The Big Fear by Andrew Case Read Free Book Online

hundred tabs and each tab was set in perfect order. The labels on the covers and spines were precisely placed — EHA Investments, Internal Investigation, a date, a volume number. Most likely the paralegal had been scolded once after a label was found to be a half-inch off of perfect center. After that the kid had started using a ruler. In city government, when you want a binder of documents, what you get is a stack of loose paper and a level two admin who can show you that three hole punching and inserting tabs is nowhere to be found in her Tasks and Standards. And she has a copy handy if you’d like to look. In the public sector, everyone is her own assistant.
    From the moment she had walked into the law firm, Davenport had learned that the paperwork, the binders, and the Post-its would always be precise and perfect. After all, there was an anonymous horde being well-paid to make sure. A few weeks ago, when she’d toured the place, when there was still some committee or other that was deciding her fate, they had shown her all of the various departments—office services, proofreading, three or four different kinds of “support” for tasks Davenport didn’t know existed. All that had sunk in was that she wouldn’t have to do anything that felt like work anymore. She would only be asked to do the thinking. She had met then with the team of junior attorneys, the people who would be sifting through the thirty thousand or so e-mails that were potentially relevant and come up with a few thousand that she was going to have to look at. The people who had gone through the four hundred and fifty thousand e-mails on EHA Investment’s actual servers, and who had culled that down to thirty thousand for the law firm, were anonymous contract attorneys working in off-site basements. Davenport didn’t even get introduced to them.
    Davenport sat down and tugged at the first binder. This was her job now, to look through a few thousand carefully curated e-mails and see if she could find someone at a minor little investment house worth sending off to prison. But it was a quiet comfortable existence, and she smiled at the knowledge that she would never again be sweltering at DIMAC, making her own copies and taking lip from the general public. The office was a perfect sixty-eight degrees even though it was still broiling outside. She had a pristine view of the oversized marble woman rinsing her hair in MOMA’s manicured sculpture garden forty stories below.
    EHA Investments had come to the firm. Some broad worries. Some concerns about trading patterns. But not even enough to get them focused properly. Maybe that had been the holdup. Maybe it hadn’t been the law firm at all. They had been waiting until they felt they had no choice but to submit to the investigation. They were very eager and wanted the help, but they were much less straightforward than most of these corporate clients as to what exactly they thought she would find. Usually what these places want is clear enough. They have already found some employee that would make a good sacrifice. Find out everything he did, and prove that no one else knew about it so we can wash our hands of him. But EHA Investments hadn’t given her a target. They had only given her worry. And that set off red flags, because that meant the target could be anyone.
    The firm had taken Davenport on but hadn’t really included her. She had a reputation after her work at DIMAC, but she knew she wouldn’t be fully welcome yet. She had done her prosecuting for the city government, which the white-shoe guys all thought of as a little dirty and a lot cheap. They themselves had all been prosecutors, but they had served their stints at one US Attorney’s office or another. They got to give lip back to the federal prosecutor, if push ever came to shove.
    Opened, the binders smelled like fourth grade. No amount of money could keep a black office binder from looking and feeling like a piece of cardboard with a