Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 79338 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79338 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
“Yeah, I totally get it. I wanted to wait and get a place with you again this year but you didn’t know if you were coming back and when I found this place I pretty much had to decide that day because they had more people coming to look at the room. We're not kicking you out, but you know…”
I grin at her. “Maybe I should go back to the Screaming Eagles and see if they have room for me. There’s a whole stable of girls that just hang out there with them.”
Meghan's eyes go wide. She yelled at me not sending a message until the middle of the night that I wasn’t going to be back until morning. I even felt bad. She’d been so worried, but I’m sure she took one look at me when I stumbled in the door and knew exactly what kind of night I had. Well, not exactly, but it was pretty obvious I didn’t spend all night talking poetry.
“You wouldn’t really, right? It’s one thing to have a little fun, but—ugh, I hate sounding judgmental, but you’re better than that. You have goals, options. If it’s about rent, I’ll—”
“Oh my God! Relax! I didn’t really mean it.” No, the slut life isn’t for me, but maybe if it was just with Reaper, Mack and Scrapper? No, still no. If I hung around there, eventually I wouldn’t be the shiny new girl anymore and I’d get to watch one of them with another girl and something about that rubs me the wrong way in a way that I probably haven't earned. They aren’t mine, but so long as I don’t go back, it won't get rubbed in my face.
Meghan raises a questioning eyebrow.
“Seriously. It was fun. Okay, really fun, but this is more important.”
She points her fork at me. “Good, remember that when you get that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“The ‘maybe the dick would make it worth it’ look like you just had. It won’t. They are practically giving them away for free on campus if you’re willing to listen to some dude talk about the Roman Empire, and if that’s too much, you can do overnight delivery and get one with all the bells and whistles that will never complain or let you down.”
“Meghan!” I snort a piece of pasta and go into a coughing fit at the table.
“Am I wrong?”
“No…”
“Good. Now clean up the dishes and get back to work.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Soon after, I'm back on my laptop. Meghan’s in her big, comfy reading chair with her legs thrown over one of the armrests and her face buried in some kind of fantasy romance. Once I tried to tell her that bikers are basically werewolves, but she just stuck her fingers in her ears and pretended not to hear.
I change tactics, sorting his files into categories based on how likely I think they are to contain something useful. There are some folders that look like tax information. As I skim through them, something doesn’t feel like it’s adding up. I look up the value of the house Mullerby lives in. Four million dollars? That could make sense if he inherited it, or bought before the prices skyrocketed, but the real estate site says he bought it five years ago. Some lawyers make a lot of money, but not usually state paid attorneys. There's no way.
Unfortunately, there’s no smoking gun, unless it’s in the password protected or encrypted files. I don’t know the first thing about how to get into them. For that I’ll need some kind of geek to help me out.
I open my personal research, staring at the spreadsheet I made of all the cases Mullerby has been assigned to, stretching back to a few years before my brother’s time and until last month. I made up similar sheets for other defense attorneys in the state, and I’ve been trying to spot a pattern. “Remind me to always hire my own attorney if I get arrested.”
Meghan looks up from her book. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The court appointed ones aren’t always bad, but they’re overworked and have no real stake in your outcome. Or time to do anything but give you some advice even if they do care.”
“So it’s not unusual that they lose most of the time?”
“Eh. It’s not always about winning or losing. They are there to try and make sure people know their rights and don’t end up with worse outcomes just because they don’t know the law. A good defense attorney might keep your sentence low, or find ways to keep you out of prison completely.”
A fuzzy idea starts to take shape in my head. Maybe I’ve been looking at this wrong. Mullerby’s record is slightly under the average when it comes to conviction rates, but if I look at the average sentencing length, it’s double.