Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken Read Free Page B

little girl. We’ve met at a few Prescott parties. Anyway, they told me you’d be calling.”
    Sasha invested considerable energy in not thinking of herself as a tiny little girl, but she had to admit the description was accurate.  At just under five feet tall and around one hundred pounds, she was rarely anything other than the smallest person in the room, unless she was babysitting her nieces and nephews. And, even then, at eight years old, Liam was gaining on her.
    She viewed her diminutive size as a competitive advantage, though. People tended to underestimate her. It was as though they expected her to be weak or childlike just because she was small. Opposing attorneys sometimes failed to adequately prepare when they squared off against her for the first time. They were always prepared the second time.
    “That’s me,” she said, searching her memory to try to place Lang.
    She had a fuzzy recollection of Ellen’s husband as some type of scientist with no sense of humor. If she had the right guy in mind, Greg had trapped her date at one of Prescott & Talbott’s cocktail parties and talked at length to him about polymers and the dangers of BPA.
    Of course, her date had been partially at fault. Ben, a chronically underemployed independent filmmaker, had thought he was being funny when he’d answered Greg’s question about what he did for a living by saying “I’m in plastics.” Greg apparently had never seen The Graduate and hadn’t gotten the joke.
    “I’d like to come over and talk to you,” she said.
    “Of course,” Greg said, all business now.
    Sasha pulled her old Prescott & Talbott attorney directory from her top desk drawer and looked up Ellen’s home address. The telephone number matched the one Will had given her.
    “Are you still on Saint James Place?” she asked.
    “Uh, yes, I’m keeping the house. For now.”
    “Great. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Twenty, tops.”
    “You want to come here? Now? This isn’t a good time. The house is a mess, and I have some errands to run this afternoon. Why don’t I come to your office tomorrow?”
    “Listen, Mr. Lang,” Sasha said, “I’m trying to determine if I’m the right person to represent you. To do that, I need to meet with you. If you aren’t interested in my services, that’s fine. If you are, I suggest you reschedule your errands.”
    Although she halfway hoped he’d refuse to see her, thereby solving the problem of whether to represent him, she collected a notepad, pen, her wallet, keys, and mobile phone as she spoke and swept them into a light blue leather laptop case that matched her sweater.
    Greg Lang huffed and puffed and then finally said, “Fine.”
    “Great. Goodbye.”
    She hung up and shut down her laptop. That went into the bag, too. Then she turned out the lights, locked the door behind her, and hurried down the stairs to the coffee shop.
    The point of springing her visit on Lang was to see him on his home turf. Sasha believed she could learn a lot about a person from seeing him in his natural environment. She would have preferred to show up unannounced so that he wouldn’t have time to clean up or hide anything, but that would have been unprofessional. The best she could do now was get over to his place quickly.
    Sasha made it a habit to meet people at home. She’d started the practice after she’d stopped by the home of a well-regarded economist to drop off an expert witness report for her to review. Sasha’s expert had answered the door at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in a bra and panties, expecting to find the male exotic dancer she’d picked up the night before, not the attorney who’d retained her to testify in a commercial dispute. Although Sasha didn’t particularly care what Professor Robbins did in her spare time, she did think some discretion was in order considering she held herself out as an economic expert to the tune of seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour. The last thing Sasha needed