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An ice princess to match Lillian’s ice queen. He wished he’d let his stepmother fight this battle for herself.
But he’d promised Lillian he would find her grandchild before Charlie’s father did, and no small-time lady lawyer was about to freeze him out.
“Sorry my brother is a murderer, or sorry he’s my brother?”
“Take your pick. You know him better than I do.”
“You don’t know him at all. But that didn’t stop you from testifying against him.”
“I didn’t testify against him. I testified in support of Márya’s—Ms. Mendelev’s—petition for a court order to protect her from him.”
Márya. That explained the brief flash of fire in those green eyes when he called the dead woman “Maria.” But that was what Charlie called her. Why wouldn’t he know how to pronounce the woman’s name? Given Charlie, he probably called her whatever he damned well pleased.“How long had you known her when you testified?” he asked
“About four months.”
“That isn’t very long to determine the dynamics of a violent relationship.” The words left a nasty taste in his mouth, but he needed to break through Ms. Walker’s icy façade.
“I determined that as soon as I saw her broken arm. The yellowed bruises from the last time he’d beaten her pretty much backed up that conclusion.”
Morgan swallowed a bolt of anger at Charlie’s brutality. “So you took it upon yourself to intervene.”
“She begged me to help her.”
The woman paused, but her face yielded no clue to what might be going on inside her head. She’d be murder to face in a courtroom, a talent clearly wasted in this one-step-up-from-a-storefront family law practice.
“And she was pregnant.”
He allowed himself a thin smile. “So the investigator was right. There is a child.”
Ms. Walker lowered her eyes to the desk and shook her head. “She was three months’ pregnant and bleeding heavily.”
Damn. How could he tell Lillian that Charlie had managed to kill his own kid?
Morgan took out his smartphone and opened a file. “What hospital did you take her to?”
Ms. Walker was still staring at the desk. “Merced County General.” She spoke slowly, as if she needed to make an effort to remember, but that was ridiculous. All this had happened less than two years ago. Had her encounter with Charlie’s lady friend really been that traumatic?
“Why there?”
Laser-green eyes snapped back to his, brown specks turned to gold. “I found Márya hiding in a campground at Yosemite, which is in Merced County. Since your brother forced her to quit school and her job when he invaded her life, she didn’t have medical insurance.”
“But she filed for the order of protection in Los Angeles County.”
The tiniest shift in the woman’s ramrod posture. What didn’t she want him to know?
“It’s easier to hide in L.A.,” she said.
Rosalie hated to be reminded of those last months of Márya’s life. Her friend had lived in constant fear that Charlie would find her. She’d moved every week from one homeless shelter to another. If only she’d accepted Rosalie’s offer of a place to live until they got Márya’s visa straightened out so she could get a job.
If only … The words echoed through the silence left behind by her friend’s death.
Rosalie shook the memories off and refocused on the man who sat across from her.
How could Charlie Thompson have a brother who oozed wealth and power the way Morgan Danby did? Mr. Danby must have been four or five years younger than Charlie, and he didn’t look at all like the stocky, red-haired murderer.
But her visitor had said something about a trust fund. And someone had had enough money to hire the best criminal defense lawyer in L.A. to represent Charlie. The investment had paid off. They’d plea-bargained down to life with the possibility of parole. The idea that Charlie would ever walk free again tightened Rosalie’s stomach one more notch.
Another if only—if only she could have claimed attorney/client privilege and refused to answer Mr. Danby’s questions. But she’d known from the start she couldn’t be Márya’s friend and her lawyer at the same time. And given her situation now, she didn’t dare openly obstruct the efforts of Charlie’s family to find out whether he had a child.
“Ms. Mendelev had no permanent address in Los Angeles,” Mr. Danby said. “So apparently you weren’t a good enough friend to give her a place to hide, as you put it, after she ended her relationship with my brother.”
“Relationship?” Rosalie’s temper finally snapped. “Like the one between a boxer and his punching bag?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. No doubt he was pleased he’d broken through her self-control. She softened her face to assume a professionally neutral expression again.
“I offered to let Márya live with me, but she was a proud woman. And once she had the protection order, she thought she’d be safe. Her attorney, the staff at the shelters where she lived, and I all tried to tell her otherwise, but in her home country defying a court order was something done only by the very brave or the very stupid.” She paused. “Given how viciously he murdered a defenseless woman, I’d guess bravery isn’t your brother’s problem.”
Mr. Danby had the decency to flinch. “I’ve read the police report on the incident.”
She swallowed another jolt of anger. A woman’s death was much more than an “incident.” At least, it was in Rosalie’s world. She wasn’t so sure about Morgan Danby’s.
“Where did you get your information?” she asked him.
“A private investigator.”
Maybe she could use that somehow. “A private investigator who worked for you?”
He glanced away. “For my stepmother Lillian, Charlie’s mother.”
So this man didn’t share a gene pool with Charlie Thompson. A tightness in her chest she’d scarcely been aware of loosened and she could breathe freely again.
“You must know it’s not necessarily in the P.I.’s best interest to tell his client everything he knows.” She let that sink in. “But it is in his interest to find leads he could be paid to follow.”
She might have struck a nerve. After all, Mr. Danby was here himself, which meant someone had had enough sense to fire the P.I. She’d bet it had been Danby.
“Why should I doubt the investigator’s integrity?” he asked her in a slightly bored tone.
“Did he provide your stepmother with a copy of the coroner’s report on Ms. Mendelev?”
Morgan Danby flinched again. “I assume the investigator didn’t think that was something she needed to see.”
“A smart move on his part. But you see my point.”
“You’re suggesting the P.I’s claim that a child had survived was a ruse to squeeze more money out of Charlie’s mother.”
“Did he find any documentary evidence Ms. Mendelev had given birth?”
She held her breath, outwardly calm, inwardly hollow with fear.
Danby shook his head.
“The P.I. found a few people who thought she’d been pregnant when she’d arrived at the homeless shelter in Fresno, and one woman at an L.A. shelter who said she’d seen Ms. Mendelev with a baby shortly before Charlie … before she died.”
“Staff members at the shelters or residents?”
“Residents. Staff members always claimed confidentiality when the P.I. talked to them.”
“As they should, of course. They need to protect their clients from unwanted intrusions into their private lives.” She gave him a pointed look, but he shook it off.
“Were Ms. Mendelev alive, I would have complete respect for her privacy.”
Which probably meant he’d have refused to give Márya a dime of Charlie’s money.
“But if she left a child behind,” Danby continued, “well, of course, that child’s grandmother has a keen interest in its welfare.”
Rosalie couldn’t stop another grimace at the “its”, but emotion was her enemy here.
“The operative word being ‘if.’ Without any proof such a child exists, I hope you will do as you suggested and respect the late Ms. Mendelev’s privacy.”
“Of course.” He stood up.
She stood too, but didn’t extend her hand until he did, then shook his with a distaste she didn’t bother to hide. “Goodbye, Mr. Danby.”
“Goodbye, Ms. Walker. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure.”
Under other circumstances, she might have smiled at that exit line. The man was witty as well as drop-dead sexy. He was also a major threat to everything that mattered in her life.
She showed him to the door, closed it behind him, and walked back to her desk on legs that barely held her. She sank gratefully into her chair, her whole body shaking.
After he left Rosalie Walker’s office, Morgan did some quick research on his laptop at a nearby coffee house before he drove the rented Porsche past a house not far away.
Nothing unusual about the place or about anything he’d been able to dig up on the Walker woman, except that she owned the house free and clear. Given the location in a solidly middle-class L.A. neighborhood, it was hard to know how she’d managed to buy it without a mortgage. Maybe she’d inherited it. Or maybe she wasn’t the one who’d paid for it.
Could the lady lawyer have a “sugar daddy,” as his father would have said? For some reason the idea rankled. Still, it fit the contrast between the low-profile law practice and the high-priced house. She was an attractive woman, if you ignored the pit-bull personality, and she probably kept that leashed around the man who’d paid for the cozy little bungalow. If she did have a sugar daddy, though, it didn’t look as if he lived in the house. Too many flowers in the garden. Two black-and-white cats lounged on the back of a flowered sofa in the front window. If Morgan didn’t know better, he would have thought the house belonged to some little old lady. But he’d spent an uncomfortable part of the afternoon trying not to stare at Ms. Walker’s breasts, so he knew for a fact that she was no old lady.
He reminded himself he didn’t like short, curvy women. Or lady lawyers. He especially didn’t like lady lawyers he didn’t trust.
Rosalie wasn’t able to escape her office for another three hours. As she crossed the lobby on the way to the parking lot, she ran into her friend Vanessa, who was headed back in with a latte and muffin from the local coffee house.
Five-foot-ten and reed-thin, Vanessa could have been a supermodel, but she had a CPA along with her law degree and made her living in the arcane realm of tax law. Friends since college, for the last two years they’d shared an office suite, along with a receptionist and two paralegals, with three other solo-practice attorneys.
“Leaving early?” asked Vanessa. “Lucky you!”
Rosalie smiled. “I’m going home to my guy.”
“Must be true love.” Vanessa winked, took a sip of her coffee, and headed to her office.
Rosalie let herself into her elderly Saab and dumped her briefcase onto the passenger seat. Time to set aside the lawyer part of her life and focus on the part that made it all worthwhile.
Morgan Danby’s face flashed across her mind, but she pushed the memory aside. His face may have stirred up a welter of half-forgotten longings, but she never wanted to see it again.
Ten minutes later she held the man in her life tight in her arms. Her eyes stung with tears of happiness as she kissed his cheek and felt his lips brush hers.
“Were you a good boy today?” she asked.
Joey blinked cornflower blue eyes at her and blew a soft raspberry.
Rosalie brushed a lock of strawberry blonde hair out of his chubby face and hugged his small body so tightly he tried to wiggle out of her arms.
Joey must have had a busy day at day care because he didn’t indulge in his usual protest at being strapped into his car seat and fell asleep as soon as she started the engine. Which left her with nothing to do on the way home except think about Morgan Danby’s visit.
She couldn’t believe he hadn’t questioned her more closely about how many months’ pregnant Márya had been when they’d first met. Rosalie had never been a good liar because she rarely lied. She understood the power of truth.
Her mother had always told the truth about the long illness that had eventually taken her life. Her honesty had made it possible for Rosalie to trust that she always knew the worst. And that, in turn, had given her the strength to move beyond the slow tragedy playing itself out at home and thrive in the world.
She’d only lied today because she’d panicked, but it had worked. Nothing else mattered. Even her mother would have understood that.
Still, Rosalie wished she’d started adoption proceedings when she’d first gotten custody of Joey. She hadn’t because it would have alerted Charlie’s relatives to Joey’s existence. She’d thought they wouldn’t care enough to look for the boy, but she’d been wrong.
She glanced in the rearview mirror at the sleeping child who filled her life with such joy. She’d do whatever was necessary to protect him.
“I don’t care what you have to do,” Márya had told her right before she died, after she signed the papers giving Rosalie custody of her son, “Keep Joey away from Charlie’s family.”
Morgan raised his gaze from the laptop and looked down Wilshire Boulevard, the lights of Los Angeles nothing more than so many colored stars from the twentieth floor condo his company owned here. He took a sip of wine and rolled his shoulders.
When his smartphone beeped he made the mistake of checking to see who it was.
Lillian. He’d have to talk to her some time. Might as well do it now.
He saved the spreadsheet he was working on and answered on the second beep.
“Hello, Lillian. You’re up late.”
“Why didn’t you call me with the report about your meeting with that woman who testified against Charleston?”
He swallowed the familiar irritation. “I told you I’d call when I learned something.”
“You didn’t learn anything at all about my grandchild?”
If she hadn’t sounded more like a major general barking orders than a grieving grandmother, he might have had more sympathy for her.
“We’re not sure there was … is a grandchild, remember? I have a couple of new leads to follow up, but nothing definite.”
“This is taking too long. Are you sure we shouldn’t have kept the private investigator?”
“We can always hire another P.I. if we need to.” Preferably one smart enough not to try to bribe the bleeding-heart workers at some homeless shelter who’d not only refused to give him any information, but had also gotten his license suspended. Morgan disapproved of unethical behavior, but he could not tolerate stupidity.
“If you’re sure.” Lillian’s voice sounded weary, older. “Call me if you learn anything.”
