by Leigh James
My heart started thudding in my chest. “Why is he coming down?” I asked.
“He’s winding up the operation,” April said. “He said that we don’t need it anymore, and that having it open is just a liability at this point.”
“So, no more payments through Miami?” I asked. I could feel Walker looking at me again.
“They’re shutting it down,” April said. “That’s all I know.”
They must have taken as much money as they wanted — or as much as they thought they could get away with. Already.
“April, I need you to get me those files,” I said, “and then I need another favor.”
“What,” she said, flatly, not even bothering to continue the facade of courteous professionalism.
“I need you to put on a sexy dress and offer to accompany Lester to Miami,” I said, all in a rush. I could feel Walker looking at me yet again, now with his jaw dropped open.
“And why the hell would I do that?” April asked.
“Because you’re going to help us. And because your life depends on it.”
* * *
“Um…Nic?” Walker asked after I’d shut my phone down and continued to pace the room. “What’s going on?” He was talking to me like I was a ticking time bomb. Who had her period.
“Lester Max is going to Miami later this week to shut the office down,” I said. “I want April to go with him. I want her to seduce him and then kidnap him, so we can question him,” I continued, feverishly. “Maybe we can use him as some sort of pawn to exchange, or something. Maybe David Proctor will be forthcoming if he knows we have Lester, and that we’re about to kill him….”
“Whoa,” Walker said, standing up and running his hand over his buzzed head. “Easy girl. We’re not threatening to kill anybody, at least not in exchange for anything. Not like this. Lester and David very well may be working together — we should know one way or the other after we cross-reference the files we’re getting — but that doesn’t mean there’s any loyalty there. We’d probably be doing David a favor by killing Lester. Everyone’s in this for themselves. Taking one of the players out of the equation would just make the rest of them happy. It’d save them some work.”
“Well, maybe she can drug him and we can just keep him?” I asked. “For questioning?”
A smile broke out over Walker’s face. “I have an idea,” he said. “It’s not as enjoyably harsh as yours, but I think it has legs.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly feeling more buoyant. Our enemies were slippery and elusive, but we were back in the game, now. Finally.
“Lester Max always goes to the highest bidder, so….” his voice trailed off. “We have to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
“Can we scare him, too?” I asked. I remembered the off-color comments he’d made to me about my professional relationship with Walker. Of course, Lester had been right — I had been dying to sleep with Walker — but it didn’t make it okay for him to say it.
Walker gave me a long look. “I think maybe you’ve been hanging around me too much,” he said.
I thought of Tammy, kind Tammy with her meticulously hair-sprayed bangs, handing me that compact. Lester Max was responsible for at least some of this, I felt certain.
“Can we scare him maybe just a little?” I asked. “Please?”
“Maybe just a little,” he said.
* * *
Seven hours later, Walker had set up a directory of files duplicated from the server at Blue Securities, courtesy of April. I’d heard nothing from Alexa and I hadn’t called her again, either; I would wait until tonight, when she went home after work.
We’d started looking through the files, taking turns. We took specific notes so that nothing was missed. But we hadn’t found anything, just a rehash of the financials we’d already scoured through for the discovery portion of Walker’s trial.
“We need to take a break,” Walker said, rubbing his eyes. “I’ll call the condo association president — we need to get a mooring for the boat. Maybe once the sun starts going down, we can go out. You can drop me off and I can drive it over.”
“I don’t get to go on the boat?” I whined. I was sick of being stuck in the house, too. The sun shone tantalizingly through the windows, the aqua water sparkling, just out of reach.
“You can,” Walker said, “but not until it’s dark out. We can’t risk it. I think I’ll ask the kid who sold it to me to drive it over, actually. It’s too dangerous for us to go get it.
“I’m worried that our lead time is officially over. On top of that, we’ve made contact. Twice. And Levi’s out there, now, scouting people, making sure everyone’s all right. We have to stay out of sight from now on.”
“Do you think that maybe Levi could tell my dad we’re ok?” I asked.
“Absolutely not, Nicole. Just like he can’t make contact with Adrian. We would put them all in too much danger. We have to be patient. I know it’s hard, but if we do this right, we’ll be able to get back to them.” He looked at me for a beat. “Maybe.”
My heart lodged in my throat. “Maybe?” I asked. “Walker, you’re innocent. Don’t give up on going back. Either the government fabricated the charges against you, or someone else who’s out to get you fabricated the evidence. Either way, the charges are bogus.
“On top of that, we are on the verge of finding concrete evidence that Lester Max misappropriated funds from your company, and that some of those misappropriated funds went to my law firm. It’s just like we thought. The paper trail is in here, somewhere, and we’re going to find it. And they are going to pay for what they’ve done to your company.
“On top of that — as if all of that’s not enough — someone tried to blow you up on your boat. Someone killed the deliveryman who had my credit card information. Someone killed Mandy and the driver of that car. We don’t know if Tammy’s alive.
“And you think we’re never going back? That’s crazy, Walker. Of course we’re going back. Remember? ‘We’re going to line them up and knock them down, like so many dominoes?’” I quoted him to himself. “Do you remember saying that? Because I sure as hell haven’t forgotten it.”
“Of course I haven’t forgotten it,” he said, his jaw clenched. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to make some enemies in the process, Nicole. We might go down a path that we can’t come back from.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that our enemies might not be so easily satisfied.” He ran his hands over his head and stalked around the room, looking like a panther pacing in a too-small cage. “Think about it: what is it that the government wanted in the first place?” he asked, searching my face, taking me through the steps.
“They wanted your technology. And they wanted it all to themselves,” I said.
“That’s right,” Walker said. “And that’s not going to change. They want the existing patented inventions — right now, with me out of the picture, they have access to them all. I can guarantee you that Lester Max isn’t trying to shop them around anymore. He’s probably the darling of the government right now, for giving them exactly what they want. The Board’s gonna go along with it, because non-exclusivity got me into so much trouble in the first place. They’re not going to pursue it. And neither is Lester — as much as he loves money, he is also incredibly lazy. He can just ride this wave, make as much money as humanly possible, paying himself through the normal channels and whatever else he’s taken from Miami. Probably the government’s paying him, too.
“And he’s free to pursue his other interests. Due to the generosity of my company, the genius of my technology, and the calculated luck of having me conveniently out of the picture.”
He kept pacing, and I wished that I could just send him out on his boat, to fish and enjoy the sun. To not think about any of this anymore.
“The government isn’t going to want me to come back and change their nice arrangement,” he said. “
Let’s say your second theory is correct: someone else fabricated the evidence against me and brought it to the government. Then the government brought the charges against me, and they were pursuing them vigorously.” He looked up at me. “They wanted me to be gone from my company, Nic, whether they fabricated the charges or someone else did. It suited them for me to be guilty.
“But let’s give it the rose-colored glasses treatment,” he continued, “just so we consider every angle. What happens if we go back, Lester Max and your entire firm are put behind bars, and then I’m back at square one with my biggest client?” he asked me, rubbing his chin. “They’re not going to stop wanting what I’ve got, and what I’ve got coming down the pipeline. They are going to want a monopoly on my inventions, past, present and future.”
“Is that the worst thing?” I asked, my mind racing. “It’s our government. We both love our country. You fought for your country — you risked your life for it. So why is it so bad to sell exclusively to them? I know it’s not just about the money. And I know you love your country, so….”
“I do love my country,” Walker said, and I could hear pain in his voice now, real regret. “I would do anything for it — if I believed the course of action be fair, just, and ethical. I didn’t agree with them when they told me I couldn’t sell my products to certain other countries. I thought it was a power grab, an unfair restriction of trade that was quite possibly illegal.
“So I didn’t do as they asked. And now we’re here,” he said, motioning around. “It’s not a coincidence, Nicole. Whether they were the originators of all this trouble or if they were just capitalizing on it, their hands are still dirty. And I don’t want to get back into a position where my only client is jeopardizing my value system.”
“What are we going to do if we don’t go back?” I asked. I couldn’t picture a future without Boston in it, my family, my apartment, my degrees. I couldn’t stay hidden in a condo on Boca for the rest of my life. I was only twenty-five, for crissakes.
“Nicole,” he said, coming to me and wrapping his arms around me. “This is something I’m running through in my mind, right now. Don’t be upset. I just need to think it through. And whatever I end up deciding, you have to know that you have to make your own choice. You’ve already given up too much for me. I’m not going to ask you to turn your back on your family and your future just because I don’t know if I want to live in that world anymore.”
My heart thudded in my chest and I looked up at him. “I already made my choice, Walker. We’re in this together. To the end.” I ran my hands down his back, reminding myself of his tattoo, the declaration of his loyalty, laid out for the world to see.
I took a deep breath. “Because we’re together, you’re going to have to take into consideration what I want too,” I said.
“Of course. That’s the most important thing to me. So what is it? Do you know what you want to do?” he asked me, running his fingers gently down my face.
“I want to be with you,” I said. Always, I thought. And then I thought about Mandy, and the driver, and the deliveryman, the triumvirate of bad deeds that always lurked in my thoughts, burning into me.
“And I want justice.”
“You’re going to get both,” he said, kissing the side of my face. “One you have already. The second is coming soon. I promise.”
I leaned up and kissed him, feeling my heart expand. My natural instinct was to grab his ass and pull him against me, but I made myself stop. We had too much to do. I looked warily at the computer; I’d never been afraid of hard work, but I was nervous now. Not about the work, but about the result — I wanted to find hard evidence, to find out exactly who was involved at my firm in addition to Lester Max, and I wanted them to be punished. I’d never wanted anything this much, except for the man who was holding me now. He was the only other thing that mattered.
“Back to what you were saying,” I said, pulling back a little more so I could clear my head. I still wanted to talk this through. “If we didn’t go back, where would we go?”
Walker shrugged. “We’d have to get my money, first. If I can get to Lester, we can maybe figure it out….” He went over and stared out the window at the water.
“We have a boat. We’re in Florida…We could head to the Bahamas. It’s close. There’s a lot of little islands down there. We could island hop for a little while, then….” His voice trailed off and I realized that this scenario was appealing to him; he sounded excited.
“Then?” I asked him, prompting him, as he continued to stare out the window.
“We could buy a house for cash and live happily ever after,” he said, and shrugged.
I shivered. Ever after. Those were the words I longed to hear. In my heart, I knew I wouldn’t say no to him, if that’s what he really wanted…but a quiet life on the beach? With no work, no goals, no stress?
“What the hell would we do all day?” I blurted out.
He looked back at me and laughed, but there was a little sadness in his eyes. A little hesitation. “Maybe you’re too young to see the perfection in it,” he said. “When I was twenty-five, that would have sounded about as interesting as watching paint dry. I was restless then, too.”
“I’m not restless,” I said, although at the moment, I was feeling exactly that. “I just don’t know what that would be like — a life without worrying about responsibilities. Work, taking care of my family, stress…That’s how I’ve operated my whole life. I don’t know anything different.”
Walker turned back out towards the water. “You could still take care of your family, Nic. Your family in Boston — we’d find a way. I’d never turn my back on them. Or my sister. We have to make sure everyone is safe and has what they need.” He paused for a beat. “And after a while, maybe it would be safe to see them again. When we’ve seen this through and the dust has settled.
“You could also be busy taking care of your other family, if you wanted,” he said, still looking out the window.
I just stood there, not understanding what he was saying. “My other family?” I asked, confused.
Walker headed towards the computer, his arms crossed across his chest, not looking at my face. “We don’t need to talk about this right now. Let’s get back to work.”
“Okay,” I said, my brow furrowed. We could get back to this later — whatever this was. I would let the picture of us on a white-sand beach, a beautiful stucco house behind us, just stay in my mind.
And maybe just consider it.
Chapter 14
“I think I found something,” I said, a few hours later. I came into the kitchen and found Walker in there, leaning against the granite island and reading a boating manual. He looked up at me, and there was still the trace of disappointment on his face, but I didn’t have time to ask about it right now; my heart was pounding about the document I’d found. “I found it in some of the Advent docs. It’s an email from Lester to David Proctor.”
“What does it say?” Walker asked, straightening up.
“It looks like Advent was another company that was set up,” I said, the words coming out in a rush.
“We didn’t see any tax records or formation papers for that during discovery,” Walker said. “You would have caught it.”
“Yeah, I would have — if Advent was part of Blue Securities. It’s not.”
We just looked at each other for a beat. Then Walker raised his eyebrows, waiting.
“Advent LLC is an off-shoot of Proctor & Buchanan,” I said. “The formation papers, which I just looked up on the Secretary of State’s website, are signed by none other than David Proctor, Managing Partner.”
* * *
“Well, well, well,” Walker said, and shook his head. He had poured himself a rather large bourbon; it was already almost gone. “I still can’t believe it. My own fucking lawyer. And I’ve known him for ten years.” We’d read through the related emails between Lester and David, which were very brief, and then I’d shown him the formation
paperwork online.
Advent LLC had been set up right at the same time Walker had retained the services of Proctor & Buchanan. Corporate formation documents had to include information about what the company did. The Advent paperwork stated that it was an investment management consulting company.
That made Walker laugh.
“The question, for me,” I said — as if it were only one question, when in fact I had many more, swirling around in my head, fighting for attention — “is whether or not this could be legitimate. David told me that they’d set up a special account for your assets, so that if you were convicted, the money would be out of your business, protected for you.” Walker looked at me skeptically, but I got up and paced, trying to work my way through it. “He said that they’d found a way to do it legally. He also said that Lester Max had helped set it up. I’m going to ask Alexa to find the paperwork for it on our end. My guess is that payments came to Advent via Miami; that would be putting another step in between Blue Securities and the money. I’m sure I saw other transactions in the Miami reports. There could have been stuff related to Advent, but I didn’t know what I was looking at.
“But it could be legitimate,” I said, turning to look at him. “I don’t think we can rule that out as a possibility.”
“I seriously doubt that any of this is legitimate — otherwise, we would have known about it. The first we heard about this special account that your firm was setting up for me was the day that you almost died. You’re forgetting the bomb,” Walker said, “remember? The one that was meant for you outside of your office? In the car David was trying to get you into? Right after he told you he was setting up a trust for me?”
“I haven’t forgotten the bomb,” I said, looking out at the water. “Not the one in the car. Not the one on your boat. I’m not forgetting any of it.” I looked down and noticed that my hands were clenched into fists. Up to now, part of me still wanted to believe that David Proctor was innocent. I think it was because I’d looked up to him. In the brief time we’d worked together, I’d trusted him. I thought he was a great lawyer and he’d actually taught me quite a bit. Norris Phaland could slither over the edge of a very large cliff for all I cared, but part of me still wanted to believe that David was innocent.