Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 04

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 04: The Woman Who Wasn’t Supposed to Speak

I’m nobody,” I said. “But your brother will be convicted before lunch on day two, and I can tell you exactly

which question does it.”

The room stopped breathing.

“Page six of the autopsy. Time of death, eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty. The medical examiner got that from liver temperature. Liver temperature assumes a body cooling in air. Tyler Reed was found in a hot tub set to a hundred and two degrees. A body in hot water doesn’t cool. So the number is garbage. He could have been dead by ten. And at ten, your brother was on a doorbell camera four miles away, arriving at that party. Youre all fighting about midnight. Nobody’s fighting about ten. That’s how you lose Eli, and it’ll look like nobody’s fault, because everyone in this room is reading the wrong page.”

I set down the carafe. My hands were perfectly still.

That’s the thing about my hands. They have never once shaken when it mattered. Only after.

Cole Ashford walked back to the table.

“Sit down,” he said. To me.

“Mr. Ashford,” Harlan began, “she is not an attorney-”

“Then it should take her two minutes to embarrass herself.” He pulled out the chair beside him. “Sit.”

I sat. In the lawyers’ chairs. In a building where I have not sat in a lawyer’s chair in three years.

“Show me,” he said.

I pulled the discovery up. My fingers found the search shortcuts without asking me first, like coming home to

a house in the dark.

“Scene photo nineteen. Steam on the lens – the water was hot when they pulled him out at two a.m. Now the ME’s worksheet, page four. Ambient temperature line: she wrote seventy-one degrees. That’s the air. She

never entered the water temperature at all.” I looked up at the screen. “Whoever tries this case shouldn’t be

defending an alibi. They should be dismantling a thermometer.”

The consultant on the screen said, slowly, “…She’s right.”

Sloane’s voice cracked. “This is absurd. She runs a photocopier.”

“Then how does she know?” Ashford said.

Nobody answered.

You only care about one thing,” I agreed. “Fine. You don’t put Eli on the stand. You don’t put the girlfriend on You subpoena the pool company’s maintenance log for the water temperature. You retain a forensic pathologist who’s published on immersion cooling. You cross the ME for ninety minutes and you make her say the words I didn’t account for the water in front of the jury. Then you sit down. Estimated trial isn’t two days. It’s four. The jury will be out under three hours.”

“Six firms said take the plea.”

“Six firms said they couldn’t win. That’s a different sentence.”

“And you can?”

The room went absolutely silent.

Three years of silence. A basement. A copier. My brother’s face through plexiglass.

“There was one lawyer who could,” I said. “Her trial transcript is public.”

“Calloway,” Ashford said.

“Calloway.”

“Chicago says Calloway disappeared.”

“Chicago’s right.”

He watched me for a long moment.

“Miss Rowan. Look at me and tell me you’ve never stood in front of a jury.”

I looked at him.

I opened my mouth.

And I couldn’t do it.

Three years of lying, and I could not make that particular lie come out of my body.

Sloane saw it. God, she saw it – I watched the calculation slide behind her eyes like a knife going back in a

drawer.

“Mr. Ashford,” she said sweetly, “I think what we’re witnessing is a very impressive amount of Google. Ms. Rowan has a personnel file. It says high school diploma, community college, eleven months at a

Yes,” Ashford said. “I would.”

That’s when Harlan’s phone rang.

Then Sloane’s. Then the associate’s. Then the general counsel’s, all at once, that ugly stereo buzz that turns- a law firm into a single animal.

Sloane answered hers, listened, and her face changed.

“The DA just filed an emergency motion to revoke Eli’s bail,” she said. “New witness. Judge Okafor’s hearing it

at ten-fifteen.”

Ashford checked his watch. Nine thirty-eight.

“Then go,” he said.

“I can’t,” Sloane said, and for the first time, she sounded human. “I’m on the record in federal court downtown

at ten. It’s a fifty-minute drive. Brody-”

Brody, the second-year associate, looked like he might be sick.

Cole Ashford turned his head.

Cole

He looked at me.