2025-09-29 17:15:48
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Chapter Five Hundred And Thirty-two
Catherine Beaumont called Lukas the morning after their first conversation, which had been brief and factual. The second call was different in character."I want to be clear about what this lawsuit is for," she said, "because I've found that when people hear wrongful death civil case they assume the primary objective is financial, and the financial dimension is real but it's not why I've spent twenty years becoming the specific kind of lawyer who can bring this specific case.""Tell me what it's for," Lukas said."My mother died when I was eight. I grew up with the official account, which was driver error on a wet road, and I accepted it because children accept what adults provide them, and by the time I was old enough to have questions the case was cold and no one was looking. What I want from this lawsuit is a finding. Not a settlement filed quietly with a confidentiality clause. Not an apology that functions as a non-admission. A finding. A court determining, on the balance of prob
Chapter Five Hundred And Thirty-one
The Rousseau file that Hartman shared with Lukas was thicker than the others, partly because 1998 was more documentable than 1987 or 1989, the paper trail denser as the decade had accumulated, and partly because Rousseau herself had been a person who documented things professionally and whose professional habit had extended to her own situation in the months before her death."She kept a working journal," Hartman said, in the meeting where the file was introduced. "Not a personal diary, more like the kind of notes journalists maintain on active stories. What we have is partial — some pages are missing, we believe these were removed from her office in the period between her death and when the materials were collected, but what remained is significant.""What does it say.""It tracks her sources, her evidence chain, her assessment of risks. In the entries from January and February 1998, the entries become more compressed, shorter, more focused on operational concerns rather than evident
Chapter Five Hundred And Thirty
The pattern analysis report was sixty-eight pages and Lukas read all of it over two evenings, which was the kind of reading that sits behind your eyes when you try to sleep and that stays with you in the particular way that documented human cruelty stays with you, not with the intensity of immediate shock but with the persistent low weight of something that has joined your understanding of how the world works and that cannot be unjoined from it.Hartman walked him through the cases in a meeting that Lukas had asked for specifically, wanting the documentation to have voices attached to it, the institutional version of the cases contextualised by someone who had been reading the source material for weeks."The three additional deaths break into two categories," Hartman said. "Two physicians and a nurse practitioner, all working within or adjacent to the trial programme, all raising formal objections through internal or regulatory channels. One journalist. The journalist is the one with
Chapter Five Hundred And Twenty-nine
Henrik's lawyer called Lukas the morning after the prosecutors' notification, not because Lukas was legally relevant to Henrik's defence but because Henrik had asked her to, which told Lukas something about what the elderly man was doing with the hours between the notification and whenever he had managed to sleep."He wants you to know directly," she said, "and he wants you to know that he intends to cooperate fully with whatever process follows. He's not going to fight the charges if charges are brought. I've advised him that this is not the only option available to him and he understands that and has asked me to note that he's made his decision.""He told me last night that telling the truth eventually isn't the same as telling the truth," Lukas said.A brief pause. "Yes. He said something similar to me this morning. I've advised clients on criminal matters for twenty-five years and I find I don't have the ordinary counter-argument available."He called Elise at nine, and she had al
Chapter Five Hundred And Twenty-eight
The documents were in a manila folder that Sofia placed on the conference table without ceremony, sliding it across to Lukas in the way of someone who has been waiting for the moment of delivery and who, now that it has arrived, wants it completed quickly."Copies," she said. "The originals are in secure storage. My lawyers have the location details and the investigators will be provided access within the next forty-eight hours regardless of anything that happens in this room."Lukas opened the folder. There were six pages, photocopies of what appeared to be correspondence, the letterhead in Dutch and the text partly in Dutch and partly in a German that Lukas could read adequately. He scanned the dates — all 1987 and 1988, the months leading up to November, the month Kofi Mensah had died.The language was careful in the way that careful language becomes when the people using it understand that what they are discussing should not be written down but cannot avoid being written down beca
Chapter Five Hundred And Twenty-seven
He called Elise before he called his lawyer this time, which his lawyer would have advised against and which he decided was the right call anyway, because this was not primarily a legal development but a personal one, a development that connected to Elise's own history with Sofia in ways that she deserved to know about before the institutional machinery had fully processed it."Laurent Pharmaceuticals," Elise said, when he had told her. She said it the way she said things when she was processing them, flat and precise, the name sitting in her mouth for a moment before she continued. "Sofia's father built that company in the seventies. She's been positioning herself for years as someone who reformed what he built, who professionalised it, who brought ethical rigour to an operation that had been more about relationships than standards.""I know.""If her family's fortune has the same foundation as ours—" She stopped. "She offered me a partnership during the hostile takeover. She offered
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