I finished talking to Dad and decided to go back to Cynthia and find out how we could put the new information to work. I figured that with Dad out on bail, it would probably be about the time that the people who wanted him silent would make new moves. Cynthia and I would need to figure things out quickly.
Chapter Eleven
“You’re sure about this,” Jack said, as we approached the bar where his contact had agreed to meet with me. I nodded.
“You put me on this trail, so I would hope you’re not getting cold feet now,” I pointed out.
“I know. But I was hoping you’d be able to talk the guy into coming to your office if I escorted him,” Jack said. I shrugged.
“He didn’t want to come to me. He wanted me to come to him. Besides which, it wouldn’t have been safe for you to go and get him and leave me alone, would it?”
Jack looked dubious for a moment, but then nodded.
I hadn’t told Shawn about the meet-up I’d put together, because I wanted to find out what I could get, and I didn’t want to add any complications to the situation that I could avoid. Besides which, I didn’t even know where he was. Hopefully somewhere safe. I’d contacted Jack’s friend and he’d insisted on meeting me at a bar he frequented, where it would be his turf. The promise of a lead was worth more to me than being completely safe; I needed to get to the bottom of the situation as soon as possible if I was going to have a head start before they decided to try another attack on me or Shawn. Though really, at this point, what are they going to do? Attack the office? That wouldn’t go well for them, I didn’t think.
I’d changed out of work clothes for the sake of not bringing too much attention to myself. I didn’t need to look like a defense attorney going into a scuzzy bar. So when Jack and I stepped through the doors, while we weren’t greeted warmly, we also didn’t have to deal with everyone staring at us. Jack looked around for our contact, and I glanced around too, taking in the scene. It wasn’t very busy, since it was the middle of the day and presumably even shady men and women had jobs to do. But there were maybe a dozen people in total inside the bar, seated around the room, most of them with beers or hard liquor in front of them.
“That’s our guy,” Jack said quietly, nodding in the direction of a man seated at a booth by himself.
As we headed in his direction, someone else came to the table and sat down. I felt my heart beating faster. I looked at Jack quickly, and he returned the glance with a faint shake of his head, telling me silently that it was fine, even if it was unexpected.
“I’m assuming this guy here is related to what we need to talk about?” I didn’t sit down, but I made sure to pitch my voice so the two men, my contact and his friend, would hear me without the rest of the bar also finding out what I had to say.
“He’s someone who knows the same people,” the man said. I sat down and Jack slid in next to me, and for a moment or two, the four of us just stared at each other, silently. A woman, who had probably been a belle of the ball ten or fifteen years ago but looked like she’d seen more than her fair share of hard times, came to the table, and Jack ordered us a couple of beers. It was on par for the course and gave us some credibility. But I was planning on milking my own drink for as much as it was worth. One beer wasn’t enough to get me drunk, but I didn’t even really want to be buzzed.
“So, what have you got to tell me?” The man glanced at his friend.
“I can’t give you the name of whoever is in charge of the whole deal, but I know some things,” the man said, first.
“I’ve heard some stuff along the grapevine that might help,” his friend added.
“Go ahead,” I told them both. They glanced over the bar and I realized they were waiting for the waitress to bring the beers, so we wouldn’t be interrupted. “We should probably, at least, pretend like we’re talking about something until she gets here,” I pointed out.
“You’re a defense attorney, right?” I nodded to the first man’s question. “So why are you involved so deep in this situation? I mean--why would someone want you dead?”
“Whoever hired you is working for someone who wants to frame a guy for a major crime,” I said. “I’m working on clearing his name.”
“You got a card or something? I might need to get in touch in the future,” the man’s friend said.
I smiled. “I’m very expensive.”
“You can always get money if you know where to look,” he pointed out, and I had to admit he had a point.
The beers came and the two of them relaxed a bit while Jack and I sipped. It was watered, but that was just as well.
“So the deal is this; I got a call a few days ago about someone who needed to be taken care of--two people. We were supposed to tail the woman and hopefully get both her and the guy at the same time.” I nodded.
“Were you supposed to take us away from the scene and…” I raised an eyebrow. My heart was pounding in my chest.
“We were mostly given carte blanche to take care of it how we saw fit,” the man said with a shrug. “Nothing personal between you and me, you know?” I nodded again.
“A man’s gotta work,” I said, blandly.
“Anyway, our thought was to just persuade you, if we could,” the man said. “You two were harder than we thought you’d be.”
“Are you the one I grabbed the knife from?” The man grinned, flashing a couple of gold teeth.
“Yeah, you were quick,” he said.
“So who hired you?”
“A mutual friend,” the man’s friend said. “He’s sort of the ‘business’ guy for this chick. She’s super high-end. Not a hooker, you know? But hangs in those circles.” I thought about that and gestured for them to go on.
“I can give you her name and his, but I don’t think she was behind it. Not, you know, all the way at the top.”
“I’d love a couple of names,” I said.
“The business guy, his name is John Hardwick,” the man said. “He does stuff sometimes for this woman we both know about, Dana Jaeger.” I tried to remember why that name sounded familiar.
“Thanks,” I said. “Anything else you can tell me?”
The two men looked at each other and shrugged.
“I can give you some details on payment, but I don’t know much about things otherwise,” the man, who’d attacked me only a handful of days ago, said.
“Do you know anything about them torching my apartment? Were you in on that?”
The man shook his head. “From what I know about the situation, it was mostly to try and scare you,” his friend said. “Basically to show they mean business and to get you to drop things.”
I smiled wryly. “They got the opposite reaction,” I said. The man grinned again.
“Yeah, I coulda told them they’d end up that way, after going at it with you in that yard,” he said.
I finished up the conversation and managed to get down about half my beer, and then Jack and I agreed that it was time to go. The longer I was in the bar, the more the chance there would be for someone to figure out that I wasn’t at the office. Or for someone else to find me. As we were leaving the bar, it finally hit me where I’d heard the name Dana Jaeger before. It was on the list of known associates of Shawn Peterson Senior. One of the mistresses, I thought, stopping in my tracks for just a moment. I looked at Jack.
“We need to get back to the apartment,” I told him. “Hopefully Shawn’s back. Because I think I’ve got a good lead.”
Chapter Twelve
When Cynthia came into the apartment, I had to stop myself from hurrying to the door. She hadn’t said anything about leaving, and I hadn’t known whether or not it would be a good idea to text her. “Where the hell have you been? I thought you were going to stay here.”
“I went into the office to try and get more information than I can access remotely,” Cynthia said. “And I did, actually. Where have you been? If it isn’t safe for me to be out and about, it sure as hell isn’t safe for you.”
“I was meeting with my Dad,” I said. “Your bail request finally went through. Or did you know that?” Cynthia’s eyes widened for a second, and then she nodded.
“Yeah, I’d heard he made bail finally,” she said. “So you went to talk to him?”
“I did,” I said. “And I think I have some information.”
“That’s good to know. Because I do, too,” Cynthia said. “I managed to talk to one of the guys who attacked us, on the condition that I didn’t call the cops or anything like that.”
“You’re getting pretty shady investigating this situation,” I pointed out. “Wait, you talked to the guy? Over the phone?”
“In person,” she said. “I had Jack with me. He was the one who put me in contact.”
“I think we need to hash all this out and figure where we’re both coming from,” I said.
“Sounds like a good idea,” Cynthia agreed. “Because depending on what you were able to find out, we might really be onto something, and none too soon. I get the feeling they’re not going to stop anytime soon, especially now that your dad’s on bail.” I nodded.
“Okay, so Dad apparently was getting involved in a deal that we do sometimes,” I said, and began explaining what he’d said to me back at his hideaway. Cynthia’s eyes widened and she nodded along; I was pretty sure that she was just waiting for me to finish.
“So the guy that I met with pointed to Dana Jaeger as the person who hired him,” she said. “But he was pretty sure she wasn’t the big person in charge.”
“Oh no, she definitely wouldn’t be,” I agreed. “She was just the person who would bring people together; Dad with the investor and the official in question. But, probably, she’d be getting a cut too, and not happy about not ending up with it.”
“So who was she working with? That’s the important question,” Cynthia pointed out. “And how do we link all this in a way that’s going to get your dad’s name cleared?”
Before I could answer, she got a notification from Nathan that he’d found some more information, and had sent it to a secure file she had access to. “This might help out,” Cynthia mused.
“We need to figure out who all is involved in this,” I told her.
“Well, if we get to the top of this particular trash heap, we can pick it apart and find out who all to go after,” she said. I had to admit, she had a point.
“We don’t know if this is even going to take us to the top of it,” I said. “Dana definitely isn’t, and even the person who is with her, who she was connecting Dad with, might not be.” Cynthia opened up the files on her laptop and we both looked over them in silence for a while.
Nathan had managed to trace the money transfers, but it was hard to use that to really prove that my father hadn’t done it. He’d included some kind of notes talking about how he had to do a secondary thing, but it was clear that whoever had managed the actual transfers from business accounts to my father’s bank, and then offshore, it hadn’t been Dad. That was something.
“Nate says that he’s got an IP address for the computer in question in the Hamptons,” Cynthia said, sitting back. “That can’t narrow it down much, at least until he manages to isolate it to a neighborhood, can it?” I considered that.
“There are only a few people who would be involved with the deal, who also have places in the Hamptons,” I said. “In fact, I can only think of one person who lives in that area who could do that kind of transfer. And he might know about the deal.”
“We just need to prove that he wasn’t working on your father’s behalf,” Cynthia pointed out.
“That’s going to be hard, because he’s done a lot of work for Dad,” I admitted. “He’s sort of a...well, a gray businessman, if you catch my drift.”
“Are there any white-hat businessmen left in the US financial trade?” Cynthia sighed.
“At the entry level, plenty,” I countered. “Once you get further up though, ethics get...flexible. Or you cease being able to earn the kind of money you need to earn.”
Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Nobody needs billions,” she told me.
“Oh, the hot-shit attorney is wagging her finger at the guy who’s paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars right now?”
Cynthia shrugged. “You could do that as a millionaire, too,” she pointed out.
“It’s just that with billions, your fees are practically chump change,” I said. Cynthia looked at me for a moment.
“That sounds absolutely insane, and it does not, at all, disprove what I said.”
“Well, Dad wasn’t always a billionaire,” I said. “It isn’t like everything we do is only technically legal.”
“Oh, that’s a sterling recommendation,” Cynthia said, sarcastically.
“How can you be in the job you have and have a bad attitude about rich people?” I raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not against rich people,” Cynthia said. “I’m just uncomfortable with people having so much money that they could spend a million dollars a day and never go broke.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Fair enough,” I said. “It is more money than anyone can really ever use.”
“And you got it in the shadiest ways possible,” Cynthia added.
“Not all of it,” I said with a grin. “Oh! That reminds me, Dad remembered who you are. He said that if he’d known how successful you’d turn out to be, he never would have made me break up with you.” Cynthia looked into my eyes and then shook her head.
“Given everything I’ve found out about him in the past week or so,” she said, “I’d rather not have the compliment from that source.”
“So where are we at now?”
Cynthia took a breath and looked at her laptop screen.
“We need to get hard proof of what we’ve figured out, if it’s possible,” she said. “Nathan’s working on tracking down the specific IP address, and once we have that, we can track down the person it belongs to. From there, we need to figure out if they’re the ones in charge, or if they’re working with other people. But, at least we have a couple of the power players, even if we can’t really prove that’s what they are.”
“Then I’m afraid you’re going to be stuck here a bit longer. You okay with that?” Cynthia looked me up and down and smiled.
“As long as you keep your promise, we’re good,” she said. I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that my promise was stupid, that she was being stupid. But I knew better. She wasn’t actually being stupid. But I knew I couldn’t be the only one that felt that thing between us. When I’d gotten back to the apartment to find her gone, I was terrified that she’d been grabbed, and terrified that if I texted her, or did something else to try and get in touch, it might get her in trouble, or it might lead to her getting caught if she was out on her own business, somehow. Reliving the worst several days of my life while talking to Dad had put me on edge, but I couldn’t blame it entirely on that. In spite of the fact that I kept trying to play it off as a simple “girl who got away” nostalgia on my part, I had actual feelings towards Cynthia. Not just the high school girl she’d been when we were dating, and not just the girl I’d lost my virginity to, but the woman she’d become. That was going to make things way more complicated. So it was best just to keep it to myself.
“I always keep my promises,” I said. Cynthia raised her eyebrow at me.
“I can remember one you didn’t,” she told me quietly. I remembered it too and cringed inside. When we had sex the first time, I’d told her my feelings for her would never change.
“I kept that one, too,” I said quietly. “I just couldn’t act on it.”
“A promise you can’t act on is just as bad as a broken one,” Cynthia said, looking so sad that I wanted nothing more than to grab her and kiss her and show her what I felt towards her. But I had made a promise more recently, and that meant not making a move.
“I’ll act on this one, and I’ll keep the promise,” I told her, firmly.
Chapter Thirteen
I didn’t really want to meet with Shawn’s dad, but I knew that if we were going to get to the bottom of the situation, all the way down, and if I was going to keep myself safe, I had to get more details from the man. Shawn and I had managed to put together part of the puzzle, but there had to be stuff that Shawn Senior knew about that would help us put the rest together.
“You’re here on your own today?” I nodded in response to Peterson’s question and sat down at my desk. I was going to have to be careful about how I talked to the man about what was going on. We’d agreed to meet at my office, now that he was out of jail on bail. Shawn had pointed out, when I’d told him about the need to meet with his father, that Peterson didn’t need to know where I was staying. But considering all that was going on, I couldn’t be sure that no one had managed to bug the place. And, there were things that I didn’t necessarily want my coworkers and bosses to know about the situation at hand.
“Shawn stayed behind at the apartment,” I said, quietly. “We need to discuss what’s going on with your case, and some issues that have come up with regards to your case.”
“I figured as much,” Peterson said, settling more firmly in his seat. “So have you figured out how I was framed?” I pressed my lips together.
“We’ve managed to track down some leads,” I said, carefully. “There seem to be a lot of people involved in the situation, and some of them are unexpected.” Nathan had managed to track down some of the back-and-forth messages straight to the District Attorney’s office; while I wasn’t sure if the DA himself was involved, there were definitely people around him who were, even if what Nathan had found wasn’t entirely admissible in court. We needed to find out who could and could not be involved, the whole web of folks, so that we could catch them at the same time.
“Unexpected?” I shrugged.
Redeemed: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance (Lost Love Book 1) Page 7
