Fatal Affair: 1 (Courthouse Connections) (12 page)

JD let out a low whistle. “I don’t keep
that much in a checking account but I can get it within a couple of hours.
Isn’t a million-dollar bond pretty steep for somebody who isn’t a flight risk?”

“Not when the charge is first-degree
murder. The mere fact that the accused is staring at a possible death sentence
makes him or her a flight risk as far as judges are concerned. Hank said he
sweated blood during the bond hearing because Wells’ top assistant argued hard
to get bond denied entirely.”

“Let me go, then. I need to make a couple
of calls to transfer the funds. I’ll leave a check with your secretary on my
way out. Meanwhile, are you going out to see Lanie again today?”

“No, I told her I’d be sending Zach Goodman
to meet her and whisk her away from the media once she’s released. Try to
relax.” Tony got up and walked JD out, stopping at the conference room and
shooting JD an encouraging smile. “Tell Liz on the way out that I want her to
personally take your retainer check to accounting, have them cut a check for
Lanie’s bail on the spot and arrange for someone to hand deliver it to the
jail. I don’t want her staying there a second longer than she has to and I’m
sure you don’t either.”

Tony paused, looked incredulously at JD and
then went on. “I want you to remind me when this is all over that I should have
picked a more lucrative specialty than criminal defense.”

“Okay, but don’t imagine that I earn more
than you do by shepherding corporations through the legal jungles. I made my
fortune the easy way—I inherited it.” He managed to return Tony’s grin. “Thanks
for everything. Lanie has to be frantic by now.”

He imagined her locked away in a jail cell.
By now she must be in shock over Wayne’s murder and confused that anyone would
accuse her of the grisly crime. “I can’t stand thinking of how she’s got to be
hurting now.”

“Hang in there. I’ll call you as soon as
I’ve spoken to her again—that is assuming she gives me permission.”

“She will.” As far as JD knew, Lanie had no
family who would stand by her. No family at all other than Wayne, and he was
dead. JD hated the fact that she was in trouble but couldn’t help being pleased
that she needed his help.

Anxious to compile the list Tony had asked
for detailing times he’d spent with Lanie, he went back to his office, where he
set to cleaning up minor details for clients’ cases to free himself for his
very personal chore.

He had some very pleasurable ideas about
how he could take Lanie’s mind off this legal debacle.

“Mr. Ackerman, you’ve got half a dozen
reporters demanding to see you. They’re causing an unseemly disturbance out in
my waiting room. What should I tell them?”

When JD looked up from scribbled notes for
the motion to suppress that he’d been dictating to his secretary, he saw the
fifteenth floor receptionist, a genteel relic who’d been working for
Winston-Roe since long before he was born. Her tight-lipped expression
reflected the apparent disapproval he heard in her soft, well-modulated
voice—disdain for the rabble who dared to invade her pristine world of CEOs and
corporate financiers. And probably disgust toward him as well.

“Tell them I’m out of the office, Mabel.
And call security to show them out if they won’t leave on their own.” Tony had apparently
been right to assume that someone had seen him and Lanie together. It seemed
that someone had already leaked the information to the local media.

“Yes sir.” She shot JD an icy look. “You
know, Mr. Roe would never have asked me to lie. I’m almost glad that I’ll be
retiring at the end of the month.”

With that she left, muttering under her
breath before closing JD’s office door with a little more force than was necessary.
JD closed the client folder he’d been working on and turned back to his
secretary. “We’ll have to finish this motion later, Leah.”

“Shall I try to get Mr. Landry for you?”

“Thanks, but I’ll take care of it.” He
assumed that since there were reporters outside his floor, there were probably
others upstairs stalking Lanie’s legal team.

He had told Leah the bare minimum about his
involvement with Lanie after Tony had mentioned the likelihood that someone
would reveal it sooner or later. Obviously the revelation had ended up being
made a lot sooner, he thought wryly when he considered the gaggle of reporters
who had swarmed and disturbed Mabel’s usually calm, ordered day.

JD wasn’t comfortable sharing the details
of his relationship with Lanie. Not with anybody—even Leah, who’d been with him
since he’d been a junior associate, and she just one of many in the firm’s
secretarial pool.

Apparently she understood his reticence, so
she reached over and laid a hand on his wrist. “All right. I won’t push but I’m
here for you if you need to talk.”

“Sorry. I know you are and I appreciate it.
I’m afraid it’s going to take a while for me to get used to having my private
life examined under a microscope.” He should have considered the possibility
that his affair with the wife of a well-known politician would become public,
but he realized that it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had. He still
would have wanted Lanie, as often and for as long as he could have her.

He took a deep breath and then met Leah’s
concerned gaze. “Go ahead and get hold of Tony for me. I’ve got to find out how
he wants me to handle the media.”

* * * * *

A few minutes later, JD sneaked through the
eighteenth-floor offices into the conference room, bypassing the horde of
vultures he imagined would have taken over the reception area by the elevators.
The walk up three flights of steep, dark emergency stairs hadn’t winded him but
it had provided time for him to imagine an angry flock of reporters picking
away at his flesh. “How the hell can you think with that gang of vultures
chattering out in the reception area?”

Tony looked across the conference table at
JD. “We heard about them storming the fifteenth floor a little while ago
looking for you. Up here we’re used to handling the media en masse. We tend to
attract clients who bring in reporters slavering like a pack of mad dogs for
juicy bits of their flesh. I’ve found that it helps to have Megan, our hot
little receptionist, take off her jacket and let them ogle her rather obvious
assets.”

“Tony, don’t be a sexist pig,” Kristine
said, but she didn’t sound angry with her husband.

JD couldn’t keep from laughing at Tony’s
wounded expression. “I thought Mabel was going to have a heart attack when they
were downstairs. Needless to say, she thought the invasion quite unseemly.”

Tony grinned. “I imagine she did, but
dealing with ill-mannered reporters is just another part of the job when you’re
taking on the criminal defense of anybody the press thinks is newsworthy. We
know they’re out there but we don’t let them bother us until we settle on the
best way we can use whatever it is they think they know for our clients’
benefit. Hank has come up with a tactic I believe we need to consider, seeing as
someone has let the cat out of the bag about you and Lanie, so to speak.”

“What tactic is that?” JD asked.

Tony glanced across the table at his soft-spoken
associate. “Hank, explain it to us.”

The very conventional-looking young
attorney with thinning reddish-brown hair and a serious expression in his blue
eyes stood and cleared his throat. “Basically, I think we should brazen it out—that
is, publicly admit to the affair but do it in such a way that at least some of
the media will put a positive spin on it. It’s risky, but…”

When Hank’s words trailed off JD looked over
at Tony. “What do you think?”

“I like the idea but I’d rather wait until
Lanie gets here to decide whether to do it, because we’ll need to get her take on
whether you and she can make it work. Zach Goodman is on his way to get her now
and Rocky is on his way back from checking out some potential leads. He tells
me that in just a few hours he has already managed to dig up some interesting
information about Senator Winstead’s sexual activities.”

JD couldn’t help wondering how the
investigator had come up with possibly damaging information on Winstead but he
didn’t want to ask and “out” Rocky if Tony wasn’t already aware of his
connections in the BDSM community. “Has Rocky come up with any ideas about who might
have had reason to want the senator dead?”

“Not yet, but he tells me he has found one
or two of Winstead’s former sex partners who’re willing to talk to reporters.
I’m thinking that if they talk, Lanie will seem more sympathetic than she’d
appear if everyone thought the infidelity was one-sided.”

Tony took off his reading glasses and set
them on the table before looking hard at JD. “You’re pretty quiet. Do you have
any objection to us doing this if it seems it will work? It will obviously
bring you into the spotlight along with Lanie. Not that the media is going to
leave you alone anyhow, now that somebody has obviously fingered you as being
her lover.”

“No objection at all. Courting publicity’s
not something I’m accustomed to doing but I’ll embrace it if it will help
Lanie.”

“I hope you mean that, because you’ll be
putting yourself right in the middle of a media frenzy.” Tony stood, stretched
his legs and headed for the side table where coffee, soft drinks, sandwiches
and fruit had been set out.

JD didn’t hesitate. “I mean it.” He hoped
it didn’t show just how much he hated the idea of being placed under reporters’
scrutiny—or that if it did, Tony and the others could coach him through the
ordeal.

Tony shot a dubious smile his way. “Good.
Grab some refreshments and make yourself at home. For God’s sake relax. Zach
will be back with Lanie in a few minutes. I think it would be a good idea for
her to stay with you pending the trial, assuming she’s okay with our plan.”

JD had no objection at all to having Lanie
close by. For her safety as well as their pleasure.

* * * * *

“Thank you for coming to get me.” Lanie
glanced over in the waning light and got a good look at Zach Goodman, the
Winston-Roe associate who’d whisked her out of the jail past a handful of
reporters and was driving on Orient Road toward I-4 and the Hard Rock Café
complex.

Tall, dark-haired and baby-faced, Zach had
to be at least her age but he made her feel much, much older. He looked enough
like his boss that he could almost have passed for Tony’s younger, less
seasoned clone.

He even dressed similarly, in a gray
pinstriped suit, blue shirt and conservatively striped tie. Unlike Tony’s
custom-made suits and shirts, Zach’s typical lawyer attire had probably come
off the rack at a high-end men’s store. Not to say the jacket didn’t fit Zach as
though it had been made for him, because it did. She noticed he wore no jewelry
except an unobtrusive dress watch with a silver face and a plain black leather
band.

After having spent a day locked up without
anyone to talk to, she found the silence disconcerting, so as soon as Zach
turned onto I-4 toward downtown Tampa, she initiated a conversation. “Tony said
when he came to see me earlier that he wanted to talk to me again tonight. I
told him I’d come to his office as soon as they…let me out.”

“That’s where we’re going now. I’m supposed
to brief you on what you should expect when we get to the firm’s offices but
I’ve been delaying for as long as I could. I know what it means to need a
little time to wipe the jail cobwebs out of your brain.”

Zach shook his head and shot her a
self-deprecating smile before returning his gaze to the always busy highway.
“There’s no way to say make this sound any more pleasant than it is. It seems
that somebody already told the media about you and JD Ackerman. The Winston-Roe
reception room on the eighteenth floor was swarming with reporters when I left
to pick you up. It almost made me glad to be going anywhere to avoid them—even
though the Orient Road jail is far from being my favorite place to hang out.” Zach
paused as though deciding what else he should tell her.

Lanie noticed that his knuckles were white
from clutching the steering wheel of his immaculate black crossover SUV. “I
agree the jail’s no five-star hotel but I’ll listen if you want to tell me why
you dislike it so.”

“I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my
phobias or how I came by them,” he told her, his tone clipped. “If it’s okay
with you, we’ll talk about how best to handle the media. Tony was leaning
toward brazening out the situation before I left—that is, having you and Mr.
Ackerman admit everything instead of trying to deny or avoid talking about it.
He also wants you to stay in town, probably at Ackerman’s condo.” His knuckles
regained some color when he loosened his death grip on the steering wheel.

It certainly didn’t bother Lanie not to go
back to the place she’d called home for so long. She never intended to go there
again except to get Purrz. “Why JD’s condo?” she asked.

“His building is a high-rise on the
Bayshore. It has good security and JD will arrange for more if need be. You’ll
be safe from reporters there.”

It nearly broke Lanie’s heart when she
visualized her quiet lover who valued his privacy caught up in the mess she’d
fallen into when she’d let her heart start to rule her head. “I told Tony when
he came out to see me that I don’t want to go back to my house, but I hate it
that JD is being dragged into something that’s my problem, not his.”

Zach pulled in to the parking garage below
the high-rise building where the firm’s offices were located and found a
reserved parking spot on the top floor between the Ferrari she recognized as
Tony’s and a silver Cadillac Escalade. After turning the car off, he turned to
Lanie. “My impression is that a herd of wild horses couldn’t keep Mr. Ackerman
from doing everything he can to protect you, Ms. Winstead. Come on—if you’re up
to an eighteen-floor hike we’ll take the stairs so we won’t have to get hoarse
saying ‘no comment’ to the reporters I imagine are still holding down the
reception area.”

* * * * *

When she came into the conference room with
Tony’s young associate, Lanie looked tired. Drained. JD wanted to get up and go
to her, wrap her in his arms and promise he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to
her. Unfortunately he wasn’t at all sure he’d be able to honor a pledge like
that, so he simply stood, kissed her cheek and held out a chair for her. “Join
us,” he said, and when she did he took her icy hand and held it—damn poor
reassurance but all he was able to provide. “Tony and his team want to talk to
us about how we’re going to handle the press.”

The only similarity JD saw to the formal
conferences he often held downstairs was that the rooms were identical—dark
green carpeting, beige bamboo wallpaper, a pair of side tables and a free-form
mahogany table flanked by sixteen identical armchairs upholstered in nubby
tweed material whose colors blended with the walls and carpeting. When he
occupied the spot Tony now held at the head of the table, though, he faced a
collection of corporate clients and his own junior associates rather than a
defense team of lawyers, investigators, researchers and God only knew who else,
scheming how best to protect a single client facing possible execution.

Lanie. JD fought the compulsion to shudder
when Tony briefly summarized the dire consequences of failure, concentrating
instead on the plan being formulated as a strategy to prevent that from
happening.

“I would rather have had some time before
having to address the relationship between Lanie and JD, but we don’t have that
option since someone has obviously leaked the information to the reporters
camped out by the elevators. Here’s what we propose to do.”

Tony introduced Hank, who handed out papers
to everyone in the room. “Take a minute and read through this, and let me know
if you see any weaknesses in the plan. Lanie, I need to know if you’re on board
with doing this.”

JD had sat in with Tony, Hank, Rocky and
the others on Lanie’s defense team as they’d discussed the plan. One of the
Winston-Roe investigators was already standing by, waiting for a signal to leak
information to a well-known tabloid rag about the late senator’s shocking
sexual liaisons.

Rocky had uncovered what JD was sure the
tabloids would gobble up like candy—the late senator’s apparent penchant for
being as submissive in bed as he was dominant in political situations. His
operatives would refer the vultures to a flamboyant dominatrix who managed a
Tampa BDSM club called Sweet Submission, and a club Dom there who was willing
to talk about a ménage à trois he’d participated in nearly a year before with
Winstead and another Dom he believed had been the senator’s master.