Her P.I. Protector

by Jennifer Morey

  “No, ma’am. He’s at lunch.”

  One more snarky “ma’am” and she would come dangerously close to committing a crime herself. She lightly rested her folded hands on the counter. If she had to wear prison orange, it should be for a better reason than losing her temper. She smiled, absolutely certain the expression was less than friendly. “Is Warden Birrell available? Although we haven’t spoken in person since my father’s funeral, it would make the trip worthwhile just to say hello and catch up for a few minutes.”

  Name-dropping wasn’t her thing, and she typically avoided throwing around Colton family connections and influence this way, but she was growing desperate.

  The guard closed the panel so she couldn’t push any more papers at him. “The warden and my supervisor are having lunch together.”

  “How wonderful for everyone,” Pippa said. “I’ll wait right here for their return.” She planted herself in the plastic chair across from the window.

  And didn’t that plan shine a spotlight on the differences between her and the prison inmates, including her client. She had the luxury and freedom to stay or go as she wished. It shouldn’t have surprised her that the speculation in the press had reached the prison. Calling her the Queen of Mean, the general consensus was that she’d taken on the Queen’s case for immediate notoriety. While it was true that getting Anna’s conviction overturned would allow her to progress her ideal career path, Pippa was here to right a wrong and to help Elizabeth, her friend.

  Twenty minutes ticked by, then another twenty. Although it made sense for both the supervisor and the warden to return through this entrance, closest to their offices, it was clear someone had warned them off. She knew when she was defeated.

  Using her phone, she drafted an email to the warden, who really was a family friend, and sent a text message update to Elizabeth on the day’s failure. Pulling out her portfolio, she opened it to the notepad printed with her firm’s formal letterhead. With her best penmanship, she wrote a friendly little letter to Warden Birrell, praising his staff. She folded the note and slid it into an envelope also printed with the firm’s logo. There was no sense pretending the note wouldn’t be read long before it reached him, if it reached him at all. Thus the reason for the more direct and candid email she would send once she was outside.

  She stepped up to the window once more. “I’d like to leave this note for the warden, please.”

  “Fine. I’ll take it,” the guard said.

  It didn’t escape her notice that he didn’t say the note would be delivered. “Thank you.” She pushed the envelope across the counter, up to the closed slot. At least he’d laid off the “ma’am” routine. “Have a wonderful day.” Chin in the air, she turned and marched out, feeling only marginally guilty that she could leave the prison behind.

  Prisons were a necessary piece of the justice system. Defense teams were essential too, and not just to stand up for those wrongfully accused. She knew she was on the right side with the Wentworth case, but it was going to be a hard road to help this particular client.

  The crisp autumn air and bright sunshine were welcome and she breathed deeply, closing her eyes briefly when she reached the relative security of her vehicle.

  After unlocking the car, she opened the back door and set her briefcase on the floor behind the driver’s seat. She paused to send the email to the warden, then shrugged out of her suit jacket and draped it over the hanger in the back. Settling behind the wheel for the drive home, she started the engine, then sat back, checking her phone one more time, just in case the warden had seen her email.

  Having dawdled as much as she dared, she backed out of her parking space and drove away.

  * * *

  The prison guard kept an eye on the security monitors, waiting until the gates closed behind the snooty attorney. He waited a few minutes more until she pulled out of the parking lot. Then he called someone to cover him so he could go have a smoke. Outside in the employee parking lot, he stared out at the line of trees blocking the prison yard from the rest of the world.

  He lit his cigarette and took a long, deep drag. The persistent woman had been almost as annoying as the inmate she wanted to see.

  Pulling out his phone, he called the number he’d been given. It rang three times before anyone picked up.

  “Go,” said the voice on the other end.

  “She’s gone,” he said. “No meeting with her client.”

  “Got it.”

  “And the daughter?” the guard asked. It was going to be a whole lot harder stonewalling that one, but he could find a way if it meant extra cash. “Hello?” He checked his signal and saw the Call Ended icon flashing on his screen.

  “Whatever,” he muttered, tucking his phone back into his pocket. He’d done his part. If the money wasn’t in his account when he got home tonight, he’d do things the right way next time.

  * * *

  Detective Emmanuel Iglesias checked his phone as he finished his lunch outside the GRPD headquarters. One of his favorite food trucks had parked nearby today and it was too beautiful outside not to soak up the fall weather. He dealt with the less appealing facets of Grand Rapids most days and last year, on the verge of burnout, he’d promised himself to focus on the nicer elements as often as possible to balance the scales.

  Seeing the text message from his friend Griffin Colton, he hesitated. The preview on the app mentioned Griffin’s sister, Pippa. Emmanuel tried not to groan out loud. Why had he agreed when Griffin asked him to keep an eye on his sister?

  Because friends stepped up.

  He opened the full text message. No word from Pippa today. No answer at her office or condo. It happens when she’s focused, but I’d feel better if you have time to check.

  Apparently Pippa had a reputation within the family for being a little too reckless in the pursuit of justice. As a business, founded by Griffin’s older brother Riley, the siblings worked together as Colton Investigations and they had their hands full with the escalating RevitaYou situation.

  RevitaYou, a daily “miracle” supplement, promised to make a person look ten years younger after only one week of use. With rave reviews from consumers and falsified medical endorsements, a new business had exploded with investors and distributors. But something in the formula was off and turning into deadly Ricin. One death had already been linked to the supplement and everything indicated there would be more.

  The GRPD and Colton Investigations were cooperating to prevent more untimely deaths, though Emmanuel knew a top priority for the Coltons was locating Brody Higgins, a young man they considered part of the family, who had borrowed money to invest in RevitaYou. Unfortunately, he’d borrowed from Capital X, a loan shark operation disguised as a legitimate financial group. The Coltons were determined to find Brody before the Capital X enforcers hurt him—again.

  Changing directions, he headed for his car to swing by Pippa’s condo and office. He’d keep his word and try to find something to ease Griffin’s mind.

  Emmanuel knew Griffin worried about Pippa getting caught up in Brody’s mess, since his last direct contact had been with her. Now that she was the new lead attorney for a convicted killer, Emmanuel had other concerns. He wouldn’t define Pippa’s choice to defend Anna Wentworth as a reckless pursuit of justice. In his mind, it was more like career suicide.

  Having worked the Wentworth case, he knew it was solid. He’d testified at the trial and walked the jury through every piece of evidence he’d found. Pippa hadn’t been on the defense team then, but now resentment was brewing against her in the GRPD. No one liked having good work picked apart in the search for a technicality that would set a criminal free.

  Anna Wentworth was guilty, Emmanuel was certain of it, and promise or not, he wouldn’t let one idealistic attorney unravel everything so a murderous socialite could get back to her mansion.

  * * *

  Onc
e Pippa was out on the deserted stretch of road that eventually connected with the highway, she finally let out the scream of frustration that had been building for over an hour.

  Feeling better with just that simple, primal release, she found a radio station playing heavy metal music and turned up the volume. People usually took in her conservative wardrobe and professional manner and decided she was a prim, entitled lawyer with musical tastes that didn’t veer from serene and classical. They couldn’t be more wrong. She was more than willing to dress the part and play the game to get a job done, but she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Blame those traits on her mother, a woman who had died before accomplishing all her big goals to help people who struggled in their community. With heavy bass pounding through the speakers, Pippa rewound and reviewed every detail of her interaction with that guard.

  Obviously he’d been instructed to block her at all turns. Who on earth had the influence to prevent her from meeting her client? More important, who had a reason to do so?

  She’d initially kept up with the Wentworth trial to support her friend, believing from the start Anna wasn’t a killer. It was only after Elizabeth had hired her that Pippa had pored over the case page by page. After two weeks, she had the case pretty much memorized from the first emergency call to the reading of the verdict. For the life of her, she couldn’t come up with anyone close to the victim who could successfully frame Anna.

  Pippa firmly believed in the theory that every crisis held the seeds of opportunity. If she couldn’t speak with her client, she was back to square one with the overwhelming evidence that was too perfect. It wasn’t enough that Anna wasn’t the sort to do her own dirty work. And making it clear she didn’t consider the victim a threat had backfired during the trial. What was her next move?

  The warden, assuming he’d actually been in his office, wasn’t interested in helping her. The guards didn’t seem to like Inmate Anna. No shock there. The woman wasn’t easy at the best of times. Used to having her own way on her own terms, she was probably raising a stink over having her days controlled by others.

  According to the last count, only Elizabeth; Elizabeth’s father, Ed; and Pippa truly believed Anna was innocent of the Hicks murder. Unfortunately, Ed was so frustrated and angry over his wife’s indiscretions and arrogant behavior during the trial that he was content to let her stew in her own mess, offering little in the way of support.

  Anna’s unswervingly self-centered choices and her habitual delegation of everything from car pool duty to signing Christmas cards would never win her awards for best wife or mom of the year, but she wasn’t foolish enough to kill a man and leave a piece of her stunning bespoke jewelry near the body. Yes, shock and rage affected the mind and impaired critical thinking, but even if Anna had been capable of those extremes and had managed to fire the two bullets that stopped David Hicks’s heart, she wouldn’t have tossed the gun into her beloved rose bushes less than three feet from the body.

  In Pippa’s opinion, if Anna had been bothered enough to want a person dead, she would’ve hired someone to handle the job. For as long as Pippa had known Elizabeth, that’s how Anna Wentworth operated. The vast majority of her volunteer hours were handled by assistants. Anna wrote checks and dressed up in glorious gowns and gems, but she never got her hands dirty. Trouble was, she didn’t have anything concrete to prove Anna’s innocence.

  Using the controls on the steering wheel, she muted the radio and called her office, leaving a message for her paralegal about the derailed meeting. When she was back home, she would review her notes on the case one more time to find a way forward. At last, she called her twin sister, Kiely, and let her know she was on the way back to Grand Rapids. That left her with two hours of uninterrupted drive time to figure out how she could effectively circumvent the prison to interview Anna.

  Last week, she’d spent an entire day with this case file in the evidence room at the Grand Rapids Police Department. She could arrange for the evidence to be reviewed by an independent lab, but it was a pricey option that was unlikely to be helpful since there were no glaring gaps in the chain of evidence.

  It would have been nice if Pippa could back up a theory that Anna had been railroaded, but it just wasn’t true. The detectives on the case had been thorough and cautious, refusing to give the press anything that might color the investigation or the trial. They’d also come to the wrong conclusion.

  Whoever had framed Anna had done an excellent job.

  If the prison system wouldn’t allow her to have reasonable meetings with her client, she would just find another way to get any helpful information out of Anna. As Hicks’s lover, she might not even realize what she’d learned about him and any enemies who might have motive to kill him and frame her.

  Pippa was still working her way through the transcripts of the interviews and depositions. At some point there must have been a different suspect, yet somehow the GRPD investigation had decided the motive and evidence fit and pinned the murder on the wrong person.

  Yes, Anna had been having an affair with Hicks. Yes, Hicks ended it before Anna was ready, and he’d reportedly threatened to tell her husband if she didn’t pay him off. But Ed had known about the affair. At some point Ed and Anna had agreed to break their wedding vows. Infidelity was one weird cog in the machine that kept their marriage working. Pippa had heard of stranger things. Her parents’ marriage hadn’t been nearly the picture of perfection that the public assumed. What worked for the Wentworths shouldn’t make any difference to the case or to anyone else, though it fed local gossip columns for weeks.

  The sound of a big engine behind her drew her attention back to the roadway. An SUV painted in the blue of Michigan State Police troopers was bearing down on her, lights flashing. Her pulse kicked up a notch as she checked her speed—within the limit—then she eased closer to the shoulder to give him room to pass.

  He blew right by her. Relieved, she merged back into the lane. For several seconds she’d thought her botched trip to the prison was going to get worse. She was jumpy. Only ten days on the job and she’d had her fill of the press hounding her for interviews and explanations.

  Well, as her dad would have said, the right choice wasn’t always the popular choice.

  Grand Rapids wanted to enjoy the implosion and downfall of the society Queen of Mean. They weren’t interested in the more pertinent facts about David Hicks. The victim was more than a decade younger than Anna, and from what Pippa could see, he’d shown a distinct pattern of risky behavior. He chose to be seen publicly with wealthy and influential married women. There were plenty of pictures and videos of him caught in unmistakable displays of affection and intimacy.

  Pippa figured any number of husbands wanted him dead, and probably a few ex-girlfriends too. She was sure Anna wasn’t the first woman, single or married, that he’d tried to blackmail in the course of a breakup. She just hadn’t been able to prove it yet. The man enjoyed an active dating life, and he thrived on rubbing elbows with society’s elite. Sleeping with Anna had provided Hicks with a serious boost of notoriety. And when he’d been ready to move on, he’d probably been shocked Anna didn’t care enough about his threats to pay him off.

  Shocked, yes, but he hadn’t shot himself in the chest.

  As Elizabeth’s friend and a familiar face, Pippa held out hope that Anna would be more forthright about what she knew of Hicks’s habits, instead of dismissing those questions as irrelevant. Pippa needed a kernel of truth to run with, something that would turn that case file upside down.

  She sang along with the radio for a time, her mind still sorting out the pieces and players.

  The prosecution insisted the insult of being dumped combined with the threat of blackmail pushed Anna to kill and to make mistakes in the process. That might have been enough with anyone else. Although Anna was self-absorbed, she wasn’t stupid.

  Her defense team had been caught in a sticky web.
Everyone in the area had an impression and opinion of high-profile Anna Wentworth. If her defense made her seem too smart or too into Hicks, that only made it easier to believe she could commit murder. The prosecution portrayed their case as a crime of passion and claimed the damning evidence had been left almost in plain sight because she’d been overwhelmed and enraged.

  Naturally, Anna’s fingerprints were on her jewelry but they hadn’t been on the gun. No gunshot residue on her hands, either, but those facts hadn’t swayed the jury.

  Bottom line, no one wanted to believe Anna’s side of the story. It would’ve helped if she’d had a decent alibi, but she’d been working from home that day and the timing of the messages she’d left her assistant weren’t enough to clear her. It didn’t help matters that during the trial Anna had referred to Hicks as a dirty rat whose only redeeming quality had been his handsome face.

  The defense team recognized they were finished, though they’d fought right up to the closing arguments and sentencing.

  What they’d needed—what Pippa still needed—was another valid suspect, another theory about the motive. The threat of blackmail sounded like enough, until you dug into the Wentworth marriage. So far the only chink in the prosecution’s armor was the lack of an interview with Ed. Or even Elizabeth. She’d found the notes from the detectives working the case that confirmed those alibis, but shouldn’t they have taken a closer look at the cuckolded husband?

  That fishy detail wasn’t enough to reopen the case, but it was something she wanted answered by Sergeant Joe McRath and Detective Emmanuel Iglesias, who had worked Anna’s case.

  She muted the radio and dictated more notes into her phone, brainstorming ways to get the GRPD to cooperate with her. Her family had connections in the GRPD from her sister Sadie, a crime scene technician, to Detective Iglesias, a good friend of her brother Griffin. She had to tread lightly because this case was polarizing, and win or lose, she still had to live here when it was done.