Justin Peacock Read online

  Also by Justin Peacock

  A Cure for Night

  To Melissa–still and again

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Two

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Part Three

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “Blind Man’s Alley bears its name for a reason. Until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy, whom every child in the ward knows, if he never heard of the President of the United States. ‘Old Dan’ made a big fortune—he told me once four hundred thousand dollars—out of his alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth.”

  —Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

  PROLOGUE

  THEY WERE three hundred feet in the air when the floor gave out beneath them. The floor crumbled into pieces; it stopped being floor. Instead it was a mass of disintegrating concrete, collapsing in a groaning roar.

  How do you run when there’s nothing beneath your feet? The mind screams flight, but the body cannot follow. There was no more than an instant of this, a failed scramble against collapse.

  There were three of them working out near the building’s edge, their legs kicking uselessly in sudden free fall. There was a safety net below, but they were past its reach, unlike a dozen of their fellow construction workers who would emerge from the accident injured but alive. For these three, there was nothing for twenty-five stories to stop their fall, no possible sanctuary from gravity’s remorseless pull.

  Kieran Doyle, Dmitri Szerbiak, and Esteban Martinez: they weren’t men New York City had ever noticed. The first time their names would ever appear in a newspaper was in the wake of their deaths. Doyle was the only one of them born in the States, growing up in Hell’s Kitchen back in the neighborhood’s last days as a rough Irish neighborhood, before gentrification turned it into an extension of Midtown. Szerbiak had immigrated as a child from Poland; Martinez, an illegal, had come from Honduras in his early twenties, made his way into the union with a forged social security card.

  They were all three experienced at construction. The work they did was hard and dangerous under the best of circumstances, and it’d long been clear to all of them—to everyone on site—that the building of the Aurora Tower was not the best of circumstances. Not with the dizzying speed with which one floor climbed above another, the cracks in the settling concrete, the various shortcuts taken in the upward dash. There’d been plenty of talk among the crews: talk of bringing a grievance to the union, talk of going to the bosses with a list of demands, even talk of walking off the job.

  But the time for talking was over, at least for talking that might have kept what happened from happening. Of course, there’d be plenty more talking in the accident’s wake: there’d be investigations, lawsuits, headlines, but for these three men it would all be so much useless aftermath.

  How quickly an entire mass of concrete could turn itself into rubble and fling itself to the ground. The deep rumbling roar grabbed the attention of everyone in earshot, filled their minds with panicked thoughts of what such a sound could mean. New Yorkers kept the echo of the Trade Center clenched within them, always ready to bloom when a steam pipe exploded or a crane fell, the urban cacophony now shaded with a darker menace. Nearby pedestrians fled the noise before they even understood what was happening. But for Doyle, Szerbiak, and Martinez, there was no place left to go, just a mad jumble of whooshing air and rattling debris, spilling them out into the falling sky.

  1

  I REMEMBER when I used to get things done.” Simon Roth was already speaking as he entered the conference room. “I went to a meeting, things got built out of it. Now I sit in conference rooms with lawyers and accountants all day. Number crunching this, produce documents—you fucking lawyers, you’ve made what you do so complicated and endless it’s all anybody has time to do. The sideshow’s taken over the stage.”

  “Good to see you too, Simon,” Steven Blake replied, standing to shake Roth’s hand. Duncan Riley, who’d been sitting next to Blake as they’d awaited their clients’ arrival, quickly rose beside him.

  Duncan was a senior associate at Blake and Wolcott, where Steven Blake was both a name partner and the leading rainmaker. They were in a conference room at Roth Properties, there to update Simon Roth and his people on the various legal tendrils extending out from the previous year’s fatal construction accident at the Aurora Tower.

  Roth Properties was a private, family-owned company. Simon Roth, the company’s founder and still its CEO, was in his late sixties, although as his deliberately over-the-top entrance demonstrated, he made a point of carrying himself with the angry energy of a much younger man. Simon had a full head of gray hair, every strand carefully lacquered into place, a perfectly tailored suit, a striped blue shirt with a white collar, and heavy gold cuff links. The only place his age clearly showed was in his craggy reddish face, like that of a sailor too long at sea.

  A small contingent of Roth Properties executives had followed Simon Roth into the room: Roth’s two children, Jeremy and Leah, both of whom were vice presidents, followed by the g
eneral counsel, Roger Carrington, and the CFO, Preston Thomas.

  Leah and her brother were very young for their positions, not far north of thirty, although that was hardly unusual in a family-controlled private company. Jeremy was heavyset and jaundiced-looking, while Leah was thin and ascetic, both appearing older than their years, although in entirely different ways.

  Carrington and Thomas were each well into their fifties. Carrington looked like an old-school WASP; Thomas was African-American. They were dressed virtually identically: both in dark pinstripe suits with pocket squares in their jackets and cuff links in their crisp white shirts.

  Duncan took his turn shaking hands after Blake, offering his best bright-boy smile and hoping he didn’t look ill at ease. Simon Roth was a notoriously demanding and prickly client, prided himself on it, and Duncan would have been perfectly content to leave the client interactions to Blake, though he’d dutifully feigned enthusiasm when tapped to come along. Duncan was on hand to be the details guy; as a senior partner, Blake had scant involvement with the nitty-gritty of a case.

  Roth Properties was the developer of the Aurora Tower, thirty-six stories of luxury condominiums going up in the heart of SoHo. The cheapest apartment, a five-hundred-square-foot pied-à-terre, was listed at just under a million, while a top-floor penthouse was on the market at twenty-five. However, advance sales for the building had been only a trickle, not good news for a half-billion-dollar construction project. The luxury aura had been tarnished by the accident and the resulting flurry of investigations and lawsuits.

  First up had been the Department of Buildings. Construction had been completely shut down for a month while city inspectors nosed around the building site. The lawyers had coordinated the turning over of documents and been present at interviews, but had generally stayed in the background while the agency did its work. Unsurprisingly, the DOB issued multiple violations relating to the accident (the site had collected over a dozen violations from the city before the fatalities, which wasn’t an unusual number for a large-scale Manhattan construction project), levying relatively small fines against both the subcontractor, Pellettieri Concrete, and the general contractor, Omni Construction.

  Even before the DOB had issued its findings, a wrongful-death suit had been filed on behalf of the families of the three construction workers. The suit named Roth Properties among the defendants, although generally it was only the contractors who were on the hook for a construction accident. But Roth was the deepest pocket and the highest-profile company involved in the Aurora, so there were strategic reasons to include them as a defendant, even if there was virtually no chance of the plaintiffs actually seeing a dime of Roth’s money.

  The accident’s aftermath had been proceeding predictably, with nothing but minor headaches as far as Roth Properties was concerned, when the article had appeared in the New York Journal. The story claimed that the concrete company had failed to provide the standard secondary supports for settling concrete. Even after workers had warned that cracks were appearing, Pellettieri Concrete did nothing to shore it up, ignoring the obvious risk. The article went on to mention that the company’s cofounder was currently in jail on racketeering charges out of a prosecution aimed at weeding out organized crime from the construction industry.

  But the main focus of the article had not been on the accident itself, but rather on the city’s response to it. The story claimed that the DOB inspector in charge of investigating the collapse, William Stanton, had originally recommended referring the case to the district attorney for a criminal investigation. That recommendation had supposedly been rejected by the head of the department, Ronald Durant, who’d then watered down the investigator’s findings before issuing a public report. Shortly thereafter Durant had resigned from the DOB and joined a prominent architectural firm that had been hired by Roth Properties to design a wholesale transformation of a city housing project. Although the article didn’t come right out and say so, the suggestion was that the city agency charged with policing construction accidents had gone out of its way to issue a toothless report in exchange for a plum job for Durant.

  The Journal’s story had sparked immediate outrage and was quickly picked up by the rest of the New York press. The district attorney’s office promptly announced that it was opening a criminal investigation into the accident. Although Roth Properties was not a target of the probe, the developer had been hit with a subpoena seeking virtually every document in the company’s files relating to the construction of the Aurora.

  If that wasn’t enough to get the billable hours flowing, Simon Roth had also directed Blake to file a libel suit against the New York Journal. They’d just survived the paper’s motion to dismiss and were proceeding with discovery, which Duncan was heading up. He was scheduled to depose the reporter who’d written the article, Candace Snow, later in the week.

  While there were a dozen or so Blake and Wolcott associates working on the various Roth matters, Duncan was the only person besides Blake who was connected to all of them. For the past six months virtually all of Duncan’s working hours had been occupied with the affairs of Roth Properties. This wasn’t ideal from Duncan’s perspective, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he could complain about either.

  Aside from providing a general update on the state of play of the various cases, the purpose of the present meeting was to discuss a particular piece of bad news: the firm’s motion to dismiss Roth Properties from the wrongful-death suit had just been rejected by the court, meaning the company would have to proceed with turning over documents and submitting its executives to depositions.

  “What did I just say?” Roth burst out, interrupting Blake’s summary of what the company would have to produce. “They want to depose me?”

  Blake shook his head. “For starters, they want your son, and Preston. If they do drop a depo subpoena on you, we can always try to quash, since it’s a matter of public record that Jeremy was taking the lead on the project and you weren’t directly involved. The good news on the documents, anyway, is that we’ve already collected everything relevant for the DA’s subpoena.”

  “You know how much time I’ve spent being deposed the past year? Three full days. That’s more time than I spent on vacation.”

  “As I recall, you were down at our place in the Caymans for most of February,” Jeremy Roth said to his father.

  Simon glared at his son, who didn’t meet his eyes. “Just because I’m in the Caymans doesn’t mean I’m not working,” he growled. “I can get more accomplished down there than the rest of you get done without me up here.”

  “I’m sure you actually believe that,” Jeremy said. Duncan was surprised by the adolescent nature of Jeremy’s sullenness with his father, and that he was willing to indulge it in a business meeting.

  “I believe a lot of things that are true,” Simon shot back.

  “In any event,” Blake said, ignoring the sniping, “discovery’s going to happen. We need to prep everybody, go over stuff. You know the drill.”

  “I’ll be coordinating things from our end,” Leah Roth said softly, her cool demeanor a world apart from her father and brother.

  “Duncan here will be our point guy on the day-to-day,” Blake said, draping a paternalistic hand on Duncan’s shoulder. Duncan smiled at Leah, who looked back at him, her own expression unchanging.

  “So, you need to take up any more of my day with this crap?” Simon said, pushing his chair back from the table.

  “We still on for lunch?” Blake asked him.

  Simon checked his watch. “As long as you promise you’re not going to try to bill me for it.”

  Leah looked at her father, then back to Duncan. “You have time to set up a to-do list now?”

  Duncan readily agreed and the meeting broke up. Leah picked up a phone on a side table and asked her assistant to have lunch brought in for them. Duncan was annoyed with Blake for not bothering with a heads-up about his own lunch with Simon Roth, although he should be used to such offh
and slights by now. Blake wasn’t a yeller or an all-around prick like a lot of partners, but he was brusque and elusive, as well as expecting something like mind reading from those who worked for him. But the law was not a profession for those who wanted their hands held.

  And besides, part of the idea of coming to a meeting like this was for Duncan to get to know the next generation of Roths. Duncan was at the point in his career that was less about acquiring new legal skills and more about developing relationships and connections to start growing his own book of business, assuming that his approaching partnership vote went as he hoped. Ideally he would establish the same sort of relationship with Simon Roth’s children, who were roughly his age, that his boss had long ago built with their father. Blake had been Simon Roth’s primary litigation lawyer for over twenty years, one of many blue-chip clients he’d maintained. Blake, who billed just under a thousand dollars an hour, was widely acknowledged as one of the country’s leading trial lawyers.