The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,84

important meeting.”

Sam smiled. She had birthday drinks scheduled with a friend.

He said, “There’s a bit of an urgent detail about the partner meeting next week. You need to nail down a point for them. I left the packet on your desk.”

“Thank you.” Sam stopped at the office kitchen. She didn’t expect Eldrin to fetch her tea every morning, but because of their routine, he’d been relegated to watching Sam prepare it.

She said, “I had an email from Curtis this morning.” She pulled a tea sachet from the tin on the counter. “I want to be in Atlanta next week for the Coca-Cola deposition.” Among other locales, Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had satellite offices in Atlanta. Sam made monthly trips to the city, staying at the Four Seasons, walking the two blocks to the Peachtree Street offices, and ignoring the fact that Pikeville was a two-hour drive up the interstate.

“I’ll let travel know.” Eldrin retrieved a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “I can also ask if Grainger has—oh, no.” He was looking at the muted television in the corner. A graphic spun ominously onto the screen. SCHOOL SHOOTING.

As a victim of gun violence, Sam had always felt a particular horror when she learned of a mass shooting, but like most Americans, she had become somewhat acclimated to their almost monthly occurrence.

The screen showed a little girl’s photograph, obviously from a school yearbook. The name underneath read LUCY ALEXANDER.

Sam added milk to the tea. “I dated a boy in school named Peter Alexander.”

Eldrin raised his eyebrows as he followed her out of the kitchen. She wasn’t usually easy with details about her personal life.

Sam continued toward her office. Eldrin continued the rundown of the day’s itinerary, but she only listened with half an ear. She hadn’t thought about Peter Alexander in a long while. He had been a moody boy, given to long, tedious speeches about the torture inherent in being an artist. Sam had let him touch her breasts, but only because she had wanted to know what it felt like.

It felt sweaty, frankly, because Peter had no idea what he was doing.

Sam dropped her purse by her desk, a glass and steel chunk that anchored her sun-filled corner office. Her view, like most views in the Financial District, was the building directly across the way. There had been no rules regarding set-back when the Canyons of Wall Street had been erected. Twenty feet of sidewalk was all that separated most buildings from the street.

Eldrin finished his spiel as she placed her tea on a coaster beside her computer.

Sam waited for him to leave. She sat down in her chair. She found her reading glasses in her briefcase. She began the review of her notes for the ten thirty meeting.

Sam had understood when she decided on patent law as a career that the job was basically one of trying to sway the transfer of large sums of money: one incredibly wealthy corporation sued another incredibly wealthy corporation for using a similar set of stripes on their new athletic shoes, or co-opting a particular color from their brand, and very expensive lawyers had to argue in front of very bored judges about the percentages of cyan in a certain Pantone.

Long gone were the days of Newton and Leibniz battling for the right to be identified as the inventor of calculus. Most of Sam’s time was spent combing through the minutiae of design schematics and referencing patent applications that sometimes reached back to the early days of the industrial revolution.

She loved every single second of it.

She loved the melding of science and law, delighted in the fact that she had somehow managed to distill the single best parts of her mother and father into a rewarding life.

Eldrin knocked on her glass door. “I wanted to update you. Looks like that school shooting took place in North Georgia.”

Sam nodded. “North Georgia” was a nebulous catch-all for any area outside of Atlanta. “Do they know how many victims?”

“Only two.”

“Thanks.” Sam tried not to dwell on the “only,” because Eldrin was correct that two was a low body count. The story would probably roll off the news by tomorrow.

She turned to her computer. She pulled up a rough draft of a brief that she wanted to be conversant with for her ten thirty meeting. A second-year associate had taken a stab at a response to a summary motion made in the case of SaniLady, a division of UXH Financial Holdings, Ltd. v. LadyMate Corp,