Mistress of Justice by Jeffery Deaver Read Free Book Online Page B

all the paralegals, typists, messengers and other support staff. But the case had been in the works for months and the cast of characters at Hubbard, White who’d been involved totaled nearly thirty people. She needed to narrow down the suspects and to get the key entry logs and the time sheets, as Reece had suggested. But to do this, she’d found, you needed to be a registered user and to have a pass code. Carrie Mason, a friend of hers at the firm, was the paralegal who oversaw the billing and time recording system and so Taylor had asked the girl to meet her here after work.
    Taylor now looked at the girl’s Coach attaché case. “You’ve got what I asked for?”
    “I feel like a, you know, spy,” the girl joked, though uneasily. She opened the briefcase and pulled out stacks of computer papers.
    “I wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t important. Are these the door key logs?”
    “Yeah.”
    Taylor sat forward and examined the papers. On top was a copy of the computer key entry ledger for the firm’s front and back doors. Like many Wall Street firms Hubbard, White had installed computer security locks that were activated with ID cards. To enter the firm you had to slide the card through a reader, which sent the information to the central computer. To leave, or to open the door for someone outside, you had only to hit a button inside the firm.
    Taylor read through the information, noting who’d used their keys to get into the firm on Saturday and Sunday morning. There were fifteen people who’d entered on Saturday, two on Sunday.
    “Where’re the time sheet reports?”
    More documents appeared on the table. It was on thesetime sheets that lawyers recorded in exasperating detail exactly how they spent each minute at the firm: which clients they worked for and what tasks they’d performed, when they took personal time during office hours, when they worked on business for the firm that was unrelated to clients.
    Taylor looked through papers and, cross-checking the owner of the key code with the hours billed, learned that fourteen of the fifteen who’d checked in on Saturday morning had billed no more than six hours, which meant they would have left by four or five in the afternoon—a typical pattern for those working weekends: Get the work done early then play on Saturday night.
    The one lawyer who’d remained was Mitchell Reece.
    Flipping to the Sunday key entries, she saw that Reece had returned, as he’d told her, later that morning, at 9:23. But there was an entry
before
that, well before it, in fact. Someone had entered the firm at 1:30 A.M . But the only lawyer for whom there were time sheet entries was Reece.
    Why on earth would somebody come into the firm that late and not do any work?
    Maybe to open the door for a thief who would steal a gazillion-dollar note.
    She flipped through the key assignment file and found that the person who’d entered at 1:30 had been Thomas Sebastian.
    “Sebastian.” Taylor tried to picture him but couldn’t form an image; so many of the young associates looked alike. “What do you know about him?”
    Carrie rolled her eyes. “Gag me. He’s a total party animal. Goes out every night, dates a different girl every week, sometimes two—if you want to call it a date. We went out once and he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”
    “Is he at the firm now, tonight?”
    “When I left, maybe a half hour ago, he was still working. But he’ll probably be going out later. Around ten or eleven. I think he goes to clubs every night.”
    “You know where he hangs out?”
    “There’s a club called The Space.…”
    Taylor said, “Sure, I’ve been there.” She then asked, “Did you bring copies of the time sheet summaries from the
New Amsterdam v. Hanover & Stiver
case?”
    Carrie slid a thick wad of Xerox copies to Taylor, who thumbed through them. These would show how much time each person spent on the case. Those more familiar with the case, Taylor was figuring,