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Suspect
Jasmine Cresswell
For twenty-five years, multimillionaire businessman Ron Raven played the loving husband and father–to two very different households. But when Ron disappears, his deception is revealed. Faced with the ultimate betrayal, both families are left questioning who can be trusted… and who remains SUSPECT. Cynical attorney Liam Raven hid his father's bigamy… until it was too late.Ironically, Liam specializes in divorce cases. But when Chloe Hamilton is charged with murdering her husband, a popular Denver mayor, he makes an exception. Liam's relationship to Chloe quickly surpasses client and attorney.Her former husband had many secrets–including a connection to Ron Raven's other family. And aquitting Chloe means uncovering a string of lies and treachery that leads back to Liam's father.
Jasmine CresswelL
Suspect
For Diane Mott Davidson, who helps to make my
summers in Colorado so wonderful.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
One
Denver, Colorado, Monday, August 7
Liam Raven looked at the woman sleeping in the bed next to him and tried to remember her name. He vaguely recalled that she enjoyed snowboarding. He knew for certain that she was studying to be a nurse. Her name, however, escaped him.
He stared at the light filtering through the broken slats of the miniblinds and wondered how it came about that at thirty-five years of age—pushing thirty-six—he hadn’t found a better way to spend his nights than sleeping with a woman he never planned to see again and whose name he couldn’t remember.
His cell phone rang—his work number—saving him from delving too deeply into the murky depths of his psyche. He was grateful for the interruption. Self-analysis was guaranteed to give him nightmares but work, thank God, usually proved a reliable anesthetic.
He eased out of bed, flipping open his phone. Out of deference to the still-sleeping No-Name, he waited until he was in the living room before he responded. “This is Liam Raven.”
“Thank God I reached you. This is Chloe Hamilton.” The woman on the other end of the phone drew in an audible gulp of air but her voice still didn’t steady. “Do you remember me? I came to see you a few months ago. I asked for your help in filing for a divorce—”
“I remember you well, Mrs. Hamilton.” Even among Liam’s client roster of rich and famous Coloradans, it would be hard to forget a woman who’d won medals in four Olympic skiing events and was married to the mayor of Denver. Not to mention the fact that Chloe Hamilton had the sort of lithe, athletic body guaranteed to provoke a major case of lust in any straight guy still breathing.
“We discussed ways to keep the proceedings confidential until the decree was granted,” Liam said, letting Chloe know that he genuinely recalled their past dealings. “In the end, though, you decided to stay with your husband for the sake of your daughter. How can I help you, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“Jason’s dead,” she blurted out, her voice catching on a suppressed sob. “He’s been…murdered.”
The mayor of Denver had been murdered? Holy shit! Liam smothered the exclamation. “I’m very sorry to hear of your loss—”
“I was the person who found him. I came downstairs and he was lying on the floor in our basement media room. There was blood everywhere. All over the wall. All over the floor. God, it was terrible.” Chloe’s explanation erupted in short, staccato bursts and it sounded to Liam as if her teeth were chattering.
“There was so much blood.” Chloe’s voice faded to a whisper. “My God, there was so much blood.”
Liam spoke swiftly. “Have you notified the police? Called a doctor?” A doctor might be able to help Chloe, even if there was nothing to be done for her husband.
“The police think I killed him.” The words tumbled out, harsh with fear. “I’m sure they’re going to arrest me. I need a lawyer right away. I can’t let them take me to jail, even for a couple of nights. Sophie’s just lost…she’s just lost her father. She can’t lose me, too. She simply can’t.”
Sophie must be the name of Chloe’s daughter. Liam had never seen the child and couldn’t remember how old she was. A preschooler, he thought. Maybe three or four? He spoke quickly. “Are the police with you now?”
“Just a couple of uniformed officers guarding the crime scene and holding the reporters at bay. They’ve already taken away—” She broke off and started again. “They’ve already taken away Jason’s body.”
“Whatever you do, Mrs. Hamilton, don’t say anything to the cops. Nothing, do you hear me? If they ask your name, you’re obligated to identify yourself, but that’s it. It doesn’t matter how innocuous the police questions seem, don’t answer them. In a murder case, the spouse and immediate family of the victim are often considered suspects. Unless you have a rock solid alibi—”
“I was here all night,” Chloe said. “It must have happened…Jason must have been killed while I was sleeping.”
She’d been sleeping—unless she’d killed him, Liam reflected cynically, but he kept any trace of skepticism out of his voice. “In the circumstances, you should assume you’re currently the prime suspect, Mrs. Hamilton. It’s nothing personal on the part of the authorities. Just routine police procedure in the early stages of an investigation.”
“Their suspicions seem a lot more than routine to me.”
Yeah, well, most likely because the evidence pointed straight to her, Liam thought. However, that was beside the point. Guilty or innocent, his advice to Chloe Hamilton would remain the same: get a competent criminal lawyer and say nothing.
He spoke briskly. “In view of the fact that we’re talking about the murder of a very prominent citizen, the police department will almost certainly send one or more of their senior detectives to question you some time soon. Whatever these detectives ask—even if it’s something as simple as the date or the time of day—tell them you need to consult with your lawyer before responding. Got that?”
“Yes, I understand. But I guess it’s too late for that piece of advice. I already answered a ton of questions about what happened last night.”
Liam shook his head, groaning inwardly. He was constantly amazed at the way even sophisticated and well educated people failed to take advantage of their right to remain silent in the wake of a crime. He attempted to reassure her anyway. Right now it wouldn’t help to add to Chloe’s stress level by telling her she’d screwed up, big time.
“There’s probably no real harm done.” For her daughter’s sake, he hoped that wasn’t a complete lie. If you really wanted to mess up a kid, he couldn’t think of a much better way than having one parent murder the other. Growing up with your mom in prison wasn’t exactly calculated to make for a picture-perfect childhood, either.
“Make sure you don’t answer any more questions until you have legal counsel right there with you, okay?”
“Okay. I understand.”
“Do you have a pencil and paper?”
“I must have, I guess.” Her voice trailed off and he could visualize her staring vaguely around the room, still too much in shock to register her surroundings with any degree of clarity. He was surprised at how sharp his mental images of Chloe were. Apparently she’d made even more of an impression on him four months ago than he’d realized.
“There must be a pencil somewhere,” she muttered.
“You definitely need to find something to write with. I’ll hold while you look.”
It was a full minute before Chloe picked up the phone again. “Thank you for waiting, Mr. Raven. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this disorganized. I have a pen now.”
“Write down this phone number and office address. It’s for a friend of mine, Bill Schuller. Bill is an outstanding criminal defense attorney and you need to call him before the police question you again.”
“But I don’t want Bill Schuller to be my lawyer!” Chloe protested. “I want you to represent me. That’s why I called. Mr. Raven, please, you have to help me.”
“I am helping you. Trust me on this. Bill Schuller is the best criminal trial lawyer in Denver—”
“No, you’re the best. Everyone says so. You won an acquittal for Sherri Norquist when the experts all predicted you were going to lose.”
Liam’s stomach knotted at the mention of Sherri’s name, and he was immediately angry with himself for reacting to a case—and a woman—that were now more than three years in his past. He’d been a complete idiot over Sherri Norquist. He’d allowed himself to be manipulated into falling in love with a murdering bitch. But hey, shit happens. It was time to move on. God knew, Sherri certainly had, and seemingly without the smallest trace of guilt or regret.
He spoke crisply, skilled by now at keeping a barrier between his outward demeanor and what he was really feeling. “I appreciate the compliment, Mrs. Hamilton, but it’s undeserved. The bottom line is that I just happened to make a big splash with a couple of my early cases. I haven’t practiced as a criminal defense attorney in several years. These days, I deal only with divorce cases.” Which not only kept him away from an unsavory assortment of accused murderers, drug dealers and armed robbers, but provided him with the added pleasure of saying a mental fuck you to his bigamist father every time he took on a new case or signed off on a completed one. Liam understood that many worse things could happen to a kid than discovering his father had two wives, and two separate families. And he hadn’t even been a kid, really, when he learned the truth about his father’s second family. Still, his disdain for his father ran deep; even the fact that Ron Raven had recently been murdered hadn’t put an end to his anger.
He brought his attention back to Chloe. “You need to call Bill Schuller, before the police come back to question you again, Mrs. Hamilton. And keep in mind that the cops aren’t joking around when they warn you that anything and everything you say can be used as evidence against you. Here’s Bill’s office phone number. Call him right now, before you do anything else. It’s important.” He reeled off the number, repeated his condolences on Jason Hamilton’s death and hung up before Chloe could protest any further.
Just as he finished the conversation with Chloe, No-Name came out of the bedroom, wrapped in a towel. She looked sleepy-eyed, cute and appallingly young. Jesus, what had he been thinking last night? Or not thinking, more like it, Liam reflected grimly.
“Oh, you’re still here,” she said, smiling in relief. “I was afraid you’d left already.”
“No, I’m still here, but only just. I was answering the phone and didn’t want to disturb you.” He returned her smile with all the warmth he could muster. No-Name couldn’t be much more than twenty-one, which would make her almost fifteen years his junior. There was still an appealing hint of hopeful innocence in her expression and he felt a sharp twinge of remorse for having exploited her naiveté. He had years of experience in developing pickup lines that worked, and she’d fallen for them all. True, he’d met her in a LoDo bar notorious as Casual Sex Central. Still, even for a one-night stand, she deserved somebody a hell of a lot less cynical about relationships than he was. Three months ago he would almost certainly have dismissed her as off-limits, but since his father died at the beginning of May, it seemed as if the small store of human kindness left to him in the wake of the Sherri Norquist fiasco had vanished, rotting deep in the Atlantic Ocean alongside the bodies of his father and his father’s mistress.
“I wish I could stay.” Liam aimed another smile in No-Name’s direction, a rueful one that suggested if only his job were not so demanding he’d be thrilled to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to let her down lightly. Or perhaps he wanted to convince himself that he hadn’t been a total asshole to have slept with her in the first place.
He tapped his cell phone. “I’m sorry. I just answered an urgent call from my office and I have to leave right away. There’s a family crisis involving one of my clients and they need me to catch the fallout.”
“Now?” she asked, pouting. “So early? It’s not even six-thirty!”
“I know. Wild, isn’t it? I swear, lawyers get more emergency calls than doctors.”
“But you’re a divorce lawyer. I wouldn’t have expected divorce lawyers to get any emergency calls.”
“Oh boy, are you wrong.” He chucked her under the chin, feeling a hundred years old as he coaxed a smile. “I sometimes think divorce lawyers get more emergency calls than anyone else. Especially on a Monday morning. Weekends are tough on couples who are splitting up. That’s when all the custody battles erupt and sometimes they aren’t just battles of words.”
“Tell me about it.” No-Name’s eyes turned sad. “My parents divorced when I was fifteen. As far as I’m concerned, they’d have done us kids a huge favor if they’d split ten years earlier. They weren’t physically violent, but the shouting was horrible.”
“Failing marriages are rough on the kids, whether you stick it out or cut through the pain and file for divorce.” Liam really didn’t want to get into a discussion of the problems associated with couples who weren’t willing to admit their marriage was over. That was a subject that cut too close to far too many bones.
He walked back into the bedroom, wondering if it was a custody battle between Jason and Chloe that had precipitated the mayor’s murder. People killed their spouses over custody issues almost as often as they killed them over money, and a lot more often than they killed them because of unfaithfulness. He’d barely been fifteen minutes into his first consultation with Chloe Hamilton when he realized that her daughter was the focus of her life. She might well be capable of killing in defense of her daughter, Liam reflected, even if such an act would be impossible for her in other circumstances.
When Chloe first came to see him, his professional instincts had shouted that there was more going on than a simple desire to get divorced. Equally, there had seemed to be something more behind her decision to stay with the mayor than a straightforward decision to reconcile. Despite his efforts to persuade Chloe to confide in him, she’d insisted she was the one who’d changed her mind and now wanted to give her marriage a second chance. He wasn’t sure he believed her, then or now. At the time, he’d suspected that Jason Hamilton had applied some sort of blackmail to prevent her walking away from their marriage. If the mayor had threatened to fight her for custody of their daughter, Chloe might have decided to end the emotional blackmail by getting rid of her husband.
No-Name followed Liam into the bedroom, forcing his attention back to her. She leaned against the doorjamb, her towel slipping provocatively as she watched him dress. “Don’t you want to take a shower before you leave? Or at least have some coffee?”
Liam tucked his shirt into his pants, zipping his fly as an excuse to pretend he hadn’t noticed No-Name’s bare breasts. “Thanks for the offer but I need to go home and get some clean clothes. I’m scheduled to appear in court today and my client is paying big bucks for the privilege of having me turn up wearing a starched shirt and a silk tie.”
No-Name protested some more, but not too forcefully, as if she didn’t quite believe his excuses but didn’t want to push too hard in case he told her something she didn’t want to hear. He managed to get out of her apartment in less than five minutes. It would have been easy to lie, to promise to be in touch, but a final flare of conscience kept him silent, so that he left her standing at her front door looking crestfallen. Truth, Liam thought wryly, was vastly overrated as an ingredient in sexual relationships.
By the time he made it to his car, his gut was twisted into a hard coil of tension. He chugged a handful of antacids—his usual breakfast—and drove with fierce concentration through the already dense traffic. Denver was a city that started early and 7:00 a.m. was well into the Monday morning rush hour.
It was a relief to enter the soothing austerity of his newly purchased condo overlooking Confluence Park. Liam had selected the white walls, slate floors and sleek contemporary furniture as a deliberate contrast to the cluttered, homey comfort of the Flying W, his parents’ ranch in Wyoming.
He recognized that his almost compulsive desire for orderliness in his surroundings was a direct reflection of the chaos of his inner life. Sometimes he wondered if he was ever going to reach the point where he would be able to let down his guard without risking an emotional meltdown. Still, whatever the psychological underpinnings of his decorating choices, the immaculate neatness and careful functionality of each room offered balm to his soul.
He tossed his car keys into the wooden bowl set on the chrome and glass side table in the entrance and made his way through the master bedroom to the shower, stopping en route to check his voice mail. There were four messages, all of them work related. It looked, thank God, as if it was going to be another frantic workweek. Just the sort of heavy-duty schedule he liked, with no time to stop and reflect.
He switched on the TV as he dressed and discovered that the murder of Jason Hamilton was making headlines on virtually every channel, not just locally but nationally as well. Not surprising, he supposed, given that Jason had been the mayor of a major city and Chloe had worn the crown as America’s Sweetheart for several months after the 1998 Winter Olympics. To make Jason’s death even more tabloid-worthy, the mayor was also a successful multimillionaire real estate developer, and the son of a U.S. army general who was a minor celebrity in his own right, having won the Medal of Honor for his bravery during combat service in Vietnam. Jason Hamilton’s violent death represented an irresistible combination of wealth, fame and mystery for the ravenous maw of the twenty-four-hour news machines. Flipping from one breathless report to the next, Liam figured the cable news networks must all be praying that Chloe didn’t get arrested too soon and spoil the potential for weeks of rabid speculation about the crime.
Facts about the murder were sparse, but it seemed that Jason’s dead body had been discovered in the basement of their family home in Park Hill by his wife at approximately 3:30 a.m., Denver time. Death was apparently due to a stab wound, or possibly multiple stab wounds; the reports weren’t clear. Chloe Hamilton had tried to revive her husband. The newscasters—discreetly noncommittal at this stage of a developing story—refrained from speculating as to whether Chloe might possibly have gotten there before Jason died rather than after.
News editors were making up for lack of hard data about the crime by filling in with copious back stories. They reminded everyone that Jason Hamilton had been one of Denver’s most popular mayors, with approval ratings consistently hovering in the high seventies. He’d even managed to clear snow from obscure city side streets after last year’s biggest blizzard—a feat that far exceeded the abilities of most of his predecessors and had won him the heartfelt gratitude of his constituents.
Between lectures on the political and civic consequences of Jason’s death, the news shows ran footage of Chloe during her record-breaking gold medal run. It was the first U.S. gold medal in that particular event and, in the wake of her win, Chloe had been the recipient of wall-to-wall media attention, so there was plenty of film footage to be trotted out. The close-up shot of Chloe on the victory podium—teary-eyed but joyful—seemed to be the special favorite of news producers this morning. Liam could understand why. She was a stunning woman and her radiant smile made for a fantastic TV visual.
Having endured two weeks in the full glare of the media spotlight when his father was murdered back in May, Liam sympathized with what Chloe Hamilton must be going through right now. His sympathies were tempered, however, by the strong likelihood that she had, in fact, killed her husband. Spouses were always the first suspect in a murder case, and Liam’s experience as a criminal lawyer had given him no reason to doubt the statistics. He figured that any Olympic gold medalist who chose to stab her spouse multiple times had to be prepared to face a little negative publicity.
Whatever the facts, whether she was the murderer or an innocent bystander, Chloe would be wise to steel herself for a continuing onslaught from the media ghouls. If the cops didn’t identify her husband’s killer within forty-eight hours, she was going to find herself soaring into the stratosphere of national attention. A miserable place to be when the attention wasn’t favorable.
Fortunately, none of the problems resulting from Jason Hamilton’s murder were his to deal with. Liam shoved aside a twinge of irrational regret for his previous career as a criminal defense attorney. Yes, he’d relished the cut and thrust of courtroom battle and he savored the memory of a couple of innocent clients he’d help to set free, but his current work provided more income, more predictable hours and a lot less stress. He’d have to be crazy to consider switching back to the high pressure work of defending criminals, especially with a famous client like Chloe Hamilton as his means for reentry. That would generate the sort of public scrutiny nobody in his family needed right now.
