her knee, his fingers squeezing lightly, supportively.
“What was the evidence you were shown?” Andrew asked, already making notes in a pad he’d brought with him.
“Several photocopies of checks made out in my name from a tabloid reporter. The checks were dated around the same times that the leaks occurred. Needless to say, I never received those checks. Someone had to forge my name to cash them.”
“Where did the senior partner get those photocopies?”
“He said they were provided by an anonymous source. Someone who had stumbled onto the truth and thought it should be brought to light. To me, that ridiculous explanation made it obvious that someone was setting me up to take the blame for the leaks, but Herb just brushed off everything I said. He refused to believe I’d been framed. He called that the oldest excuse in the book.”
“The photocopies of the checks were all the evidence he had?”
“No. There were also copies of e-mails sent from my computer at the firm to that same sleazy reporter. I didn’t send them, but they had my e-mail address on them.”
“Wouldn’t you have noticed if you’d gotten any return e-mail from the reporter?” Aaron asked.
“The e-mails I was shown instructed the guy not to reply to that address. Instead, they said he was to make contact ‘through the usual means,’ whatever that entailed.”
“Did you try to contact that reporter to make him admit he hadn’t been talking to you?” Casey asked.
“He wouldn’t take my calls. Nor would he talk to me when I tried to show up at his door. He said if I continued to try to contact him, he would inform the firm that I was causing trouble.”
“You’ve had more than your share of threats lately,” Casey muttered, and he sounded angry on her behalf.
She nodded. “That was all the so-called evidence my superiors had on me, but it was enough for them to believe I was guilty. And it was an easy solution for them. Get rid of me, sweep any potential scandal under the rug, go on with business as usual.”
“Have you been in touch with any of your former associates?”
She shook her head in response to Andrew’s question. “They act as though I’m in quarantine. If it hadn’t been for Amber, I wouldn’t know what was going on there.”
“Amber?”
“Amber Keller, my former clerical assistant. She’s still there, working for another attorney, Stephen Gilbert, but she calls me every few days to let me know if she’s heard anything. Amber stuck by me. She’s the only one who has believed me from the start.”
“As your assistant, Amber would ha
