“I like it,” Tiffani said, nodding. “It sounds ferocious.”
Martin kissed her again. He couldn’t resist.
“Please,” she said with fake decorum. “We’re working.”
“Spoilsport.”
“So no one gains professionally from McMillan losing the trial,” Tiffani said, her cheeks prettily colored still from how she’d blushed when he’d kissed her. “So it’s personal, but probably not so personal that it’s about love. If it’s about him—and it might not be—it’s about hate. It really is just because he’s a jerk.”
“Someone must be pretty bothered by that to risk this much just to hurt his pride. The protesters could have been an innocent joke, but calling in the bomb threat is a crime. No one’s going to take that lightly unless it really is a kid who did it.”
He paused, thinking it through.
“And of course some people, like McMillan, would hammer them into the ground even if they are a kid. Juvenile sentences are no joke. This could cost someone a lot if they got found out, no matter how old they are.”
“No one ever thinks they’ll get found out, though,” Tiffani said.
He wondered if she was thinking of her ex-husband. Gordon Marcus had indeed gotten by without getting caught for a long time. He’d had time to work his way through a whole laundry list of financial crimes. But Gordon had at least had a reason to make the gamble he had. He’d bet against the law, but he’d done it because winning would let him rake in millions.
What did their mystery caller get?
He couldn’t think of anything.
Besides, obviously, the satisfaction of ruining Terrence McMillan’s day.
Either they were very dumb or they were very, very angry.
“Did McMillan have a regular court reporter that he worked with before you came along?”
Tiffani shook her head. “No, I asked around about that when I heard about his reputation. Everyone did the best they could to keep from getting assigned to him a second time—which of course didn’t work, but they at least tried to space out their stays in hell.”
She suddenly frowned.
“What is it?”
“Hell—that was what Bruce called it. Bruce Tompoulidis, McMillan’s law clerk. McMillan was lecturing me in his chambers and just completely ignoring the fact that Bruce was there, and when we were finally able to leave, Bruce congratulated me on escaping from hell.”
Martin remembered that, more or less. Bruce must have been the clerk who had kept Tiffani talking so long in the hall.
“It didn’t feel like anything more than the usual complaining about work—he was getting ready to ask me out on kind of a date—”
Martin resisted the urge to instantly decide that this Bruce was his primary suspect.
“—but I just remembered it. You said whoever did this must be pretty bothered by McMillan being a jerk, right? Bruce has worked with him for years now.”
He could sense that she was holding something back, not sure yet how to phrase it. He waited.
“And when I turned him down,” Tiffani said slowly, “he shut off the charm right away. It was like someone turning off a faucet. And we’d barely spoken to each other—there’s no way he was that disappointed that I wasn’t going out for a drink with him. Not really. But the second I wasn’t someone he wanted to impress, he turned ice-cold.”
She might have been underrating exactly how saddened any man would be by her politely saying no thanks to a date, but any good man would have done his best not to show it.
If Bruce Tompoulidis could keep his cool around McMillan but had let Tiffani see that she’d made him angry, that meant he’d done it on purpose. He’d liked lashing out, so long as he could lash out safely.
“Tompoulidis,” he said.
“Yeah. Bruce Tompoulidis.”
Florence had remembered that the young man who had given them the bright idea of the flash mob protest at the trial had given his name as something that had started with a T.