by Leigh James
“John Tobin was the name of our contact,” Lester said. “We’d worked with him for a long time. He wasn’t comfortable with the direction we were going in, and he let us know that.”
“When was this — the difference of opinions?” I asked.
“It started a little before, but it came to a head last August,” Lester said. “Slightly over a year ago.”
“When did they try to blow up your boat?” I called to Walker. He was back in the kitchen, probably re-reading the boating manual, since I had the computer and he couldn’t get any work done.
“Last August,” Walker called back. I’m sure he wanted to ask Lester about it, now, but he stayed in the kitchen, letting me handle it.
“Tell me what you know about this,” I said to Lester.
“Well…” Lester started, and smoothed down his rumpled T-shirt. “Mr. Tobin was not happy with the way things were going. He wanted Walker to stop selling the disputed technology to other countries. Walker, as you know, refused to remain exclusive. He was within his rights, of course. But Mr. Tobin wanted to secure a deal where he got what he wanted.” Lester coughed, clearing his throat, and shifted uncomfortably.
“And did you make a deal with him?” I asked.
Lester coughed again.
“Just answer her question,” Walker called, from the kitchen. “I already promised you that I wasn’t going to kill you. You have my word. Which is worth a lot more than yours, I might add.”
Lester looked back up at me and cleared his throat: the cat had swallowed the canary, but apparently the canary was trying to come back up. “Yes, I did. I was going to get control of the company, through the Board, and then I would make Blue’s technology exclusive with the U.S. Government.” He paused for a beat and had the decency to look ashamed. “I arranged to have that bomb planted on Walker’s boat. When that didn’t work, we had documents fabricated. Those documents formed the basis of the government’s case against Walker.”
“I never saw those documents. The ones that formed the basis of their charges. Not during the course of discovery,” I said, my brow furrowing.
“That’s because you hadn’t seen the prosecution’s stuff yet,” Lester said. “They hadn’t released it yet. It was going to look as though it was stuff that Walker had tried to dispose of, that Blue wasn’t providing through discovery, even though it should have been. So Walker was going to get in trouble for what the documents said and also for tampering with evidence.
“Even though the evidence was fabricated and was provided in a timely manner.”
“That’s pretty dirty,” I said.
“It gets worse,” Lester said.
“Did the prosecution know about it?” I asked. I pictured Marnie Edmonds, the U.S. Attorney, calmly indignant in her cream suit, talking about going after Walker at the press conference.
Lester shook his head, no. “I don’t think so, anyway,” he said. “It was just our one guy. They like to keep a pretty tight circle, if you know what I mean. If just John Tobin got found out, that was one thing. A whole government conspiracy is something else.”
“But this had the government’s tacit approval,” I said, challenging him. “The whole security department knew that Walker didn’t want to keep certain patents exclusive. They had to be surprised when everything fell so neatly into place.”
“I don’t think there was a lot of surprise,” Lester said, and laughed a little. “And everyone else, who wasn’t familiar with the history and the dynamic of the relationship, they just moved forward.”
Except for me, I thought. I’d taken a look at the situation and wondered what the hell was going on. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up: I didn’t like where my thoughts were going. I shook my head, as if to clear it, and focused on what he was saying.
“Because the evidence was fabricated, we didn’t feel comfortable going up against your law firm. We didn’t want them to figure it out and come after us. We needed some insurance,” Lester continued. “So after Walker hired you, I approached David and Norris with the idea of setting up a trust for Walker’s assets, so that he’d have some financial protection if he went to jail. They balked, but I assured them that the money was untraceable, and that on top of that, their fee was going to be doubled. All billable, all above-board.”
“So they actually thought that the extra money was for Walker’s benefit?” I asked, almost letting myself feel relieved. At least my firm hadn’t been in on it since the beginning. “They weren’t helping you embezzle it? And they weren’t aware of the fraud involved in the case?”
“You’re almost correct,” Lester said, and fussily wiped the bagel crumbs off of his pajamas. “They didn’t know at first. But then, their hands got a little filthier too.” He paused for a beat. “They didn’t know that I was involved with the charges. Not at first. But when you found the payments through Miami and had a very vocal hissy fit about it, things got a little more complicated.
“The payments to your firm were supposedly what David initially thought they were — the money for a trust held in Walker’s benefit. Proctor was holding this money in escrow. When David saw that I was being paid from Miami, too, independent of that, it was a red flag for him. He wanted to know what the payments were for. I told him that if he knew the truth, he would wish that he could un-know it pretty quick, and also that he could kiss his good moral standing with the Bar goodbye. He said that he had a duty to ask. So I told him that I was paying myself in case things didn’t work out, and I needed to take a long sabbatical.”
I kept typing and didn’t interrupt him. I was holding my breath.
“I told him then that the money coming into his firm was not for Walker’s benefit — that it was for his firm’s benefit, courtesy of me, courtesy of Blue’s client, the United States Government. For taking on such a difficult case.”
“Bribe money,” I said.
Lester shook his head. “Nah, not really. It was more like implication money. I had David pinned against the wall, he had accepted the funds and held them in the firm’s trust account under the guise that it was to be held in trust for the benefit of Walker. This move, in and of itself, was completely illegal. Completely against the professional conduct rules. You can’t co-mingle client funds with firm funds.”
“So, even though David accepted this under the guise of doing something for Walker, to protect him, it was still illegal,” I said, following the complicated trail through in my head.
“Totally illegal,” Lester said, “even though in this instance, if David really meant to keep it for Walker, it wasn’t immoral.”
“How could he make a mistake like that?” I asked, skeptical. “He’s been practicing law for forever. He knows the accounting rules — everybody does. You can’t hold client funds with firm funds. That’s a law firm accounting basic.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Lester said. “He thought he was protecting his client. And that because the money was coming from a secondary source, he wasn’t going to get flagged for co-mingling client funds. It was going to look like a straight-up payment. And he thought it would be safer to put the money in the big pot, so no one could find it.
“He also thought that either he could help himself to some of that money, as a ‘processing’ fee, or that Walker was going to reward him greatly for putting money aside for him, so that part of it was his to keep, anyway.”
“Why would he think that?” I asked.
“Because I told him he would,” Lester said, simply. “And Walker always told David he would take care of him, so….”
“So David was doing something illegal. He accepted the funds — that were supposed to be set aside for Walker’s benefit — and put them in the firm’s trust account even though he knew it was against the rules. He did it to hide the money, and he did it with the expectation that he was going to profit from it. Do I have that right?” I asked.
Lester nodded. At least David and Norris hadn’t set Walker up, I reasoned. They we
ren’t ultimately responsible for the bad things that had happened to him.
“It’s bad, but just not as bad as I thought,” I murmured, mostly to myself.
“Oh no,” Lester said and laughed. “It’s actually a lot worse than you thought.”
I looked at him and waited, my heart pounding.
“This is where you come in — and everything starts to fall to pieces,” Lester continued, and he looked at me with a sparkle in his eye that made my skin crawl. He blamed me for this; that’s what that malicious sparkle told me. “You’re the one who found the payments coming out of the Miami sub-corporation and started questioning them. David told me that you were quick and he expected that you would find them all, eventually. The problem was, you didn’t behave like we were planning.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, typing furiously. I refused to look up at him. I wanted to hear it, but I didn’t want to see his ugly, copper-penny face look gleeful as he somehow blamed all of this on me.
“David hand-picked you for this case right after I came to him with the idea about the trust. We needed someone to babysit Walker, and keep him out of trouble, and David said you were the best choice. That you were brilliant, but that you were in debt up to your eyeballs, and that you needed your job more than anyone else.” He paused for a beat, but I kept typing, even though I had a lump in my throat. “David said that you were loyal, and that you’d play along, and not ask questions if he told you it wasn’t a good idea.”
“I would never break the law like that,” I said. “David was wrong.”
“But he told you that it was for a trust for Walker’s benefit, and you believed him, right?” Lester asked. “Right after he offered to pay off all your debts?”
I looked up at him, my face turning red. “I trusted David. I trusted his judgment.”
“You trusted the dollars,” Lester said, and he sounded smug. “Don’t act so high and mighty now.”
“As soon as I thought he might be lying, I wanted out,” I said.
“And here we are,” Lester said. He gave me a searching look, but I looked back down at my keyboard.
“We also picked you because we’d thought you’d be safe with Walker. We all thought you were a safe bet because you were mousy and shy, not like that other one, the Senator’s daughter. We figured if we sent her over, Walker would have had her out of her suit and bent over something in about two seconds.”
I stopped typing and clenched my hands into fists.
“David said you had a boyfriend. A serious one, and that you were a good girl. He never thought you’d turn out to be such a….”
Walker suddenly exploded into the room and grabbed Lester by the throat, lifting him up off of the couch, where he spluttered and choked and was no longer able to finish his sentence.
That suited me just fine.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Walker asked, and I watched as he squeezed Lester’s throat. Lester kicked and struggled and batted his arms uselessly against Walker’s massive frame.
He tried to talk, but he just gurgled, and his face was changing from red to purple.
“Don’t you ever talk to her like that,” Walker said through clenched teeth, as he continued to squeeze.
Lester Max’s eyes started rolling back in his head.
I stood up. “Walker, let him go,” I said, but he didn’t budge. “Now, before you kill him!”
Lester Max was an asshole, and my insides were really hurting right now from what he’d said, but we couldn’t let that stop us. We couldn’t kill him just because he was mean.
It was a shame, really.
Walker dropped him like a stone and Lester’s hands flew to his neck; he writhed and coughed and spluttered on the couch while Walker and I just watched him, his color changing from purple back to red.
Just then, April came out from her bedroom, looking clean and put-together in immaculate white linen pants and a hot pink T-shirt, completely clashing with the rest of us — unkempt, sweating and furious. She looked at the three of us and pointed towards the kitchen. “I’ll just go get some coffee,” she said, raising her eyebrow at Lester Max’s disheveled form on the couch and scooting out of the room quickly.
Walker loomed over his former CFO. “Don’t you ever,” he said, and the menace in his voice made my arms break out in goosebumps. He didn’t even finish the sentence; he didn’t have to.
Walker turned back to me. “Are you okay?”
I gave him a weak smile. “Never better,” I said.
“Do you want to keep going?” he asked, quietly.
“Of course,” I said, “we’re just getting to the good part. The part where people start dying because I’m such a mousy slut.”
Walker winced, but I reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing it. I looked him in the eye. “Trust me,” I said. “I have better things to do than wallow in guilt and regret.” There’s plenty of time for that later, I thought.
If we got that far.
“Sit up, Lester,” I said without sympathy. He glared at me while he rubbed his neck. “Now, tell me how I’m responsible for the rest of this mess.”
Chapter 19
“Actually, before we get to the worst part….” I started.
“The worst part wasn’t Walker trying to kill me?” Lester asked, rubbing his throat.
“It all depends on your perspective, I guess,” I said, and gave him a long look.
“What I want to know are two things. First: what is Advent? The name keeps popping up.”
“Advent is the name of the LLC we started — we meaning me and David Proctor — after we realized you were digging deeper into the Miami corporation,” he said. “The firm was going all in once they realized that we had them on the accounting stuff, and that we were prepared to say they’d been colluding against their client from the beginning. They committed to us. We were using Advent as a cover, so we could eventually move all the files and payments over to it. We were going to use its name for everything — billables, accounts payable, etcetera — so that it just looked like a regular client file.” He paused for a beat. “What was the second thing?”
“Who was having us followed?” I asked. “There were at least two people following us, all the time. One of them, a woman, sped off right after that delivery guy left our house. Next thing we knew, he was dead. Who was she?”
“Walker,” Lester called suddenly, “are you gonna choke me again if I tell Nicole the truth?”
“Not if you actually tell the truth,” Walker called back, calmly. “But don’t disrespect her. Otherwise, I’m gonna make you pass out next time.”
Lester frowned but nodded, as if this was as he expected. “They were government — I should say, they were independent contractors hired by the government. Actually they were hired by John Tobin, just to make sure that Walker didn’t make a run for it.
“At first, they were working just for Mr. Tobin. But then someone from your firm put them on the payroll, and had them reporting to him as well. Tracking your moves. They were looking for something very specific, and they offered to pay them handsomely for it.”
“What did they want?” I asked, barely breathing.
“Your credit card information,” Lester said.
“Why,” I said, not even bothering to raise my voice to form a question. I could hear my heart thudding, and sudden stillness from the kitchen — Walker and April didn’t seem to be moving, waiting for an answer.
“So they could buy all sorts of things with it,” Lester said, smoothly. “Once the firm had decided that they were going to partner with me, they went all in. I was somewhat surprised by the lengths they went to. They wanted their firm protected, themselves protected, and most of all, their money protected. So they came up with a Plan B. Nicole, you were the Plan B.”
I just blinked at him.
“The deeper you were getting with Walker, the more it looked like you were going to go rogue, leave the firm and represent him yourself�
�� they wanted to have a backup plan. Because they couldn’t have you digging too deep into the files. You would have seen what was really happening. So they bought things that made it look like you were planning on running. Flashlights, sleeping bags, disposable cellphones, guns, a tent, survival gear. A guide to living in the desert — all sorts of crazy prepper shit. They were preparing to frame you. That was the first step. When you gave your notice, they took it one step further. They had this stuff in place, so that it would support their other theory: that you were creating a horrible distraction with that bomb, so that you and your lover could run. But instead, you were the one going to get killed.”
I felt like he had slapped me.
I sat there for a moment, reeling. My analytical mind saw all sorts of holes in his story; I went over them, again and again, feeling their width, their breadth. “What about the fact that David asked me back and I said yes,” I said, “when he offered to pay all my debts? Why would he still want to kill me?”
“Because you couldn’t be trusted, no matter what you said. You’d found out too much and had too many suspicions. So they wanted you out there, near the car. And then they blamed you for the whole thing.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, after a minute. “That bomb was in the car that was meant for me. People would know that. And know that I’m innocent.”
“No one knows you’re innocent, Nicole,” Lester said, leaning forward. “The public thinks you and Walker were planning on running, and that you’d been preparing for a while. They made it look like you two were planning on running forever, and they released that information via a ‘leak’ — in the guise of Norris Phaland. They let the public think you set off that bomb so you two could create confusion and escape.”
Lester’s shiny face took on a look of excitement as he explained it to me. “Who knew you were getting in that car, Nicole? No one. No one except for David Proctor and you — and you were supposed to be dead after it went off. That’s about as small as a circle can get. A circle of one.”
“But what about Walker?” I asked. “He knew.”
