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“Speaking as a divorce lawyer, I can only say that I’m sure you’re right. I wish more people were as smart as my little sister.”
“No, you don’t, or you’d be unemployed!”
Liam laughed but there was a lump in his throat. Since he couldn’t deal with his emotions, today of all days, he spoke with deliberate briskness. “Adam seems like a good guy. Nowhere good enough for you, of course, but almost in the ballpark. Be happy, Meggie.”
“He’s a great guy, and I plan to be.” She broke off. “Oh my gosh, wait! We’re wading so deep into the sentimental stuff that I almost forgot the reason I called you in the first place. It’s about Dad.”
Liam winced, stopping outside the entrance to his offices. “Please don’t tell me Adam has uncovered more financial problems.”
“None that we didn’t know about already, thank goodness. Between the platinum mine in Belize and the disputed wills, I couldn’t take another financial disaster, or more documents to sign and send off to the probate court. No, this is something quite different. Do you remember Tricia Riley? She’s a distant cousin on Dad’s side of the family. Her grandmother and our grandmother were sisters.”
“I have a vague image from Grandma’s funeral.” Liam wrinkled his forehead. “She’s got curly hair a bit like yours, right? She was on the ditzy side, but smart in a geeky sort of way. As I recall, she used to work for a dotcom in Houston. She must be in her fifties by now.”
“Yes, that’s the one. She still does work in Houston, apparently for a company that manufactures household robots. She asked me to call her back when I had time to talk. She claimed she had something important she needed to discuss with me.”
“That sounds ominous. If she’s asking you to invest in her robots, I recommend you ask for a demonstration first.”
“That was precisely my thought, but we’re both offtrack. I called her back this morning and what Tricia had to say turned out to be a lot more worrying than robots designed to scrub the floors. Liam, she told me that she’d seen Dad in a shopping mall in Houston.”
“What? You’re kidding. She’s claiming to have seen Dad recently?”
“She says she saw him last week.”
“Good lord, she must be even more ditzy than she looks. So is she claiming to have seen him for real, in the flesh? Or are we talking visitations by a ghost?”
“Absolutely not ghosts. Tricia says she saw Dad going into Nieman Marcus in Houston. She called his name and hurried to catch up with him, but he ignored her. By the time she got into the store, he’d vanished.”
“Obviously she suffers from an overactive imagination,” Liam said, not sure whether to be irritated by his cousin or to pity her. He never understood why some people felt the need to turn commonplace events into major dramas, with themselves as the stars. “The guy didn’t turn around because he had no idea he was being called. He didn’t respond to somebody calling Ron Raven for the simple reason that wasn’t his name!”
“You’re singing my song. That’s exactly what I suggested to Tricia, but she wasn’t persuaded. She says she’s sure the man she saw was Ron Raven, or else his double. I pointed out that she didn’t know Dad all that well and that she hadn’t seen him in the twelve years since Grandma’s funeral, and she informed me that I was wrong. She’d had dinner with him in San Antonio a couple of months before he died. Apparently they discussed the possibility of Dad investing in her darn robots! She claims that she knows exactly what Dad looked like right before he was murdered and that this man—quote—had Dad’s way of walking.”
“That’s what Tricia’s basing her identification on?” Liam was torn between laughter and exasperation. “The way this man walked? She saw him at a distance, from the side at best and possibly even from behind, and now she’s positive it was Dad?”
“Apparently. That and the fact she insists the man saw her and recognized her. According to Tricia, he dodged into the store in order to avoid her.”
“She’s paranoid. Not to mention delusional.”
“Very possibly. But she’s already called the police in Miami to tell them they’ve made a mistake in assuming that Dad was murdered. Cousin Tricia has informed them he’s alive and they need to refocus their investigation.”
Liam rolled his eyes. “And what did the cops have to say?”
“Nothing that satisfied Tricia.” Megan groaned. “They thanked her for letting them know what she thought she’d seen and said they would investigate her claim as time and manpower permitted. In other words, they totally blew her off.”
“Are you surprised? My sympathies are with the cops on this one. They’d never get any work done on the real cases if they allowed themselves to get distracted by reports like Tricia’s.”
Megan hesitated for a moment. “You don’t think we ought to follow up with a private detective?”
Liam leaned against the wall outside his office, wanting to finish the call before he went inside. “Follow up what? How? There’s nothing to follow up.”
“That’s true, I guess.”
“You sound uncertain.”
“I am. Tricia may be nuts—”
“Tricia is nuts.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that much. But there are problems with the official police account of what happened the night Dad disappeared. The cops in Miami have closed the investigation, except for a half-hearted effort to track down Julio Castellano. But as I already told you, when Adam and I were in Belize, we met Castellano and spent quite a bit of time with him. He swore he wasn’t the killer.”
“I know. And you told me you and Adam are both inclined to believe him.”
“We’d be dead if not for Castellano,” Megan pointed out. “He put himself significantly at risk for our sakes, which makes it hard to see him as a brutal killer. And if he didn’t kill Dad, who did?”
“Well, if Tricia saw him in Houston, apparently nobody! Did she have any suggestions as to why Dad hasn’t let anyone know he’s still alive?”
“She suggested he might have amnesia.”
“If he has amnesia, why would he have run when she called his name?”
“You’re right. Her story is incoherent.” Megan hesitated for a moment. “Unless Dad deliberately chose to disappear.”
Liam’s stomach lurched, then quickly righted itself. “Why would Dad walk away from every penny he possesses? Does that seem likely to you? Or even remotely credible?”
“No,” Megan conceded. “But we have to face the fact that the cops in Miami have no idea what really happened the night Dad died.”
Now it was Liam’s turn to hesitate. He was much less convinced than his sister that Julio Castellano was as innocent as he had claimed, despite the fact that the guy had definitely helped to rescue Megan and Adam from the dangers they faced in Belize.
“We talked about this when you first got back from Belize,” he said in the end. “I agree the cops might have screwed up on the details of what happened the night Dad died, but their basic outline seems to be correct—”
“Sure. Apart from the minor detail that they have the wrong name pinned on the hit man.”
“In a sense, that is a detail. From what you told me about your trip to Belize, it seems that Uncle Ted knew plenty of people who wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Dad for quite a small sum of money. If not Julio Castellano, then take your pick of a dozen or so other smugglers and thieves hanging out in Las Criandas.”
Liam found it depressing to think about his Uncle Ted, a maternal uncle with as few ethical scruples as his father. Poor Sophie was certainly inheriting a package of unpleasant genes from the Raven side of her family, he reflected grimly. For her sake, he hoped to God that the scientists who claimed nurture was more important than nature were correct.
“The cops in Miami aren’t going to rethink their entire investigation without a stronger inducement than a vague sighting by a woman who didn’t know him all that well,” he said, forcing his thoughts away from his daughter. “It’s convenient for them to have Julio Castellano as the chief suspect. Who could be better to accuse of murder than a man who’s already been convicted and imprisoned for a previous killing?”
“Maybe a private investigator would find something powerful enough to turn the cops’ attention in new directions,” Megan suggested.
“But what could an investigator find? And how would he find it? Tricia hasn’t given us anything new to work with. She didn’t give you an address or a car registration for this guy she spotted. She didn’t even get a make or model of the car he was driving. All she gave us was the way he walks! Where the hell is that going to lead us? Nowhere.”
“You’re right.” Megan sounded wistful.
“You don’t sound entirely convinced.”
“No, I am. Of course, you’re right…”
“Look, if you want us to hire a detective to reexamine the events surrounding Dad’s disappearance, we should go for it. Except…what exactly are you going to instruct the guy to do? Even if we sent him to Belize, there’s nobody to question. Uncle Ted is dead. We haven’t a clue where to find Julio at this point—”
“I know. Tricia didn’t provide any new information we can follow up on and there are no other leads. Rationally, I knew that even before I called you.”
“There’s a melancholy note in your voice. What’s that all about, Meg?”
She hesitated for a moment. “I guess I realized when I was talking to Tricia that I haven’t quite accepted the finality of Dad’s death. He left so many issues unresolved that part of me feels mad at him for being at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where I can’t demand answers. I wanted Tricia to be right. I wanted Dad still to be alive. After a while, it eats at you to be angry with a dead person.”
“You’re right. But for my sake, I hope he’s not alive,” Liam said coolly. “Because if he ever did come back, I’d be tempted to kill him, and I have no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
Megan gave a wry laugh. “I think you’d have to stand in line. Ellie and Avery would both want to take the first shots.” She paused for a moment. “Tricia told me the cops in Miami have received four hundred and twenty-seven reports from people claiming to have seen our father. Isn’t that astonishing?”
“Not really. Police reports are generated in direct proportion to the amount of media attention. For a couple of weeks after Dad died, there was coast-to-coast, wall-to-wall TV coverage. The four hundred reports don’t mean anyone’s seen him, or even that they’ve seen a man who looks like him. It just means lots of lonely people like to feel connected to a celebrity murder.”
“It totally amazes me how much media attention our family is still attracting. I caught a snippet on the news just last night. They were doing a special report on the increase in cases of bigamy and polygamy, and they dragged out all the facts of Dad’s situation again.”
Liam had a suspicion it would be a while before the Ravens and the Fairfaxes could sink back into welcome obscurity. In life, Ron Raven had been rich and successful; in death, he was mysterious. The combination was irresistible to news outlets and his two families were suffering all the notoriety that really ought to have been Ron’s.
On the other hand, he wasn’t in a position to be judging other people’s failings right now, Liam reflected as he said goodbye to his sister and entered his office. His own choices and decisions over the past four years certainly didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Four years ago he’d spent the night with a woman dressed as Cleopatra whose real name he didn’t know and hadn’t made any effort to find out. That fact alone put last night’s careless seduction of No-Name into a new and unpleasant perspective. Clearly, he’d been pursuing a problematic lifestyle for several years. And what was his excuse? Four years ago, he’d been angry at the world because his father was a bigamist and the following year he’d had the bad luck to fall in love with a woman who’d murdered her husband. It was past time for him to admit that plenty of other people survived far worse. He’d chewed out Chloe this morning because she’d been unfaithful to her husband. Talk about the pot accusing the pan of being dirty! Okay, Chloe’s adultery had been reprehensible, but his own behavior would clearly not stand up to any sort of ethical scrutiny.
Awareness of his own culpability—that he’d behaved like a major dick—did nothing to improve Liam’s mood. In retrospect, he wished that he hadn’t been so damned smug this morning.
Chloe was already waiting for him in the small reception area, sipping water from a paper cup. She’d changed her ratty T-shirt for a soft cotton blouse that looked new, and her hair was combed into a smooth ponytail, held in place by a pewter-colored barrette. He felt a sharp jolt of sexual attraction as she crumpled the cup and tossed it into the trash, rising to her feet.
He pushed the attraction aside. God knew, where Chloe was concerned, sex had already gotten him into more than enough trouble. From now on, he was going to concentrate on thinking with his brain, a significantly smarter portion of his anatomy than his penis. Giving her a quick nod, he put the Cellini file on Jenny’s desk and tried to sound like a man in full control of his life.
“We’re finished with this case, Jenny, so you can send out the final bill.”
“Did we win?” Jenny asked.
“We did.” Liam gave a thumbs-up. Then he opened his office door and beckoned to Chloe. “Come on into my office,” he said. “I’m glad you made it back safely.” He was pleased with the casual courtesy of his opening gambit. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming you didn’t run into any trouble with the cops? Or the press?”
“I didn’t even see a squad car, thank goodness. And no journalists.”
“You got lucky. Quite often the journalists are more difficult to shake than the cops.”
Chloe followed him into his office. “I did what you instructed. I went to the mall at Park Ridge and watched a movie, although I couldn’t describe a single scene of what I supposedly saw. The worst thing about having the police believe I killed Jason is that I’ve been left with no time to mourn him. So every time I’m alone and quiet, I feel paralyzed with grief.”
Liam damped down another unwelcome rush of sympathy. Emotion and sound legal advice rarely went together. Besides, Chloe’s comments could be carefully calculated to evoke sympathy.
Until he took Sherri Norquist out for a celebratory dinner in the wake of the jury’s acquittal and she’d dropped her bombshell, he’d arrogantly assumed he would always know at some gut level whether or not his clients were guilty. Sherri had proved how ridiculous that assumption was. His feelings for her had also proved that he was quite capable of falling in love with a woman of dubious morals who lied easily and often. Sherri, it turned out, had murdered her husband because she wanted his money, and as far as Liam could tell she felt no remorse that the man was dead. Her only regret was that she hadn’t been clever enough to avoid arrest. Worst of all, she had assumed Liam would be delighted that he’d persuaded the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty, despite the fact that she was guilty as charged. She’d even offered to marry him as a reward for his superior professional skills. She’d been offended, not to mention furious, when he declined the honor.
At least Sherri had provided a crash course in humility. Liam considered himself a wiser, as well as more cynical, man these days. His basic assumption post-Sherri was that all his clients lied, at least some of the time. Many of them lied all the time. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Chloe fitted right into the general pattern, at least as far as the events surrounding her husband’s murder were concerned. If he was to provide effective legal counsel, his task was to find out where there were holes in her story that the prosecutor’s office might take advantage of and then find ways to plug those holes without encouraging her to commit perjury. A task that wasn’t likely to be easy.
“Let’s get right to the point, shall we?” He sat behind his desk and turned a deliberately distant gaze toward Chloe. He had to ask these questions, even though he placed no reliance on the accuracy of her answers. “Did you kill your husband?”
She flinched, but answered steadily enough. “No.”
“Did you pay somebody else to have him killed?”
“No!”
She sounded surprised by his question, rather than outraged, which made him marginally more inclined to believe her. Murderers falsely protesting their innocence tended to go heavily for moral indignation.
“Do you still want me to represent you?” he asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Let me explain just one of the reasons why that isn’t a smart decision on your part. Here are the facts of your situation as I understand them. Your husband is dead, stabbed through the heart. The stabbing occurred last night, while you were in the house. It also occurred after you and Jason had been arguing. You were found next to the body, holding a bloody knife. As if that’s not trouble enough, your daughter is not Jason’s biological child. I already advised you that it’s essential to notify the police of this fact. At which point, I can almost guarantee the first question the cops will ask is the identity of Sophie’s father. What are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing?” Chloe said, but her voice rose in a question.
He allowed himself a small smile. “I’m glad you were listening this morning. Nothing is a very good choice. However, the cops are going to press you for a name. The detectives working this case will be smart, and they’ll utilize every trick of the trade to persuade you to give them a name, because they’ll want it. Badly.”
“Why? Why in the world would they care?”
Liam’s smile turned bleak. “Because the police will suspect Sophie’s father—which would be me, of course—of being involved in the murder. They’ll want to question him. In other words, they’ll want to question me.”
She stared at him, eyes wide with shock. He was almost a hundred percent sure that such a possibility had never crossed her mind. “But that’s crazy! You had no idea about Sophie. You had absolutely no motive to want Jason dead.”
“True. But the police aren’t going to believe either one of us just because we happen to be telling the truth. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone last night so I have an alibi.” Depending on precisely when the mayor had been killed, Liam might still have been in the bar, in which case there were dozens of potential witnesses. If Jason Hamilton had been killed after 2:00 a.m., he had No-Name as proof that he’d been in an apartment on Alameda Avenue, and definitely not in the mayoral residence. Thank God he’d gone back to No-Name’s apartment last night and not to a motel. Otherwise, he’d have had no sure way to track her down, given that he had no clue what she was called. He grimaced in disgust at yet another reminder of the caricature that passed for intimacy in his life.
Chloe linked her fingers, gripping tightly. “If you have an alibi, your personal connection to the case is irrelevant. The police will know you’re not involved and it’s okay for me to hire you as my lawyer.”
He shook his head. “The fact that I’m not likely to be arrested doesn’t mean that I would be a good person to represent you in court. You came to me because you thought I’d be the lawyer who would work hardest to keep you out of prison, that I’d have a vested interest in keeping you safe because Sophie is my daughter. Unfortunately, you could hardly have chosen a worse person to approach than the man who fathered your child. If this case ever comes to trial, the D.A.’s office would use the connection to blow us away. You wouldn’t be the only person on trial in that situation. I would be, too. Almost before you could say cheating wife and sleazy lover, you’d be facing a jury who wouldn’t believe a word I was saying, and a judge who would question my professional ethics. And their doubts would be justified, given the circumstances.” The lingering stench from the Sherri Norquist trial wouldn’t help, either.
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Chloe sounded as if she’d passed beyond the point of despair and had moved well into apathy.
“I’ve already given you the answer to that. If you actually reach the point of being arrested, you need to hire either Robyn Johnson or Bill Schuller. I’ll call both of them on your behalf if you like. In the meantime, until Robyn clears her calendar or Bill gets back in town, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you and your daughter safe. I’ll try very hard to insure that the police don’t arrest you until one or other of them agrees to represent you.”
Chloe’s head jerked up, and it was only when Liam saw the hope dawning in her eyes that he realized just how despairing she’d been previously. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate your help.”
Now that he’d given her hope, he’d better live up to it. Liam quickly assessed and discarded options. It was important to avoid crossing paths with the police until he knew exactly what had happened last night. On the other hand, the widow of the murdered mayor of a major city didn’t have many options open to her if she wanted to disappear. She was highly recognizable, and the press corps was going to be hunting her as hard as the police.
“What’s the name of your husband’s chief of staff?” he asked.
“Frederick Mitchell. Frederick Ambrose Mitchell.”
“Is he a good guy?”
She nodded. “He’s a friend, as well as Jason’s chief of staff.”
“Do you remember the number for his direct line?”
She nodded again and he pushed a scratch pad toward her. “Write it down for me, please.”
Chloe wrote the number and he depressed the intercom. “Jenny, here’s the number for the late mayor’s chief of staff. His name is Frederick Mitchell. Call him, please, and tell him that Mrs. Hamilton is grief stricken and exhausted. She plans to spend the night at a friend’s house, where she hopes to avoid any run-in with the media. She’ll be back at her home in Park Hill tomorrow morning around eleven. For the next few hours, Mrs. Hamilton would appreciate it if Frederick Mitchell would run interference for her with the cops and especially with the media.”
“Can I give him a number where he can reach Mrs. Hamilton if there’s an emergency?”
“Tell him that Mrs. Hamilton isn’t taking any phone calls tonight. Give him my cell number, and tell him I’ll pass on any urgent messages from him to Mrs. Hamilton and vice versa. Encourage him to tell the press that she’s not going to be returning to the mayor’s home tonight so that they pack up their cameras and go home.”
