Critical Vulnerability (An Aroostine Higgins Novel Book 1)

by Melissa F. Miller

  Arousal overwhelmed the sliver of guilt that had managed to pervade the alcohol, and he slipped a hand around her waist.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  His voice sounded slurred to his own ears, but she didn’t seem to notice. She gathered her coat and bag while he closed out his tab.

  He stumbled into the bar as he turned to leave, and Mikey eyeballed him hard.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive, Joe?” the bartender asked.

  Jen waved off the question. “I’m gonna drive. He’ll be fine.”

  She nestled her hip against his, and they walked out of the bar with their arms around each other. Joe was glad for it, because his legs felt awfully unsteady, and his vision was blurring.

  He blinked, trying to clear his head, but everything was swimming. He was hot. Shaky. And so tired. The cold air hit his face as she hurried him across the highway, but still he felt dizzy, nauseous, and thickheaded.

  He wanted to tell her he was sick—must have caught a stomach bug—but his tongue was too heavy to lift.

  Then he was falling into the cab of her truck. She pushed him unceremoniously, dumping him inside.

  His arms dangled loosely, and his head lolled back. He thought he must look like an ass, but he was too exhausted to care.

  He closed his eyes and heard the engine roar to life. Then everything went dark and silent.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Aroostine chewed the end of her Mirado Black Warrior pencil and considered her edits to Rosie’s witness outline. The pencils were her lawyer magic. Every trial attorney she’d ever met had some pretrial superstition, and this was hers.

  Not appreciably more expensive than the government-issued yellow No. 2s, her Black Warriors smelled like fresh cedar, wrote in thick, dark strokes, and, because they were perfectly round and smooth, rolled right off the table unless they were angled just so. They were the pencils she’d used ever since her first year of law school, when Joe had presented her with a finals care package of chocolates, tea, and the black pencils.

  “They just reminded me of your glossy black hair and warrior spirit.” He’d explained with a shrug when she’d held up the package of presharpened pencils with a quizzical look.

  She used them. And she aced her first semester with a rock-solid 4.0 average. After that, she refused to use any other pencil. Throughout law school, studying for the bar exam, or her trial work back home, it was the Black Warriors or nothing. When she’d landed in DC, she’d been too timid to ask the taxpayers to fund her pencil obsession, but she’d found a stationery store in Dupont Circle that kept her in a constant supply of Black Warriors on her own dime.

  An unexpected but happy extra benefit of her obsession was that writing her comments and critiques in pencil, rather than the standard red ink favored by senior attorneys the world over, seemed to soften the blow for the recipient of those comments. As Rosie put it, at least her drafts didn’t look like they were bleeding when Aroostine handed them back to her.

  As if she’d summoned her by thinking of her, Rosie eased the door open and poked her head in.

  “I’m about to head into a meeting with the computer guys to finalize the exhibits for the expert’s direct examination. Do you have any more notes for me on the witness outlines?”

  Rosie’s excitement at the prospect of going to trial was palpable, almost visible. Despite the fact that they’d been at it all day and the sun had long since slipped beneath the horizon, she seemed to shimmer with energy.

  Aroostine hid a smile. She remembered that feeling of barely contained anticipation, although it had been a long time since trial preparation had held all the allure of Christmas morning for her. Even though this was her first trial at the Justice Department, she’d stood up in court dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. She suddenly felt world-weary. Old.

  “Hang on, my comments are here somewhere.”

  She pawed through the pile of outlines on her desk and found her comments on the direct examination of the Mexican bureaucrat who’d been approached and offered the bribe. Jorge Cruz spoke impeccable English, and Rosie’s Spanish was only marginally better than the little Aroostine could manage to recall from eighth grade with Señora Anderson. But when Aroostine had mentioned to Sid that she planned to let Rosie examine a minor witness or two, he’d surprised her by insisting Rosie take the lead on Mr. Cruz’s testimony—testimony that was particularly crucial if the recordings were excluded from evidence.

  Uncharacteristically, Sid hadn’t explained his reasoning. He loved to explicate. At length. About everything. In light of his silence, Aroostine hoped his analysis went beyond the fact that the witness and lawyer shared a heritage. But the truth was, it was a plum assignment for Rosie, so neither she nor the junior lawyer was inclined to delve into the reasons.

  A frown creased the younger woman’s mouth, and a worried wrinkle crawled across her forehead as she scanned Aroostine’s comments. Aroostine winced. Had she been too harsh?

  She hadn’t had much experience—or any, really—supervising junior attorneys when she’d landed at Justice. She’d borrowed a set of textbooks from some friends of the Higginses, whose daughter had majored in industrial management and had spent a weekend giving herself a crash course in how to manage and supervise personnel.

  Had she forgotten to use a compliment sandwich? Or to phrase her suggestions as “I” statements?

  “Everything okay?”

  Rosie looked up from the page. She chewed her lip for a moment before answering.

  “The edits? They’re great. We’re going to pulverize these idiots . . .” She trailed off.

  “But?”

  “But,” she began, hesitantly, “can we talk about what’s going on here?”

  Aroostine pasted a neutral expression on her face and tightened her grip on the pencil. She couldn’t know about Joe. Could she?

  She forced the thought from her mind and cleared her throat. “What’s going on?”

  Rosie perched on the chair next to hers and leaned in. “You’re in some kind of denial, right?”

  The pencil snapped in Aroostine’s hand. She dropped it to the table, her heart hammering. How had Rosie found out about Joe?

  “Uh—”

  Rosie rushed to continue. “I know it’s not my place. This is your case, your trial. But, for goodness’ sake, you nearly died.”

  Aroostine blinked.

  “My surgical mishap? You want to talk about that?”

  Rosie let out a short, frustrated huff of breath.

  “Come on, Aroostine. First the court loses your filing. Then your apartment catches fire. Then the equipment malfunctions while you’re in surgery. Does that really sound like a regular old string of bad luck to you. I mean, really?”

  “Well, yeah. What else would it be? Do you think Womback and Sheely put a curse on me?”

  She laughed at the image of the two sales representatives poking at a voodoo doll in her image.

  “No, not a curse,” Rosie said slowly, like she was speaking to a not-particularly-bright child. “But have you considered the possibility that these events may not be accidents? Or unrelated?”

  “You think someone is doing these things to me intentionally?”

  Rosie shrugged. “I don’t know. I just think there are no coincidences. And all of this started to happen after we turned over the list of exhibits we intend to use at trial.”

  Aroostine cocked her head. “And?”

  “And as soon as they got our exhibit list, the defendants filed a motion in limine.”

  “Now you sound like Sid. There’s nothing remotely unusual about moving to exclude evidence. I mean, their attorneys do seem to take laziness to a new level, but they have to do something to earn their fee.”

  “Is it usual to only object to one proposed exhibit? Defense counsel finally stirred themselves to a
ction, went through all the trouble of actually filing a motion, and only bothered to object to a single exhibit out of hundreds?”

  Aroostine’s pulse thrummed in her ear. When Rosie put it that way, she had to admit it certainly was not usual. In fact, it was highly unusual. So unusual as to be downright bizarre—a fact that she might have homed in on earlier, had she not been running as fast as she could on a treadmill of disaster and destruction. And now, divorce.

  Rosie watched her face, waiting for an answer.

  “No,” she said slowly, “it’s not typical.”

  “Right. It’s almost like the defendants don’t really care about winning the case.”

  “Okay, you lost me again.”

  Rosie pawed through the piles of documents stacked on the table and pulled out the exhibit list. “There’s lots of stuff on here they could have objected to. Really, there’s lots of stuff they should have objected to.”

  She passed the list to Aroostine, who flipped through it.

  Rosie had a point. They had padded their list with dozens and dozens of exhibits that simply weren’t admissible. It wasn’t Aroostine’s personal style to hit the other side with a document dump, but Sid had informed her in excruciating detail that the attorneys in his department strove to be over-inclusive, not selective. He’d given her his trademark sniff of exasperation and said, “It’s not your job to decide what’s in, Higgins. It’s the judge’s. Or do you think you’re smarter than Judge Hernandez?”

  “Okay. So?” she said now to Rosie.

  “So. What they do care about—or at least what someone cares about—is making sure you don’t stand up in court and mention those conversations for some other reason that has nothing to do with the FCPA charges. Mitch and I agree, it’s the only explanation for everything that’s happened to you.”

  “Mitch and you agree?”

  She didn’t know why she cared that Rosie and Mitchell had been talking about her string of bad luck, but she suddenly felt self-conscious.

  Rosie arched an eyebrow at her, and she flushed.

  Anyway, it wasn’t the only explanation. For all she knew, her condo was built on her ancestors’ burial ground. Or maybe Mercury was in retrograde. But she had to concede, if she was honest, that Rosie’s suspicion didn’t sound ridiculous against the totality of events.

  The lawyers representing the named defendants, while on the lazy side, were widely viewed as ethical and upstanding. She doubted very much that they would be involved in anything shady.

  Their clients, however, were criminals. Criminals, by definition, commit crimes. So while she might not be able to conceive of a reason to destroy federal court papers, commit arson, or attempt murder, there was no denying that a sizable population justified those very acts every day. If they didn’t, the Department of Justice wouldn’t exist.

  She closed her eyes to think. Her very first case as a special prosecutor had involved a local politician who’d murdered a judge to prevent him from issuing an opinion that she’d mistakenly believed would hurt her business interests and a state attorney general who’d helped her in exchange for a slice of the pie. The politician’s sister committed perjury multiple times to have her elderly patients declared incapacitated for her own financial gain. And that was in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, where the stakes were low, and the living was easy.

  “What are you thinking?” Rosie asked.

  “I’m thinking we need to pull a Woodward and Bernstein.”

  “Pardon?” Rosie threw her a blank look.

  “All the President’s Men? You know, Deep Throat? Watergate.”

  “Follow the money?”

  “Follow the money.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Wednesday morning

  Joe’s head was in a vise. It was being crushed. His mouth was sour; his tongue, lined with fur. He cracked one eye open, and the weak winter sun seared his eyeball. He squeezed his eye shut.

  A jumble of memories from the night before swam through his headache on waves. The voicemail from Aroostine. The beers. The girl. More beers. The girl.

  Her name was . . . Jen, maybe? Her hand on his thigh, warm through his jeans. The curve of her throat when she threw her head back to laugh. Walking out of the Hole in the Wall, hip bumping up against hip.

  Where had they gone? What had they done?

  He remembered the rush of cold air. Nausea rising in his throat. Stumbling into the cab of her truck. Then . . . nothing.

  Could he really have blacked out? He’d never had a lost evening—not after drinking grain alcohol punch in the cornfield behind the high school, not in college, not when the band had played some crappy club that paid them in shots, not even after his bachelor party.

  This was going to be one helluva hangover. His stomach cramped in agreement.

  He sucked down the chilled air and breathed it out slowly.

  Jen’s bedroom was really cold. And her bed was unusually hard.

  He eased his eyes open again and blinked against the onslaught of brightness and pain.

  Jen’s bed was no bed. He lay sprawled on a thin mat spread out on a bare wood floor. A scratchy wool blanket was tangled in a heap around his knees. He turned his head to the side and stared at the wood, forcing his dry eyes to focus on the grain.

  He stretched out a hand and ran his fingers along a plank. Aged oak, four inches wide. His eyes traveled up to the walls. More old-growth oak. Hand-hewn logs. His woodworking brain fought through the fog and estimated them as having twenty-inch faces. The rafters were more of the same, with hand-hewn chestnut joists.

  He was in an artfully restored log cabin. He’d place its original build date at 1800. Maybe a few years earlier. The coloring of the oak and the craftsmanship were slightly different from what he’d seen in old Pennsylvania barns and cabins. He pegged both as native to western Maryland. He’d bought similar boards from a dilapidated bank barn in Emmitsburg once.

  Professional excitement overtook his queasiness. To a master carpenter, this place was like heaven.

  He’d have to ask Jen about the cabin’s provenance. Assuming she was here. The small room was still, and there was no evidence of a woman. There was no evidence that anyone used the room as a bedroom. Aside from the mat, it was empty. No dresser, no table, no lamps. Nothing.

  There was a small square window carved high into one wall. It was bare. No curtain, no blinds. The adjacent wall contained a door. It was closed. He couldn’t tell if it led outside or to another room.

  He exhaled and pushed himself to standing. His legs shook beneath him, and sweat beaded his forehead from the effort of moving. He steadied himself and shuffled toward the door, trying to keep his head motionless.

  He palmed the door. It was the same temperature as the rest of the room, so it couldn’t be an exterior door. He ran a hand through his hair to smooth it down and tucked his shirt back into his pants, girding himself for the awkward morning-after conversation.

  He pressed the curved, iron handle down and pushed outward. It was locked. From the other side.

  His heart thumped.

  He swallowed and tried to call out, but his voice was nothing but a croak.

  He wet his lips. “Jen?” His voice was hoarse and husky but audible.

  He listened hard. No response.

  “Jen?”

  His heart pounded even faster, and he dropped a hand to his back left pocket where he kept his wallet. Empty.

  He forgot about the splitting pain in his head and swiveled around to look for his jacket, sweeping his eyes over each corner of the tiny room. No jacket.

  On the other side of the door, he could hear shuffling and rustling. Someone was out there—someone who was ignoring his cries.

  His dry throat closed. He grabbed the door handle and pulled, shaking from the futile effort. Then, as his stomach roiled with nausea and bil
e, he hammered his fists against the door, over and over, shouting a wordless, primal cry until his voice gave out and his hands ached.

  Then he slumped against the wall and stared blankly at the slice of paradise that had just become his cell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Aroostine sat motionless at her desk and listened to the sound of her wristwatch ticking and her own breathing. She’d sent Rosie off with instructions to run down SystemSource’s corporate structure—an important and time-sensitive task—but her true motivation had been to achieve quiet and stillness.

  If she was going to find some critical piece of information that she’d previously overlooked, she’d have to change her perspective. That was Tracking 101: you only see what you’re looking for.

  It had been one of her grandfather’s first lessons. If you’re focused on finding the squirrel, you won’t register the bird. Or the edible berries hanging on the bush right in front of you. Or the slight depression in the earth where the last tracker had sat.

  He taught her not only how to see, but how to use all her senses. First, he showed her how to examine a scene from all vantage points—crouching on the trail, lying flat on her belly, propped up on her elbows, hanging from a tree. Then, he wrapped a bandanna around her eyes as a blindfold and told her to listen to the same scene. She learned to hear the difference between a caw of hunger and a squawk of pain, between frozen ice thawing and water forcing its way through a chink in a dam. Next, she learned to smell the faint milky odor of a mammal nursing her newborns and the coppery scent of fresh blood to find a den or an injured animal. Her fingertips could tell if wood was dry enough to start a fire. She could taste whether wild berries were at their peak.

  Most importantly, he taught her to be still and wait for an answer to reveal itself—a valuable skill in the wild, but not one she’d ever tried to transfer to her practice of law.

  At this point, what did she have to lose?