Knock 'em Dead (12 page)

It had been too long since my last hit of caffeine. I was jonesing but Ellen didn’t do coffee. She was an herbal tea kind of girl. What a silly contradiction—real tea has caffeine; herbal tea is, well, it’s just colored, sometimes perfumed hot water.

“Did you enjoy Charleston?”

I stiffened. “Excuse me?”

Ellen made some sort of guttural noise, a cross between a scoff and a groan. “Don’t confuse me with Victor,” she cautioned. “I know all about your long lunches and clandestine shopping trips. I also know that you went to Charleston yesterday. What did you find out?”

Becky? My nearest and dearest friend ratted me out? How much did that suck? I told her everything I learned, wondering why she was so curious.

“You’re meeting with Mr. Taggert at lunchtime?”

I nodded. “I was thinking he could file a motion to reconsider based on the new information.”

“It should work,” Ellen said. “Which is why I insisted Becky remove herself from any official affiliation with the case. She’ll take on the role of an adviser only. This firm does not handle criminal cases, nor do we appreciate being associated with, well, with salacious cases.”

So, I’m thinking now is not a good time to mention the subpoena Quinn served me.
That
trial was going to be a real sideshow. “With all due respect, Ellen, Jane needs her.”

“No, Jane needs a criminal attorney and the support of her friends and family.”

“She doesn’t have any family.”

Ellen’s lips pinched together for a second. She was losing patience with me, but I was pretty nettled by her from-a-distance micromanagement of Jane’s case.

“Still,” Ellen began, scooting her chair back and rising to her full height of five-eleven, “the two of you need to be discreet. Particularly you. Becky can continue a passive involvement, preserving privilege, but not as cocouncil at the trial table. You will maintain a much less conspicuous place in all this.”

Nettled went past really annoyed and straight to majorly pissed. My blood pressure was climbing with each passing nanosecond. “I won’t turn my back on Jane. You can fire me if you want.”

Ellen shook her head. “What I want is for you to go back to school and earn a law degree. You’d be much more valuable to the firm as an attorney. We could bill your time accordingly. Barring furthering your education, I want you to do your job, not just go through the motions.”

That stung. Because it was basically true. Not the education part. The part about going through the motions. I’m a paralegal on autopilot. I like it that way. The thought that I’d have to be at my desk by freaking daybreak simply reinforced my resolve. I didn’t want a seventy-hour-a-week job. Forty hours was just fine. Thirty-eight? Even better.

Rising slowly and wearing a forced smile, I said, “I think you’ll find my work more than satisfactory. If there’s nothing else?”

“Your work is always satisfactory. That’s the problem. With your brains, it could be exemplary. But yes, there is one other thing.”

I waited, half expecting her to tell me I also had to wash the windows. It was almost enough to make me long for Vain Dane. At least he ignored me. Well, mostly he did. I could fly under his radar. Unless Margaret tattled like a snotty child. Then I got screwed.

“You will be at your desk on time.”

Yeah, we covered that.
“Yes, I will.”

Ellen sat down, tucking the yards of fabric under her invisible rear end. Pivoting, I walked toward the door, more than ready to leave.

“Finley?”

I stopped but in the smallest little display of defiance, I didn’t turn around. “Yes?”

“You need to be on time.”

Jeez! Beat that dead horse, why don’t you?
“I will.”

“Good, because I expect you to have your work done before lunch. All of it. My assignments and your pending estate matters.”

Had I missed something? I spun back and faced Ellen. She was back to signing things with her fancy tortoiseshell pen. “What do you want me to do with the other part of my day?”

“I’ve already told Victor that while you’re on loan to me, you’ll be spending your afternoons in Broward County.”

“That’s a long drive and I—”

“I didn’t say you were going to be in Broward County. Just that I’d told Victor that’s where you’d be. Details, Finley. Pay attention to the details.”

“I’m not following you.”

“If your work is completed, you could have your afternoons free.”

I felt like dancing in place. “I can work on Jane’s case?”

She held up one hand, then sliced into me with her stare. “So long as you stay out of the newspapers and out of trouble, I don’t want to know what you do.”

“Thank you. That’s really very nice of you.” There had to be a catch. Ellen Lieberman wasn’t the warm fuzzy type.

“I’m not being nice, Finley, I’m being practical. Only an idiot would think you’d stay on the sidelines, so I’m willing to give you some leeway. But—”

Why was there always a
but
?

“This firm represents clients who will not take kindly to having reporters camped outside these offices because you’ve done something public and self-aggrandizing. They made that very clear to Victor after you got involved in that whole Marcus Hall thing.”

“Where I was instrumental in unmasking the real killer.”

“Listen to yourself,” Ellen said, then blew out a frustrated breath. “You’re not a superhero. You put yourself in physical danger and this firm’s reputation in jeopardy. As for exposing the killer, we both know that was more luck than determination. Let’s not forget that you defied a specific directive from the senior partner to back off. The only reason I’m paying Liam McGarrity to babysit you is I’m not convinced you learned anything from that experience.”

Wrong. I learned to fear large dogs.

“I’m giving you some room here, Finley,” Ellen said. “Yank too hard on the rope and I’ll hang you with it. You and Becky.”

“You and Becky,” I muttered in a pretty unflattering imitation of Ellen’s voice a few minutes later when I was tucked inside the safety of the elevator. I didn’t think Ellen would actually fire Becky. I knew for certain that she’d kick me to the curb without working up so much as a bead of sweat. Great. Now I felt the weight of Becky’s job security dangling off me.

Once I was back in my office with a mug of coffee poured, I called Liv. I knew she’d been to visit Jane and I wanted an update. Well, I also wanted to vent.

“Hi,” I said when Liv answered her cell phone. “How’s Jane?”

“She looks horrible. She’s scared and she’s really, really pissed at you.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.” I raked my fingers through my hair, then checked the ends. I needed a trim. I could control the condition of my hair, but I had this sense of dread pooling in the pit of my stomach about every other aspect of my life. “Why is Jane mad?”

“She didn’t want that thing with Molly Bishop to become public and now she’s afraid Taggert will use it to get her out of jail.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Of course he’ll use it. Once Faulkner has all the facts, he’ll have to grant bail.”

“Jane doesn’t want that.”

“She doesn’t want bail? She’s definitely not thinking straight. Incarceration has obviously short-circuited her brain.”

“She sounded lucid,” Liv insisted. “I think there’s more to the Bishop thing than we know. Some reason she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m on it. By the way, who’s your contact at the limo company?”

“Harold Something from Drive Right Limousine Service. Why?”

“Was he the one who drove Jane and Paolo Saturday night?”

“No. He’s the owner. I don’t know who drove the limo. I only order the type of car, not a specific driver. Unless the client asks me to make a specific request. Want me to call him?”

I didn’t have anything pressing on my plate and I could tell by the slight fading in and out of Liv’s voice that she was on the road. “No, I’ll do it. What’s his number?” I scribbled it on a small pink Post-it as Liv recited it from memory. “Thanks. I’ll talk to him and I’ll see what I can dig up on Molly Bishop.”

“No need.”

I nearly dropped the phone when I heard the familiar, deep, and way,
way
too appealing voice from my doorway. Liam stood there, one broad shoulder brushing against the frame. His black T-shirt was faded, as were his jeans. On anyone else, the ensemble would have looked ratty. On Liam, it was full-on sexy as hell. As was his slightly crooked smile and those eyes of his. Mostly blue, they had just enough gray to make them look as dangerous as an approaching thunderstorm.

I love thunderstorms.

He sauntered—yes, that was the only way to describe his utterly masculine walk—into the room, a small folder tucked under one arm. The scent of his soap swirled around the room and threatened to overwhelm my senses. Or addle my brain. Being a whisper away from an honest to God swoon wasn’t in my comfort zone.

He tossed the folder on my desk, then grabbed up my still steaming mug of coffee and helped himself.

Me? I was just struggling to get my pulse to stop racing. So much for not being man-obsessed. In my defense, only a corpse could be immune to Liam. Who doesn’t appreciate walking, talking tall, dark, and handsome?

“I’ll call you back,” I said into the receiver before placing it on its cradle. Luckily my voice didn’t betray me. At least I hoped not.

As I watched him drain the coffee from my mug, my equilibrium returned. No one gets between me and my coffee. “No, really. I don’t mind at all. Help yourself.”

Nonplussed by my tone, he nodded toward the file. The action caused a single lock of dark hair to fall forward against his forehead. Liam was a holdout. His hair was devoid of any product. While I’m normally attracted to more polished types, Liam’s casual style had my heart thumping against my ribs.

Ignoring my inappropriate urge to stand, walk around the desk, and plant myself in his lap, I snatched up the file. Inside I discovered gory, disgusting crime scene photographs. “Ewww!” I glared at Liam as I slapped the folder closed and let it fall to my desktop. “A little warning would have been nice.”

“You went to Charleston to play investigator. Pictures like those are part of the job.”

Dry, ordinary, boring contracts were suddenly sounding better and better. Stubborn pride kicked in, and as much as I didn’t relish the idea, I reached for the folder and opened it again. I wanted to hurl.

It was a vivid, color image of a pillow. A huge blood pool obscured all but the corner hem of the once-white case. In the lower right-hand corner was a small yellow sticker.
Charleston Police Department,
I read, followed by the date and what I presumed was a case number.

Continuing on, the pictures showed more blood on the bedroom wall; a second blood-drenched pillow; bloody towels on the carpet; then photographs of a younger Jane. A couple were limited to crimson smudges on her hands. Then finally, a booking photo.

The last few were of a small woman being loaded into an ambulance, an IV inserted in the crook of her arm. Her bloody arm. The caption told me it was Molly Bishop. Lastly, there were copies of police reports that I skimmed just to give my body a chance to purge the bile lodged in my throat.

“Thanks for the show-and-tell,” I said to Liam as I took a second mug out from the cabinet of my credenza and poured myself a full cup and drizzled the last mouthful into the one he had expropriated. “And the point is?”

“No void.”

Our eyes met. “Meaning?”

Moving my/his cup off to the side, Liam opened the folder and ran the tip of his forefinger around the image of the pillow. “There shouldn’t be any blood here. Not if it happened the way Jane and Molly said in their sworn statements to the cops. There should be some sort of ghost impression because Molly’s head, and probably her shoulders, would have prevented the blood from soaking the pillow.”

“I’m still in the dark here.”

“There’s a news flash,” he teased, amusement shining in his eyes.

“You don’t get to make fun of me in my own office.”

“Sure I do,” he returned easily. “Anyway, according to the story Jane and her spoiled little rich girl roommate told the police, Molly was lying beneath the victim when Jane, um, shoed him.”

“Shod.”

“Whatever. You want to play Grammar Fairy or hear the facts?”

His irritation was kinda sexy. I wanted to play a quick game of escaped prisoner and the warden’s wife.
No. Stop!
“Go on.”

“Molly then stated she rolled him to the other side of the bed while Jane put pressure on the stab wound until the paramedics arrived seven minutes later.”

“What did the victim say?”

“Too high to remember any real details.”

“So what are you saying?”

He shrugged and I struggled not to notice the fact that his muscular chest and shoulders strained the soft fabric of his shirt. Tried. And failed.

“The evidence doesn’t support the story.”

Excitement rumbled though my entire system. “You’re saying Jane didn’t attack the victim.”

“If Jane was the aggressor, then she’d have cast-off blood spatter on her clothes and her body. Puncture the jugular and you get a gusher.”

“Thanks for that disgusting tidbit.”

He flipped through the photographs, tapping on the close-up of Jane taken at the crime scene. “No spatter.” He sifted through again, placing the one of Molly on the stretcher next to the one of Jane. “That’s spatter on Molly’s arm. And there’s no blood in her hair or on her face. The evidence doesn’t match the story they told.”

“This is great.” I felt like leaping up and kissing him. Well, I pretty much wanted to do that anyway. Not an option. “It means Jane didn’t do anything wrong. Faulkner will have to grant bail.”

He took in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “It isn’t great and you shouldn’t say anything to Taggert.”

“But this proves Jane—”

“Has a history of giving false statements to the police and willingly participated in a conspiracy. If the cops or the prosecutor gets wind of this…”