Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken by Melissa F. Miller Page B

craft a sound bite for the reporter. After she’d provided the quote and gotten the reporter’s contact information, Sasha turned to Greg, who had been silent since Naya had broken the news of Clarissa’s murder.
    “So, I guess this is helpful news for our defense,” she said, ignoring the self-loathing that came with those words.
    Greg, his head down, mumbled something at the table.
    “I’m sorry,” Sasha said, “I didn’t catch that.”
    He raised his head and repeated, “I said, I have to go.”
    “Why?”
    He cleared his throat and hesitated, then said, “Because Nick Costopolous is asleep in my guest room. I need to break the news to him that his wife is dead.”
    Sasha didn’t want to—knew she shouldn’t—but heard herself ask, “Why is Nick at your house?”
    Greg looked her straight in the eye and said, “Last night, Clarissa had divorce papers served on him while he was at his club. He tried to call her but she didn’t answer her phone. When he left the club to go home, his key didn’t fit in the lock. Apparently, that sneaky little bitch had gotten the locks changed.”
    “So, how’d he end up at your house?” Naya asked.
    “We’re friends. I mean, the girls were friends, so we sort of just ended up pals. Me, Nick, Tanner Landry.”
    “Nick called you?”
    Greg nodded. “Right. He was crying and slurring. He’d been drinking. I told him to call a cab and come over. He didn’t. That big idiot drove his truck, but he came over and passed out on my couch. Around two a.m., I woke him up and set him up in the guest room. When I left this morning, I could hear him snoring in there. Anyway, I have to go. He’s going to lose it when he hears about this.”
    Greg pushed back his chair and stood with his feet planted hip-distance apart, as if he expected someone to try to stop him. No one did.
    “Call Naya to reschedule, though, Greg. We need to get a cohesive story in place,” Sasha said as he started for the door. She added, “And please give Mr. Costopolous my condolences.”
    He nodded and walked out.
    As soon as the door banged shut behind him, Sasha turned to Larry and Naya.
    “Clarissa’s death could give credence to Prescott & Talbott’s idiotic theory that someone is killing female partners to make the firm look bad. But, if Greg and Nick are buddies, that also could lend itself to a theory that they had some kind of pact or something to kill their wives. Especially since Nick was just served with divorce papers, too,” Sasha said, working through this new development, trying to decide if it was a net positive or negative for her case.
    Naya jabbed a finger in Sasha’s direction. “What makes you so sure they didn’t have a pact?”
     

 
     
    CHAPTER 21
     
    Caroline scraped her teeth across her bottom lip even though she knew she was leaving tooth marks in her lipstick. She was trying to decide how to get Mr. Prescott to stop poking around in the filing cabinets and tell her what he needed. She realized many of the attorneys whispered about her boss’s personal quirks and lack of legal acumen, but she had always enjoyed working for him. He was a boss who understood his place.
    Unlike so many of the younger attorneys, he didn’t insist on doing his own word processing, entering his own time entries into the electronic system, or drafting his correspondence on his own. No, he dictated all of his documents—mainly, she thought to show off the fact that his assistant knew shorthand.
    Equally important, he didn’t burden her with endless personal errands. She selected his wife’s birthday, Christmas, and anniversary gifts and had the jeweler wrap them. That was the extent of it.
    Some of the other senior partners were, in her view, far out of bounds in the requests they made of their secretaries. Marco DeAngeles, for instance, not only had his secretary fire his children’s nanny, but required her to interview and select the replacement. And Lettie Conrad had recently