52
By the time Laurie had gotten home from Kendra’s the night before, she barely had enough time to eat takeout with Timmy and her father and then call Alex to say good night. Only a few months ago, she had hesitated to blend her life with his. Now she couldn’t wait for them to live together under one roof. She wanted him to be the last person she saw at night and the first person she saw in the morning.
She was working at her desk the next day when her office phone rang. She could see the call was coming from Grace’s line and hit the speaker button.
“What’s up?”
“I hate to tell you this, but Dana just called. Brett Young’s on his way to see you. Oh—I see him now.” She hung up, and a few seconds later, Laurie heard a tap on her office door.
“Come in,” she called out, trying not to allow her voice to reveal the dread she felt in her stomach. She wondered if Brett had seen the charges yet for her new computer and cell phone. She steeled herself for an argument about whether the replacements were a personal or company expense.
She placed a fake smile on her face as she heard her office door open. She was shocked when Alex walked in. Grace was giggling at her desk behind him.
When Laurie saw him at the door, she jumped up, ran over, and kissed him. His arms went tight around her. “What a wonderful surprise,” she said.
“I was nearby and suddenly needed to see you. Ever since that man pushed you, I’ve been so worried. If anything had happened to you . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.
“Stop worrying, Your Honor. I really am okay.”
They walked over to the conference table. When she sat in a chair, he began to gently massage her shoulders.
“For someone who says she’s okay, you feel really tense,” he said as he massaged more deeply.
“Don’t worry. I promise I’m all right.”
She rolled her neck as the soothing effect of the massage took hold. “It’s your last free day before the chief judge starts assigning you cases. Are you doing anything special?”
“Yes, I’m visiting you. By the way, it’s my last ‘weekday’ before cases,” he corrected. “My docket assignments begin Monday, and it’s only Friday.”
“Well, I know tomorrow you’re taking your clerks to the Yankees game.”
As a federal judge, Alex would employ two recent law school graduates as judicial clerks. Until the fall, he’d be working with the clerks who had been hired by his predecessor, who had decided to retire on his eightieth birthday. Laurie had met both clerks briefly at the induction. Samantha was a Yale grad, and Harvey went to Stanford. They both seemed bright, enthusiastic, and pleasantly surprised to be working for a boss who offered them first-level Yankees seats as a way to kick off their work together. “Get used to them calling you Your Honor.”
She could tell he liked the sound of it.
“Are you really holding up okay?” he asked. “I know you were torn last night about how to handle this new information about Kendra. It took every bit of restraint for me not to call the police when you told me. That has to be the same man who attacked you.”
“Maybe,” she said, turning more toward him. “But we don’t even know who he is, so what’s the point? This man is obviously critical to the case, but I have no way of identifying him on my own. I could air his photograph and ask for tips, but then he’ll know Kendra told me about him, and she swears that he’s been threatening both her and her children. I can’t have that on my conscience.”
“Of course not,” Alex agreed. “But you could go to the police with it. That’s probably the safest route.”
As much as Ryan had turned a corner in his working relationship with her, she missed having Alex as a sounding board for her cases. When they brainstormed together, she always felt better afterward.
“Part of me wants to do that, but what am I supposed to tell them? I don’t know who he is, or what he’s even done. Kendra says it never dawned on her that the man might be Martin’s killer, but that seems hard to believe. On the other hand, I can’t prove she hired him, either. I also have no idea if he’s the same man who attacked me on Monday. No matter how I game it out, I keep hitting a wall. Something doesn’t feel right. I’m missing the bigger picture, I just know it.”
The impromptu massage Alex was delivering suddenly stopped. “Please tell me you aren’t working with Joe Brenner. Did that slimeball manage to weasel his way into the studio? Was it Brett Young who hired him? I could see him falling for something like that.”
She swiveled her chair to face him. “What are you talking about?”
“Him,” he said, reaching for a photograph on the conference table and pulling it closer. “Joe Brenner. He’s totally low-rent. Did he convince Brett to take him on as an investigator? If so, you must get rid of him. I’ll talk to Brett myself if I have to.”
It was a printout of the photograph that Kendra had emailed her from her cell phone the previous night. Beehive Man. “Alex, you know this guy? This is the guy from last night—the one Kendra claims is blackmailing her.”
Alex leaned forward to get a closer look. “That’s definitely him.” He reached for her new laptop, typed a few keystrokes, and then turned the screen to face her. She saw a photo of the same man, but in a black open-collar shirt and black sports coat. He was losing his hair, and had shaved it close to the skin. His eyes were narrow and cold. “Mean,” as the bartender at the Beehive had described them.
The text next to the head shot read “Joe Brenner is the owner of New York Capital Investigations, a private investigative firm with a quarter century experience conducting discreet and effective investigations.”
Laurie’s thoughts were reeling. Why would a private eye shake down Kendra for money? Or did he? For all she knew, Kendra could have been lying. Maybe Kendra had been paying Brenner for stealing Laurie’s case notes and laptop.
“How do you know him?” Laurie asked.
“I don’t, not anymore. But about fifteen years ago, I was working on a multi-defendant conspiracy case. The attorney for one of the codefendants hired Brenner as an investigator. When he took the stand, I was absolutely convinced that he exaggerated the exculpatory evidence he claimed to have located. At one point, I thought he had even perjured himself. I couldn’t prove it, and the defendants were all convicted regardless. But I confronted the attorney who had hired him. He said sometimes clients were—quote—willing to pay extra for an investigator who goes the distance.”
“So you think he lied on the stand for an extra fee,” Laurie said.
Thoughts were pinging inside Laurie’s head so quickly, she was having a hard time keeping track of them. A stranger who started talking to Kendra at a dive bar just happened to be a lowlife private eye who recorded her conversations? That was too much of a coincidence. She thought about Martin Bell’s desire to leave Kendra and retain custody of his children. Maybe he had hired Brenner to chat up his wife and gather incriminating evidence. But if the plan had worked and Brenner had damning recordings of an impaired Kendra, why hadn’t Martin filed for divorce? And wouldn’t he have told his parents about his intentions?
Or maybe the alleged recordings didn’t even exist. Kendra could have fabricated the entire story to cover the fact that she had paid Brenner to kill her husband.
Laurie could tell she was close to connecting the dots, but each time she was about to have a breakthrough, she felt the truth fall from her grasp.
Alex was staring at Brenner’s photograph, clearly upset that this man had entered Laurie’s orbit. “As I said, I can’t prove it. But I was certain enough that I spread the word among defense lawyers that they should avoid him, and apparently I wasn’t the only one. His work for litigators has completely dried up. No one will touch him because they think it could backfire at trial.”
Stretching the truth under oath was one thing; murder for hire was another. Maybe Brenner’s detective business had disintegrated to the point that he had crossed the line to working as a paid killer.
“Yet he still has a private eye website,” she said, gesturing toward his image on her screen. His face—those dark, mean eyes—gave her a chill. “Apparently someone is still hiring him?”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Alex said drily. “People think lawyers have no scruples? If Brenner’s bankroll is any lesson, then politicians are even worse.”
“He has political clients?”
“That’s what I’ve heard. You see, lawyers need to worry about him getting caught on the stand playing loose with the facts. But if you just need a tough guy willing to cut corners to dig up dirt on your political enemies? Brenner’s the go-to man in certain circles. My guess is the guy’s a regular on the Amtrak back and forth to Albany.”
And with one little word, Laurie finally had a breakthrough. Albany.
She reached for her cell phone on the table and pulled up her father’s number.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?” Alex asked.
“Almost.” When her father answered, she spelled out her theory as Alex nodded along beside her. When she was done, she asked Leo if he could make another call to his NYPD source.
“Let me see what I can do.”