Schuster nodded. “Reputable businessmen, both of them. He’d gambled on the fact that, were he to be audited, the firm would take the names at face value and not look at those books. A chance that paid off.” The prosecutor dropped his head a second time.
“Chances are I’m going to lose this one because I went for a charge of fraudulent schemes and the man is guilty of forgery,” he said. “I haven’t done a forgery case since my first year out of law school.”
He might lose a case. But what about justice?
“If this is true—” which Blake was certain it was not “—why wouldn’t James have come clean with his attorney from the beginning?”
“Who knows?” Schuster said, standing to pour himself another drink. Blake was going to have to call the man a cab. “McNeil has one hell of a reputation. Maybe he was hoping she’d get him off altogether. Save his reputation, his business, his lifestyle. And when he got scared, he figured facing the much lesser charge of forgery was better than spending the next fourteen years in jail. Ego and fear. Two of the three things that most often get a man.”
“And the third is?” Blake didn’t give a damn. He was stalling. Avoiding the rest of what Schuster had to tell him.
“Sex,” the man said, his lips pursed with disgust.
“So what motivation did James give for my father blackmailing him? How did he explain the fact that Walter Ramsden, a man everyone in the business community knows to be honest to the point of self-righteousness, didn’t go immediately to the authorities with the things he’d found?”
The prosecutor’s eyes were surprisingly clear as he stared at Blake. “You.”
“What?” He hadn’t meant to raise his voice.
“You hadn’t seen your father in four years, Blake. That’s a long time when a man is in his seventies. Especially a man who is suffering from a bad heart. A lack of physical strength had taken its toll. Apparently Ramsden Enterprises wasn’t doing as well as it once had.”
“Nothing that couldn’t easily be fixed.” Blake tried to keep defensiveness and emotions out of his reply. He couldn’t afford clouded judgment at this moment. “As with any company in today’s market, we needed to diversify. To expand. The day of small family concerns had passed.”
“Expansion takes time. Planning. And more energy than your father had. He needed the money to stay afloat until you came home.”
Standing, Blake grabbed his glass from the table and took it to the small built-in dishwasher at the bar. “Well, there you go then,” he said, his back to Schuster. “That will be easy enough to prove. Just look at our books. I did, thoroughly, when I came home. True to form, my father left not one dime unaccounted for—either incoming or outgoing. There was absolutely no influx of money other than what was invoiced and signed off with double signatures.”
“You actually think your father would have put the money someplace it could be found? Tracked?”
“No.” Blake turned. “I don’t. Because my father would never have taken the money to begin with.”
“According to Eaton James, he put it in an account in the Cayman Islands.”
Blake’s eyes narrowed. “How convenient. James mentions a place that’s well known in the business world for its ability to hide money as though it didn’t exist. Without the Cayman Islands’ cooperation, he knows there’s no real way to prove his claim one way or the other. And he’d also know that the government is known for its blindness to such matters.”
Schuster’s eyes were narrowed, too, although he remained seated. “He has a bank account number. That was the information he presented to your father just before Walter came to me.”
There was more. Blake felt it coming. With both hands bracing his weight behind him, he leaned back against the counter. “You’re going to tell me the account has my father’s name on it.”
“No.” Schuster surprised him. “According to James, it has yours.”
“’NIGHT, MOM.”
“Good night, imp. Sleep well.” Leaning over, Juliet kissed her daughter’s cheek, pulling the covers up to Mary Jane’s chin. No matter how hot the weather, she wouldn’t sleep without being completely covered, at least by a sheet.
She forced herself to stand in the doorway until the child opened her eyes for one last blown kiss, a ritual they’d started when Mary Jane was a toddler. Never had bedtime taken so long.
More often than not, she let Mary Jane talk her into staying up past her bedtime. Mary Jane didn’t seem to require as much sleep as most children. A characteristic of precocious children, her pediatrician had said when, at two, the little girl had played happily in her crib all through naptime.
She gave her daughter another fifteen minutes to settle into sleep before she could no longer stand the tension and called her twin. From a cell phone, sitting in her bedroom with the door closed, just in case Mary Jane got up.
“He’s a criminal, Marce!” she blurted as soon as her sister picked up.
“Who’s a criminal?”
She could hear voices in the background. The television. Again.
“Blake Ramsden.” The father of her child. “What kind of defense attorney am I that I didn’t even suspect?” The thoughts that had been torturing her all evening came tumbling out in no apparent order. “What kind of mother? I’ve been working on this case for months and not once did I have even an inkling that the road to Eaton’s freedom was paved by Ramsden Enterprises. It’s like I was blinded by a nine-year-old memory that might have cost a man several years of his life.”
“So what bothers you more, Jules?” Marcie’s voice was soft yet tough. “Your ego, because you might not be as infallible on the job as you think? Or your heart, because you might have made a bad choice for the father of your child?”
“I didn’t choose the father of my child. The child chose me.”
“You used the same condom twice!”
“I was drunk!”
Marcie didn’t say another word. It was a silence that drove Juliet insane every single time her sister used it on her.
“Why are you doing this?” Juliet whispered a full thirty seconds later. “You’ve never said anything like this before.”
“It didn’t matter before. He had a life in another world.”
A laugh track exploded in the background.
“You think I got pregnant on purpose?” Because if Marcie thought she’d ever consider something as cold-blooded as that—to go out looking for a man for the express purpose of having his kid—then her sister didn’t know her at all.
“I don’t think you consciously chose the course.” Marcie’s reply came quickly. “But I’ve always suspected that somewhere, in the back of your mind, the thought was there.”
Juliet leaned her head against the wall, legs straight out, and studied the subtle texture of her nylons. She really shouldn’t be sitting on the floor in her suit.
“You need family, Jules,” Marcie said slowly. “We both do. And there was no way you could possibly contemplate marriage—not until you’d proven to yourself that you had a full life on your own.”
“I made it through law school by the time I was twenty-five. I had a life.” The carpet was making her legs itch.
Marcie nodded. “You had the beginning of a life. But not enough of one to take away your fear. I’ve wondered if maybe part of you needed to know that even if you were in Mother’s position—pregnant and alone—you had what it took to make it. You couldn’t live with the fear of thinking you