No Legal Grounds

Fiction
Deadlock
Breach of Promise
Sins of the Fathers
Presumed Guilty
The Darwin Conspiracy
Circumstantial Evidence
Final Witness
Blind Justice
The Nephilim Seed
City of Angels
(cowritten with Tracie Peterson)
Angels Flight
(cowritten with Tracie Peterson)
Angel of Mercy
(cowritten with Tracie Peterson)
A Greater Glory
A Higher Justice
A Certain Truth
Glimpses of Paradise

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AER Edition January 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-54055-7
Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan,
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

PART I: OLD FRIENDS 7
ONE 9
TWO 20
THREE 32
FOUR 49
FIVE 72

SIX 79
SEVEN 98
EIGHT 107
NINE 116
TEN 136
ELEVEN 152

FOURTEEN 191
FIFTEEN 217
SIXTEEN 229
PART II: DESERT SOLITAIRE
237
SEVENTEEN 239

TWENTY 293
TWENTY-ONE 303
TWENTY-TWO 319

Hey, buddy! Long time! Tracked you down after reading your blurb on the Prominent Alumni page. Prominent! You made it, buddy. I always knew you would, though it was all pretty crazy back there freshman year. Remember that? Wild times, oh yes. How’d we ever make it out of the dorm!

So I found your law firm website and then you and here I am! I’m in town! We have a lot of catching up to do. Call me, man. Can’t wait to see you.

Sam Trask vaguely remembered the name at the end of the email. You remember guys named Nicky, even if you don’t think about them for twenty-five years.

Nicky Oberlin.
That’s how he’d signed the email, along with a phone number.
The tightness in his chest, the clenching he’d been feeling for the last few weeks, returned. Why should that happen because of one random email? Because it presented a complication, a thing that called for a response. He did not need that now, not with the way things were at home.
Sam took a deep breath, leaned back in his chair in his Beverly Hills office, and tried to relax. Didn’t happen. He kept seeing his daughter’s face in his mind. She was screaming at him.
A quick knock on his door bumped Sam from his thoughts. Lew poked his head in. “A minute?”
Sam motioned him in. Lew Newman was Sam’s age, fortyseven, and wore his sandy hair short, which gave his sharp nose and alert eyes added prominence. When Lew was with the Brooklyn DA’s office he was known as the Hawk, and Sam could see why. He would’ve hated to be a witness about to be pecked by the Hawk’s cross-examination. He was glad they were partners and not adversaries.
9

“We’re going into high gear against the good old US of A this week,” Lew said.
Sam nodded. “Got it on the radar.” The FulCo case was by far the biggest Newman & Trask had ever handled. Potentially a billion at stake. That thought gave Sam’s chest another squeeze.
“Cleared everything else?” Lew said.
“One matter to take care of.”
“What’s that?”
“Harper.”
Lew rolled his eyes. “Hasn’t that settled?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Please do.”
“I said I would, okay?”
Lew put his hands up. “Just asking. I get to ask, don’t I?”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“Need you, buddy. I know things haven’t been the best with — ”
“I can handle it, Lew.”
His partner nodded. “How’s Heather doing, anyway?”
Sam did not want to talk about his daughter, not now. “We’re working on it.”
“Good. She’ll pull through. She’s a good kid.”
Sam said nothing.
“So on Harper — ”
“Lew, please — ”
“Let me just say this once, okay? We do have a business to run, and — ”
“You want me to get rid of the Harper file ASAP.”
“That would be nice. Can you settle?”
“Not right away.”
“Why not?”
“I need more discovery or it’ll be undervalued.”
“Come on, Sam. What about your value to the shop?”
Always preoccupied with the cost-benefit analysis, Lew was. Maybe that was what really had changed for Sam in the last four years. After his conversion, a little of the drive for the dollar had gone from his life.
As if sensing he’d stuck a foot over the line, Lew said, “Look, I trust your judgment, of course. But a quick settlement surely is going to be within the ballpark, give or take, and what’s the problem with that?”
“No problem at all. Girl goes blind, we can toss her a few bones and move on.”
“Come on, I don’t mean that. Just think about it for me, will you? Harper off the table. I love you, sweetie.” He made a golfing motion. “How about eighteen next week?”
Golf was always the way Lew made up. “Sure.”
“I love you more,” Lew said, then left.
For a long time Sam swiveled in his chair, as if the motion would gently rock his thoughts into some cohesive order. But it wasn’t happening, because Sarah Harper was not a case he wanted to expedite.
The tightness came back. Come on, he scolded himself. No heart attack. You’re not even fifty years old yet. Guys like you don’t die before fifty. He kept in shape, ran three miles every other day, didn’t have too many extra pounds. But he knew there was no guarantee. One of his old friends from UCLA Law had just gone to the cooling rack after playing pickup basketball.
One minute Tom had been a hard-charging partner at O’Melveny, and boom, the next he’s an obit in
California Lawyer.
It could happen to anyone.
Sam rubbed his chest and looked back at the monitor. Nicky Oberlin. He tried to remember the face that went with the name. Didn’t come to him.
Truth was, a lot of that first year at UC Santa Barbara up the coast was lost in a brain fog. He was still a long way off from a sober life then, and most of what he remembered of freshman year was a dorm known for grass and beer and late-night parties.
So this blast from the past was hearkening back to days he’d just as soon forget.
Was he the guy who came into his dorm room one night, hammered to the gills, and tried to roll out Sam’s bed — while Sam was still in it? A lot of crazy things happened back then. It was a wonder any of them passed their classes.
Yeah, that might have been Nicky, a little guy with a moustache. But then again . . . brain fog.
And in the fog, like the trill of a night bird, a faint vibration of unease. Oberlin had sent this to Sam’s private email address. It wasn’t posted on the firm’s site. It would have taken some doing to find it. Apparently, Oberlin had. Which bothered him no end. It was like . . . an intrusion, and by a guy he really didn’t know.
He closed his eyes for a moment and expressed his favorite prayer of late, for wisdom. Having a seventeen-year-old daughter who seemed determined to throw her life down the toilet necessitated divine intervention on a daily basis.
Now he needed wisdom for his professional life. The Harper family had come to him in their hour of greatest need. He would not drop the ball.
He took a deep breath. This was not what he thought life would be at this point in his career. He thought he’d be at the pinnacle of his profession, able to coast along at a hardworking but smooth pace, with his wife and kids along for the ride.
Instead, he was tighter than a hangman’s rope and wondering if the American dream was imploding on him.
He didn’t need any more tasks or obligations, no matter how small. With a touch of his index finger he deleted Nicky Oberlin’s email.
He hoped Nicky wouldn’t take offense.

He had the right look. She liked long hair that hung down wavy, especially if it was blond. He had great style too, judging from the way he tapped the table with his hands. He played drums for a band called Route Eighteen.

And he clearly had his eye on her. Always gave her a half smile whenever their eyes met.
Would he be the one, her first time, so she could get it over with?
Roz, who was holding court as usual at an outdoor table at Starbucks, was already well schooled in the guy department. She’d burned through three boyfriends in the last year. Heather hadn’t had even one yet. Roz was older than Heather by only two years but had a worldliness Heather could only admire.
Heather also loved the way Roz could cut and color her hair any which way, without a thought. Right now it was short and hot pink. Heather wasn’t quite ready to chop her shoulder-length tresses and go from brown to a more luminescent tone. Maybe she would once she got out of the house.
Maybe then she’d feel like she really fit the puzzle. The pieces at home were all jumbled. She wasn’t a piece there; she was a hole. The church thing wasn’t going to happen for her, and her parents’ disappointment made her feel like an alien presence in the home she grew up in.
Depression washed over her again. She’d been feeling so much of the dark side lately. She was using it in her songs, which Roz said were bordering on genius. Still, it was like a big, black weight on her, and she was sick of it.
Her mom and dad’s solution? God. Jesus. Church.
Why couldn’t she get into religion? It just didn’t click, the tumblers didn’t fall. Something was wrong with her brain. It wasn’t a Trask brain, and she could see that thought in her parents’ pained eyes with every new confrontation.
She needed to get out of there. They’d be much happier and she could finally see if there was something in this world that made sense. She could get on with things she should already have gotten to at seventeen.
So, she wondered, would her first time be with the drummer?
There were eight of them around the black iron table, crammed in and chattering away through a haze of cigarette smoke. Heather didn’t really like smoking that much but did it anyway. Image. The hard part was covering up the smell when she got home.
Big Red cinnamon gum was good for the breath part. As far as her hair and clothes, well, she just told her mom it was because she’d been at Starbucks at an outside table. You just couldn’t get away from the smoke out there.
She didn’t think her mom totally bought that, but at least she didn’t press the issue. Her dad was the one who would’ve made the big deal, but he was always so busy he never noticed.
“They could’ve taken the geek-rock crown from Weezer,” she heard Drummer Boy saying. “But they turned to slacker romanticism.”
Oh, no. Was he one of those pretentious, know-everythingabout-music types? The kind who couldn’t shut it once you got them started?
“Their last CD was nothing but lo-fi jangle and lush fuzz.”
Yep.
“Detached and boring,” Drummer Boy concluded loudly.
Just like you, Heather thought.
Drummer Boy brought his chair over to her side. He smiled at her and said, “Are you Jamaican?”
“What?”
“’Cause j-makin’ me crazy.”
She closed her eyes.
No way he’d be the one.
Maybe she should just let it be random and hope for the best.
Or maybe there wasn’t going to be any
best.
What would she do then?