Harmful Intent: A Novel - Hardcover

Chapter One

Terry Winter twisted the wand to level the conference room blinds. Glittery cold on the street outside, November on the Front Range. She glanced both ways then took a chair across from Moss at the black teak table, a rippled blaze of light at her back.

She'd brought her daughter to the interview, a twelve-year-old in blond dog's ears and jeans with iron-on stickers, friendship pins on Nike knockoffs. Moss demurred to the girl's request to remain in the conference room with them. He had People magazines brought in, a Pepsi, and jellybeans from the paralegal's jar.

"This is Emmy." She indicated her daughter with a toss of her head. "As in M. E., as in Mary Eliza." Her black hair shook and shone.

"Are you our lawyer?" Emmy considered him skeptically.

Peter Moss tightened his Jerry Garcia neckware. "Could be." They might take some convincing. So might he.

Moss negotiated the introductory pleasantries alert for false notes, weak links. Practiced in the evaluation of suffering, he sensed only a suggestion of reserve, purposeful rather than diffident. Terry Winter was holding something back, but not necessarily from him.

"So tell me what happened to bring you here."

She thought a moment. "What I say to Emmy is you take your knocks and you keep going. You could say, why me? Or you can say, why not me? Who else is there?" She rolled a thumb along her palm. "The idea that you overcome things. That's what got us to you."

It was what Peter Moss needed to hear.

He was three months back from a half-year sabbatical in Costa Rica, in the cloud forest of the Cordillera de Tilarán. Like a million other lawyers he'd felt the urge to quit shudder through him like a fever chill. He'd looked with dismay on the decline of his profession, the rapacity, rancor, and deceit of an adversary system in extremis, ever less up to the tasks of justice. He'd seen the red flags flying in his marriage. Not since Vietnam had imponderables of such magnitude confronted him. What am I doing here? What is the point?

In the six months off Moss aimed at nothing dramatic -- Spanish studies and neotropical biology in the Quaker colony of Monteverde. Detox, recharge, and reflect. Reflection had led to resolution: No more medical malpractice. He wrote it on Post-it notes and stuck them everywhere. MALPRÁCTICA NO MÁS.

You can get some distance, some perspective, from the Cordillera de Tilarán. When the misty jungle rings with bell birds, and howler monkeys roar at dawn, it can occur that suing doctors is too much grief.

After fifteen years of his doing little else, malpractice cases remained too hard to win; they cost too much; and winning meant too little. Settlements were confidential, the client was still as maimed or dead, and the practice and malpractice of medicine would proceed unedified. The epic contest of lawyer against doctor faded away in a quarrel over money. You have it and I want it. I got it and you can't have it. The dust that settled was swept under the rug.

Do such labors, Moss had given pause to reflect, make a better world?

He vowed to return to less anguished stuff. The bloodless combat of commercial disputes. Businesses for clients instead of damaged human beings. Patent infringement for excitement.

Yet here he was, eye-to-eye with Terry Winter, sizing up her case.

Moss had found the reflective life by itself insufficient. He had an incorrigibly Western outlook. Virtue was acquired by deeds, not contemplation. He'd always succumb to the suffering born of desire. Still, the cumulative glow from spending each day for six months apart from the world and in the company of his wife felt something like enlightenment.

On Earthwatch projects in Monteverde he and Sally recorded the mating dance of long-tailed mannikins and inventoried golden toads. Sally drew and etched. He reread Shakespeare and the court romances. He rarely brought up cases. Life's too short, Sally would say, when the subject turned to past disappointments. Her miscarriages; his bad verdicts. When he thought of getting older, and of his wife's forest beauty in the Cordillera de Tilarán, Moss agreed. Life's too short. Malpráctica no más.

Three months back and already it wasn't working. Part was boredom. Moss was restless, and restless lawyers cause trouble. Maybe patent infringement wasn't quite the answer. Maybe leaking underground storage tanks would better suit a somber turn of mind. He caught himself weighing whether to take on a guy brain-injured by a water balloon at the Flatirons County Fair. Could he find fulfillment proving which of those manning the catapult was to blame -- the clown, the cowboy, or the commissioner's son?

Then Lata rang him with a cold call. Lata, the Junker and Wylie receptionist, a high-boned beauty from the Orange Free State with a prized African Oxbridge telephone voice, had a sixth sense for good work. Mother and daughter had walked in off the street. May I be of assistance? Lata inquired. I think I need a lawyer, mother replied. Daughter added, I want to meet him too.

"How's she look?" Moss had asked.

"Talk to this lady," Lata said.

That was another part, the novelty of Terry Winter.

But the main part was the doctor, the reason to breach his sabbatical treaty for one more clash of arms. It had been Bondurant. Again. No way could he tell her no. But no way, either, could he tell her why.

Terry Winter looked maybe midthirties but had to be older, with clear skin, black eyes, features reminiscent of Maria on Sesame Street, but not so tall. She was dressed like a ranch hand and lived in the mountains west of Boulder. The boots and tight jeans had turned Junker's head as she stood at the reception desk talking to Lata. She could pass, Moss judged, as a sabanera, a cowgirl, in the Cordillera de Tilarán. She appeared unrelated to the blond kid reading about the princess in People.

Terry had breast cancer. Large tumor, positive nodes. The afflicted breast was gone. No visible effects of chemo though he observed a subtle stiffness, left arm extension a little short, from the axillary dissection of her armpit. Otherwise, she said with emphasis, healthy and cancer free. In Moss's assessment she gave off strength. But a bad prognosis for recurrence. She knew what that would mean.

"It means you're toast," she said. "I'm toast."

"How did Bondurant miss it?"

"I was fixing to ask you that."

Moss outlined what needed to be done. He'd want an authorization signed that day for the release of records and film. He'd get her charts from Bondurant and the cancer center, have the mammograms independently read, have her parafin tissue blocks recut and slides sent out. When all the information was in place it would be forwarded for review by a family medicine specialist, probably out of state. Moss may need to meet with her other doctors, if they were cooperative. Then he'd tell her whether he thought she had a case.

"Always remember," Moss said, as he always did, "your health is more important than any lawsuit. Go to your doctors regularly. Comply with their directions. Bondurant can use it against you if you don't. Trust me," he said. "I'm a lawyer." His self-deprecating joke.

The daughter rolled her eyes.

"Trust is the issue, isn't it?" Terry shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "I'm trying to be proactive about it." She crossed her arms. "My health," she said, as though health were an abstraction in which she tried to place faith. The way people say, my country.

The twelve-year-old peered at her mother from behind the cover photograph of Princess Di.

"These are hard cases," he said frowning and leaning her way. Moss was somewhat slow of speech, with a bearing obscurely Lincolnesque -- careworn and distantly countrified enough to earn raised e