Jasmine CresswelL
Suspect

For Diane Mott Davidson, who helps to make my

summers in Colorado so wonderful.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

One

Denver, Colorado, Monday, August 7

Liam Raven looked at the woman sleeping in the bed next to him and tried to remember her name. He vaguely recalled that she enjoyed snowboarding. He knew for certain that she was studying to be a nurse. Her name, however, escaped him.

He stared at the light filtering through the broken slats of the miniblinds and wondered how it came about that at thirty-five years of age—pushing thirty-six—he hadn’t found a better way to spend his nights than sleeping with a woman he never planned to see again and whose name he couldn’t remember.

His cell phone rang—his work number—saving him from delving too deeply into the murky depths of his psyche. He was grateful for the interruption. Self-analysis was guaranteed to give him nightmares but work, thank God, usually proved a reliable anesthetic.

He eased out of bed, flipping open his phone. Out of deference to the still-sleeping No-Name, he waited until he was in the living room before he responded. “This is Liam Raven.”

“Thank God I reached you. This is Chloe Hamilton.” The woman on the other end of the phone drew in an audible gulp of air but her voice still didn’t steady. “Do you remember me? I came to see you a few months ago. I asked for your help in filing for a divorce—”

“I remember you well, Mrs. Hamilton.” Even among Liam’s client roster of rich and famous Coloradans, it would be hard to forget a woman who’d won medals in four Olympic skiing events and was married to the mayor of Denver. Not to mention the fact that Chloe Hamilton had the sort of lithe, athletic body guaranteed to provoke a major case of lust in any straight guy still breathing.

“We discussed ways to keep the proceedings confidential until the decree was granted,” Liam said, letting Chloe know that he genuinely recalled their past dealings. “In the end, though, you decided to stay with your husband for the sake of your daughter. How can I help you, Mrs. Hamilton?”

“Jason’s dead,” she blurted out, her voice catching on a suppressed sob. “He’s been…murdered.”

The mayor of Denver had been murdered? Holy shit! Liam smothered the exclamation. “I’m very sorry to hear of your loss—”

“I was the person who found him. I came downstairs and he was lying on the floor in our basement media room. There was blood everywhere. All over the wall. All over the floor. God, it was terrible.” Chloe’s explanation erupted in short, staccato bursts and it sounded to Liam as if her teeth were chattering.

“There was so much blood.” Chloe’s voice faded to a whisper. “My God, there was so much blood.”

Liam spoke swiftly. “Have you notified the police? Called a doctor?” A doctor might be able to help Chloe, even if there was nothing to be done for her husband.

“The police think I killed him.” The words tumbled out, harsh with fear. “I’m sure they’re going to arrest me. I need a lawyer right away. I can’t let them take me to jail, even for a couple of nights. Sophie’s just lost…she’s just lost her father. She can’t lose me, too. She simply can’t.”

Sophie must be the name of Chloe’s daughter. Liam had never seen the child and couldn’t remember how old she was. A preschooler, he thought. Maybe three or four? He spoke quickly. “Are the police with you now?”

“Just a couple of uniformed officers guarding the crime scene and holding the reporters at bay. They’ve already taken away—” She broke off and started again. “They’ve already taken away Jason’s body.”

“Whatever you do, Mrs. Hamilton, don’t say anything to the cops. Nothing, do you hear me? If they ask your name, you’re obligated to identify yourself, but that’s it. It doesn’t matter how innocuous the police questions seem, don’t answer them. In a murder case, the spouse and immediate family of the victim are often considered suspects. Unless you have a rock solid alibi—”

“I was here all night,” Chloe said. “It must have happened…Jason must have been killed while I was sleeping.”

She’d been sleeping—unless she’d killed him, Liam reflected cynically, but he kept any trace of skepticism out of his voice. “In the circumstances, you should assume you’re currently the prime suspect, Mrs. Hamilton. It’s nothing personal on the part of the authorities. Just routine police procedure in the early stages of an investigation.”

“Their suspicions seem a lot more than routine to me.”

Yeah, well, most likely because the evidence pointed straight to her, Liam thought. However, that was beside the point. Guilty or innocent, his advice to Chloe Hamilton would remain the same: get a competent criminal lawyer and say nothing.

He spoke briskly. “In view of the fact that we’re talking about the murder of a very prominent citizen, the police department will almost certainly send one or more of their senior detectives to question you some time soon. Whatever these detectives ask—even if it’s something as simple as the date or the time of day—tell them you need to consult with your lawyer before responding. Got that?”

“Yes, I understand. But I guess it’s too late for that piece of advice. I already answered a ton of questions about what happened last night.”

Liam shook his head, groaning inwardly. He was constantly amazed at the way even sophisticated and well educated people failed to take advantage of their right to remain silent in the wake of a crime. He attempted to reassure her anyway. Right now it wouldn’t help to add to Chloe’s stress level by telling her she’d screwed up, big time.

“There’s probably no real harm done.” For her daughter’s sake, he hoped that wasn’t a complete lie. If you really wanted to mess up a kid, he couldn’t think of a much better way than having one parent murder the other. Growing up with your mom in prison wasn’t exactly calculated to make for a picture-perfect childhood, either.

“Make sure you don’t answer any more questions until you have legal counsel right there with you, okay?”

“Okay. I understand.”

“Do you have a pencil and paper?”

“I must have, I guess.” Her voice trailed off and he could visualize her staring vaguely around the room, still too much in shock to register her surroundings with any degree of clarity. He was surprised at how sharp his mental images of Chloe were. Apparently she’d made even more of an impression on him four months ago than he’d realized.

“There must be a pencil somewhere,” she muttered.

“You definitely need to find something to write with. I’ll hold while you look.”

It was a full minute before Chloe picked up the phone again. “Thank you for waiting, Mr. Raven. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this disorganized. I have a pen now.”

“Write down this phone number and office address. It’s for a friend of mine, Bill Schuller. Bill is an outstanding criminal defense attorney and you need to call him before the police question you again.”

“But I don’t want Bill Schuller to be my lawyer!” Chloe protested. “I want you to represent me. That’s why I called. Mr. Raven, please, you have to help me.”

“I am helping you. Trust me on this. Bill Schuller is the best criminal trial lawyer in Denver—”

“No, you’re the best. Everyone says so. You won an acquittal for Sherri Norquist when the experts all predicted you were going to lose.”

Liam’s stomach knotted at the mention of Sherri’s name, and he was immediately angry with himself for reacting to a case—and a woman—that were now more than three years in his past. He’d been a complete idiot over Sherri Norquist. He’d allowed himself to be manipulated into falling in love with a murdering bitch. But hey, shit happens. It was time to move on. God knew, Sherri certainly had, and seemingly without the smallest trace of guilt or regret.

He spoke crisply, skilled by now at keeping a barrier between his outward demeanor and what he was really feeling. “I appreciate the compliment, Mrs. Hamilton, but it’s undeserved. The bottom line is that I just happened to make a big splash with a couple of my early cases. I haven’t practiced as a criminal defense attorney in several years. These days, I deal only with divorce cases.” Which not only kept him away from an unsavory assortment of accused murderers, drug dealers and armed robbers, but provided him with the added pleasure of saying a mental fuck you to his bigamist father every time he took on a new case or signed off on a completed one. Liam understood that many worse things could happen to a kid than discovering his father had two wives, and two separate families. And he hadn’t even been a kid, really, when he learned the truth about his father’s second family. Still, his disdain for his father ran deep; even the fact that Ron Raven had recently been murdered hadn’t put an end to his anger.

He brought his attention back to Chloe. “You need to call Bill Schuller, before the police come back to question you again, Mrs. Hamilton. And keep in mind that the cops aren’t joking around when they warn you that anything and everything you say can be used as evidence against you. Here’s Bill’s office phone number. Call him right now, before you do anything else. It’s important.” He reeled off the number, repeated his condolences on Jason Hamilton’s death and hung up before Chloe could protest any further.

Just as he finished the conversation with Chloe, No-Name came out of the bedroom, wrapped in a towel. She looked sleepy-eyed, cute and appallingly young. Jesus, what had he been thinking last night? Or not thinking, more like it, Liam reflected grimly.

“Oh, you’re still here,” she said, smiling in relief. “I was afraid you’d left already.”

“No, I’m still here, but only just. I was answering the phone and didn’t want to disturb you.” He returned her smile with all the warmth he could muster. No-Name couldn’t be much more than twenty-one, which would make her almost fifteen years his junior. There was still an appealing hint of hopeful innocence in her expression and he felt a sharp twinge of remorse for having exploited her naiveté. He had years of experience in developing pickup lines that worked, and she’d fallen for them all. True, he’d met her in a LoDo bar notorious as Casual Sex Central. Still, even for a one-night stand, she deserved somebody a hell of a lot less cynical about relationships than he was. Three months ago he would almost certainly have dismissed her as off-limits, but since his father died at the beginning of May, it seemed as if the small store of human kindness left to him in the wake of the Sherri Norquist fiasco had vanished, rotting deep in the Atlantic Ocean alongside the bodies of his father and his father’s mistress.

“I wish I could stay.” Liam aimed another smile in No-Name’s direction, a rueful one that suggested if only his job were not so demanding he’d be thrilled to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to let her down lightly. Or perhaps he wanted to convince himself that he hadn’t been a total asshole to have slept with her in the first place.

He tapped his cell phone. “I’m sorry. I just answered an urgent call from my office and I have to leave right away. There’s a family crisis involving one of my clients and they need me to catch the fallout.”

“Now?” she asked, pouting. “So early? It’s not even six-thirty!”

“I know. Wild, isn’t it? I swear, lawyers get more emergency calls than doctors.”

“But you’re a divorce lawyer. I wouldn’t have expected divorce lawyers to get any emergency calls.”

“Oh boy, are you wrong.” He chucked her under the chin, feeling a hundred years old as he coaxed a smile. “I sometimes think divorce lawyers get more emergency calls than anyone else. Especially on a Monday morning. Weekends are tough on couples who are splitting up. That’s when all the custody battles erupt and sometimes they aren’t just battles of words.”

“Tell me about it.” No-Name’s eyes turned sad. “My parents divorced when I was fifteen. As far as I’m concerned, they’d have done us kids a huge favor if they’d split ten years earlier. They weren’t physically violent, but the shouting was horrible.”

“Failing marriages are rough on the kids, whether you stick it out or cut through the pain and file for divorce.” Liam really didn’t want to get into a discussion of the problems associated with couples who weren’t willing to admit their marriage was over. That was a subject that cut too close to far too many bones.

He walked back into the bedroom, wondering if it was a custody battle between Jason and Chloe that had precipitated the mayor’s murder. People killed their spouses over custody issues almost as often as they killed them over money, and a lot more often than they killed them because of unfaithfulness. He’d barely been fifteen minutes into his first consultation with Chloe Hamilton when he realized that her daughter was the focus of her life. She might well be capable of killing in defense of her daughter, Liam reflected, even if such an act would be impossible for her in other circumstances.

When Chloe first came to see him, his professional instincts had shouted that there was more going on than a simple desire to get divorced. Equally, there had seemed to be something more behind her decision to stay with the mayor than a straightforward decision to reconcile. Despite his efforts to persuade Chloe to confide in him, she’d insisted she was the one who’d changed her mind and now wanted to give her marriage a second chance. He wasn’t sure he believed her, then or now. At the time, he’d suspected that Jason Hamilton had applied some sort of blackmail to prevent her walking away from their marriage. If the mayor had threatened to fight her for custody of their daughter, Chloe might have decided to end the emotional blackmail by getting rid of her husband.

No-Name followed Liam into the bedroom, forcing his attention back to her. She leaned against the doorjamb, her towel slipping provocatively as she watched him dress. “Don’t you want to take a shower before you leave? Or at least have some coffee?”

Liam tucked his shirt into his pants, zipping his fly as an excuse to pretend he hadn’t noticed No-Name’s bare breasts. “Thanks for the offer but I need to go home and get some clean clothes. I’m scheduled to appear in court today and my client is paying big bucks for the privilege of having me turn up wearing a starched shirt and a silk tie.”

No-Name protested some more, but not too forcefully, as if she didn’t quite believe his excuses but didn’t want to push too hard in case he told her something she didn’t want to hear. He managed to get out of her apartment in less than five minutes. It would have been easy to lie, to promise to be in touch, but a final flare of conscience kept him silent, so that he left her standing at her front door looking crestfallen. Truth, Liam thought wryly, was vastly overrated as an ingredient in sexual relationships.

By the time he made it to his car, his gut was twisted into a hard coil of tension. He chugged a handful of antacids—his usual breakfast—and drove with fierce concentration through the already dense traffic. Denver was a city that started early and 7:00 a.m. was well into the Monday morning rush hour.

It was a relief to enter the soothing austerity of his newly purchased condo overlooking Confluence Park. Liam had selected the white walls, slate floors and sleek contemporary furniture as a deliberate contrast to the cluttered, homey comfort of the Flying W, his parents’ ranch in Wyoming.

He recognized that his almost compulsive desire for orderliness in his surroundings was a direct reflection of the chaos of his inner life. Sometimes he wondered if he was ever going to reach the point where he would be able to let down his guard without risking an emotional meltdown. Still, whatever the psychological underpinnings of his decorating choices, the immaculate neatness and careful functionality of each room offered balm to his soul.

He tossed his car keys into the wooden bowl set on the chrome and glass side table in the entrance and made his way through the master bedroom to the shower, stopping en route to check his voice mail. There were four messages, all of them work related. It looked, thank God, as if it was going to be another frantic workweek. Just the sort of heavy-duty schedule he liked, with no time to stop and reflect.

He switched on the TV as he dressed and discovered that the murder of Jason Hamilton was making headlines on virtually every channel, not just locally but nationally as well. Not surprising, he supposed, given that Jason had been the mayor of a major city and Chloe had worn the crown as America’s Sweetheart for several months after the 1998 Winter Olympics. To make Jason’s death even more tabloid-worthy, the mayor was also a successful multimillionaire real estate developer, and the son of a U.S. army general who was a minor celebrity in his own right, having won the Medal of Honor for his bravery during combat service in Vietnam. Jason Hamilton’s violent death represented an irresistible combination of wealth, fame and mystery for the ravenous maw of the twenty-four-hour news machines. Flipping from one breathless report to the next, Liam figured the cable news networks must all be praying that Chloe didn’t get arrested too soon and spoil the potential for weeks of rabid speculation about the crime.

Facts about the murder were sparse, but it seemed that Jason’s dead body had been discovered in the basement of their family home in Park Hill by his wife at approximately 3:30 a.m., Denver time. Death was apparently due to a stab wound, or possibly multiple stab wounds; the reports weren’t clear. Chloe Hamilton had tried to revive her husband. The newscasters—discreetly noncommittal at this stage of a developing story—refrained from speculating as to whether Chloe might possibly have gotten there before Jason died rather than after.

News editors were making up for lack of hard data about the crime by filling in with copious back stories. They reminded everyone that Jason Hamilton had been one of Denver’s most popular mayors, with approval ratings consistently hovering in the high seventies. He’d even managed to clear snow from obscure city side streets after last year’s biggest blizzard—a feat that far exceeded the abilities of most of his predecessors and had won him the heartfelt gratitude of his constituents.

Between lectures on the political and civic consequences of Jason’s death, the news shows ran footage of Chloe during her record-breaking gold medal run. It was the first U.S. gold medal in that particular event and, in the wake of her win, Chloe had been the recipient of wall-to-wall media attention, so there was plenty of film footage to be trotted out. The close-up shot of Chloe on the victory podium—teary-eyed but joyful—seemed to be the special favorite of news producers this morning. Liam could understand why. She was a stunning woman and her radiant smile made for a fantastic TV visual.

Having endured two weeks in the full glare of the media spotlight when his father was murdered back in May, Liam sympathized with what Chloe Hamilton must be going through right now. His sympathies were tempered, however, by the strong likelihood that she had, in fact, killed her husband. Spouses were always the first suspect in a murder case, and Liam’s experience as a criminal lawyer had given him no reason to doubt the statistics. He figured that any Olympic gold medalist who chose to stab her spouse multiple times had to be prepared to face a little negative publicity.

Whatever the facts, whether she was the murderer or an innocent bystander, Chloe would be wise to steel herself for a continuing onslaught from the media ghouls. If the cops didn’t identify her husband’s killer within forty-eight hours, she was going to find herself soaring into the stratosphere of national attention. A miserable place to be when the attention wasn’t favorable.

Fortunately, none of the problems resulting from Jason Hamilton’s murder were his to deal with. Liam shoved aside a twinge of irrational regret for his previous career as a criminal defense attorney. Yes, he’d relished the cut and thrust of courtroom battle and he savored the memory of a couple of innocent clients he’d help to set free, but his current work provided more income, more predictable hours and a lot less stress. He’d have to be crazy to consider switching back to the high pressure work of defending criminals, especially with a famous client like Chloe Hamilton as his means for reentry. That would generate the sort of public scrutiny nobody in his family needed right now.

He drove to the office, mentally reviewing his schedule for the day. His first appointment was with Heather Ladrow, whose divorce from one of Denver’s most successful venture capitalists he’d helped negotiate fifteen months earlier. Heather had indicated in making this morning’s appointment that there was now a problem with the financial settlements.

Heather looked older and a lot more worn than Liam remembered. Once he learned what she was going through, he wasn’t surprised by her frazzled appearance. Heather’s former husband, multimillionaire Pierce Ladrow, had reneged on his legal obligations and stopped paying child support.

“Don’t worry,” Liam reassured Heather. “We’ll get a court order to compel him to pay everything he owes. We’ll ask the judge to impose penalties and interest. If he still refuses to pay up, we can garnish some of his assets.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Heather said, plucking angrily at the strap of her purse. “But he’s left the country.”

Her ex-husband had married a Frenchwoman and moved to Monaco, she explained, taking out French citizenship for good measure. He’d sold his remaining property in the States and put his entire fortune in various complicated trusts held in banks scattered around the globe. Financially speaking, as far as the U.S. authorities were concerned, Pierce had dropped off the edge of a cliff. What’s more, he’d told Heather the last time they communicated that the moon would explode in the sky before he’d send her or the kids another dime.

Liam listened in grim silence, not enjoying the advice he felt obligated to give. “The unwelcome fact is that your former husband has put himself out of reach of our American civil courts, Mrs. Ladrow. We can get a court order to attach his assets anywhere in the States, but from what you’ve told me, it seems clear there are no assets in this country for us to go after.”

“What about all the money Pierce has in Europe? And in the Cayman Islands? And the Bahamas? And Hong Kong, too!” Heather Ladrow’s cheeks were scarlet with frustration. “My pig of an ex has twenty-five million dollars and I’m struggling to afford new running shoes for my son! Meanwhile, my daughter had to give up ballet lessons because we can’t afford them.”

“I understand how unfair it must seem, but I don’t see any effective legal recourse open to you—”

“But Pierce owes me that money!”

“Yes, he does. Right is absolutely on your side. The law is, too. The difficulty is that nobody is in a position to enforce the court rulings.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? Let Pierce win? Dammit, I won’t let that bastard win!”

Liam suppressed a sigh. The Ladrows were so angry with each other that their divorce was a bloody battle ground, not a mechanism for dealing sensibly with a failed marriage. “Fortunately, you own the house in Cherry Creek. There’s no mortgage on the property and it’s worth at least two million dollars.” Liam had insisted, despite fierce opposition from Pierce Ladrow’s lawyer, that Heather was entitled to the house, free and clear of a mortgage. Now he was doubly grateful that he hadn’t accepted the attorney’s offer of a divorce settlement that granted Heather extremely generous annual payments but left all the capital assets in Pierce’s hands. In retrospect, it was obvious why Pierce had been so willing to pay his wife far more alimony than any court would impose. The guy had clearly planned all along to renege and then decamp abroad.

“It’s outside my area of professional expertise to offer financial advice, Mrs. Ladrow. But in your situation, I would sell the house and buy something smaller and cheaper. Then I’d invest the balance in a mutual fund. That would generate more than enough income to cover dance class for your daughter and running shoes for your son.”

“I thought there was a law against deadbeat dads in this state,” Heather said bitterly.

“There is, and I’ll certainly do the paperwork to get a warrant issued for Mr. Ladrow’s arrest—”

“You can do that?” She brightened.

“Absolutely. If Mr. Ladrow comes back to Colorado, he’ll face a choice between paying up and going to jail. But how do we enforce the warrant if your ex-husband remains out of the country?”

“Can’t we get the police in Monaco to arrest him?”

“We can try, but there’s almost no chance we’ll succeed. The authorities in Monaco aren’t going to arrest your husband on charges stemming from a contested divorce settlement, especially since he’s now a French citizen.”

“But nonpayment of child support is a criminal offense, not just a civil matter like divorce.”

“True, but it’s not a criminal offense that foreign countries are willing to extradite for. Bottom line, as long as your ex-husband and his money stay out of the country, he’s found an effective way to thumb his nose at the American legal system.”

“I hate him.” Heather spoke with quiet venom. “I really hate him.”

Liam let that comment slide. “Is there no chance that your ex-husband is going to decide he misses his children? After a few months, he may decide it’s worth paying the money he owes in return for the chance to visit with his children.”

“That’s not going to happen,” she said bleakly. “My children are adopted. They’re wonderful young people, and the light of my life, but in fairness to Pierce—and God knows, it kills me to be fair to him—I have to admit that he always told me he’d never be able to love children who weren’t his own flesh and blood.” She gave a bitter smile. “That seems to have been the one thing he didn’t lie about.”

“I’m very sorry. The situation must be very hard for you and for your children.”

She smiled sadly. “I should have listened, shouldn’t I? It’s amazing how easy it is when you’re inside a marriage to ignore what your partner is telling you. The reality is I should have seen this coming, but I refused to accept that Pierce meant exactly what he said. He didn’t want to adopt children. I insisted, he went along to the extent of signing the papers, and—here we are.”

We get too soon old and too late smart. That had been one of his grandmother’s favorite sayings and Liam’s work provided almost daily reminders of its truth. Married couples, it seemed to him, took an especially long time to get smart about each other. His work had convinced him—if he’d needed further convincing—that marriage was a damn good way to expose yourself to the agony of hell without the extra inconvenience of dying first. He had no idea why so many otherwise sensible men and women chose to submit themselves to the torment. He realized, of course, that not every marriage degenerated into the sort of vicious endgame that Pierce Ladrow had inflicted on his wife and kids but, from Liam’s perspective, far too many of them came disconcertingly close.

Jenny, the young woman who kept watch over the reception area, came in as soon as Heather Ladrow left. “Chloe Hamilton is waiting to see you.” Jenny had clearly watched the morning news. She spoke in hushed tones, dazzled by Chloe’s celebrity and the aura of criminal scandal surrounding her. “She realizes she doesn’t have an appointment but she says she really needs to see you as soon as you can spare a moment.”

“Tell her I have no openings in my schedule this morning.” Liam was in no mood to pander to Chloe Hamilton’s strange fixation for hiring him as her defense attorney.

“You have almost half an hour before your next client is due to arrive,” Jenny pointed out.

“If you watched the news this morning, you know Mrs. Hamilton needs a criminal lawyer,” Liam said curtly.

“You were a criminal lawyer until a couple of years ago.”

Liam glanced up, startled by Jenny’s comment. She’d been with him eighteen months and had never before indicated that she knew anything at all about his professional history.

“You’re correct,” he said coolly. “I used to be a criminal lawyer. Mrs. Hamilton is almost three years too late to hire me.”

“Okay, you’re the boss. I guess I’ll tell her you’re not avail—oops.” Jenny stood aside as Chloe walked into Liam’s office.

“Mr. Raven, I’m sorry to force my way in, but I’m desperate.”

Chloe gave every appearance of speaking the truth. She looked nothing like the self-possessed, elegant woman who’d visited Liam’s offices back in early April. Her hands visibly shook and her blue eyes had huge dark circles under them, all the more visible because her face was so pale beneath its golden tan. Her outfit passed beyond casual and well into ratty. She was wearing a misshapen lime-green T-shirt that didn’t match the formality of her tailored beige slacks and her hair was haphazardly tied back with a black scrunchie. Oddly, Liam still found her attractive, a fact that did nothing to improve his mood. Sherri Norquist had taught him everything he needed to know about the idiocy of defense lawyers who took on clients to whom they felt sexually attracted. He didn’t need Chloe to provide a brush-up course in stupidity.

“As I informed you earlier this morning, Mrs. Hamilton, you should make an appointment to see Bill Schuller. I can assure you that Bill will provide outstanding counsel.”

“I tried to hire Mr. Schuller. It can’t be done. He’s fishing in the Alaskan wilderness. Nobody can reach him until he gets back to the base camp on the Alagnak River, and that’s going to be another forty-eight hours at least. I can’t wait forty-eight hours, Mr. Raven. I need a lawyer now. This minute.”

“Why the urgency?”

“Because I think the police will arrest me as soon as I go back to either my home or the official mayoral residence. My sister called me a few minutes ago. The cops have even been out to her house to see if she knew where I was.”

Liam looked at her assessingly. If Chloe was right, she definitely needed immediate legal help. “I can give you fifteen minutes,” he said, although he wasn’t sure why he made the concession. He gestured for her to take a chair.

“Do you want me to take notes?” Jenny asked hopefully.

Liam inclined his head. “Yes, thank you.”

“No,” Chloe said abruptly. “I prefer to speak to you alone, Mr. Raven. No notes.”

Jenny looked at him inquiringly, and Liam shrugged, then nodded to indicate that she should leave. As soon as they were alone, Chloe sat down, although she perched on the edge of her seat as if she might take flight at the slightest provocation.

“Tell me why you think the police are going to arrest you,” Liam said. Since he only had a narrow time window before his next client arrived, he figured they might as well cut to the chase.

Chloe’s hand fluttered, then she clenched her fists and shoved both hands into her lap as if despising the helpless gesture. “They have a witness who claims to have seen me stab Jason.”

“Who’s the witness?”

“Sophie’s nanny.”

“Does the nanny dislike you?”

“I don’t think so. Trudi’s from Finland and came over here to improve her English. She’s reliable and honest and she’s never given the slightest sign of having a grudge against me. I like her and thought she liked me. Or that she used to, until this morning. Now I daresay she thinks I’m a vicious killer.”

“Is she right?” Liam asked mildly. “Did you stab your husband?”

She looked straight at him. “No, Mr. Raven, I didn’t stab Jason. I didn’t harm him in any way. When Trudi saw me, I was trying to unbutton Jason’s shirt and look at his injuries. I know it was a crazy thing to do, but when you see somebody you love lying in a pool of blood, you don’t think, you just react. I thought that if I could only get the knife out and pad the wound, then maybe I could give him CPR and he’d start breathing again.”

Her explanation was ridiculous coming from a woman as smart as Chloe Hamilton, especially in view of the knowledge she must have of human anatomy after her years of intensive athletic training. However, that didn’t mean her account was a lie. Liam’s training and professional instincts all suggested to him that Chloe was the most likely murderer, but he also knew that innocent people occasionally ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time—and not only on TV crime shows.

Jenny buzzed the intercom. He picked up the phone, so that Chloe wouldn’t hear whatever Jenny had to say. “Liam, Terry Robbins has arrived.”

“Thanks, Jenny. I’ll be right with him.”

Liam glanced at his watch. Terry Robbins was ten minutes early, but he was a man with a high regard for his own importance—not a good client to keep waiting. Terry couldn’t be shunted aside for a preliminary meeting with Helen, Liam’s highly competent paralegal; his self-importance meter would explode from righteous indignation at the prospect of discussing his failed marriage with a mere paralegal.

Liam started scribbling a list of names onto the notepad on his desk. “Mrs. Hamilton, I’m sorry but my next client has already arrived.” He tore off the sheet and handed it to her. “These are for you. In my opinion, those are the half dozen best criminal attorneys currently practicing in the Denver area. As I mentioned earlier, Bill Schuller is the best, but any of these six would be more than competent. I’ve also included Robyn Johnson’s name on the list. She’s outstanding, but she’s approaching sixty and these days she spends most of her time on pro bono work for people who’ve already been convicted.”

Chloe ripped the list in two and tossed the crumpled pieces onto Liam’s desk. “I don’t want Bill Schuller or the great Robyn Johnson, who probably isn’t available anyway. I don’t want any of these other attorneys. I want you.”

She really was beginning to sound somewhere close to obsessive. What the hell was her problem? There was something going on here that he was missing, Liam decided.

“I’m a good lawyer, Mrs. Hamilton, but I’m not that good and it certainly isn’t to your advantage right now to have a lawyer whose courtroom skills have been rusting for almost three years. You ought to be begging Robyn Johnson to put aside her pro bono work and take you on, if you want truly brilliant representation. Why are you so determined to hire me?”

She looked at him in silence and for a moment he was sure she wouldn’t answer. Then she gave a tiny shrug, as if clearing some final mental hurdle.

“Because you’re Sophie’s father,” she said. “I thought that might give you a vested interest in keeping me out of prison.”

Two

Right up until the moment she spoke, Chloe hadn’t been sure she was going to tell Liam the truth. She’d imagined this scene a thousand times, but it seemed despite all the practice, she’d never envisioned Liam’s reaction correctly. He didn’t shout, he didn’t protest, he didn’t appear angry. He didn’t even look surprised. Disconcertingly, his face displayed no expression at all. She’d decided back in April that he was one of the most self-controlled human beings she’d ever met, but his calm right now was unnerving. He simply fixed his gaze on her, his expression shuttered and his amazing hazel eyes bereft of emotion.

“Sophie is your daughter, isn’t that right, Mrs. Hamilton?” Liam’s question was polite, but distant.

“Yes.”

“How old is Sophie?”

His coolness set Chloe’s jangled nerves on edge. “She’s three and a half. A little more. She’ll be four on the first of October.”

“I see. I thought she was somewhere around that age.” Liam opened a gilt-embossed, leather-bound appointment diary on his desk and flipped quickly through a few pages. Chloe was too emotionally battered even to wonder what he was doing.

He apparently found what he was looking for. Swinging the diary around on his desk, he pushed it toward her so that she could read the entries and pointed to a line in the middle of the left-hand page. Her name—Chloe Hamilton (Mrs. Jason Hamilton)—was written in the space for 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 5 of the current year.

Liam spoke soothingly, as though to a lunatic, or an overexcited child on the verge of pre-Christmas meltdown. “As you can see, Mrs. Hamilton, we met for the first time almost exactly three months ago. In April this year, to be precise. Quite apart from the fact that there has never been any form of sexual contact between the two of us, you’ll understand why I’m quite sure that you’re wrong about the paternity of your daughter. Sophie can’t possibly be my child. She was already three years old the first time you and I met.”

Chloe wished that she had an elegant leather-bound diary in her purse with a notation showing the night when they’d really met for the first time. It would have been eminently satisfying to pull it out of her purse and shove it under Liam’s patronizing nose.

She’d wondered for years if he had recognized her the night Sophie was conceived. In April, when she approached him about the divorce, she’d been almost sure that he had no recollection of their previous encounter. Now, unfortunately, she was convinced he didn’t remember the time they’d spent together. Liam wasn’t trying to evade the fact that he’d fathered a child by denying the fact that they’d been lovers; he was simply humoring a woman he believed to be mentally unbalanced. Presumably he was afraid she would start frothing at the mouth or throwing wild punches if he showed surprise or anger.

“I’m perfectly well aware of the fact that we met on April 5 to discuss the possibility of my filing for a divorce from Jason.” Chloe repeated the exact date of their meeting in an effort to sound as sane and in control as possible. “But that wasn’t our first encounter. We’d met before. To be precise, we met at the Grovelands’ New Year’s Eve party four years ago.”

Liam’s expression remained controlled but she saw a faint flicker of emotion in his eyes before he once again retreated behind his mask of impassivity. “You’re claiming that your daughter was conceived at the Grovelands’ party?”

“She was conceived in a motel on Hampden Avenue, but we met at the Grovelands’ house in Cherry Creek. Do you remember the occasion? It was the year the Grovelands threw a fancy dress party.”

Liam’s eyes narrowed and the faintest trace of color flared along his cheekbones. The color vanished almost as soon as it appeared. “I remember the party,” he admitted.

“You came as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States.” And he’d damn near taken her breath away in the velvet coat and ruffled cravat of an eighteenth century gentleman.

Liam said nothing.

“I came dressed as Cleopatra,” she added.

His head jerked up, but his face still gave away nothing.

He remembers, Chloe thought. Thank God. She was relieved that he had some recollection of their time together, even if the memory hadn’t been scalded into his soul.

Given how smooth Liam’s seduction techniques had been, Chloe suspected that sleeping with a woman he barely knew was his standard operating procedure. But from her perspective, their encounter had been infinitely memorable, and not just because Liam had been a fantastic lover, or even because of the epic fact that it had resulted in Sophie’s conception. It had also been her single foray into adultery. No point in telling him that, though. He certainly wouldn’t believe her.

“My costume explains why you didn’t recognize me,” she said. “I wore lots of eye makeup and a dark wig. Almost nobody recognized me that night.”

“Tell me something, Mrs. Hamilton.” She was sure Liam’s continued use of her married name was intended as an insult, not as a mark of professional courtesy. “Did you deliberately set out to get pregnant that night, or was I just the lucky son of a bitch who happened to be hanging around when you felt in the mood to get laid?”

“I didn’t plan to get pregnant. I swear I didn’t.” On her good days, Chloe was almost sure that was true. On her bad days, she considered that, mere hours before the party began, she’d discovered Jason was sterile. Not only that, but he’d known of his sterility for over two years and had chosen not to tell her, for fear that she would leave him. She’d gone to the Grovelands’ party in a volatile state somewhere between furious anger and extreme despair.

But surely even in that dangerous mood she’d been smart enough to realize that the solution to the multiple problems of her marriage was divorce? She couldn’t have been brainless enough to think that getting herself impregnated by a virtual stranger was a smart or correct thing to do.

“It’s highly unlikely you conceived your daughter that night we were together,” Liam said tersely. “I know I used a condom. I always use condoms.”

“Condoms aren’t fool proof. There’s something like a five percent failure rate.”

Liam’s gaze touched hers. “Well, hell, didn’t I get lucky?” He gave a short, hard laugh. “One chance in twenty and you’re claiming I hit the jackpot?”

Chloe drew in a shaky breath. “I’m quite sure you’re Sophie’s father but we can arrange for a DNA test if you want to be one hundred percent certain. There are plenty of labs that will make the identification without needing to know the names of the people being tested.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Whose identity are you trying to protect, Mrs. Hamilton? Mine or yours?”

“Everyone’s,” she said. “Especially Sophie’s. If there’s anything we can agree on, surely it’s the fact that she’s the one completely innocent person in all of this.”

“I’m feeling pretty innocent myself,” Liam said curtly. “I didn’t go to the party planning to have sex with a married woman. More to the point, I came away not knowing I had.”

“I didn’t plan to commit adultery, either. I’m not in the habit of sleeping around.”

“That’s hard to believe. You were married, Mrs. Hamilton, but you told me—more than once, in more ways than one—that you were single.”

She made the mistake of attempting to justify the inexcusable. “Jason and I had an argument right before we left for the Grovelands’ New Year’s Eve party. We both said some hurtful things and I was in a reckless mood by the time you and I met.”

Liam’s expression remained controlled but she realized that his anger was rapidly escalating toward the tipping point. “So I was your therapy for the night? A little bit of sex on the side to get back at your husband?”

The wretched truth was that her flirtation with Liam had started out pretty much as something that sordid and that unforgivable. She’d just never intended to let the situation progress beyond mild flirtation. “You’re sounding very self-righteous,” she said quietly. “But I seem to recall that you were the person who put the moves on me, not the other way around.”

It was absolutely the wrong thing to have said. Liam leaned across the desk, his hands gripping the edge until his knuckles gleamed white. Probably so that he didn’t give in to the temptation to bop her one, Chloe thought wryly.

“You’re forgetting one minor fact,” Liam said, teeth clenched. “I had every right to solicit sex with you because I wasn’t married! I wasn’t even dating seriously. You, on the other hand, had a husband.”

“It was wrong of me, I know—”

“Wrong? A little more than that, Mrs. Hamilton. Do you happen to remember that annoying bit in the marriage vows where you promised to remain faithful and hang in there when times got tough? As I recall, there’s absolutely nothing in the wedding ceremony that says adultery is okay if the spouses have had a spat before they leave for a party.”

He was quite right. There was no defense for what she’d done, and Chloe felt her face burn with shame for the lies she’d told when they first met—and since. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Except that I can’t regret what happened that night because I have Sophie as a result.”

“Unfortunately, I can and do regret what happened that night, Mrs. Hamilton, precisely because you have Sophie.”

“If you’d ever met her, you’d know that she’s the most wonderful person—”

“But I haven’t met my own daughter, and that’s the point, isn’t it?” He looked at her with shriveling scorn. “Did your husband know that Sophie wasn’t his child? Come to think of it, why are you so sure Jason isn’t her father?”

There was no way to preserve Jason’s privacy at this point. “My husband is…he was sterile.”

“So how did you explain the fact of your pregnancy to him?”

“He was shocked when I told him, of course—”

“You have a gift for understatement, Mrs. Hamilton.”

She ignored his mockery and plowed on doggedly. “Jason was shocked and upset, but once Sophie was born, he fell in love with her. She is…she became Jason’s daughter in every way, except biologically. He loved her as much as I do.”

“As a divorce lawyer, I find that hard to believe. My experience strongly suggests that men have a difficult time accepting living proof of their wife’s infidelity.”

“Hard to believe or not, it’s the truth.” For once, the whole truth and nothing but. Jason had adored Sophie and been grateful for her existence.

“In case this hasn’t occurred to you, the cops are going to find your husband’s supposedly forgiving attitude impossibly hard to believe.” Liam sounded grim.

She stared at him, appalled. “Why do the police have to know Jason isn’t Sophie’s father? What on earth does my daughter’s biological background have to do with Jason’s murder?”

He shook his head, clearly impatient with her naiveté. “The cops have to know upfront. You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you let them discover this information for themselves.”

“Why would they find out?”

“The postmortem might easily reveal that Jason is sterile, depending on the cause of his sterility. Or the cops might subpoena his medical records and find out that way. Trust me on this, if you keep quiet and the truth comes out during the course of the investigation, the cops will interpret your silence as an admission that you consider Sophie’s paternity a dirty little secret. They’ll assume your husband was furious when he discovered Sophie wasn’t his biological child. They’ll imagine her existence caused bitter arguments between you and Jason. They’ll conclude the arguments escalated over the years and, after an especially violent disagreement, Jason ended up dead on your living room floor, with you wielding the murder weapon.”

His scenario sounded chillingly credible. “Is that what you think happened?” Chloe asked. “That I killed my husband because we were fighting about Sophie?”

“As a possible scenario, it matches all the known facts.” The complete lack of inflection in his voice somehow transformed his statement into an accusation.

“Nobody who’d ever seen Jason with Sophie would believe something so crazy.”

“But the cops haven’t seen your husband with Sophie,” Liam pointed out with infuriating calm. “Neither have the potential jurors if you end up being brought to trial. However, you were seen poised over Jason’s body with the murder weapon in your bloody hands. I can only hope for your sake that nobody heard you and Jason arguing last night?”

There was a definite question in his final words. Add one more person to the list of those who were already convinced she’d murdered her husband, Chloe thought wearily. She dropped her gaze. No doubt Liam would interpret her silence as an admission that she and Jason had been arguing last night. Unfortunately, his interpretation would be correct. Their disagreement had been about Jason’s political ambitions and how best to achieve them, certainly not about Sophie.

“Jason never regretted his decision to welcome Sophie as his daughter,” Chloe said finally. “She was a source of joy to both of us. I have no way to convince you of that, but it’s the simple truth.”

“Did Jason know I was the man who’d impregnated his wife?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you. How come he never confronted me? Why didn’t he demand an explanation as to why I slept with his wife?”

Chloe met Liam’s derisory gaze head on and a ripple of anger floated across the surface of her despair. “The truth is he considered the precise identity of our daughter’s biological father somewhat irrelevant. As long as you didn’t know the truth, he had no interest in confronting you.”

Her barb found its target and Liam’s mouth tightened. “As the man trapped into impregnating you, I can’t say that I agree with your husband’s point of view. I consider the fact that I have a child to be extremely important and I’m furious that you kept the information hidden from me.”

“I couldn’t tell you about Sophie,” she said, realizing there was almost no hope that Liam would understand why she’d felt compelled to remain silent. “If Jason was willing to accept Sophie as his daughter, I felt I owed him the courtesy of not telling anyone how she’d been conceived.”

“Not even the lucky father?” Liam’s voice vibrated with irony.

She shook her head. “Not even you. Perhaps especially not you.”

“I’m sure you agonized over the ethics of the situation.”

“Yes, I did,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. “Especially when I decided to end the marriage and came to you for help with a divorce.”

“Let’s talk about that for a moment. Why did you choose—” The intercom buzzed again and Liam snatched the phone. “Yes?”

Chloe couldn’t hear the receptionist’s part of the conversation, but Liam responded by saying he’d be right there.

He hung up. “I have to end this conversation, Mrs. Hamilton. My client has been waiting for fifteen minutes—”

“For heaven’s sake, would you stop calling me Mrs. Hamilton!” she snapped. “My name, as you very well know, is Chloe. I think our acquaintance has reached a stage of intimacy where it’s okay for you to use it!”

“Nothing about our acquaintance has anything to do with intimacy,” he replied angrily.

“Whatever.” She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall, too exhausted to fight anymore. She stood up, struggling to regain at least a vestige of her old pride and determination. “I should leave. This has been a mistake and, as you keep reminding me, you have important clients waiting.” She turned to go, suddenly chilled by the air-conditioning. She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold air and realized as she did so that she was still wearing the scruffy T-shirt that she’d grabbed first thing this morning when the police sergeant sent her upstairs to shower and change out of her blood-soaked robe. Apparently she’d been in such a state of mental turmoil when she prepared to leave the house that she’d changed into decent slacks but forgotten to put on the silk blouse that went with them. Good grief, she must look like a demented bag lady. Chloe felt a wave of embarrassment sweep over her.

With all that was going on right now, it was crazy to come unglued because her outfit was less than perfect, but somehow the knowledge that she was wearing a worn out T-shirt was the last straw. She hated the fact that she had been so overwhelmed by the police interrogation that she couldn’t even dress herself properly. She was annoyed by the fact that she wanted Liam’s approval, or at least his acceptance. Why did she care if he disapproved of her? He was an accidental sperm donor, nothing more. Still, if she’d looked a bit more elegant, maybe he’d have worked a bit harder to hide his contempt. Tears threatened to overflow, and she blinked them away, pride coming to her rescue when everything else failed. She wasn’t going to give in to self-pity, not in front of Liam, who so clearly had no interest in joining her sob party.

He walked around from behind his desk and came to stand between her and the door. She was relieved when he gave no sign that he realized how close she was to breaking down.

“Obviously there are a lot of things we still need to talk about,” he said. “I can’t spend any more time with you right now and I have to be in court right after lunch. Can you be back here at four?”

She hesitated for a moment. “If the police don’t arrest me, I’ll be here.”

“Go to the movies,” he said. “Pick a theater in a nice, family-oriented suburb. Movie theaters are great places to hide from cops.” He tapped briefly on a side door she hadn’t noticed before and a female voice responded.

He opened the door. “Hey, Helen, I have a client coming through if you don’t mind.” He turned back to Chloe. “This leads to my paralegal’s office. If you go out this way, you can access the main corridor directly. It’s probably better if you avoid exiting through the reception area. I think you and my next client probably know each other.”

“Thank you.” She walked towards Helen’s office, numb enough to follow his instructions without question.

“Chloe.”

She stopped and swung around to look at him, grateful for his small concession of using her name. “Yes?”

“Where is…your daughter…right now?”

“My sister came and picked her up early this morning. She took Sophie back to her house in Conifer.”

“How long can you leave…Sophie…there?”

“As far as my sister is concerned, forever. As far as Sophie is concerned—at least until bedtime. My sister has two preschoolers of her own, and Sophie loves to play with her cousins.”

He gave a quick nod to acknowledge her answer. “Then I’ll expect to see you here this afternoon at four. Try not to get arrested in the meantime, okay?”

Three

He had a child. Sophie was his daughter. Chloe Hamilton was the mother of his child. His daughter was three and a half years old.

However many ways he found to express the simple facts, Liam still couldn’t wrap his mind around the crazy notion that he was a father. A father, for God’s sake! If ever there was one role that he’d been determined never to take on, fatherhood would have to be it.

Among the worst of the unpleasant emotions accompanying the discovery that he had a child was the shame of knowing he’d behaved no better than his own father, the late, not-very-lamented Ron Raven. Ron had impregnated Avery Fairfax twenty-seven years ago, when his legal wife, Ellie, was already pregnant. Then Ron had solved the dilemma of two women simultaneously pregnant with his child by marrying Avery—without bothering to divorce Ellie first.

Ever since he learned about his father’s bigamy, Liam had derived a morbid satisfaction from heaping scorn on his father’s head for the idiocy of contracting a fake marriage. He’d harped on Ron’s carelessness in causing the pregnancy that had precipitated it. Now it seemed that he had been as careless as his father. Juggle the pieces of the Liam-Chloe-Jason triangle, toss them up in the air and you could watch them fall to the ground in a pattern humiliatingly close to the Ellie-Ron-Avery triangle. Like father, like son wasn’t a cliché he’d ever wanted to live up to, Liam reflected cynically, but it seemed he’d done just that.

Court, thank God, was over for the day, and he’d managed to focus on the Cellinis’ civil war, euphemistically described as their divorce petition, long enough to avoid disaster for his client. The financial decisions had gone in favor of Mr. Cellini, more because the legal facts were overwhelmingly on his side than because Liam had presented them with any special brilliance. Still, right now he’d take his victories any way he could get them.

He parked his car in the lot at the back of his office building and sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Five hours had passed since he learned he had a daughter and he still had no idea what he was going to say to Chloe Hamilton except that he wanted to see Sophie. He felt supremely ill-equipped to assume the role of father but, despite his fury at having been tricked into parenthood, he had no intention of taking out his anger on Sophie.

His child. His daughter. The unbelievable refrain started up again. Jesus, there was absolutely no way to make those words sound anything less than insane.

His cell phone rang just as he was getting out of the car and he answered automatically, his attention focused four years in the past on a sexual encounter with Chloe that—surprisingly—he could remember quite clearly.

“Liam Raven.”

A woman responded, her voice tinged with laughter. “Golly gee, big brother, your bark is getting worse by the day! If you always sound this fierce, it’s a wonder you have any clients left!”

“Megan! How are you doing? Sorry to sound so abrupt. I was distracted.” At almost any other time, Liam would have been delighted to hear from his sister. Megan was nearly nine years his junior, so their childhoods had followed separate paths, but he’d always loved her and he was pleased that she seemed so happy in her new relationship with Adam Fairfax. The Fairfaxes weren’t the family he’d have chosen for Megan to marry into, to put it mildly, but in his more rational moments, he realized Adam was no more responsible for the multiple sins of Ron Raven than anyone else caught up in the fallout from Ron’s bigamy. Adam, after all, couldn’t help the fact that he was Avery Fairfax’s younger brother.

Liam shook his head, trying to clear away the fuzziness of shock lingering from the morning’s revelations. He wanted to respond to his sister without alerting her that anything was wrong, but Chloe’s news was so much at the forefront of his thoughts that he was in danger of blurting out something about Sophie if he didn’t watch himself. He loved Megan and respected both her intelligence and her integrity, but he was more in the habit of protecting her than asking for her advice. Besides, he had no intention of telling anyone—friends or family—that he had a child until he’d decided exactly what he was going to make of his relationship with Sophie. He saw no point in adding more complications to an emotional stew that was already overspiced with his own neuroses.

He grabbed his briefcase and tucked the phone between his cheek and his shoulder, using his hip to shut the car door. “It’s good to hear from you, Meg. How are you?”

“Hmm, let’s see. Busy at work. Missing Wyoming. Hopelessly in love with Adam. Wishing he lived about a thousand miles farther away from his parents. Maybe a million miles farther away, actually.”

He made a sympathetic noise. “That would mean living on the moon, Meggie.”

“Yeah, well, that would work for me.” Megan’s laugh was rueful.

“I take it Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax Senior are still less than thrilled that their favorite son is engaged to Ron Raven’s daughter?” Liam pressed the button to summon the elevator, which was currently ten floors away.

“Less than thrilled barely begins to describe it. Try frothing-at-the-mouth furious, interspersed with occasional patches of icy disdain just for variety. They’d have a hard time reconciling themselves to the fact that their Southern gentleman son is living in sin with a damn Yankee, but the fact that I’m Ron Raven’s daughter sends them over the top.”

“They’ll come around, Meggie. Eventually, they’ll get tired of hating our father.”

“Will they?” She sighed. “Is that happy day going to arrive this century, do you think?”

“It’ll arrive when their daughter and granddaughter stop hurting because of what Dad did to them. You need to give everyone a few more weeks, Meg. It’s only three months since Avery Fairfax learned that her supposed husband was dead and that her marriage had never existed as a legal reality.”

“You’re right, I need to be patient, which is never my strong suit,” she said. “I guess I’m feeling extra sensitive because Adam and I were in Wyoming with Mom last week and the tension at the ranch just never let up. And then we flew back to Georgia and found even more hostility waiting for us. After a while, having your prospective in-laws fall silent every time you walk into the room gets kind of old. Adam gets it from Mom in Wyoming and I get a double dose from the Fairfaxes in Georgia.”

Liam was sorry to hear that their mother still wasn’t at ease with Megan’s choice of fiancé. He would have been more than willing to put in a positive word for Adam and his sister, but his own relationship with their mother was sufficiently rocky that interference from him was likely to do as much harm as good.

“Dad managed to mess with everyone’s emotions,” he said, giving another frustrated push to the elevator call button. “Even though Mom likes Adam and wants you to be happy, it still must seem to her as if you’re siding with the enemy.”

“You’re so right.” Megan smothered another sigh. “She tries hard, but she’s really uncomfortable when she has to spend time alone with Adam. If she finds herself in the same room with him, without a cushion of other people around, it’s obvious she’s thinking about just one thing—”

“The fact that Adam is not only a Fairfax, but Avery’s youngest brother.” Liam had no trouble finishing his sister’s sentence.

“You’ve got it. I know it’s hard for Mom to accept that Dad was the only villain in what happened, but he was. Avery and Adam were both his victims, just like she was.”

“Mom will accept that soon. She’s coming around.” Liam hoped he was speaking the truth. “Give it a bit more time, and I’m betting Mom won’t see Avery’s brother every time she looks at Adam. She’ll see Megan’s fiancé and a good guy.”

“God, I hope so. By the way, speaking of fiancés—” Megan’s voice turned a little breathless. “Adam and I are thinking of getting married at the beginning of next month. We thought we’d slip away for a few days over the Labor Day weekend.”

“Hey, congratulations! I’ll make sure to clear my calendar.” Despite his general disdain for the married state, Liam was surprisingly happy for his sister. He’d met Adam three times now and really liked the guy. “Will you have the ceremony in Wyoming? At the community church or at the ranch?”

There was a slight pause. “Neither place,” Megan said.

“In Georgia, then?” Liam was careful not to sound surprised by her choice. Megan loved Wyoming and the ranch; he’d simply assumed she would get married there.

“Adam and I can’t get married in Wyoming or in Georgia,” she said, and he could hear the regret in her voice. “And we can’t invite our families to the ceremony. Think about it. If we don’t invite the Fairfax clan, Adam will be sad and his family will be justifiably offended. If we do invite them, especially if we invite Avery, Mom is going to hate every minute of my wedding day.”

She had a valid point, Liam thought grimly. Jeez, what a mess. The elevator finally arrived and he stepped in, pushing the button for the seventh floor. In a perfect world, the Fairfaxes and the Ravens would be so happy for Megan and Adam that the past would have no importance. In the real world, Ron Raven’s bigamy cast a long and chilling shadow. It was unrealistic to expect the two widows to sit in church, smiling benevolently as Ellie’s daughter married Avery’s younger brother. And although Megan hadn’t mentioned anything about the media, unless they hired armed guards to surround the church and the ranch, the whole ceremony would probably end up being filmed for some sleazy tabloid TV show. Ron’s death had become one of those stories that the world of cable refused to let die.

“What are you going to do, then?” he asked. “Do you want to come to Colorado and get married in Denver? It would be easy for me to make all the arrangements and I might even be able to keep them secret, since I’m in the marriage business, so to speak…”

“Thanks. I appreciate the offer, Liam, but we’ve decided the best thing for us is to elope to Vegas.”

In normal circumstances, Vegas would have been just about the last place Megan would have chosen to get married and Liam felt a spurt of resentment on his baby sister’s behalf that the wedding of her dreams could never be. He was so taken aback at the thought of Megan in a wedding chapel on the Vegas strip that for a crucial moment he couldn’t come up with a damn thing to say.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said softly. “Don’t worry, Liam. I’m not regretting the white dress and the flower girls and the endless family conferences about who gets to sit at which table—”

“Why not?” he asked, sending a silent curse in the direction of his dead father, the most recent in a long and useless line of similar curses. “It’s a huge day in your life and it ought to be as special as you can make it.”

“It will be special.” Megan sounded completely sure of herself. “I’ll be marrying Adam, so it’s bound to be wonderful wherever we have the ceremony.”

The elevator clunked to a stop. Liam got out on his floor, amazed by his sister’s quiet exuberance. “You really love the guy, don’t you?”

“Yes, and fortunately he loves me, too.” She laughed. “That kind of puts the where-shall-we-have-the-ceremony issue into perspective. Before I met Adam, I used to fantasize about the perfect wedding. The only problem was that I had this huge hole where I was supposed to have a mental image of the groom. Now I realize the only thing that matters about a wedding is having the right person as your partner when you make your vows. The bridesmaids, the cake, the fancy dress and all the rest of it are basically irrelevant.”

“Speaking as a divorce lawyer, I can only say that I’m sure you’re right. I wish more people were as smart as my little sister.”

“No, you don’t, or you’d be unemployed!”

Liam laughed but there was a lump in his throat. Since he couldn’t deal with his emotions, today of all days, he spoke with deliberate briskness. “Adam seems like a good guy. Nowhere good enough for you, of course, but almost in the ballpark. Be happy, Meggie.”

“He’s a great guy, and I plan to be.” She broke off. “Oh my gosh, wait! We’re wading so deep into the sentimental stuff that I almost forgot the reason I called you in the first place. It’s about Dad.”

Liam winced, stopping outside the entrance to his offices. “Please don’t tell me Adam has uncovered more financial problems.”

“None that we didn’t know about already, thank goodness. Between the platinum mine in Belize and the disputed wills, I couldn’t take another financial disaster, or more documents to sign and send off to the probate court. No, this is something quite different. Do you remember Tricia Riley? She’s a distant cousin on Dad’s side of the family. Her grandmother and our grandmother were sisters.”

“I have a vague image from Grandma’s funeral.” Liam wrinkled his forehead. “She’s got curly hair a bit like yours, right? She was on the ditzy side, but smart in a geeky sort of way. As I recall, she used to work for a dotcom in Houston. She must be in her fifties by now.”

“Yes, that’s the one. She still does work in Houston, apparently for a company that manufactures household robots. She asked me to call her back when I had time to talk. She claimed she had something important she needed to discuss with me.”

“That sounds ominous. If she’s asking you to invest in her robots, I recommend you ask for a demonstration first.”

“That was precisely my thought, but we’re both offtrack. I called her back this morning and what Tricia had to say turned out to be a lot more worrying than robots designed to scrub the floors. Liam, she told me that she’d seen Dad in a shopping mall in Houston.”

“What? You’re kidding. She’s claiming to have seen Dad recently?”

“She says she saw him last week.”

“Good lord, she must be even more ditzy than she looks. So is she claiming to have seen him for real, in the flesh? Or are we talking visitations by a ghost?”

“Absolutely not ghosts. Tricia says she saw Dad going into Nieman Marcus in Houston. She called his name and hurried to catch up with him, but he ignored her. By the time she got into the store, he’d vanished.”

“Obviously she suffers from an overactive imagination,” Liam said, not sure whether to be irritated by his cousin or to pity her. He never understood why some people felt the need to turn commonplace events into major dramas, with themselves as the stars. “The guy didn’t turn around because he had no idea he was being called. He didn’t respond to somebody calling Ron Raven for the simple reason that wasn’t his name!”

“You’re singing my song. That’s exactly what I suggested to Tricia, but she wasn’t persuaded. She says she’s sure the man she saw was Ron Raven, or else his double. I pointed out that she didn’t know Dad all that well and that she hadn’t seen him in the twelve years since Grandma’s funeral, and she informed me that I was wrong. She’d had dinner with him in San Antonio a couple of months before he died. Apparently they discussed the possibility of Dad investing in her darn robots! She claims that she knows exactly what Dad looked like right before he was murdered and that this man—quote—had Dad’s way of walking.”

“That’s what Tricia’s basing her identification on?” Liam was torn between laughter and exasperation. “The way this man walked? She saw him at a distance, from the side at best and possibly even from behind, and now she’s positive it was Dad?”

“Apparently. That and the fact she insists the man saw her and recognized her. According to Tricia, he dodged into the store in order to avoid her.”

“She’s paranoid. Not to mention delusional.”

“Very possibly. But she’s already called the police in Miami to tell them they’ve made a mistake in assuming that Dad was murdered. Cousin Tricia has informed them he’s alive and they need to refocus their investigation.”

Liam rolled his eyes. “And what did the cops have to say?”

“Nothing that satisfied Tricia.” Megan groaned. “They thanked her for letting them know what she thought she’d seen and said they would investigate her claim as time and manpower permitted. In other words, they totally blew her off.”

“Are you surprised? My sympathies are with the cops on this one. They’d never get any work done on the real cases if they allowed themselves to get distracted by reports like Tricia’s.”

Megan hesitated for a moment. “You don’t think we ought to follow up with a private detective?”

Liam leaned against the wall outside his office, wanting to finish the call before he went inside. “Follow up what? How? There’s nothing to follow up.”

“That’s true, I guess.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“I am. Tricia may be nuts—”

“Tricia is nuts.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that much. But there are problems with the official police account of what happened the night Dad disappeared. The cops in Miami have closed the investigation, except for a half-hearted effort to track down Julio Castellano. But as I already told you, when Adam and I were in Belize, we met Castellano and spent quite a bit of time with him. He swore he wasn’t the killer.”

“I know. And you told me you and Adam are both inclined to believe him.”

“We’d be dead if not for Castellano,” Megan pointed out. “He put himself significantly at risk for our sakes, which makes it hard to see him as a brutal killer. And if he didn’t kill Dad, who did?”

“Well, if Tricia saw him in Houston, apparently nobody! Did she have any suggestions as to why Dad hasn’t let anyone know he’s still alive?”

“She suggested he might have amnesia.”

“If he has amnesia, why would he have run when she called his name?”

“You’re right. Her story is incoherent.” Megan hesitated for a moment. “Unless Dad deliberately chose to disappear.”

Liam’s stomach lurched, then quickly righted itself. “Why would Dad walk away from every penny he possesses? Does that seem likely to you? Or even remotely credible?”

“No,” Megan conceded. “But we have to face the fact that the cops in Miami have no idea what really happened the night Dad died.”

Now it was Liam’s turn to hesitate. He was much less convinced than his sister that Julio Castellano was as innocent as he had claimed, despite the fact that the guy had definitely helped to rescue Megan and Adam from the dangers they faced in Belize.

“We talked about this when you first got back from Belize,” he said in the end. “I agree the cops might have screwed up on the details of what happened the night Dad died, but their basic outline seems to be correct—”

“Sure. Apart from the minor detail that they have the wrong name pinned on the hit man.”

“In a sense, that is a detail. From what you told me about your trip to Belize, it seems that Uncle Ted knew plenty of people who wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Dad for quite a small sum of money. If not Julio Castellano, then take your pick of a dozen or so other smugglers and thieves hanging out in Las Criandas.”

Liam found it depressing to think about his Uncle Ted, a maternal uncle with as few ethical scruples as his father. Poor Sophie was certainly inheriting a package of unpleasant genes from the Raven side of her family, he reflected grimly. For her sake, he hoped to God that the scientists who claimed nurture was more important than nature were correct.

“The cops in Miami aren’t going to rethink their entire investigation without a stronger inducement than a vague sighting by a woman who didn’t know him all that well,” he said, forcing his thoughts away from his daughter. “It’s convenient for them to have Julio Castellano as the chief suspect. Who could be better to accuse of murder than a man who’s already been convicted and imprisoned for a previous killing?”

“Maybe a private investigator would find something powerful enough to turn the cops’ attention in new directions,” Megan suggested.

“But what could an investigator find? And how would he find it? Tricia hasn’t given us anything new to work with. She didn’t give you an address or a car registration for this guy she spotted. She didn’t even get a make or model of the car he was driving. All she gave us was the way he walks! Where the hell is that going to lead us? Nowhere.”

“You’re right.” Megan sounded wistful.

“You don’t sound entirely convinced.”

“No, I am. Of course, you’re right…”

“Look, if you want us to hire a detective to reexamine the events surrounding Dad’s disappearance, we should go for it. Except…what exactly are you going to instruct the guy to do? Even if we sent him to Belize, there’s nobody to question. Uncle Ted is dead. We haven’t a clue where to find Julio at this point—”

“I know. Tricia didn’t provide any new information we can follow up on and there are no other leads. Rationally, I knew that even before I called you.”

“There’s a melancholy note in your voice. What’s that all about, Meg?”

She hesitated for a moment. “I guess I realized when I was talking to Tricia that I haven’t quite accepted the finality of Dad’s death. He left so many issues unresolved that part of me feels mad at him for being at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where I can’t demand answers. I wanted Tricia to be right. I wanted Dad still to be alive. After a while, it eats at you to be angry with a dead person.”

“You’re right. But for my sake, I hope he’s not alive,” Liam said coolly. “Because if he ever did come back, I’d be tempted to kill him, and I have no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

Megan gave a wry laugh. “I think you’d have to stand in line. Ellie and Avery would both want to take the first shots.” She paused for a moment. “Tricia told me the cops in Miami have received four hundred and twenty-seven reports from people claiming to have seen our father. Isn’t that astonishing?”

“Not really. Police reports are generated in direct proportion to the amount of media attention. For a couple of weeks after Dad died, there was coast-to-coast, wall-to-wall TV coverage. The four hundred reports don’t mean anyone’s seen him, or even that they’ve seen a man who looks like him. It just means lots of lonely people like to feel connected to a celebrity murder.”

“It totally amazes me how much media attention our family is still attracting. I caught a snippet on the news just last night. They were doing a special report on the increase in cases of bigamy and polygamy, and they dragged out all the facts of Dad’s situation again.”

Liam had a suspicion it would be a while before the Ravens and the Fairfaxes could sink back into welcome obscurity. In life, Ron Raven had been rich and successful; in death, he was mysterious. The combination was irresistible to news outlets and his two families were suffering all the notoriety that really ought to have been Ron’s.

On the other hand, he wasn’t in a position to be judging other people’s failings right now, Liam reflected as he said goodbye to his sister and entered his office. His own choices and decisions over the past four years certainly didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Four years ago he’d spent the night with a woman dressed as Cleopatra whose real name he didn’t know and hadn’t made any effort to find out. That fact alone put last night’s careless seduction of No-Name into a new and unpleasant perspective. Clearly, he’d been pursuing a problematic lifestyle for several years. And what was his excuse? Four years ago, he’d been angry at the world because his father was a bigamist and the following year he’d had the bad luck to fall in love with a woman who’d murdered her husband. It was past time for him to admit that plenty of other people survived far worse. He’d chewed out Chloe this morning because she’d been unfaithful to her husband. Talk about the pot accusing the pan of being dirty! Okay, Chloe’s adultery had been reprehensible, but his own behavior would clearly not stand up to any sort of ethical scrutiny.

Awareness of his own culpability—that he’d behaved like a major dick—did nothing to improve Liam’s mood. In retrospect, he wished that he hadn’t been so damned smug this morning.

Chloe was already waiting for him in the small reception area, sipping water from a paper cup. She’d changed her ratty T-shirt for a soft cotton blouse that looked new, and her hair was combed into a smooth ponytail, held in place by a pewter-colored barrette. He felt a sharp jolt of sexual attraction as she crumpled the cup and tossed it into the trash, rising to her feet.

He pushed the attraction aside. God knew, where Chloe was concerned, sex had already gotten him into more than enough trouble. From now on, he was going to concentrate on thinking with his brain, a significantly smarter portion of his anatomy than his penis. Giving her a quick nod, he put the Cellini file on Jenny’s desk and tried to sound like a man in full control of his life.

“We’re finished with this case, Jenny, so you can send out the final bill.”

“Did we win?” Jenny asked.

“We did.” Liam gave a thumbs-up. Then he opened his office door and beckoned to Chloe. “Come on into my office,” he said. “I’m glad you made it back safely.” He was pleased with the casual courtesy of his opening gambit. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming you didn’t run into any trouble with the cops? Or the press?”

“I didn’t even see a squad car, thank goodness. And no journalists.”

“You got lucky. Quite often the journalists are more difficult to shake than the cops.”

Chloe followed him into his office. “I did what you instructed. I went to the mall at Park Ridge and watched a movie, although I couldn’t describe a single scene of what I supposedly saw. The worst thing about having the police believe I killed Jason is that I’ve been left with no time to mourn him. So every time I’m alone and quiet, I feel paralyzed with grief.”

Liam damped down another unwelcome rush of sympathy. Emotion and sound legal advice rarely went together. Besides, Chloe’s comments could be carefully calculated to evoke sympathy.

Until he took Sherri Norquist out for a celebratory dinner in the wake of the jury’s acquittal and she’d dropped her bombshell, he’d arrogantly assumed he would always know at some gut level whether or not his clients were guilty. Sherri had proved how ridiculous that assumption was. His feelings for her had also proved that he was quite capable of falling in love with a woman of dubious morals who lied easily and often. Sherri, it turned out, had murdered her husband because she wanted his money, and as far as Liam could tell she felt no remorse that the man was dead. Her only regret was that she hadn’t been clever enough to avoid arrest. Worst of all, she had assumed Liam would be delighted that he’d persuaded the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty, despite the fact that she was guilty as charged. She’d even offered to marry him as a reward for his superior professional skills. She’d been offended, not to mention furious, when he declined the honor.

At least Sherri had provided a crash course in humility. Liam considered himself a wiser, as well as more cynical, man these days. His basic assumption post-Sherri was that all his clients lied, at least some of the time. Many of them lied all the time. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Chloe fitted right into the general pattern, at least as far as the events surrounding her husband’s murder were concerned. If he was to provide effective legal counsel, his task was to find out where there were holes in her story that the prosecutor’s office might take advantage of and then find ways to plug those holes without encouraging her to commit perjury. A task that wasn’t likely to be easy.

“Let’s get right to the point, shall we?” He sat behind his desk and turned a deliberately distant gaze toward Chloe. He had to ask these questions, even though he placed no reliance on the accuracy of her answers. “Did you kill your husband?”

She flinched, but answered steadily enough. “No.”

“Did you pay somebody else to have him killed?”

“No!”

She sounded surprised by his question, rather than outraged, which made him marginally more inclined to believe her. Murderers falsely protesting their innocence tended to go heavily for moral indignation.

“Do you still want me to represent you?” he asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“Let me explain just one of the reasons why that isn’t a smart decision on your part. Here are the facts of your situation as I understand them. Your husband is dead, stabbed through the heart. The stabbing occurred last night, while you were in the house. It also occurred after you and Jason had been arguing. You were found next to the body, holding a bloody knife. As if that’s not trouble enough, your daughter is not Jason’s biological child. I already advised you that it’s essential to notify the police of this fact. At which point, I can almost guarantee the first question the cops will ask is the identity of Sophie’s father. What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing?” Chloe said, but her voice rose in a question.

He allowed himself a small smile. “I’m glad you were listening this morning. Nothing is a very good choice. However, the cops are going to press you for a name. The detectives working this case will be smart, and they’ll utilize every trick of the trade to persuade you to give them a name, because they’ll want it. Badly.”

“Why? Why in the world would they care?”

Liam’s smile turned bleak. “Because the police will suspect Sophie’s father—which would be me, of course—of being involved in the murder. They’ll want to question him. In other words, they’ll want to question me.”

She stared at him, eyes wide with shock. He was almost a hundred percent sure that such a possibility had never crossed her mind. “But that’s crazy! You had no idea about Sophie. You had absolutely no motive to want Jason dead.”

“True. But the police aren’t going to believe either one of us just because we happen to be telling the truth. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone last night so I have an alibi.” Depending on precisely when the mayor had been killed, Liam might still have been in the bar, in which case there were dozens of potential witnesses. If Jason Hamilton had been killed after 2:00 a.m., he had No-Name as proof that he’d been in an apartment on Alameda Avenue, and definitely not in the mayoral residence. Thank God he’d gone back to No-Name’s apartment last night and not to a motel. Otherwise, he’d have had no sure way to track her down, given that he had no clue what she was called. He grimaced in disgust at yet another reminder of the caricature that passed for intimacy in his life.

Chloe linked her fingers, gripping tightly. “If you have an alibi, your personal connection to the case is irrelevant. The police will know you’re not involved and it’s okay for me to hire you as my lawyer.”

He shook his head. “The fact that I’m not likely to be arrested doesn’t mean that I would be a good person to represent you in court. You came to me because you thought I’d be the lawyer who would work hardest to keep you out of prison, that I’d have a vested interest in keeping you safe because Sophie is my daughter. Unfortunately, you could hardly have chosen a worse person to approach than the man who fathered your child. If this case ever comes to trial, the D.A.’s office would use the connection to blow us away. You wouldn’t be the only person on trial in that situation. I would be, too. Almost before you could say cheating wife and sleazy lover, you’d be facing a jury who wouldn’t believe a word I was saying, and a judge who would question my professional ethics. And their doubts would be justified, given the circumstances.” The lingering stench from the Sherri Norquist trial wouldn’t help, either.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Chloe sounded as if she’d passed beyond the point of despair and had moved well into apathy.

“I’ve already given you the answer to that. If you actually reach the point of being arrested, you need to hire either Robyn Johnson or Bill Schuller. I’ll call both of them on your behalf if you like. In the meantime, until Robyn clears her calendar or Bill gets back in town, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you and your daughter safe. I’ll try very hard to insure that the police don’t arrest you until one or other of them agrees to represent you.”

Chloe’s head jerked up, and it was only when Liam saw the hope dawning in her eyes that he realized just how despairing she’d been previously. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate your help.”

Now that he’d given her hope, he’d better live up to it. Liam quickly assessed and discarded options. It was important to avoid crossing paths with the police until he knew exactly what had happened last night. On the other hand, the widow of the murdered mayor of a major city didn’t have many options open to her if she wanted to disappear. She was highly recognizable, and the press corps was going to be hunting her as hard as the police.

“What’s the name of your husband’s chief of staff?” he asked.

“Frederick Mitchell. Frederick Ambrose Mitchell.”

“Is he a good guy?”

She nodded. “He’s a friend, as well as Jason’s chief of staff.”

“Do you remember the number for his direct line?”

She nodded again and he pushed a scratch pad toward her. “Write it down for me, please.”

Chloe wrote the number and he depressed the intercom. “Jenny, here’s the number for the late mayor’s chief of staff. His name is Frederick Mitchell. Call him, please, and tell him that Mrs. Hamilton is grief stricken and exhausted. She plans to spend the night at a friend’s house, where she hopes to avoid any run-in with the media. She’ll be back at her home in Park Hill tomorrow morning around eleven. For the next few hours, Mrs. Hamilton would appreciate it if Frederick Mitchell would run interference for her with the cops and especially with the media.”

“Can I give him a number where he can reach Mrs. Hamilton if there’s an emergency?”

“Tell him that Mrs. Hamilton isn’t taking any phone calls tonight. Give him my cell number, and tell him I’ll pass on any urgent messages from him to Mrs. Hamilton and vice versa. Encourage him to tell the press that she’s not going to be returning to the mayor’s home tonight so that they pack up their cameras and go home.”

“I’ll take care of it. I’ll call right now.”

Liam made sure he’d cut the intercom connection before speaking again. He didn’t want Jenny to have any idea where Chloe was actually staying so that his receptionist would neither be required to stonewall or to lie if anyone happened to ask her.

“It’s better if you don’t return to your sister’s house tonight,” he said to Chloe. “The police don’t have enough manpower to stake out dozens of places, even in pursuit of the mayor’s murderer. But since they already know Sophie is staying with your sister, they’ve almost certainly spared at least one cop to watch her front door. I’ll bet they’re hoping to snag you for questioning when you come to pick up your daughter. In the circumstances, it would be best if you simply left Sophie at your sister’s.”

“I can’t do that.” Chloe was quiet but adamant. “I’m not going to leave her all night with Alexia. You’re forgetting it’s Sophie’s father who just died. She’s scared, she’s sad and I’ve already left her for much too long.”

“I’m not asking you to abandon your daughter, but you have to consider the big picture. She isn’t going to be reassured if you’re arrested when you go to pick her up.”

Chloe paled. “Maybe my sister could drive her to a hotel?”

Liam shook his head. “The police will follow your sister. Same result, except at a hotel with plenty of witnesses instead of at your sister’s house.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll have to pick up Sophie myself.”

“But how will you avoid the police? What’s the difference between you driving her to a hotel and my sister making the same drive?”

“I’ve had some practice in evading both the cops and the media. Above all, nobody will be looking for me. At this point, the police and the media have no idea there’s any connection between the two of us.” He held out his cell phone. “Use my phone to call your sister. Did you say her name is Alexia?”

“Yes.”

“Tell Alexia I have your permission to pick up your daughter. If she asks where I’m taking Sophie, or where you plan to spend the night, explain that you can’t tell her. That way, Alexia can’t be tricked into revealing your destination.”

“If the police ask her where I’ve gone, what should she say to them?”

“She should tell them the truth—that she has no idea if you’re even still in town. If they press her, she should insist that she’ll say nothing further unless she has a lawyer present. If the police decide she’s hiding relevant information, they could be persistent enough to be unpleasant. Having a lawyer present will prevent that.”

Chloe fiddled with the cell phone, looking troubled. “I had no idea I’d be dragging my sister into the middle of such a mess when I asked her to look after Sophie. Isn’t there some less complicated way to do this?”

“Trust me, this is a lot less complicated than having you spend the night in jail.”

“In jail?” She stared at him, eyes wide. “Surely they wouldn’t put me in jail!”

“Why not?” He was deliberately brutal. “Because you’re pretty? Because you won an Olympic medal? Because you married an important man?”

“I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t implying I deserved special treatment. But I assumed I could post bail even if they arrested me…”

“You can. As soon as a judge sets bail. If the cops arrest you tonight, you’d be required to stay in jail until court is in session tomorrow.”

He’d managed to scare her to the point that her cheeks were now dead-white. “You really think I’m going to be arrested, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “It’s a high-profile case. That works for you and against you. The cops will be more careful building their case, and they’ll make sure it’s strong before they seek any warrants. On the other hand, they can’t possibly let the murder of the mayor go unsolved, so there’s going to be a lot of pressure on them to make an arrest.”

“But how in the world can I prove that I didn’t kill Jason?”

“I don’t know that yet. If I’m going to help you, I need to find out everything that happened last night in painstaking detail. That’s why I need you and Sophie to stay with me at my apartment so that you and I can take as long as we need to discuss the case. I can only work out a strategy once I know everything you know about what happened last night.”

“I understand.” Chloe straightened her spine, almost visibly girding herself for battle. Liam saw the return of some of the fire and strength of mind which he knew must be an integral part of her character. Any woman capable of achieving gold medal status in an Olympic event as challenging as downhill skiing must have courage to spare.

“I appreciate the offer of safe haven in your home, Liam. That’s far more generous of you than I could expect.”

“You’re welcome.” That was more true than he would have liked.

“There’s one thing we have to get clear, though.” Chloe’s mouth firmed into a straight, determined line. “You do understand there’s no way I can allow you to tell Sophie you’re her biological father—”

“Not tonight. Of course not.”

“Not tonight, and perhaps not ever.”

There was no way in hell he’d allow a child of his to grow up not knowing the truth about her parentage. He’d seen what happened to families built on a foundation of well-meaning lies and it wasn’t pretty. But that was a battle for another night, and he completely agreed with Chloe that a few hours after Jason’s death was no time to be burdening a three and a half year old with the knowledge that the man she loved hadn’t been her biological father.

“I agree that we need to protect Sophie,” he said. “Tonight we’re going to do that by developing a strategy for keeping you out of jail. Telling Sophie that I’m her father—”

“Jason was her father.”

He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Telling Sophie that I’m her biological father is a discussion for another night. We need to take this one logical step at a time. Right now, that means we need to get Sophie back to my apartment without alerting the cops. Go ahead, Chloe. Call your sister. Let her know I’ll be leaving to pick up Sophie within the next ten minutes.”

Four

Chicago, the Same Morning

Paul Fairfax climbed onto the stationary bike in his custom-designed exercise room and grunted in annoyance when he saw that his wife had altered the settings. This was his favorite piece of equipment and Julia knew it. He wished she’d stick to the treadmill, for Christ’s sake, since she was the one who’d insisted on spending thousands on the fanciest damn treadmill manufactured in the entire United States. Probably the fanciest treadmill in the entire goddamn world, Paul reflected morosely, since Julia’s ability to spend money reached a level that came close to high art.

God forbid that she should change her spending and shopping habits now, he thought sarcastically. He’d warned her repeatedly since Ron Raven died that things were tough and the business was going through a little rough patch. He might as well have been telling the wind blowing over Lake Michigan to stop ruffling the surface of the water.

Not that he expected his financial problems to last for long, Paul reassured himself. He was twice as shrewd as Ron had ever been, and the fact that he’d been unable to raise any new investment capital since Ron’s disappearance didn’t mean that the Chicago business community thought that Ron had been blessed with better instincts for turning a profit. How could anyone think that? Paul would never accept that good ole boy Ron, dragged up by a ranching family in the wilds of Wyoming, had been smarter than him—the eldest son and heir to a fine Southern family with roots growing three hundred years deep in the rich Georgia soil.

Changing the bike settings back to his liking, Paul flicked the switch and started pedaling. The challenging routine he’d designed for himself was so ingrained by now that he would have to put in at least fifteen minutes of intensive effort before he felt the rewarding tug of muscles that meant his workout was paying off. It was a never-ending struggle to keep his fifty-three-year-old body looking and behaving ten years younger than his calendar age, but it was a struggle Paul was determined to win.

God forbid that he should ever get a paunch of the sort Ron Raven had developed over the past couple of years. Paul despised people who didn’t have sufficient discipline and willpower to keep their bodies in shape. Ron had no real willpower where his physique was concerned. He’d constantly bemoaned his weight problems, but he’d loved gourmet food and vintage wines far too much to stick to a diet.

Paul had always been mystified by the way Avery had fallen instantly in love with a man as crude as Ron Raven. He was even more mystified by the fact that his sister had apparently remained in love, right up until the day a Chicago cop came and informed her that Ron Raven was not only missing from his Miami hotel room, but that he had another wife and family living in the godforsaken hick town of Thatch, Wyoming. As a crowning insult, the woman in Thatch was actually Ron’s legal wife. Avery, a flower of Southern womanhood, had been nothing more than Ron Raven’s long-term mistress.

Ron had been downright rough around the edges when he first came into Avery’s life but for some mysterious reason, she’d been captivated by Ron’s self-confidence and aura of bravado. When Avery announced her engagement, Paul pointed out to her that Ron was as brash as he was bullheaded. Avery had laughed and replied that her fiancé’s brashness was one of the things she liked best about him. She’d claimed it was refreshing after too many years of being surrounded by men whose energy had been sapped by generations of keeping up appearances under the merciless Georgia sun.

Paul had to admit that Ron had been handsome enough back in those days. It was infuriating, though, that Ron’s magnetism hadn’t faded with the passing years as his waistline expanded and his hair grayed. What the hell had been the root of his appeal? True, the guy had been blessed with bedroom eyes. True, his bluff manner somehow conveyed a hint of the intellectual power and business smarts hidden behind the jovial facade. But Ron had looked every one of his fifty-seven years. What’s more, he’d developed the beginning of arthritis in his knees and he’d lost his springy stride. His hands had been stubby and gnarled with calluses. He’d looked, in fact, as if he actually worked on his damned cattle ranch.

The memory of Ron’s frequent trips to the Wyoming ranch and the rival wife he’d kept there was enough to make Paul’s heart pump fast with rage. He still couldn’t believe how Raven had fooled them all. To think that Ron had spent twenty-seven years with his legal wife tucked away at the Flying W Ranch, while Avery stayed in Chicago, living in a fool’s paradise with no legal claim to the wealth and prestige that her skills as a hostess had helped Ron secure. And all the time he, Paul Fairfax, had been adding class to Raven Enterprises—not to mention lending legitimacy to the scam of Ron’s second bigamous marriage—by acting as business partner to the cheating son of a bitch.

Even if Paul could have forgiven Ron for deceiving Avery, he could never forgive his former business partner for the fact that he’d exposed the entire Fairfax family to public humiliation. Ron’s bigamy shamed everyone it touched, leaving Paul to go through life knowing that people he met were sniggering behind their hands because his sister had never actually been married to the man she lived with for over a quarter of a century. Paul’s blood pressure had skyrocketed in the wake of that humiliating discovery and he’d never been able to bring it down since. Another injury to lay directly at Ron’s door, Paul thought angrily. Taking blood pressure pills was something only a loser should have to do and he was absolutely not a loser.

He mopped away the first welcome beads of sweat, admiring his own elegant fingers and buffed, neatly-trimmed nails as he did so. Unlike Ron, he would never be confused for a man who worked with his hands. The thought comforted him slightly. What the hell. Ron was officially dead and Paul was very much alive, which gave him the last laugh after all. Best of all, he was finally in charge of Raven Enterprises, after years suffering as Ron’s junior partner. He’d run into a couple of financial rough spots over the past couple of months, but he’d soon be raking in the big bucks. To hell with all those tight-ass bankers who wouldn’t lend him fresh investment funds. When the Arran project came on line, they’d be singing a different song.

His mood lightening as the endorphins kicked in, Paul clicked the remote fastened to the exercise bike. He muted the sound until the ads finished and the news came back on. The weather forecaster promised a day of high temperatures, low cloud and lots of humidity. Paul pulled a face. Jeez, what a miserable climate the city of Chicago had to endure. The summer was barely more tolerable than the winter. Thank God for air-conditioning.

“Let’s go now to our affiliate in Denver,” the anchor said, “where we’re following a breaking story.”

Paul frowned, irritated by the interruption. He tuned in to the local Chicago news precisely so that he wouldn’t have to be taken to Denver, or anywhere else. Who the hell cared about breaking news a thousand miles to the west? He resigned himself to watching pictures of forests burning because some idiot had thrown away a lighted cigarette.

“It was reported just before dawn that the mayor of Denver has been murdered,” a reporter for the affiliate intoned, standing in front of a large Tudor-style home on a sunny street lined with huge old trees.

“The police department is now confirming that the violent death of Jason Hamilton, one of the nation’s most popular mayors, was caused by multiple stab wounds inflicted by an unknown assailant. The mayor was struck quote several times, the blows landing in the general area of the heart and lungs. The police department isn’t saying anything more about the precise cause of death until the preliminary autopsy results are complete, which should be some time tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there are no official suspects, but the chief of police has confirmed that the mayor’s wife, Chloe Hamilton, was found by the couple’s nanny with a bloody knife in her hands, kneeling beside her husband’s body.

“Chloe Hamilton won the gold medal for downhill skiing in the 1998 Winter Olympics, as well as a silver and a bronze in the same Olympics. In addition, she won a bronze medal during the 1992 winter Olympics in Albertville, France, when she was only sixteen. Before being elected mayor of Denver, Jason Hamilton successfully developed property in Telluride and Steamboat Springs….”

Jason Hamilton was dead! Paul stared at the screen and the bike jerked to a halt as he forgot to pedal.

His stomach roiled and for a dreadful moment he was afraid he would throw up. What a fucking disaster. He had every cent he could scrape up invested in Sam DiVoli’s new building project, and with Jason Hamilton dead, they could probably whistle their chances of rezoning approval into the wind.

Paul switched off the power to the bike and listened intently to the rest of the report from Denver, where it was still only six-thirty in the morning. You didn’t have to search too hard for a subtext to realize that Chloe Hamilton was the prime suspect in the death of her husband. Paul didn’t put as much faith in the news reports as he would have three months earlier. Having lived through the media frenzy that followed Ron Raven’s disappearance, he knew better than to believe everything he heard on any news program. It was possible that Chloe Hamilton had killed her husband, but he wouldn’t put money on it. Personally, he would be more inclined to believe Edgar Showalter had ordered the hit. God knew, Edgar was ruthless enough. Not to mention furious that Sam DiVoli had bought the Arran property out from under his nose, acting on a tip that came directly from Jason Hamilton.

Slinging his towel around his neck, Paul hurried into the library, barely noticing his wife when he passed her coming out of the master bedroom.

Julia gave him a nervous smile. “Paul, do you remember that we’re having dinner with the Feldmanns tonight? It’s black tie. Eight o’clock.”

He didn’t remember because Julia had never mentioned the invitation until right now. She knew how much he disliked the Feldmanns, so she had clearly hoped to corner him into accepting an invitation he would otherwise have insisted on refusing.

“Why the hell are we having dinner with the Feldmanns? You know the only reason they ever invite us is because they want a donation for one of their damned charities.”

Julia’s thin, pointed face took on the mulish expression he so disliked. There was a price attached to keeping a forty-nine-year-old body fitting into size four designer clothes, and Julia’s face was paying it. “The Feldmanns know everyone who’s anyone in Chicago. There are going to be lots of people there with money to invest—”

There was so much else going on right now that he couldn’t be bothered to disabuse Julia of her naive notions of how capital was actually raised. “Okay, okay. I’ll be home at seven.”

Julia was shocked into silence. He shut the library door before she could find her voice. His wife speechless was a rare enough occurrence that he needed to savor the moment. He had Sam’s number on his speed-dial, and he barely waited for the door to cut off the view of Julia’s startled expression before he pressed the appropriate key.

“Hello.” Sam picked up the phone right away, but he sounded both sleepy and disgruntled.

“This is Paul Fairfax. You need to switch on your TV right now. Jason Hamilton’s dead. He’s been murdered.”

“Jason’s dead? Murdered? Christ almighty. There has to be a mistake!”

“It’s all over the news. He was killed last night. Stabbed to death in the mayoral mansion.”

“Jesus H. Christ, that’s impossible! I just had dinner with the mayor last night. I had some friends in from D.C. and we were talking about Jason running for the Senate—”

“Well, he’s dead now.” Paul wasn’t interested in hearing how close Jason and Sam had been, and even less interested in hearing about the mayor’s ambitions to hold national political office. Bottom line, Sam’s friendship with the mayor meant zilch now that the guy was dead. It could even be a negative as political factions lined up behind new players.

“I guess that means we can kiss goodbye to getting the Arran property rezoned any time in the next year or two.” Paul didn’t bother to hide his resentment that Sam DiVoli had taken so goddamn long to get the zoning variances he’d promised to deliver when Paul forked over money he goddamn couldn’t afford. “The zoning committee is stacked with Edgar Showalter’s people, and they’ll never grant us a variance.”

Sam swore with truly remarkable variety and fluency. “They’ll stonewall us at best,” he said when he finally ran out of curses. “And every day we can’t get started is costing us money. Worst case, they’ll flat out reject the rezoning, and then the project is dead.”

Paul’s stomach knotted with dread. He simply couldn’t allow this project to turn sour. “There’s going to be a couple of weeks of confusion in the wake of Jason’s death,” he pointed out. “We need to get to somebody powerful on the zoning committee before Showalter has them lined up and on the record as opposed to the Arran rezoning.”

“Yeah, great idea.” Sam’s voice oozed sarcasm. “Which councilman do you suggest we approach while they’re all busy issuing statements mourning the loss of the mayor.” He broke off. “Damn, Jason was a good guy. I’m sorry he’s gone. He would have made a truly fine senator.”

Paul couldn’t spare time to waste mourning the mayor. “What’s the name of the annoying little Nazi who guarded access to Jason as if he was in charge of the gateway to heaven?”

“Fred Mitchell,” Sam said. “He is…correct that. He was the mayor’s chief of staff. Jesus! I can’t believe Jason’s dead. Son of a gun, he was right here, enjoying dinner, less than twelve hours ago. He was smart and honest, too. You don’t get many politicians like that. Especially not with approval ratings like Jason was getting. Dammit, his death is a real loss to the community.”

Not to mention a real loss to the Arran project. Sam needed to get his thinking focused on what was important here, namely that there was nobody left to get their project the zoning variance it needed and that Paul’s financial future was on the line. It was a hell of a nuisance that he had to rely on Sam, Paul reflected, but he really had no choice. The man had a knowledge of the inner workings of Denver city government that was second to none. Paul sure as hell hoped the guy would be able to put that knowledge to good use and pull a rabbit out of the hat. The financial consequences of an implosion of the Arran project were more than Paul could bear to contemplate.

“I’m going to fly out to Denver right now,” Paul said. Sam might know Denver politics, but when the going got really tough, Sam backed off. He would apply pressure, but only so much. Paul, on the other hand, had discovered that if bribes didn’t work, a touch of polite blackmail could usually turn the trick. Sam was one of those naive, old-fashioned types who scorned bribes and didn’t understand blackmail—although he knew exactly where all the bodies were buried.

“I can maybe catch the ten-thirty flight.” Paul was already walking toward his bedroom. “With the time difference, I could be in Denver before noon. I’ll go straight to your offices. We need to plan our strategy.”

“What are you smokin’, Paul? Nobody in the mayor’s office is going to be meeting with developers today. For Christ’s sake, Jason Hamilton’s dead! Show the man some respect, will you?”

“I’m sure he was the best mayor in the country. But showing him respect isn’t going to get the Arran zoning sewn up before Edgar Showalter can fuck us over. We need to get somebody on the zoning committee to sign off on the paperwork. Today, if possible. I’ll see you this afternoon, Sam.” Paul hung up the phone before DiVoli could object some more. Maybe the millions at stake didn’t matter all that much to Sam, but they sure as hell mattered to Paul.

He walked through the empty bedroom and into the shower. Julia was already dressed. He could hear her down in the kitchen, grinding beans for their thousand-fucking-dollar super-deluxe espresso machine. He wouldn’t tell his wife he was going to miss the Feldmanns’ dinner, Paul decided. He’d call once he landed in Denver. That would teach her to try to manipulate him into accepting invitations from people she knew he didn’t like.

Paul turned the water on full blast and calculated how much he and Sam DiVoli might have to shell out in bribes to get the rezoning sewn up. Right now he was so strapped for cash that it might even be difficult to come up with a bribe big enough to do the trick. Maybe they should bag the idea of bribery and move straight on to blackmail. If that was the route they took, Sam would be crucial to their success. If you were important enough to have a secret, and you lived in Denver, Sam knew your secret. He was a useful business partner to have, Paul reflected, provided he didn’t get sidetracked by an annoying attack of civic responsibility. Sometimes Sam DiVoli was just too damned honest to be reliable.

Paul couldn’t afford to let this become one of those occasions on which Sam was afflicted with a conscience. The entire financial future of Raven Enterprises was riding on the success or failure of the Arran project.

He’d already suffered the public humiliation of being identified as the business partner of a bigamist. He sure as hell wasn’t going to go bankrupt because that same damn bigamist wasn’t around to tell him where to invest his money. Whatever the business and financial communities might think, Paul Fairfax was every bit as smart an investor as Ron Raven had ever been. The Arran project would prove that to all the doubters and then Raven Enterprises could be renamed Fairfax Enterprises, which it should have been from the first.

Bottom line: the Arran project simply could not be allowed to fail. It was Paul’s ticket out of a deep financial hole and into a promising future.

Five

Conifer, near Denver, the Evening of August 7

Liam drove slowly along the twists and turns of Coyote Lane, looking for 356, the house belonging to the Mallorys, Chloe’s sister and brother-in-law. The road was narrow and gravel-surfaced, in keeping with Conifer’s past as a frontier town, but the houses still managed to project an aura of yuppie success with front yards expensively landscaped to look untamed.

In keeping with the phony rural atmosphere, there were no sidewalks, no mailboxes and the house numbering seemed expressly designed to be invisible from the road. This last feature would have been infuriating except that it provided Liam with an excuse to brake often and scope out his surroundings, all the while creating the impression that he was simply searching for his destination.

Once he had the house located, Liam checked again for any cops in the vicinity. There were only three vehicles within sight and two of them seemed harmless: an empty Mercedes parked in a driveway and a landscaping truck at the far end of the cul-de-sac. Liam could hear members of the landscaping crew calling out to each other in Spanish as they loaded equipment onto the truck in preparation for leaving. The men were working too hard and much too efficiently to be undercover cops, Liam decided.

By contrast, the phone company van parked a couple of houses down from the Mallorys struck him as highly suspicious. In his experience, phone companies no longer made service calls after six, whatever type of emergency the customer pleaded. In addition, there was no activity around this particular vehicle. The man in the driver’s seat had been staring at the same clipboard of papers ever since Liam first noticed him. Eighty-twenty the guy was a cop, Liam decided. Thank goodness there was no reason for him or his car to provoke any special interest.

Taking care not to glance back toward the cop, he parked his BMW right in the driveway and jogged up the front steps. The Mallorys’ front door was opened by a man about Liam’s own age, holding a small boy in his arms. The boy’s nose was painted blue and he had green stars stuck on his cheeks, but otherwise he seemed a pretty regular kid bordering on the cute, in fact. Not that Liam considered himself an expert on toddler cuteness. His attitude toward kids was pretty similar to his attitude toward tiger cubs: they looked adorable, were incredibly difficult to raise and could bite off chunks of your flesh if you didn’t treat them right.

“You must be Liam,” the man said, shifting the toddler to a different arm so that he could shake Liam’s hand. “I’m Tom Mallory, Chloe’s brother-in-law.”

“Hey, Tom. Good to meet you.”

“And this is Peter, our son. Chloe’s nephew.” Tom jiggled his arms, bouncing Peter, who didn’t crack a smile.

Liam told himself it was ridiculous to feel intimidated by a toddler with a blue nose. “Hi, Peter, how are you doing?”

The toddler stared at him in silence. Not hostile, exactly, but definitely assessing. Liam decided that a tiger cub would have been easier. At least nobody would have expected him to hold a conversation with a tiger.

“Come on in,” Tom said, stepping to one side, apparently not expecting his son to speak. “This is a terrible situation, isn’t it?”

Liam nodded, relieved to turn his attention back to a grown-up. “Yes. It’s bad enough that Chloe’s lost her husband, but it’s worse that she isn’t getting a moment’s peace and quiet to grieve for him.”

“Jason was a good guy and a terrific mayor. His passing is a terrible loss for a lot of people.” Tom frowned and then shook his head. “Anyway, it’s great to know you’re on Chloe’s team. Her whole family is very relieved that she’s moved quickly to get the legal help she needs instead of relying on the fact that she’s innocent to protect herself.”

Liam certainly agreed with that. “Innocence is a lousy defense if it’s all you have to bring to the table. But I’m hopeful we’ll soon find concrete evidence to point the cops in another direction.”

“God, I hope so. And it can’t be too soon as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, Lexie’s just finished feeding the kids their dinner, so Sophie is good to go whenever you’re ready to take her.” Tom shoved a plastic horse out of the way with his foot, sending it skittering toward the staircase. “Sorry about the mess. Dinner time is always chaotic around here and tonight Lexie is trying to give Sophie a bit more one-on-one attention than usual, so clearing up has to wait.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m awestruck by people who can cope with even one child, let alone multiple preschoolers.”

“You don’t have kids of your own?” Tom asked.

“I’ve never been married,” Liam responded, as if that answered the question. He had known the truth of his fatherhood for less than twelve hours and already he could see that everyday conversation was going to be filled with booby traps. His choice seemed to be constant lies or a head-on clash with Chloe. At some point she would have to accept that he wasn’t willing to abide by her wish that Sophie should spend her life in the mistaken belief that Jason had been her biological father. But for tonight, he’d given Chloe his word and he would stick to it. Eventually he would have to decide whether to be actively involved in Sophie’s life. He was pretty sure he’d make a lousy father, but at least he wanted his daughter to know his name, for God’s sake.

The parallels to his own father’s life were too powerful to ignore, and not at all attractive. In the wake of their father’s death, Megan had suggested that it might have been a desire to protect his existing family that had propelled Ron into a twenty-six year pattern of criminal deception. Liam had found that explanation incredible two months ago. Now he was having second thoughts. Had the whole bigamous mess of Ron Raven’s life started as innocently as his father not wanting to hurt the people he loved? It was possible, Liam conceded grudgingly. After all, that was exactly what Chloe had chosen to do for Sophie—hide the truth beneath a more palatable sugarcoating. And Chloe’s ploy would have worked, if her husband hadn’t been murdered—just as Ron Raven’s ploy had worked for more than two decades.

Liam circled a giant plastic tub of toys deposited in the center of the hallway, not willing to cut either Chloe or his father any slack. Ron had screwed up, literally, and then lied to cover his ass. Ron’s possible desire to protect his wife and children from being hurt didn’t excuse either his initial adultery or the next quarter century of deception. Chloe’s choices, in Liam’s opinion, had been just as wrong.

He followed Tom into the family room, his breath catching in his throat when he saw a little girl sitting on the floor surrounded by an array of Barbie dolls. Chloe had claimed that Sophie was an amazing child and it seemed she hadn’t been exaggerating. This little girl was picture-perfect, from her mop of golden curls to her tiny button nose and petal-soft rosy lips.

She jumped to her feet and greeted them both with a beaming smile the moment she noticed them. His daughter seemed to be friendly as well as adorably cute, Liam thought with a stab of irrational pride.

“Hi,” she said to him, waving the naked Barbie clutched in her left hand. “I’m Morgan. I’m four. Soon I’ll be five.” She held up four fingers on her right hand and then pointed toward Peter. “My bruvver is three. It’s a long time till his next birfday.” She adjusted her fingers to provide Liam with a demonstration of the number three.

The child’s name was Morgan? The delectable little girl was not, it seemed, Chloe’s child or his daughter. Liam pushed aside a twinge of regret and tried to decide how he was supposed to respond to Morgan’s overture. “I’m thirty-five,” he said finally, since age seemed big in her life at this point.

Morgan’s eyes opened wide. “That’s old,” she informed him. “That’s very old.”

“Er…yes, I guess it is.”

“My grandpa is old. My grandma is old. My nana is old. My poppa is old. Miss Rose is old—”

“Who is Miss Rose?” Liam asked, interrupting what threatened to become an endless litany of the aged. “Is she your teacher?”

“No!” Morgan chuckled at his ridiculous mistake. “Miss Rose is my dog. She frew up on Mommy’s shoes ’cos she ate Peter’s chicken nuggets. Mommy shut her in the laundry room.”

Liam had no idea how to respond to this wealth of information. Tom, on the other hand, simply laughed.

“The bit about throwing up on Mommy’s shoes might have been more than we needed to know, Morgan, love. Peter, you can play with your sister for a while.” He set his son on the floor and dragged a box of wooden blocks into the center of the room. “Build a house for Morgan’s dolls,” he suggested. “Build a red house.”

Peter, clearly a man of few words, sat down without complaint and carefully selected a dozen or so red blocks. “He’s very good with his colors,” Tom said proudly. “He knows them all.”

“Er…great.” Liam felt as if he’d been plunged into a foreign country where he spoke only a textbook version of the language and didn’t quite grasp the native customs. According to Morgan, Peter was three years old. Didn’t all three year olds know their colors?

“Do you like how I fixed Barbie’s hair?” Not wanting to be overlooked, Morgan extended her naked doll for closer inspection and Liam noticed that the stiff blond hair was haphazardly decorated with glittery pins.

“Er…very nice,” he said.

Tom smiled. “Barbie is beautiful, honey bun. I love all those pink diamonds. Why don’t you try dressing her in a skirt to match? Then she can go to the ball.”

Morgan frowned. “She’s not Cinderella. She’s Barbie.”

“Right. But Barbie can go to a ball if she wants.”

Morgan considered this in silence for a second or two, then shrugged. “Daddy, tell Peter not to pull the heads off of my Barbies.”

“Peter, are you listening? No chopping off Barbie’s head, okay?”

Peter interrupted his turret building long enough to give a reluctant nod.

“Okay, be good both of you. Don’t fight. I’ll be right back.” Tom appeared unaware of anything in the least strange about his conversation with his kids. Maybe discussion of head-removal was a normal exchange when you were dealing with preschoolers? Since he’d been thirteen by the time Megan was four, Liam had spent very little time playing with his sister but for sure he couldn’t recall harboring any murderous impulses toward her Barbie dolls.

Liam followed Tom out of the family room, trying to remember when he’d last spoken to a human being under the age of twelve. He supposed it must have happened at least once or twice during the past fifteen years, but he’d be damned if he could remember the occasion.

A slender, pretty woman sat at the kitchen table across from a tiny little girl with poker straight, mouse-brown hair who was coloring with magic markers. The child’s head was bent so intently over her task that it was impossible to see her face. The little girl didn’t send a single glance toward the newcomers, but the woman rose to her feet, her smile not quite hiding both fatigue and worry.

“Liam?” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, holding out her hand. “Hi, I’m Alexia, Chloe’s sister. I’m so glad you’ve agreed to help us. I’ve seen you on TV several times and your glowing reputation precedes you.”

Liam let the possible reference to Sherri Norquist’s trial slide over him. Surprisingly, it barely stung. “With any luck we’ll be able to get Chloe’s problems squared away fast,” he said. “Then your sister won’t need my help or anyone else’s.”

Alexia didn’t look reassured. “I’m not optimistic about this being resolved quickly,” she said, her voice low. “The whole situation is made-for-TV perfect and, boy, are they reveling in the mess.” She glanced quickly toward Sophie, who gave no sign that she’d even noticed Liam’s arrival in the room, much less that she was paying attention to the conversation. Once again, Liam was forcefully reminded of his own family’s situation only two months earlier. Media intrusion then had been a nightmare for his mother and sister. He could barely imagine how much worse it would be if you were trying to shield young children from a brutal reality.

“I have a couple of questions for you,” Alexia murmured, walking over to the sink where she stood staring at the dish detergent as if she couldn’t remember why she was there.

Liam followed, gesturing toward Sophie when Alexia didn’t speak. “Is your niece going to be upset at being picked up by a complete stranger?”

Alexia shook her head. “I’ve told her the truth—that you’re here to drive her home—so I’m sure she’ll go with you willingly. She’s taking the loss of her father very hard. She’s been frighteningly quiet today.” She gave a quick shrug. “Although I guess that’s a dumb thing to say. How else could she take Jason’s death except badly?”

“It’s a difficult situation all around and the media attention makes everything that much more difficult.” Liam winced at the platitude but he was sneaking covert glances at his daughter and didn’t have much brain power to spare for conversing.

“Especially in our family. Did you know that our father—Chloe’s and mine—is the deputy superintendent of schools in Colorado Springs?”

“No, I wasn’t aware that Chloe had parents in the state.”

“We all moved here in the late eighties, when Chloe started serious training for the Olympics. Once we were here, we fell in love with Colorado and never left.”

He’d been ignorant of that, along with virtually every other fact about Chloe’s life. “Is your father’s profession significant for some reason?” he asked.

“Well, just that he’s such an important figure in their community and the notoriety of Jason’s murder is already proving horribly difficult for him and my mother.” Alexia sighed. “Dad always tries so hard to set a good example for his students. Family is really important to him and to my mother. This is just the pits.”

Tough for dad, maybe, but the situation wasn’t exactly easy on Chloe, either. “I’ll do my best to prevent the situation getting any worse than it already is,” Liam said coolly. “I recommend, however, that you and your parents avoid piling any more burdens on your sister’s shoulders, even by implication. She’s carrying a heavy enough load as it is.”

Alexia flushed. “I’m sorry. I must have sounded like a jerk just now. That’s what comes of listening to my mother cry into the phone all afternoon. She’s terribly worried about Chloe, of course.”

But not worried enough to have driven up from Colorado Springs, apparently. Liam stowed that fact away for future reference. “I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to keep your sister out of jail,” he said. “You can pass that information on to your parents if it will make them feel any better.”

Alexia stared at him in mute horror and he realized that, despite everything, the possibility of her sister ending up behind bars hadn’t hit home until this moment. She rubbed her forehead, as if trying to send away a sudden headache.

“The talk show hosts have been salivating at the possibility of Chloe in prison for the past couple of hours,” Alexia admitted. “The fact is, I was so angry at their outrageous comments that I dismissed everything they said as ridiculous.”

“Most of what they said probably was. Still, we have to manage the timing of your sister’s arrest—if it comes—in such a way that the police have no excuse to hold her in jail overnight while we wait for a bond hearing. That can be trickier than it sounds. Accused murderers are usually required to wait trial in custody, but I’m optimistic we can persuade a judge not to lock Chloe up.”

Alexia took a few seconds to absorb the horrifying prospect of her sister awaiting trial behind bars. Apparently, she couldn’t handle the implications and changed the topic. “It’s mind-blowing that the media can use Jason’s murder as entertainment,” she said. “Chloe was the most loyal wife you could imagine, but the TV reporting today managed to make her sound like a nympho on steroids. They interviewed every guy in Colorado she ever dated from the time she was sixteen and edited the sound bites so you’d have thought she spent her life hopping from bar to drunken party and back again. How the hell do they think she won her Olympic medals? By falling out of bed and whizzing down the ski slopes between parties? Have they any idea—any remote clue—what it takes to train for such dangerous and grueling races?”

The annoying thing about the media, Liam reflected cynically, was not that they were so often wrong, but that they were occasionally dead right. Alexia seemed to think Chloe was a saint; Sophie’s existence proved she was, at the very least, capable of breaking her marriage vows and committing adultery. He sneaked another glance at the top of his daughter’s head, which was all he could see since she was still coloring with fanatic concentration. He doubted if Sophie could hear what was being said and he reassured himself that there was no chance that a three-year-old—an age level that apparently had trouble distinguishing red from blue—would be able to grasp the significance of the conversation.

Liam forced himself to turn away from his daughter. There was no point in shattering Alexia’s glossy image of her sister. In fact, from a defense attorney’s point of view, family and relatives who firmly believed in a suspect’s innocence were valuable assets and he needed to bolster Alexia’s good opinion of her sister.

“The reporters are probably annoyed that they haven’t been able to find Chloe to interview her,” Liam said. “Unfortunately, when they can’t get hard information, they tend to move on to speculation.”

Alexia grimaced. “Yes, we learned that when Chloe was part of the Olympic ski team. In fact, I was thinking the best way to counteract the harmful publicity might be to choose one of the more sympathetic reporters and give them an exclusive interview.”

“Bad idea,” Liam said quickly. “Trust me, any sort of family interview right now would be a very bad idea.”

“Why?” Tom had joined them. He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and she leaned against him gratefully. “That’s what Chloe used to do when the sports journalists got on her case. Her PR rep would call a few journalists and get some positive articles out there.”

“This is different.” Liam tried not to sound impatient. “We’re not talking about putting a stop to rumors that Chloe is overtrained, or having a hard time with her left knee joint. We’re talking about avoiding an arrest for murdering her spouse.”

“We could find somebody friendly,” Tom persisted. “Somebody from ESPN who remembers her warmly—”

“Take my advice on this, no reporter is genuinely sympathetic to a suspected murderer. Worse, when the piece airs, the police would be watching and analyzing every word that comes out of Chloe’s mouth.”

“But all she’s going to say in an interview is that she’s innocent!” Alexia protested. “And she can’t be tripped up because she didn’t do it!”

“The first lesson for you to learn right now is that innocence doesn’t count for much in a court of law, and even less in the court of public opinion.” Liam spoke flatly, no longer trying to win over Alexia and her husband. On the question of media contact, he was adamant. Chloe had spent most of her young adult life in the spotlight and it was natural for her family to think they knew how to handle reporters. They didn’t, not in the wake of a celebrity murder.

“I’m giving you advice based on my experience trying other high profile criminal cases,” Liam said. “I guarantee that there are plenty of secrets concerning her marriage that Chloe doesn’t want revealed, whether or not they relate to Jason’s murder.”

“But—”

“No buts. As long as I’m her defense lawyer, Chloe will refuse any and all interviews. I can’t force you two to do the same, but I’m strongly requesting it. If you want to help your sister, don’t speak to the press. Or the police, for that matter. Your only smart response to any and all questions is no comment, whoever is asking—friendly neighbor, church minister, cop, reporter, one answer fits all. No comment. Practice saying it until it’s a reflex. Advise your parents to do the same.”

Tom started to protest again, but Alexia put her hand on his arm, silencing him. “Then what options do we have? Sit back and wait for Chloe to be tried and convicted by the media?”

“We can’t tackle the media or the cops in a vacuum. We need a comprehensive strategy. I’ll have a better idea of exactly what we’re facing when Chloe and I have had a chance to talk.”

“You haven’t discussed the case with Chloe yet?” Tom sounded incredulous. “What have you been doing all day, for Christ’s sake?”

“Serving my existing clients.” Liam kept his voice level. “I spent most of today in court. Consequently, I don’t know enough of the facts of this case to have even the outline of a strategy.”

“I’m sorry.” Tom gulped in air and shoved his hand through his hair. “This situation is getting to me. I didn’t mean to criticize.”

“That’s okay. It’s stressful for everyone. However, right now we’re wasting valuable time. I need to get your niece back to her mother.”

“Like I said, the poor little thing has barely spoken since she got here.” Alexia dried her hands on the dish-towel, although she hadn’t actually washed them. “Normally she’s as chatty as Morgan and the two of them love to play together. But not today.”

Liam followed Alexia’s worried gaze toward the child at the table. Sophie was still coloring. Despite his inexperience with kids, even he was able to recognize her extreme focus as an avoidance tactic.

Ignoring the roller coaster that had begun operation in his stomach the second he walked into the kitchen, he crossed the room and drew up a chair next to Sophie. Next to his daughter.

“Hi, Sophie,” he said, hoping she couldn’t hear the squeak in his voice. He cleared his throat. “My name is Liam. I’m…um…a friend of your mom.”

Sophie said nothing. She continued to color exactly as if he hadn’t spoken—as if he didn’t exist. By comparison, blue-nosed Peter had been positively friendly.

Liam felt sweat gather under his shirt collar. He was astonished to discover that he wanted, quite desperately, for Sophie to acknowledge his presence.

“Your mom asked me to pick you up and drive you home,” he said. “Well, not home exactly. I’m going to take you to the place where your mom is staying for the night.”

Silence.

“Your mom is really anxious to see you.” He wondered if anxious was too hard a word for Sophie to understand. “She’s waiting for us,” he elaborated. “If you’ve finished your picture, we need to get going.”

Sophie finally looked up from her coloring. Her face was pale and pinched with worry, but that wasn’t what made Liam feel as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. It was her eyes that had him gaping. They were huge, long-lashed and green. His sister Megan’s eyes staring out at him from his daughter’s face. Megan’s eyes, displaying Sophie’s heart-wrenching grief.

“Mommy isn’t waiting. She’s gone away,” Sophie said with unsettling calm.

“Well, yes, I know she went away,” Liam agreed. “She’s kind of busy right now. That’s why she sent me to fetch you.”

Sophie’s expression remained shuttered, as if she struggled to hold an unbearable weight of sadness inside. “Mommy is wiv my daddy. They’re in heaven. That’s far away.”

“Sweetheart, no!” Alexia swooped across the kitchen and hugged Sophie to her chest. “My God, I had no idea she was thinking that.” She rocked her niece back and forth, tears wetting her own cheeks although Sophie didn’t cry. “Sweetheart, your mommy is fine. She’s waiting to see you, I promise!”

“She’s in heaven,” Sophie repeated, but this time there was a faint question in her voice. “Wiv my daddy.”

Liam knelt beside Sophie’s chair, reaching instinctively for her hands. They were ice-cold and he chafed them as he spoke. “Sophie, I promise, your mom is waiting for you in Denver. She’s sad that your father is…” Dead? Murdered? Gone to heaven? Jesus, what euphemisms did you use to explain death to a three-year-old? Liam swallowed. “Your mom is waiting for you,” he finished lamely.

“We should have realized Sophie wouldn’t understand if her mother vanished almost the moment we told her about Jason,” Tom said. He rubbed his hand across the stubble on his cheeks. “Jeez, we really blew that, didn’t we?”

Alexia combed her fingers through her niece’s flyaway hair. “Sophie, sweetie, your mommy isn’t in heaven. She’s right here, I promise.”

“No, Mommy isn’t here,” Sophie said with incontrovertible logic. “Only you and Uncle Tom are here. And the other man.” She nodded toward Liam, finally acknowledging his existence.

“Well, she’s not right here in the kitchen, but Mommy is very close by. She isn’t with your daddy in heaven, I promise. She’s in Denver, like Liam said, waiting to see you.”

Sophie slowly put down her marker. “If my mommy isn’t in heaven, why did she go away?”

“She had grown-up stuff she needed to take care of.” Alexia chose her words with visible care. “She wanted to stay with you, but she just couldn’t. That’s why she sent Liam to get you.”

“I don’t know him.” Sophie kept her gaze fixed on her aunt.

“He’s a good friend of your mommy’s. Can you say his name?”

Sophie nodded. “Liam. It’s easy-peasey.”

“Right. Liam will take you in his car. It’ll be a little way to drive, but not nearly as far as going to Nana and Poppa’s house.”

Sophie said nothing, but Liam thought he detected a slight reduction in the tension that had held her spine straight and her tiny, skinny body so rigid that it looked brittle. The oddest ache was lodged in the pit of his stomach and he fought the urge to push Alexia aside and take his daughter into his arms. It was physically painful for him to see her so miserable.

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