“We know that some of the people involved are close to you. Shawn and I, between us, figured a few of them out,” I said. I didn’t want to name any names, so that if there was anyone eavesdropping, they wouldn’t know specifically who to hide. “But it seems to me that some of the things that are going on couldn’t happen without...some help from a few strangers.” I raised an eyebrow, hoping against hope that Peterson would catch my drift and also understand that we both needed to be discreet.
“So you want to know who I might not have mentioned having some backdoor access,” he said. “Something, maybe, even Shawn doesn’t know about?” I nodded.
“It just seems unlikely to me that the people we know, who are likely to be involved, could pull this off on their own,” I said. “Especially given that law enforcement seems convinced that you’re the one who did these things. And they honestly should have investigated more than they did.” Peterson pursed his lips, and for a few moments I thought he looked more like a petulant child than he did a middle-aged billionaire.
“There might be someone, or a few someones, I could tell you about,” Peterson said, slowly. “But for the most part, anyone involved in my business should be someone that Shawn knows. He’s been deeply involved since he turned eighteen.” I tried not to react to that, remembering that Shawn had gotten so deeply involved in his father’s shady business just after he’d dumped me. That was a personal consideration; it had no relevance to what was going on in the moment.
“I need to know if the deal that you and Shawn discussed yesterday had anything to do with certain individuals in high positions here,” I said, slowly. “Because while we certainly have a head on the go-between, there’s the question of who that person was going between other than you. Do you follow?” Peterson looked confused for a moment but then nodded, his face clearing.
“That would stand to reason, given how things shook out with that deal and now this,” he said. “There’s a certain high-ranking public official here who stood to benefit from a...let’s say, diversification of his portfolio?” He inclined his head slightly to see if I caught his meaning.
“You’re all about diversity, clearly,” I said dryly, while nodding to indicate I mostly understood. “What can you tell me about these people?”
“One of them is close to the person who is responsible for the charges against me,” Peterson replied. “Another one of them is involved in, I guess you could say, official finance.” I raised an eyebrow at that. It would take me some time to figure out what he meant by that, but I wasn’t about to ask him to clarify any more. I gestured for him to go on.
I wrote a few notes for myself as Peterson went over some of the details of the situation, all while being as oblique as possible, not saying who he was supposed to have been helping, or what person in another country he was assisting either. I wanted to shake my head, but I knew that there was no real point in judging the man, not at this juncture. I’d worked with murderers, with pimps, drug dealers, to get them out of trouble, so I couldn’t exactly pretend that a billionaire with loose ethics, who was paying people off to get someone in another country elected so that someone else in this country could benefit from secret campaign contributions, or other deals, was dust I wanted off of my feet.
“I think we can work on this,” I said, once I was clear that Peterson had told me all that he’d intended to.
“Let my son know, when you see him, that he’d better be managing the parts of my business he has control over, just as if I could directly oversee him,” Peterson said.
“Tell him that yourself,” I suggested. “The only thing I have to do with Shawn is this case.” Peterson looked at me skeptically.
“You do hold a grudge, don’t you?” I looked the older man dead in his eyes.
“If your son hadn’t basically forced me to take this case, I would have happily let you rot,” I said, not caring for a moment that there might be someone eavesdropping, someone listening in.
“He’s a man who knows what he wants,” Peterson said with pride. I rolled my eyes.
“Mr. Peterson, he was always someone who knew what he wanted,” I said, making it clear with my voice that I didn’t think that was necessarily a virtue. “Occasionally he hasn’t been able to get it, though.”
“He certainly had you until I made him back off,” Peterson said. He frowned slightly. “You do realize that it was nothing personal at the time, right?” I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.
“It was deeply personal to me,” I said. “Fortunately, I am also a person who knows what I want. And right now, all I want is to get your legal mess taken care of, so that I don’t have to have you or your son in my daily life anymore.”
“You could do a lot worse than Shawn,” Peterson said.
“One, that’s not on the table. Two, I could do a lot better than him, too, if I was interested in having a relationship right now. Don’t you have something to do with the rest of your day?”
“Shawn’s clearly interested in you, or he wouldn’t have brought this case to you,” Peterson pointed out.
“He brought it to me because I’m the best defense lawyer in town,” I said firmly.
“And he only would have known that by watching your career,” Peterson countered. “Not that I disapprove of you, at least not now.”
“Your approval or disapproval means less than nothing to me,” I said.
“You should know that you don’t know the whole story behind that business,” Shawn Senior said, firmly. “It’s not my story to tell you and I don’t expect that you’d believe me if I did. But it wasn’t anything personal about you. It was personal about Shawn. You should talk to him about it.”
“We’ve talked about it, and I’m not interested in rehashing that bullshit,” I said, as bluntly as I could. “I think I should get back to work on your case, if you want it resolved before someone decides to make a move on you to keep you way more silent than federal prison would.”
“If you’re not interested in rehashing it, you shouldn’t be still holding a grudge about it,” Shawn Senior pointed out and I shook my head.
“I don’t hold a grudge,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work on figuring out some of this information you were finally open enough to bring to my attention.” I pressed the button on my desk phone to alert the receptionist to come to my office.
“Please give my son my regards, if you should happen to see him,” Peterson said with a slightly leering grin. Becky knocked on the door and poked her head in before I could say anything to Peterson’s remark.
“Mr. Peterson was just leaving, Becky,” I said. “Please show him out. I’m not entirely sure he knows the way.” Peterson’s grin took on a more respectful look, and Becky opened the door to let him leave my office as I stared him down. I could feel the warmth in my cheeks, and chest, but I hoped it wasn’t visible. I didn’t want Shawn Senior to think I was blushing over his approval of me as a girlfriend for his son.
I thought about calling Shawn, asking him what his father meant about there being more to the story. No matter how I tried to deny it, the part of me that still felt a little broken wanted to know there was something more to Shawn breaking up with me as a teenager than his father insisting that I wasn’t good enough. A wiser-sounding voice in my head told me that it was pointless, anyway. We weren’t going to reconcile, because he was a client, and once he wasn’t a client anymore, he would be out of my life again. Better to protect my feelings. You have to have feelings to protect them, the first mental voice countered. I told it to shut up and let me focus on my work.
Chapter Fourteen
I’d stayed behind at the apartment when Cynthia went to talk to dad for a few reasons. For one, I wanted her to have plenty of space to talk to him how she needed to, without me getting in the way. I knew, somehow, that if I’d been there, Dad would figure out something had happened between Cynthia and me, and that would be a distraction from the whole situation. Time was
of the essence. Then two, there were a few avenues I wanted to go down, talking to people that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted Cynthia to know I knew.
“Yo, Harris,” I said, when one of my friends picked up. “I know Dad’s nuclear just now, but I was hoping I could pick your brain.” Harris was an associate of mine, someone I’d met along the way working in the business with Dad. Like me, he’d gone into the industry following his father. We’d met just out of college, when I was getting established in my own right.
“You’re not exactly green yourself, you know,” Harris told me.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But you and I go way back, right?” There was a quick silence on the other end of the phone line and I wondered if I’d underestimated the size of the attack on my family.
“I do owe you for getting me out of that situation with Carlson,” Harris said, finally. I grinned to myself; that had actually been a pretty good time, even though Carlson had tried to get a hit out on Harris. I’d managed to negotiate things for him so that everyone ended up, if not friends, then at least not trying to kill each other.
“So what can you tell me? What do you know?” I sat back in my chair, hoping for a decent amount of news.
“You hired that hot shot attorney, right? What’s-her-face?”
“Cynthia Evers, yeah,” I confirmed.
“Well, it looks like whatever she’s doing, she’s getting pretty close to uncovering things. Or, at least, she’s close enough to where some folks are particularly unhappy with her,” Harris said.
“They’re after her?” I’d known that people were after me; the attempts to get the DA to charge me along with my father, and the attack at my townhouse, had tipped me off to that fact. But I had thought Cynthia was more or less an accessory to whoever it was, not that she was a target in her own right.
“Yeah, apparently they feel like they’ve got your situation all wrapped up. But she’s a bit harder to go after,” Harris said.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, more to myself than him. “What do you know about it?”
“Not a lot, unfortunately,” Harris told me. “Just that they’re interested in getting her out of the way, and they’ve put some more people on it in the past day, since they haven’t been able to scare her off yet.”
“Thanks man,” I said.
“If you get on the other side of this, I’d love to get together and interface about a few possible deals,” Harris said. I shrugged off the idea. If I managed to get through the situation I was in without dying or being thrown in prison, I was going to start nailing down the security of my businesses a lot more intensely.
“We’ll see if I get through it, first,” I told him, before finishing up the call. I set my phone down and made myself stop for a moment to think. Part of why Cynthia and I had agreed on me staying behind, beyond the obvious, was that it was easier for us to both stay under the radar if we didn’t travel together. But there was a good chance that if they were after Cynthia still, they might have found out where she was. They might be after her at the moment, and I wasn’t convinced that Dad would take the right kind of precautions to keep people from tracking him to her.
I decided it would be a good idea to get to Cynthia at the office. After all, she needed to know that she was a target on her own. And, at this point, it was unlikely that anyone would be looking specifically for me. I’d been taking precautions for almost a full week. In fact, both of us had, and we’d made sure we didn’t leave the apartment at the same time, or in the same vehicle. I didn’t think anyone knew about the apartment, or that either of us was staying there. If I could get to her, we could work out how to keep her safe.
I grabbed the keys to a car I was keeping a few blocks away from the apartment, and slipped my phone into my pocket. It would take me about thirty minutes to get to her office, since I’d have to take an indirect route. If anyone was watching the areas around my known haunts, or Cynthia’s, I didn’t want to give them the ability to trace me back to the apartment. I thought about what Harris had said, that they were especially after Cynthia because it was harder to get at her through the justice system. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, granted technically, at the moment, neither was I. And, she didn’t have the kind of shadiness that had worked its way around me and Dad over the years. She wasn’t part of the machine, so they didn’t have anything on her, at all.
I finally got close to Cynthia’s offices and started having second thoughts. Cynthia had Jack, and it wasn’t like the law offices weren’t well-protected anyway. I could just call her, let her know that there were people after her--more people--and maybe make arrangement for her to stay somewhere else that was even more secure. I knew a couple of people who worked at the French Embassy in the next city; they might be willing to do me a favor. I didn’t think that they’d be the kind of target that someone would be interested in going after.
You’re already almost there. You might as well go through with it. I pulled into a parking spot a bit down the road from the law offices and got out of the car. If nothing else, it would give me an excuse to maybe go to lunch with her. It was about that time of day, and I didn’t think that Cynthia would have gone to lunch so close to meeting with Dad. I’d find out what she had gotten from him, and we would put our heads together to figure out how to make it go away.
“Shawn Peterson! Stop where you are!” I did, but only because I was surprised. “FBI. You have the right to remain silent…” Four agents converged on me, in the stereotypical, regulation FBI suits, and I realized the major flaw in my plan. While Cynthia was clean enough that they couldn’t frame her for anything, whoever had helped my father’s former mistress frame him had been after me for over a week. Clearly they’d had enough time to pull some strings further up the ladder than the local law enforcement agencies.
“Let me speak with my lawyer,” I said.
“No sir, we are taking you into custody on charges related to cyber crime, fraud and embezzlement,” one of the agents said. “You can contact your attorney from holding.”
I thought about arguing the point, but the FBI were definitely not local police. I let myself get handcuffed and hoped I could get the word out to Cynthia before anything happened to her.
Chapter Fifteen
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered to myself, as I checked my makeup in the mirror. Jack was driving, and I was, for once, glad about it. I felt too shaky to be driving myself, and I needed to focus on the situation at hand. I had dropped the ball.
Nathan had called me twenty minutes ago to tell me that he’d picked up a tip that Shawn had been arrested by the FBI. It had, apparently, made news on a few blogs, since he’d been charged not just with fraud and embezzlement but also with unspecified cyber crimes.
“My guess is that they’re going to charge him more specifically with unauthorized access; trying to pin some of the stuff I’ve uncovered on him,” Nathan had told me. “If I were you, I’d do my best to get him bailed out as quickly as possible. I suspect the goal is more likely to get him somewhere they can get rid of him.”
“We’re almost there,” Jack told me from the driver’s seat. I took a quick breath; I was going to have to be fully “on” once I got to the federal detention center, in full-blown lawyer mode. I had dealt with criminals charged with federal crimes before, but it was not something I’d done often, and it was something that was going to take some clout and some confidence to get through.
I felt unbelievably stupid that I hadn’t done more to prevent Shawn from getting arrested in the first place. I’d been so distracted by the attacks, by trying to figure out who was behind it all, that I hadn’t kept up with the way the people involved were going after Shawn too. Clearly they had more strings to pull than I’d originally thought, considering that they’d managed to get the FBI involved. It was turning into an enormous mess, and my first appearance as Shawn’s lawyer of record in the detention center would have to make a strong impression.
Jack let me ou
t of the car and told me he’d be waiting for me by the entrance when I got out. I smoothed the skirt I’d changed into over my thighs, squared my shoulders, and walked towards the doors leading into the facility. I’d managed to put together some pieces of the conspiracy through a combination of what Nathan had found out, what Shawn had discovered, and what his father had told me during our meeting earlier in the day. But there were just one or two pieces of physical evidence that I would need to get, along with some confirmation on details, before I could blow the thing wide open.
“Attorney for Shawn Peterson,” I said, when I was asked to state my business. “My client has a right to see me.” I took my ID out and handed it over to the guard.
“We didn’t have an attorney on record for Peterson,” the man said, suspiciously.
“Well, I am his attorney, and if you do not admit me to see him, you’ll be in violation of federal as well as local law,” I told him, tartly. “Make a copy of my ID if you have to, but either I am going to see my client in the next fifteen minutes, or your job will be the first one on the chopping block, with your commanding officer’s job right behind it.” For another moment, the man looked like he might try and press the point, but he shook his head and took my ID to make a copy for the file.
He let me enter the holding area, and one of the other guards went to go get Shawn while I made my way to the secure part of the detention center where visitors could meet with prisoners. I sat down with my briefcase and thought about what to do, and what to tell Shawn, while I waited for him to come out and meet with me.
I didn’t have to wait long, fortunately. Shawn came out a few minutes after I’d settled into my seat, looking a bit worse for wear. He was in a khaki jumpsuit, paper-soled shoes, and there was a bruise above one of his eyes. Without any warning, the impulse to jump up, to hug him--maybe even kiss him--rose up in me. I was glad to see him and terrified that something had already happened to him. Clearly, he wasn’t safe. “Someone had an issue with me,” Shawn said, sitting down.
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