Chapter 3
The past three days at Sterling I'd flagged the HR anomaly in my first meeting with Will.
Her public record search revealed that she'd resigned one day after court documents were unsealed, exposing a prior fraud conviction she'd failed to disclose on her bar application.
My coffee went cold beside me as I pulled file after file.
Gregory Prentiss, senior associate. Resigned after a news outlet exposed his membership in a private club with documented ties to white supremacist organizations.
Diana Chen, contracts specialist. Left the firm two days after an anonymous tip led investigators to discover she'd been padding billable hours on three major accounts.
Thomas Whitmore, litigation support. Quit after following revelations about a gambling addiction that had led him to access confidential client information for insider trading tips.
The pattern was undeniable. Every single person who'd left Sterling & Steele in the past three years had a scandal break days before their departure. Not weeks. Not months. Days. The timing was surgical.
Someone wasn't just cleaning house after problems surfaced. Someone was creating the conditions that forced these people out.
"Who are you?" I whispered to my screen.
The answer came from the security access logs I'd requested on day one.
Each personnel file had a digital footprint, a record of who'd accessed it and when. Most showed routine HR activity, supervisory reviews, and standard administrative touches. But one access code appeared with grim regularity in the weeks before each scandal broke.
WAS-1.
Will A. Steele.
I sat back in my chair, the leather creaking in the silence.
The city glittered beyond the glass walls, thirty floors of indifferent beauty, and I pressed my palms flat against the table and counted to ten the way my therapist had taught me, during the six months of sessions I'd stopped attending because I'd convinced myself I was "managing fine. "
He wasn't just a ruthless litigator. He was hunting people inside his own firm.
The ethics complaints suddenly made terrible sense. They weren't from sore losers or disgruntled rivals. They were from people who'd caught a glimpse of the pattern and tried, futilely, to flag it.
I should have felt vindicated. This was what an audit was supposed to find. Clear, documented, damning.
Instead, I felt something that made no professional sense whatsoever.
Curiosity.
Because the people he'd destroyed. They weren't rivals. Weren't competitors. Weren't random victims of a man exercising power for his own sake. They were, each and every one of them, people who had done genuinely terrible things.
That didn't fit the profile of a monster. It fit something else entirely. And I couldn't stop turning it over in my head, poking at it, the same way I couldn't stop pulling at a number that didn't balance.
I gathered my tablet before I could talk myself out of it. The smart move was to document everything, call my supervisor, and file a preliminary report with the bar. That was the safe path. The procedural path. The correct path.
Instead, I walked down the darkened hallway toward Will Steele's office.