School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,23
of the place was Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper, but since they’d fired Ellery for doing the right thing—and Jackson and Jade had quit in protest rather spectacularly—Jackson refused to use it. Ellery had understood the firm had made a business decision. A defense attorney with a well-developed moral compass was not going to make them as much money as one who would just plead people out whether they were guilty or not. Jackson and Jade held grudges.
“Yes,” Ellery returned blandly. “Feisty, Llamas, Hamsters and Cloppers now hold our future in their hooves. Or paws. Or whatever. Anyway, I also sent copies to my mother.”
Jackson looked panicked. “Did you instruct her not to come over?”
“She lives in Boston, Jackson. She’s not just going to hop a flight over because I sent her an email.”
Jackson shook his head. “She will too. She’s been out three times in the last year. We can’t get rid of her!”
“She was out to help take care of you,” Ellery said patiently. “I had to go back to work, remember?”
Jackson shook his head. “Next time, you stay home and let Lucy Satan defend criminals. She’s terrifying. She’ll scare them straight.”
Ellery gritted his teeth and refrained from telling Jackson that his mother’s name was Taylor. It never worked. Jackson’s uneasy relationship with Ellery’s mother seemed to include both affection and exasperation, equally mixed, and Ellery wasn’t going to solve it now.
“Well, she has her own firm,” Ellery said, “and we’ve got a job to do.”
Jackson sobered. “Got it. Okay, so we have five sets of eyes here and a lot of highlighters. Yellow highlighter for connections you see between the two cases and blue for inconsistencies. Everybody gives a twenty-minute review, and then we compare notes.” He glanced at Ellery. “You good with this?”
Ellery gave a faint smile. God help him if he wasn’t, since Jackson had just captained the meeting with ease. But it was a good plan.
“Ready if you are,” he said, picking up his highlighter.
“Go,” Jackson said, taking a set and a file from Jade.
Exactly two minutes of silence passed before Jackson said, “Motherfucker!” at the same time Ellery said, “Are we serious here?”
They locked eyes, and Ellery nodded. “You saw it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Anybody want to share with the class?” Galen asked, voice sandpaper dry.
“For the record,” Jackson said, “the two incompetent and/or corrupt flatfoots on the Townsend case were the same potatoes who just tried to grill me downstairs.”
“So which are they?” Henry asked. “Corrupt or incompetent?”
“I’m guessing a little of both,” Jackson murmured thoughtfully.
“We just watched them botch evidence,” Ellery said. “And that was for another cop. But they’d have no way of knowing they were helping someone they knew.” He took a breath, his eyes going to the police report. “Unlike this, where it’s so obviously a setup. I’m with Jackson here. Someone bought off a couple of low-level cops who weren’t getting promoted anyway.” He looked at Henry, who had been on Jackson’s computer scanning the prints. “By the way, have we gotten any hits?”
“Still running,” Henry said. “We don’t have the giant server that they do at the FBI or the police office. It’s gonna take a while.”
“Gotcha,” Ellery said. “I have no idea what you guys are doing. It’s like with Crystal back at Fingerling, Hamster, et al.” Everybody was so grim, he felt like he had to play that game too. Jackson gave him a wink to let him know he’d done okay. “Anyway, fingerprints could help, even if they won’t be under chain of evidence.”
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even look for a guy running down the street with a bloody goddamned knife,” Jackson muttered, then frowned again and uncapped his highlighter, hitting the page with unnecessary force.
The whole table stopped and stared.
“What?” he asked irritably.
“C’mon, Rivers, share with the class,” Henry drawled, and Jackson blew out a breath.
“Let me ask Ellery something first,” he said, and he bumped Ellery with his shoulder and pointed to Ellery’s note. Ziggy=Sergio Ivanov.
Ellery looked at it and arched an eyebrow.
Next to Ellery’s note, Jackson wrote, Description?
Ellery frowned. Let me ask Ty.
He pulled out his phone while everybody else read, and texted Ty Townsend, asked for a photo of Ziggy Ivanov, then put his phone away and resumed skimming the two files. After about ten minutes of silence, there was a general shift in the room, and Ellery looked up from his last page to see people making eye contact.
He grabbed a legal pad from the center of the table, and