Reasonable Doubt: Volume 2 (Reasonable Doubt 2)

“Really? What is it?”

“It’s go the f**k home.” I started stacking my papers. “All of you. Right now.”

“But—”

“Now.” I glared at them, waiting until they all left the room.

The second I was alone I let out a sigh and sat down again. I was better off letting Jessica help me out on this case. She didn’t know shit about the law but I was sure that she would at least try.

“Mr. Hamilton, I—” Aubrey stepped into the room with a cup of coffee. “Where did everyone go?”

“Home.” I took the cup from her, frustrated. “You’re free to go, too.”

“Are you ever going to formally give me my intern position back or am I forever stuck being your coffee and file organizer?”

“You’re also in charge of taking phone calls. That’s a responsibility you shouldn’t take lightly.”

“I’m serious...” She rolled her eyes. “As much as I enjoy having sex with you every morning with your coffee, I would like to go back to feeling like I actually have a purpose here.”

“Fine.” I took a sip from my cup. “Have you been keeping up with my current case?”

She nodded.

“Great,” I said dryly. “How do you think I should proceed?”

“I think you need to first get ahold of the man who erased your client’s identity.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

She took a folder from her purse and set it in front of me. “My parents taught me how to research someone’s background very, very well. That’s the one thing I can credit them for.” She flipped a few pages. “Your client has school records from his childhood—test scores, address changes, et cetera. There’s a record of where he attended college, grad school—even a record of the time he broke into his school’s firewall and got suspended for an entire semester. After that, there’s a short failed marriage to some woman he met in Cabo, and a few founding records for his company. But after that—with the exception of these recent allegations, there’s nothing.”

I glanced at the pages.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” She looked at me. “How you can google someone and nothing about them pops up? How you can search several databases for information and find entire decades are missing?”

I shut the folder. “It’s slightly odd.”

“Slightly?”

“Yes. Slightly. Is this all the evidence you have?”

“It’s all the evidence you need.” She stared into my eyes. “Find the guy who erased him, or find the guy who erased you and you might have yourself another win under your belt. If not—”

“Aubrey...”

“People don’t just come out of nowhere, Andrew,” she said. “You know that, I know that, and I’m pretty sure your client knows that.”

“Now we’re talking about the client?”

“There is no record of Andrew Hamilton in any of state’s registered lawyer databases.”

“I’m not facing a trial.”

“I called every law school in the state and pretended to be an alumna searching for a fellow alum and there was no record of an Andrew Hamilton getting his degree from any of them.”

“Are you that obsessed with me?” He smirked.

“I did the same thing for the law schools in New York. That was a bit trickier, but the results were just the same. There was no record of you going to school during the years you would’ve been in attendance.”