“What are you looking for, exactly?” Casey asked. I’d expected him to be looking over my shoulder, but he instead chose to look out from between my ears, and the longer half of his side part was tickling my right ear a little bit.

  “Well, partially just trying to get through this absolutely God-awful interface,” I responded, clicking through menus, login screens, saved passwords, search boxes, and more. Jesus wept, who thought it was a good idea to have four separate login pages just to get to one search field?

  Casey and I had gone back to the office after court. Julio and Fatima technically had as well, but the two of them just dropped some stuff off in their offices and immediately left for… shit, I didn’t have a clue. If I had to guess, they were going to some agreed-on comfy location to get in some last-minute prep for their respective witness examinations. Julio had the direct examination of our other expert, the electrician, whose practical demonstration meant we needed another fire extinguisher. Fatima, meanwhile, got to do one of the most fun things you could do in a courtroom: examine a hostile witness.

  Right now, though I was busy looking in on a hunch of mine. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the contractor was the least to blame for what had happened to the Hillside Courtyard. No, not blameless; they’d still fucked up pretty badly. But think about it — after a building’s been built, and assuming it’s not undergoing renovations, when do you call in a contractor? When something’s broken and needs fixing. Who determines when that is, though? In theory, it’s the tenants. In practice? Not so much.

  And because I had a hunch, I was currently suffering through Washington DC’s bloated, overpriced, revamped website. Oh, and buggy. Don’t forget the bugs.

  “Is it, like, PACER bad?” Casey asked. “Or…”

  “PACER is bad because it’s old, out of date, finicky, and it has no excuse costing money for anything under fifty pages,” I replied, clicking through another field and typing in my search terms finally. “Which, by the way, is just another way that the legal system is kept inaccessible to those of lower economic means. No, this is bad because it’s a frickin’ matryoshka doll of websites, all stacked on top of one another rather than being hosted in any way that’s actually sensible. Aha!”

  I picked up a pen with my left hand, clicked it on, and pulled a notepad up alongside my keyboard. My right hand stayed on the mouse so I could scroll around the page and click through other tabs once I’d written down what I needed.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Names,” I told him. “Names connected to business entities.”

  “And why are those important?” Casey asked. I felt his hair brush against my left ear as he shifted from looking over my head to over my shoulder.

  “Because people who start certain types of businesses tend not to leave off at just one,” I answered, clicking away from DC’s awful database site and onto another, running what I’d found through a quick search to get a bit of intermediary info. And then from there, I went to the exact website I’d disparaged earlier: PACER. “And if you know what tends to precede letting the old version die and starting the new one, you have an idea where to look.”

  I typed the first search term into the bar, and ran the search.

  PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. For the most part, it was where you went to look up federal cases. It had the records for three courts. First, the district courts, which had trial-level federal cases. Then you had the appellate courts, which was where you went if you wanted to appeal a district court or special program court ruling (like the vaccine court, veteran claims court, Moonshot claims court, etcetera). And lastly, you had the one that I actually wanted here.

  The bankruptcy courts.

  “Here we go,” I said, using the butt end of my pen to point things out for Casey. “So, to spell out for you how I got here: first, I looked up the business registration for the contractor, Columbia Construction & Contracting, LLC. Now, the person they had listed as their resident agent is just the person who accepts stuff for them, like summons or official mail. I wanted to find the owner, and I found that by looking at the LLC’s registration as a limited liability company. Then I took the names of the people on that, plugged those into a skip trace to get their social security numbers, and plugged that into PACER to search for any past bankruptcy filings. And what did we find?”

  I hovered over the results, clicked, put the charge (part of why we all hated PACER) on the firm’s card, and pulled up the docket.

  “Bingo,” I said, circling the docket header and party information sections with my pen. “Chapter seven bankruptcy. You covered bankruptcy at all in Corporations law?” I asked Casey.

  “Um, I…” Casey let out a sound that was somewhere between a whine and a groan. “I kinda skipped most of my Corporations classes?”

  “… you know what? Fair enough. I did too,” I told him. “Fulbright?”

  “Fulbright,” he confirmed.

  “Yeesh, talk about a false positive on RateMyProfessor,” I said, to which Casey commiserated with a nod and a hum. “Anyway, Chapter 7 is a liquidation bankruptcy. It’s also one of the types that has a hard time piercing the corporate veil, so if a particularly shady dealer had laundered enough money through the corporation and out into his pockets, odds are he could just… walk off and start a new, almost-identical business.”

  “Which is what happened here, right?” Casey pointed at the party listing on the bankruptcy docket. “District Construction Contracting, LLC. They barely even changed the name, huh?”

  “And then if we go back to the search results,” I said, clicking back over there, “we have the name of the contracting company that actually got the bid for the initial construction: Mount Vernon Construction Contractors, LLC. And since we’ve got all thirty years’ of maintenance requests and invoices in our doc review software…”

  I pulled open our software and typed in the search terms, selected “date” as the sorting function, and ran the search. A loading bar popped up — unsurprising, given we had a few thousand pages of documents for the software to load, but annoying nonetheless.

  “Hey, uh, Naomi?” Casey asked. “Um, did you have any classes with Gorman, by chance?”

  “1L ConLaw and the mandatory Law & Moonshot lecture,” I said.

  “Wait, they made you take that?” Casey asked, incredulous.

  “Mhmm,” I said, lowering my ears in annoyance — and thwacking my left ear into Casey’s face, oops. His mouth or nose, I thought, going by the way he started sputtering. “Sorry ‘bout that. Anyway, why do you ask?”

  “Why does her ear smell like strawberries?” Casey muttered under his breath. While that would’ve been quiet enough for normal people to not have heard him quite so clearly, I caught it clear as day.

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  “Strawberry-scented leave-in conditioner,” I said, a smile on my face as I spun my desk chair to face Casey. “Used to use a vanilla one, but something about it did not agree with the transition from hair to fur.”

  “Shoot, sor—”

  “Casey, hun, it’s fine,” I interrupted, offering him that same smile and an amused flick of my ears, which I could already tell he’d learned to read. “Anyway. Gorman. What’s up?”

  “Well I, uh… kinda let slip that you’re the most senior attorney BVS has me working under?” Casey’s tone was that particular type of uncertain statement that wasn’t so much a question, so much as it was trying to beg me not to get mad or upset. I sighed, my ears going low in dismay.

  “Let me guess: he wants you to ask if I can come in and talk to the class?”

  “Yeah, um…” Casey trailed off, shoulders tense as he looked anywhere but my eyes. “Yeah, I just… sorry. Shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Hmm…”

  If it had been any of my other past professors asking, I probably would’ve considered it. But Jared Gorman was the entitled jackass who used me as a practical example in my mandatory Moonshot & Law class. If he had asked, then maybe I would’ve agreed. But no, he didn’t. Gorman knew that the weird ‘chubby’ girl who always wore hats and floor-length skirts was actually just hiding that she was Moonshot, and decided that giving his class a practical example was more important than letting her stay incognito.

  So if Gorman wanted to use me as a practical example again, then he could come hat in hand, and beg.

  “Give him one of my business cards, let him know that if he wants me there, he can ask me himself.” One ear flicked towards my computer when it beeped, letting me know the search was done. “Oh, there we go. Alright, let’s see… damn. So much for that hunch.”

  “What were you thinking?” Casey asked, looking back out from between my ears again.

  “I was trying to figure out why the contractor seems so okay to just roll over and let both the property manager and the building owner scapegoat them,” I said, reaching up to scratch at the base of my left ear with a sigh. “It’s the one thing that hasn’t made sense. They’re clearly the least to blame of the current cadre, because, like — yes, okay, the fire panel room’s construction was fucked up, and that had to have been the contractor, right?”

  “Right,” Casey agreed.

  “But after the building was done, knowing what to fix and when it needs fixing? That falls on the property manager, building owner, and building inspector. And the property manager made it so Mr. Arroyo never reported anything, and while WCS and Leslie King would know that, the contractor wouldn’t. And I thought maybe there was a family connection to explain it, some kind of kickback involved, but… no. It literally just looks like someone who’s okay doing a shit job that they can skim off the top of, goes bankrupt whenever consequences come calling, and walks away with personal millions.”

  “Not the neat little bow you wanted, huh?” Casey asked.

  “It never is,” I griped, closing the search results. “It’s literally just independent greed on the contractor’s part. There’s no grand scheme, no big evil plot, no master plan; it’s all selfish ambition, that’s it. And like, sure, maybe there’s some evidence of collusion between WCS and Property Management Solutions? Somewhere? But if there is, I’m not seeing it right now.”

  Damn. What a waste of time. And all it did was reinforce just how scummy this whole situation was, how incredibly many people all had to independently just… be awful.

  Shit, it was almost enough to make me nostalgic for my NMR days.

  “Anything we can do with this?” Casey’s voice had a hopeful tinge to it. “Someone you can send this info to, maybe they can do something with it?”

  “Afraid not,” I said, signing out of my work computer. “Sometimes you just have to know which battles you can pick, and which ones you should. We’re already picking a bigger fight than we had to with this case. A lot of lawyers would say that what we’re doing here? Trying to do more than the scope of our trial should allow, trying to point a finger at the ultimate culprit? That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to leave for the prime time TV dramas.”

  “Then why are we doing that anyway?” Casey asked, walking around the edge of my desk to sit on it. “Why did you not just get a big settlement with a public statement of wrongdoing stipulated as part of it?”

  “Because it’s not what our client wanted,” I answered as I stood from my desk chair. “She wanted us to raise a stink, and there’s no better way to do that than by giving the public a bad guy.”

  “And what if we can’t do that?”

  I leveled a look at Casey, and lowered one ear, the same way normal people might raise one eyebrow. It was different than when I lowered an ear in amusement, as this time my ear went low and back, as opposed to just going flat on my head.

  “Casey, we already did,” I said. “That’s not in question. But federal investigators are lazy as sin. If we don’t give them a specific party to look into, then odds are good that they just slap all three parties on the wrist, and this whole thing repeats in five years.”

  “… oh,” Casey murmured. “I, uh… sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, waving him off. “Remind me, you have class tomorrow morning, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts,” I said, interrupting him. “Go to class. Court in the afternoon. Focus on getting that GPA as high as you can, that gives me more leeway in arguing for your first bonus.”

  “Wha—seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I confirmed, picking up my purse. “Now go on, I gotta lock up.”

  Thankfully, Casey took the hint, and exited my office. I locked it up behind me, put my keys in my purse, and met back up with Casey to walk him out.

  “Hey, Naomi?” he began once we’d gotten in the elevator.

  “Hm?”

  “I just… please don’t get mad, but — how are you not sad that she’s dead?”

  I sighed softly, ears dipping down in dismay. I knew this question would come up eventually.

  “And it’s not just you,” Casey continued. The elevator dinged for the ground floor, and I guided Casey towards one of the cushioned benches in the lobby so we could sit down for this little talk. “Julio and Fatima seem to not care, either! And I just — someone who I met died, you knew her for a lot longer than I did, so… so why…”

  Casey choked up a bit as he trailed off, and took a deep breath to try and get his emotions back under control. I wrapped my arm around Casey’s shoulder and pulled him into a half-hug.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve had someone die during a case.” I kept my voice soft and low, barely above a whisper. “And it won’t be the last, either. It’s just a thing that happens, Casey. But we don’t get to stop doing our jobs just because somebody involved in a case dies, even somebody we spent a lot of time and effort helping. We have to prioritize getting the job done first, and save our grieving for when we’re free.”

  “... I don’t know if I can do that,” Casey whispered. “I… I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Well, it’s not like the solution is one-size-fits-all,” I admitted, nudging Casey’s shoulder so he’d turn to look at me. “Saving it for later is what works for me, and maybe it doesn’t work for you. That’s okay. But you do need to find some way to cope.”

  “Like a therapist?” he asked.

  “Yeah, like a therapist,” I agreed, then stood from the bench. “Now, come on. You’re getting mopey, I’m not leaving you alone with those thoughts, and I’m getting hungry. So let’s get dinner and eat our emotions, okay?”

  “S-sure, I guess.” Casey stood up and shrugged on his coat, and I was glad to see a soft smile back on his face. “What’re we getting?”

  “Well it’s cold out, I’m craving soup, and there’s a pho place four blocks west of here,” I said. “How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good to me!”