“Seems like it,” I agreed. I took a quick breath and composed my thoughts. Just like with his father, I’d have to be careful with what I said to Shawn. I knew, for sure, that our conversation would be recorded. “I’ve got your bail paperwork, and I’m about to turn it in myself. I don’t think we can trust couriers right now, do you?”
“Nobody we don’t already know is safe,” Shawn agreed.
“There’s also the issue of the overall situation,” I said, raising one eyebrow slightly and hoping that Shawn would understand what I meant.
“You’ve been gathering information, right?” I nodded.
“I’ve got almost everything,” I said. “I need to check on one or two more...items.” Shawn’s eyes widened.
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “Not until I can help you out.” I shook my head.
“If I wait, then there’s a risk of worse things happening in the meantime,” I pointed out.
“There’s a risk of worse things happening if you don’t…” Shawn pressed his lips together and glanced around the area, spotting the cameras that were recording us. “There are people who don’t want you to find out things about the situation.”
“That’s not going away,” I countered. “If I can get one or two more things settled, I might be able to put a stop to it altogether.” Shawn shook his head.
“It’s too big a risk,” he said.
“And you being here, waiting on bail when--” I took a quick breath, reminding myself that if I let on how much I knew of the situation, I’d just be putting us both in more danger. “When things are still so unsettled, isn’t it a big risk?”
“I have confidence you can get me bailed out,” Shawn said with a grin. “If anyone can do it, you can.” I frowned.
“Bail for FBI detention, like the one you’re in, isn’t easy,” I pointed out. “It takes time, even under the best of circumstances.”
“Just promise me that you’re not going to proceed with your... investigation into my and my dad’s defense without me being there to help,” Shawn said firmly. He made a face and glanced quickly around the room, and I knew he was just as aware of the cameras and the recordings being made of our meeting as I was.
“I care about your well-being.” I stared at him for a moment, shocked. I hadn’t expected that; it was the closest he had come to admitting actual feelings for me, given the situation. But why was I surprised? It wasn’t like Shawn had made it a secret. I remembered what he’d said about his promise, the one I’d called him out on breaking. Think about it another time. You’re both in danger right now, I reminded myself.
“This thing I need, it’s time sensitive,” I told him. “Even beyond the usual level of risk that we’ve been dealing with in the investigation.” It was true; Nathan had sent me something along with the information about Shawn getting snatched up by the FBI that had made me think. And while I’d been getting the bail paperwork ready for the judge, I’d also been ruminating on the situation and how best to resolve it. Technically, I didn’t need Shawn for it. I could do it on my own. But I needed to get it done quickly, or it would be even more impossible for me to clear anyone’s name.
“It can’t possibly be more time sensitive than what we have going on,” Shawn insisted. “Please--please, Cynthia. Promise me that you won’t go after a piece of evidence or a line of investigation without me.” I met his gaze for a long moment and saw that he was actually, shockingly, concerned about me; genuinely so. Nathan had said, on the phone, that Shawn had gotten picked up just a block away from my office where he’d parked a vehicle registered under another name. He’d clearly been coming to see me for some reason, and it hadn’t been something he thought could wait. But neither could the bit of evidence I thought I was only a few steps away from getting my hands on.
“I promise,” I said finally. But I knew I was lying. Shawn and I went over his bail paperwork, and I told him that I was pretty sure he was going to have to relinquish his passport until after he was cleared, in order to be allowed to leave the jail. That was assuming he’d be allowed to bail out in the first place. His father had only barely managed to get clearance to bond out, and both father and son’s assets were currently frozen, if I knew anything about how federal law worked, and I did. Shawn was going to have to play it very careful, show that he was definitely going to be a good egg while awaiting trial.
I watched him head back into the holding area and took another slow, deep breath. I’d told him that I was going to wait on his release before I moved on anything, and I knew I couldn’t. But his insistence had made me think that I should take a few precautions before I did make my move. I gathered up Shawn’s paperwork and mentally prepared myself to file his request for bail, and to move onto the next phase of my plan. With any luck, by the time he was able to bond out of the detention facility, I’d be in the perfect position to make everything go away. But I would have to be fully ready to go to war to do it.
Chapter Sixteen
It took three days for the bail request to go through, and get approved. The night before my arraignment and bail hearing, in the cafeteria, I found myself surrounded by five guys, ones I’d never seen before. I knew, instantly, what was about to happen, though I’ve been in more than one fight in my life. I went into instinct mode, letting my tray fall out of my hands and dodging the first fist that came flying at me, looking around to see if anyone else was going to join in on jumping me.
Fortunately, no one seemed interested in anything other than watching the fight, so for all of maybe five minutes, I was surrounded, fists and feet and a few creative handmade weapons coming at me at every angle, from every side. I managed to avoid getting stabbed, but I got more than one scrape on my arms, and according to the doctor on-site, I had two bruised ribs in addition to the bruises on my skin.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been jumped since I’d arrived at the detention center. Before Cynthia had come to see me, one of the guys in the holding cell with me had taken advantage of the lack of attention from the guards to crack me right above the eye and tell me my billions wouldn’t do me any good in holding. But he’d stopped at that, and I’d figured it was just ill will from a guy who probably couldn’t have even imagined the kind of luck I’d had growing up.
The guys in the cafeteria seemed like a whole different situation, though. They seemed to be intent on killing me, if they could, and it was only my good luck that I’d managed to dodge the worst of their attacks while the guards made their way to the dust-up. Once the doctor cleared me, I was put in a different cell. At least, I’d gotten to eat in the infirmary. After that, the guards took me to another part of the detention center.
“Since you got jumped, and you obviously are in danger, we’re placing you in PC,” the guard said, leading me towards a hall with single-person cells on either side. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I could recognize that it was a better situation, at least until I was able to get out of there. On the other hand, how am I supposed to find out who put those assholes up to beating the shit out of me if I’m all alone?
I figured it out about an hour later, after the guards had left. The CP wing was quiet most of the time. People didn’t really talk much, and there weren’t many other guys on the block with me. But once things had settled in for good, I heard someone hissing across the corridor. “Rich kid!” I rolled my eyes. Of course he would have heard who I was, and of course the only real thing anyone knew about me, apart from the five guys who attacked me, was that I was rich.
“Yeah?”
“You got money still?” I thought about the question. Technically, in the larger sense, I didn’t. My assets had been frozen, or were in the process of being frozen, as part of the bogus investigation into my life. But I did have some money that I could hope the Feds didn’t know about; fully legal, but not somewhere they could easily touch by eminent domain. And of course, if and when I was cleared, I would have access to it all once more.
“I can get money,” I said. �
��Why?”
“I might have something you want to know,” the man called across to me, pitching his voice in that weird tone that was low enough to not alert the guards, but loud enough for me to hear.
“What do you want for it?” I wasn’t sure how smart the man was. If he’d really thought it through, he’d realize that there was not a lot I could do to pay him until, or unless, I got out. And even then, there wasn’t really anything holding me to pay him, except my honor. And it isn’t like honor means much, not when I’m here for fraud and cyber crime, even if it’s bogus.
“Ten Gs,” the man said.
“I could do that once I get out,” I told him. “I can’t do it from in here, not right now at least. But, maybe if I could get to a phone, I could put it in an account for you.”
“Call Helm in here,” the man suggested. “He can let you use his phone. You can authorize the transfer and then I’ll tell you.” The man was clever, and I had to think for a moment how I would be able to do that. I didn’t know what kind of information the guy might have. He might even be bullshitting me.
“I’m going to need to know just how much I’m getting for ten grand,” I said. Heavy silence came down over the block, and I could almost feel the other men in their separate protective cells listening in.
“You here because some guys took a poke at you in the caf, right?” I nodded.
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” I said. Even in protective custody, this guy had apparently heard about it.
“I could, maybe, tell you about those guys that tried to make you a skewer,” the man told me.
“You could? How could I even trust you’re giving me good information?”
“I’ll make an arrangement with Helm, too,” the man suggested. “I got money of my own. I can call someone to make an escrow situation, you get me?” He meant that the money I was sending him would go into escrow, and wouldn’t be released to him until I could act on the information he’d given me. “Call it thirty days. I’m in here at least that long, right?”
“I could do that,” I said. I called for Helm, who was apparently one of the guards; a nondescript man, balding but not quite fully bald on top, with curly hair at the sides He came down the corridor to stand between my cell and the other man’s.
My would-be informant explained what we wanted to do, which of course resulted in Helm demanding a cut; he wanted ten percent transferred to him. We both agreed to it, and Helm took out his phone for me to start the arrangements.
Twenty minutes later, I had ten thousand in escrow going to Aaron Jenkins across the aisle from my cell, and another thousand paid out of an account in the Caymans to Helm. “Pleasure doing business with you two men,” Helm said, excusing himself. “I’ll bring down everyone’s dinner in another hour.” We both waited until he left and then I spoke up again.
“So what have you got to tell me, Stephen?” I sat down in my cell to where I could still hear the man but didn’t have to put any pressure on my back or knees. I had a feeling I was going to be thinking for a while.
“So, those guys that came for you,” Stephen said, “They’re not normally the type to jump a dude, you know?”
“I get ya,” I replied.
“I happened to be sharing a cell with one of them, a guy by the name of Paul Barker. He got a phone call the night you came in from someone who claimed to be from a law firm.”
“I’m still with you,” I said. I wondered how Stephen had gotten the information he seemed to have.
“According to a guy I was talking to about it, Paul got offered some major bennies for ‘helping out with a problem’,” Stephen explained. “And I heard him talking to a few other guys, the ones he was recruiting, saying that if they helped him with ‘solving the problem’, he’d cut them in for two thousand each.”
“Cheap,” I muttered.
“Yeah ,these guys get penny wise and pound foolish, as my mom used to say,” Stephen said. “They’ll take two thousand for a job because they don’t know better. Then end up spending it all at the commissary or something.”
“And then be on the lookout for another two thousand,” I added.
“You got it,” Stephen agreed. “Anyway, from what I could see, someone actually smuggled something in to Paul. He didn’t show me, and I couldn’t get to it to look. Real talk; I wasn’t all that curious until I heard him and his boys talking about icing a rich guy.”
“And then, when I didn’t get taken out, you decided to roll over,” I said.
“Not like you’re going to rat on me in here, right? And no one else on the block will either, if they know what’s good for them.”
“Got it,” I said. “Thanks, man.”
“My pleasure,” Stephen told me. “Always happy to make good money.” I thought about what to do with the information.
“Could you tell me what law office it was?”
“Oh! Shit, yeah, I should probably tell you that, right?” Stephen laughed.
“That would help,” I said blandly.
“Law firm Paul heard from was called Montgomery, Sharpe, and Little,” Stephen told me. Now that was good information, and worth the full 10,000. Montgomery, Sharpe, and Little wasn’t a criminal defense firm or anything like it; they were tax attorneys, and one of them, Montgomery, was connected to my Dad. That was important information. The call would have been captured, too. I wondered if there was a way to get access to the information on who’d come in to smuggle weapons to the five men who had attacked me.
I needed to tell Cynthia about it. I decided to wait for Helm to bring dinner to call her; he wouldn’t want to be pulled out of whatever his normal routine was, and I figured I could probably get off with a lower cost if I got him to help me when he would be down on the block, anyway. I started putting pieces together in my head, working out a shape of what I knew about the conspiracy against my Dad and me. It was getting to be a bigger and bigger web, and I was pretty sure that Cynthia had different parts of the web that she knew about. It was a huge conspiracy, almost certainly. It was going to take a lot to bring it down.
“Hey Helm,” I said, when he arrived with dinner. “How much to use your phone again? I need to make a call to my lawyer.”
“You can do that over the normal line,” Helm pointed out.
“I want to make it without anyone else listening in,” I said. Helm looked at me for a moment that seemed to stretch out for a full minute.
“Okay,” he said finally, and took his phone out of his pocket. He started to hand it across to me. “If you try and steal this…”
“You can get into my cell any time,” I said. “I really just want to call my lawyer and tell her something.” Helm nodded, looking dubious, but finished handing me the phone.
“That’s another three hundred, but I trust you to settle up separately,” he said, turning away to give me a little bit of privacy while he handed out the rest of the meals.
Cynthia picked up after the third ring. “Who the hell is this?”
“It’s me, Shawn,” I said. “I’m calling you from a guard’s phone.”
“What the hell?” I smiled to myself.
“Don’t think about it too hard. Money is changing hands, but that’s not important. I got jumped earlier today.”
“You’re okay, right?” I couldn’t help smiling a bit more at the concern in Cynthia’s voice. Maybe, if we sorted out the situation that put both of us in danger, we could sort out some other issues going on in both our lives. After all, I wouldn’t be her client forever. In the background, on the other end of the line, I could hear movement. What was she doing?
“If I wasn’t okay I wouldn’t be calling,” I pointed out. “I need to tell you about this fast, because I don’t think the guard’s going to give me much time.” I explained to her about the attack, and about paying off one of my fellow protective custody inmates, and then about the name he’d given me. “You got all that, right?”
“I did,” Cynthia said, and I could
almost picture her nodding. I’d been in with a bunch of guys with no real privacy long enough, and picturing Cynthia in my mind was almost enough to make me start wanting to relive our night together, our little “reunion”. But I pushed that out of my mind. Once we were out of danger, both of us, we could talk about that. If then.
“Hopefully I’ll be getting out tomorrow, but I thought that would be information you could use in the meantime,” I said.
“It does help. It closes up something I’ve been trying to sort out,” Cynthia said. “Listen, I need to let you go. I’m kind of on my way to something.”
“What?” Now it was my turn to be shocked.
“Nathan was able to trace the source of the charges to a couple of people working for the DA,” Cynthia said. “And now, with this guy Montgomery involved, I’m pretty sure I know how it happened. I’m on my way there now.”
“No the hell you aren’t,” I said, almost before I could fully understand what she was explaining. “You promised you wouldn’t move on anything until I was out.”
“Things are developing too fast,” Cynthia countered. “I need to take care of this now. Jack is with me.”
“Don’t do it,” I said. “You’re not safe out there--you know that, or you wouldn’t have Jack with you. Wait until I’m out at least.”
“This is part of guaranteeing that you’ll be allowed to be out before someone kills you,” Cynthia said. Before I could argue on that point any harder, Helm knocked on the bars at the window for his cell.
“Need it back before I head up,” he said. I cussed under my breath and told Cynthia to take care of herself, and then I ended the call. All I could do was wait and see. I sat down with my dinner, but I didn’t have much of an appetite.
Chapter Seventeen
I glanced at the sight of Jack driving away from me, taking a quick breath to steady my nerves. It had been a hectic few days since Shawn had been arrested, and I’d gotten maybe eight hours of sleep in the entire time, snatching in quick naps here and there. Leaving the jail, I’d started on the process of putting together the last few things I would need to get to the heart of the issue. Nathan had managed to get concrete proof of a few things, especially the people involved in the DA’s office who had made the charges against Shawn happen, and who had gone to the FBI with falsified information.
Redeemed: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance (Lost Love Book 1) Page 9