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Sasha a look.
    Is he okay?
    Sasha shrugged and moved on, “Each of you will be responsible for putting together a dossier on one of the victims. Look for criminal records, unpaid parking tickets, compromising Facebook pictures, internet forum posts, anything you can find that they wouldn’t want us to know about. Naya will e-mail around an assignment list. I’ll take Calvaruso. Kaitlyn, once you finish the conflicts analysis, you take Celeste Grant.”
    Ordinarily, Sasha would have taken Grant herself, but something about Calvaruso was bothering her. She wanted to check it out.
    Parker, a blonde who looked like she should be riding a horse in a Ralph Lauren ad, raised her hand. “Why are we digging up dirt on the crash victims?”
    Sasha glanced at Peterson to see if he wanted to field this one. It was the type of question he was an expert at turning around, obfuscating the moral issue so completely that you ended up wondering how lawyers could claim to represent their clients’ interest if they weren’t trashing the plaintiffs. Peterson didn’t look up from his mug.
    “Don’t think of it as digging up dirt on the victims,” Sasha said. “To properly defend Hemisphere Air, we need to understand our opponents—their motivations, their strengths, and their weaknesses.”
    Parker twirled a long strand of hair around her finger and just looked at her.
    “You’ll be surprised at how much damaging information is out there about people. Last year, Noah and I were defending UPMC against an employee who claimed he couldn’t work because he had a debilitating fear that the building was toxic even though the results of environmental studies showed it wasn’t. But he said he experienced all the symptoms of sick building syndrome whenever he came to work.”
    She waited a minute to let her colleagues scoff and laugh derisively. It was absurd now, but at the time the medical center had been staring down the barrel at a high seven-figure demand and there was nothing funny about the case.
    She went on, “Plaintiff’s counsel retained a doctor from New Mexico who touted himself as the leading expert in this area. A three-minute Google search revealed a state medical board decision revoking his medical license, a Justice Department investigation into possible Medicare fraud for bogus billing of nonexistent treatments, and a federal court decision barring him from testifying because it viewed his opinion as junk science. After a very entertaining deposition of the good doctor, the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed with prejudice in exchange for us not filing a motion for sanctions and fees. Could we have really served UPMC’s interests in that case if we hadn’t thoroughly researched our opponent? Of course not.”
    The assembled attorneys bobbed their heads, sold on the idea. Caught up in the moment, they failed to appreciate the difference between discrediting a for-hire whore selling his opinions to the highest bidder and destroying the shell-shocked family members’ memories of their loved ones—men and women who were just trying to get from Point A to Point B.
    If averages held, two of the associates sitting around the table would stumble onto that distinction at some point. And one of them would care. That one would become a former Prescott attorney. The other would someday pick out the furniture for a corner office.
    The meeting broke up and people drifted out, talking about how awesome it must have been to shove that expert down plaintiff counsel’s throat.
    Sasha stayed behind to cadge the remaining pastries for Lettie and her friends. On her way out, she stopped to offer one to Flora, who deliberated before settling on a muffin.
    “Thanks,” she said, peeling back the paper with her purple talons.
    Naya came out of the conference room and caught up with Sasha at Flora’s work station. She put a hand on Sasha’s arm to keep her there.
    “What’s going on with Peterson?” Naya asked.
    Sasha shrugged. “I