by Lexi Blake
“You can certainly try,” she replied.
“Goodbye, dear. I’ll let you know when we plan the memorial. And I’ll get you that list. I know you’re trying everything you can to convince yourself this isn’t Trey’s fault, but I think you’re wasting your time. Still, it’s what my sister would want. She did see you as something of a daughter.”
She turned on her heels as the elevator was opening. Isla felt like she’d gone a couple of rounds with a boxer. The doors closed.
Erin shook her head. “Wow, she’s a bitch, and I don’t even know what to call the kid.”
“Asshole,” Isla said. “He’s an entitled little asshole.”
And she had to deal with them all. The day was not looking up.
* * *
• • •
David sat back, his eyes tired. The damn words were all kind of meshing together at this point. He’d read the brief about a thousand times and he still wasn’t sure it was right. That might be because his mind was somewhere else. He kept going back to that moment when Isla looked at him like he was a monster for even suggesting that Trey belonged in a hospital.
She’d looked a lot like his mother had when he suggested the same thing for his father.
His mother had barely spoken to him for two weeks after he’d tried to get her to see that she was killing herself taking care of him. She’d merely said that was what people in love did.
He wondered if she would go back. Had his mother known how her fairy tale would end—with Alzheimer’s dominating her husband—would she have chosen a different path? Was he taking Isla down the exact same path his mother had walked? Would he fall for her? Marry her, have a couple of kids, and then leave her when the CTE kicked in? Hell, it would be better if he would leave her, but that’s not what would happen. He would become her dependent. He would suck the life out of her and their children. He would drag them all down. At least if he fell apart at work, they could fire him and not look back.
“That’s a bleak look,” Henry said from the doorway. “You know something I don’t know?”
He shook off the dark thoughts. He needed to concentrate. It had been days since he’d actually been in the office. “Not at all. I think we went over everything earlier today. Although we did clear up who Portia Adams was meeting every Thursday.”
“McKay-Taggart come up with that?”
“No, Isla did. She finally talked to Portia’s sister.” Isla had texted him roughly an hour before, letting him know she was sending him a report on the conversation and he should look for it in email.
Very polite. Very professional. He’d obviously fucked up quite badly with her.
“I’ve forwarded her email report to you. She’s going to follow up with Cressida because she also found out that Kristoff Paloma was definitely around during their Paris trip but he wasn’t hanging out with Portia. The sister is adamant she wasn’t having an affair.”
Henry studied him for a moment. “What are your thoughts right now?”
“I think we’re not in a position to do a whole lot of thinking.”
“But that never stopped you,” Henry pointed out. “You’ve been brooding in here all morning.”
He knew he was in trouble when the broodiest person he knew called him out. “I’ve been thinking about probable outcomes. I know what Isla wants me to do.”
“And that is?”
He sat back in his chair, his brain threatening a truly impressive headache. “She would go to trial. I think she would want me to go to trial even if there was footage of Adams stabbing his wife.”
“And you?”
He hated what he would have to do. “If we don’t find conclusive evidence that someone else was in that apartment the night of the murder, I think we have to plead this out. I think insanity is our only defense and we’ll have to admit to the crime in order to have a prayer of it working and our client not going directly to jail. The crazy thing is, it’s Isla testimony that will likely put him there if I let this go to trial.”
Henry sank into the seat in front of David’s desk. “Is there any purpose in me telling you that this is exactly why we don’t get involved with clients?”
“She’s not the client.”
A dubious huff came from Henry. “She might as well be. Legally, she now makes all the decisions for the client. She can fire you if she wants to, and Trey doesn’t have a say. Look, I can easily see you’re into this woman. The best thing might be to hand the case over to me. Let me be the bad guy.”
It wouldn’t work. “And when the inevitable happens? She’s going to turn to me and ask me to take over and I won’t be able to. I’m in a position where I can’t win. If I take this case to a jury right now, I better hope I get twelve crazed Guardians fans because otherwise, Trey Adams is going to jail for the rest of his life.”
“She’s not exactly some wide-eyed novice,” Henry pointed out. “She’s an attorney. I can’t imagine she doesn’t understand the implications of the evidence we have and how that’s going to affect an actual trial. Unless we come up with something concrete, I’m with you. Mental incapacity is our best defense, but I wouldn’t take this to court unless the DA’s office simply won’t deal with us.”
Ah, but there was the other issue. “Well, we’ve got a problem with that. The ADA handling this thing had a prior relationship with Isla that didn’t end well. It looks like he’s using this case to punish her. And I can’t get him recused because he hasn’t actually had Trey arrested.”
Henry shifted, his irritation apparent. “They’re playing for time. They don’t have to turn anything over until they arrest him. Technically they’ve only got him on the reckless endangerment charge and they can avoid bail because he’s being held for his mental state. It’s a nice little package they’ve tied him up in. If we didn’t have such good police contacts, we would know next to nothing.”
At least someone understood the problems he was facing. “She thinks I’m some sort of legal superhero.”
Henry’s expression softened. “She’s obviously in that first stage of a relationship. You know the one, where you can’t stop thinking about your partner and you need a couple of reminders that someone less interesting is talking to you.”
He groaned because that had happened a couple of times during the morning meeting. Henry had to poke him to get his attention and apparently Noah had started talking for him at some point. All in all, not his best performance. “I told you I was thinking about the case.”
“Yeah, but you also have a couple of tells when you lie, and no, I’ll never describe them because I like winning at poker.” Henry sobered. “It’s okay to think about her. God knows I still think about Win all the time. We’re the old married couple now and I still can’t get her out of my head. It’s a good thing.”
Old married couple was a bit of an overstatement. They were basically still honeymooners, but David got his point. They were settled, and he and Isla didn’t even know what they were yet. If they were anything at all but a bunch of chemistry and need. “It’s not in my case.”
“Because you think she’s going to dump you if you can’t get her client off on a murder charge? I’m going to sound an awful lot like my grandfather now. If she requires that you get all her friends off their murder charges in order to maintain a relationship with you, she’s not worth having a relationship with.”
David groaned and let his head fall back. “It’s not that.”
But he couldn’t tell Henry his real worry. He couldn’t admit it out loud. Twenty years he’d known Henry and not once had he told his best friend his deepest fear.
He sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up with Isla. No, if she hadn’t figured it out . . . did he have any right to put that on her? On anyone at all?
Heart. Bottle. Zebra.
His mantra for the day. Did she deserve a man who desperately held on to thre
e random words as proof that he wasn’t losing his mind?
“It’s hard once the pressure’s off,” Henry said. “I know that sounds crazy, but it is. Win and I went through all that drama and then we were living together out of necessity. It would have been easy to skip steps. You know there’s not a lot of going back after you live together, especially not if you care about her, but you can fix a couple of things. You can take her on a date that has nothing to do with the case. You can take her out to meet your parents.”
The thought turned his stomach and then made him flush with shame. He loved his parents and yet he was hiding them away.
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “There’s no shame in your dad having a disease.”
Oh, but there was such anxiety and fear in knowing that it was one more fucking strike against him. “He can be difficult to deal with. Maybe I could ask Mom to let me know when he’s having a good day.”
“Or you could understand that you’ve managed to find a woman who gets it, who won’t be afraid to deal with your situation. She could be great for your mom because she wouldn’t be afraid of what’s happening with your father.”
But maybe she should be. However, there was no point in arguing with Henry. “I will see if I can make that happen.”
Henry stared at him for a moment and then sighed and stood up. “Like I told you before, David. You have tells. I would hate to see you ruin something that could be good because you’re scared of something that might not ever happen.”
Or maybe he didn’t need to tell Henry what he was afraid of. “Yeah, well, I’ve got a damn good shot of it happening. I have to think about it.”
“And you could also get hit by a bus. She could have some unknown heart defect,” Henry argued. “The world could come to an end tomorrow and there’s very little we can do about it. You’ve got a twenty-eight percent chance of developing CTE. You’re my best friend. You think I don’t know that?”
That shook him up a bit. “It’s more than twenty-eight percent. You have to add in the factor that a close relative of mine has Alzheimer’s. It ups my risk factor considerably.”
“I don’t care if you have a fifty-fifty chance. What are you going to do? Stop living because the coin flip doesn’t go your way?” Henry paced as though this was a topic that unnerved him, but he was going to plow through. “Because that’s not the David Cormack I went to school with. He was a full-ride kid who worked his ass off to make his life better, his parents’ lives better. He didn’t fucking give up because things might go bad. He fought and he fought like hell.”
“I’m not lying down, man,” he replied with some fire of his own. “You have no idea everything I do to keep my mind sharp.”
“Good, then put the same effort into the relationship with Isla. I know this case is what brought her into your life. Don’t let it be the thing that takes her out of it, too. You need to talk to her about what you want outside of the case. Firm boundaries. Explain to her that she’s more important than any one case, even this one. Tell her you need those boundaries or you need to pass the case off to someone else.”
It wasn’t a horrible plan. “I’ll talk to her.”
He pointed David’s way with a relieved sigh. “Good. That I believe. You talk to Isla and I’ll have Noah call his mole in the DA’s office to see if she’s heard anything. We’ll try to get ahead of them if we can. I hate this cat-and-mouse shit.”
Naturally, Noah’s mole was a female, one he very likely paid for information with his body. Noah was a giver. But he still had one question. “Come on, man. You’re not going to tell me how you know I’m lying?”
Because Henry seemed to have excellent instincts.
A smirk lit his friend’s face. “Nope. Like I said, you suck at poker and I’m not going to change that for you. I’ve got a wife now. I need the extra income.”
Noah showed up at the door, his face flushed and chest heaving because it was obvious he’d run from wherever he’d been. “Guys, you aren’t going to believe this. They’ve made an arrest in the Portia Adams case.”
The world seemed to stop and David prayed whatever came out of Noah’s mouth next didn’t change his life forever.
ELEVEN
“Are you sure you want to go in?”
The sound of Margarita’s quiet question brought Isla out of her thoughts. How long had she been standing here staring at the door to the penthouse? They’d left Erin downstairs talking to the guard about the protocols of the building and security. They’d gotten in the elevator to the penthouse and she’d kind of zoned out. She didn’t remember walking down the hall.
She remembered that night. She remembered how she could practically hear the pounding of her heart as she’d stepped up to the door.
“I’m fine,” she managed.
Margarita stepped in front of her. She was a lovely woman in her midthirties, the kind of woman who looked stylish even when she was working out. Today she was wearing a drapey sweater, slacks, and boots that came up to her knees. Her deep brown hair was highlighted with sections of honey blond. “You can’t possibly be fine. The last time you were in this place, your friend had been murdered. It’s okay to not want to walk in.”
She wished it were that simple. “I don’t want to, but I have to. I don’t have a choice. It’s my job.”
“Okay, then let’s talk about what we need to do in there, and that might help us focus. I’m going to take some of my own pictures. Until we get the crime scene photos, these will have to do. You are going to look for something.”
Isla took a deep breath, trying to shake off the feeling of dread she got from standing outside the door. “Anything, really. Anything out of the ordinary. I know whoever broke in that night took her computer, but she kept up with her schedule a couple of ways. I have to wonder if the police found all of it.”
“Do you know if she wrote in a journal? Maybe a diary?” Margarita asked.
“No, but she used a small voice recorder to document ideas that came to her. I want to know where that went. It wasn’t on the log of what the police processed.”
“Then the killer might have taken it.”
“Or Portia misplaced it. She kept a few around in places where she was most likely to come up with ideas. Like she kept one in the bathroom because she thought a lot in the shower or the tub. She said she always had the best business ideas while soaking in the tub.” Isla could feel herself calming down as she talked about what she needed from this trip. Focus. She needed to focus and not get lost in the nightmare.
Still, a vision of all that blood struck her.
A perfectly manicured hand reached out to touch her shoulder. “They’ll have cleaned up for the most part, though there might still be some stains. You don’t have to do this.”
But she did. “I’m not going to be able to be one hundred percent cool. I might as well use it to see if I can remember anything else about that night.”
“Are you sure? Because that might be incredibly helpful but David will kick my ass if you end up a shivering heap in the corner somewhere,” Margarita said. “Not that anyone would blame you. Like I said, he would totally blame me.”
“I’m going to try not to,” she replied. “Okay. Let’s start at the beginning.”
Margarita pulled out her phone. “Do you mind if I record this?”
She hated being recorded but understood the need. “No. We definitely should. The door was unlocked when I got here. I remember asking the doorman if anyone had come up.”
“And what did he say?”
She took a deep breath and proceeded. “He had no one using the private elevator after six P.M., which was when Portia returned. He didn’t know where she’d been. I can only hope it was in her day planner. She left the building at four P.M. Before that the only visitor they had that day was Oscar. He had breakfast with his mother. He claims he simply came by to spend t
ime with her, but I bet he needed money.”
Oscar always needed money, which was precisely why he would be upset about the will. He had years before he could blow through his trust fund with impunity. Isla was certain the idea of having to come to her for cash didn’t sit well with Oscar, but he would find that the will was going to be impossible to break.
“The door was unlocked. Was that unusual?” Margarita asked.
“Yes. Though Portia considered the private elevator to be the real security. You had to be allowed up. I opened the door and walked in.” Deep breath. Don’t let your hands shake. She pulled the key out and opened the door. The police tape was gone, but she could see where the adhesive had held it to the exquisite custom door.
“Was there a security system on?”
She frowned. “No. I guess I didn’t think about it at the time. It wasn’t usually on when I came by during the day. I didn’t come by a lot at night, but it should have been active. I stepped inside and everything was quiet for a moment.”
Margarita followed her in. There was a foyer that led to the grand staircase.
“I called out but no one answered.”
“Were there lights on?”
“A couple.” She closed her eyes and tried to remember. She’d walked down the foyer and stopped. “The living room had a lamp on. They have lights that lead up the stairs, but they were off and that wasn’t normal. As you can see it would be difficult to navigate in the dark.” She stood at the edge of the stairs. “The bedrooms are upstairs. There are five of them, but the two largest are on either side of the penthouse. There’s also an office and a workout room. I went upstairs and checked on Trey. He wasn’t in his bedroom. That was when I heard it.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard Trey screaming.” She could still hear it, that horrible sound. It was ripped from the soul. “I ran up the stairs.”
“You know a lot of people would have run the other way.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I heard that sound and I needed to get to him. Trey’s been like a big brother to me. I’ve known him since I was a teenager hanging around the Guardians’ front office.” She climbed the stairs much more slowly than she’d done before. “I helped them buy this place. It was one of the first deals I handled for them.”