Glass House by Patrick Reinken Read Free Book Online Page A

its
end, and the water came on. It drove Anthony back in the chair, the
power of it pushing the water until it jetted out from his mouth
and ran from his nose and leaked from his ears.
    They were drowning him. In a chair that was
bolted into the middle of a barren room, in a desert corner of the
country that was ten miles from any body of water deep enough to
kill, the two men were drowning Anthony Dikembé.
    Rupert pulled the good and solid pink from
his pocket again. He rolled it in his palm, alternating his glances
between the rough but beautiful stone and the man who was dying in
front of him.
    Blood began to drain from Anthony’s mouth.
It wasn’t like what seeped from the gashes that the cords had cut
into his wrists. It wasn’t like the spider-web spit, with its hint
of cotton candy pink color.
    It was somewhere in between, a red tint that
had been deep but now was washed pale by the water.
    Rupert was thinking of that color as he eyed
the pink. He lifted it toward the room’s weak light and felt his
heart pick up a bit.
    Even here, he thought. That color
is fantastic even here . He knew it would be ear-marked for some
particularly valuable, and lucky, customer.
    Rupert returned the pink to his pocket. He
passed the man with the hose, and he passed the man who was dying
in the chair. He didn’t look back.

Chapter 6
    Two
Sides
    The file in the matter of Landry v.
Waldoch & DMW Holdings arrived two days after Megan Davis’s
meeting with Jeremy Waldoch. Megan was just starting to worry about
what she’d gotten herself into when the messenger wheeled it
in.
    Then she started worrying about what she’d
gotten herself into anyway.
    She’d reserved a conference room. It was a
small one, and the file filled it.
    Four binders of pleadings were on the table
in the center, all of them fat, their sides bulging. Three more
equal-sized binders of correspondence were beside those, and twelve
boxes of discovery were set against the wall, nine of them labeled
“Documents.” “Research” was scrawled on a tenth box in the heavy
black lines of permanent marker.
    Megan opened the first of the document
boxes. The pages were stacked, stapled, and rubber-banded. The
documents were a fresh copy that was so neatly put together it
couldn’t have been looked at. It probably was prepared by Waldoch’s
previous counsel, solely to provide to Megan. They’d have kept
their own set, for no other reason than making sure they could
prove all the work they’d done if need be.
    She read the production number that was
stamped on the first page of the set of documents on top, then
emptied the box and found the number for the last page of the set
at the bottom. The box included pages 6023 through 8514. Each of
the others would contain about the same amount, roughly 2500
sheets. For nine boxes, that was almost 23,000 pages of material,
most of it likely from DMW and Jeremy Waldoch.
    Another box contained transcripts of
depositions, the formal reporting of witness testimony taken during
a civil action’s discovery process. Megan counted five depositions
in all, with four of those for people she didn’t yet know by name.
She pulled the fifth, the deposition of Plaintiff Kathleen Landry,
and settled herself in a chair at the table.
    Megan looked through the first few pages,
then turned more hurriedly through the rest. The deposition had
gone most of a day, and the transcript was long, but it seemed
straightforward enough.
    Allegations and facts in sexual harassment
cases can be startling and distinct, but they follow a general
pattern. They’re typically either inappropriate touches or
offensive comments or propositions of various kinds, or they’re
sexual relationships that went south and pissed any number of
people off in the process – whoever was involved, co-workers,
spouses, you name it.
    This one didn’t seem much different.
    Skimming over the questions and answers and
jumping back and forth through the transcript, Megan saw