Gray Mountain Read Free Page A

Justice. If her parents fought, Samantha was not aware of it; her father was simply never at home. At some point, no one would ever know exactly when, a young and pretty paralegalentered the picture and Marshall took the plunge. The fling became an affair, then a romance, and after a couple of years Karen Kofer was suspicious. She confronted her husband, who lied at first but soon admitted the truth. He wanted a divorce; he’d found the love of his life.
    Coincidentally, at about the same time Marshall was complicating his family life, he made a few other bad decisions. One involved a scheme to take a large fee offshore. A United Asia Airlines jumbo jet had crashed on Sri Lanka, with forty Americans on board. There were no survivors, and, true to form, Marshall Kofer got there before anyone else. During the settlement negotiations, he set up a series of shell companies throughout the Caribbean and Asia to route, reroute, and outright hide his substantial fees.
    Samantha had a thick file with newspaper accounts and investigative reports of her father’s rather clumsy attempt at corruption. It would make a compelling book, but she had no interest in writing it. He got caught, humiliated, embarrassed on the front page, convicted, disbarred, and sent to prison for three years. He was paroled two weeks before she graduated from Georgetown. These days, Marshall worked as a consultant of some variety in a small office in the old section of Alexandria. According to him, he advised other plaintiffs’ lawyers on mass tort cases but was always vague with the details. Samantha was convinced, as was her mother, that Marshall had managed to bury a pile of loot somewhere in the Caribbean. Karen had stopped looking.
    Though Marshall would always suspect it and Karen would always deny it, he had a hunch his ex-wife had a finger in his criminal prosecution. She had rank at Justice, plenty of it, and lots of friends.
    “Dad, I got fired,” she said softly into her cell. The coffee shop was empty but the barista was close by.
    “Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry,” Marshall said. “Tell me what happened.”
    As far as she could tell, her father had learned only one thing in prison. Not humility, nor patience, nor understanding, nor forgiveness, nor any of the standard attributes one picks up after sucha humiliating fall. He was just as wired and ambitious as before, still eager to tackle each day and run over anyone stalling in front of him. For some reason, though, Marshall Kofer had learned to listen, at least to his daughter. She replayed the narrative slowly, and he hung on every word. She assured him she would be fine. At one point he sounded as if he might cry.
    Normally, he would have made snide comments about the way she chose to pursue the law. He hated big firms because he had fought them for years. He viewed them as mere corporations, not partnerships with real lawyers fighting for their clients. He had a soapbox from which he could deliver a dozen sermons on the evils of Big Law. Samantha had heard every one of them and was in no mood to hear them again.
    “Shall I come see you, Sam?” he asked. “I can be there in three hours.”
    “Thanks, but no. Not yet. Give me a day or so. I need a break and I’m thinking about getting out of the city for a few days.”
    “I’ll come and get you.”
    “Maybe, but not now. I’m fine, Dad, I swear.”
    “No you’re not. You need your father.”
    It was still odd to hear this from a man who had been absent for the first twenty years of her life. At least he was trying, though.
    “Thanks, Dad. I’ll call later.”
    “Let’s take a trip, find a beach somewhere and drink rum.”
    She had to laugh because they had never taken a trip together, not just the two of them. There had been a few hurried vacations when she was a kid, typical trips to the cities of Europe, almost always cut short by pressing business back home. The idea of hanging out on a beach with her father was not immediately