James Grippando - Last to die

A transit bus rumbled past him, leaving him in a black cloud of diesel fumes. He hardly noticed. “Holy shit,” he said as he slipped his cell into his pocket.

The conversation with Theo did not go well.

He’d get over it, for sure, and Jack hadn’t been all that accusatory anyway. The more thought Jack had given it, the more impossible it seemed. No way was Theo going to rat out his brother to anyone, much less an overly ambitious reporter. But Jack felt as though he had to at least touch base and completely rule him out as “the source” before confronting the person that Deirdre Meadows had assumed was closer to Jack than anyone else.

“Kelsey?” he said with surprise. “I didn’t know you were coming in today.”

She hadn’t been on the work schedule, but she was in Jack’s office seated on the couch waiting for him when he arrived. “Can I talk with you a minute?” she asked.

“Sure.” Jack pulled up a chair and straddled it, facing her. He’d rehearsed his delivery during the drive into the office probably a dozen times, but he could see from the expression on her face that he was conveying some awkward vibes. “Kelsey, before we go off in some other direction, there’s something I need to know.”

“Please. I know what you’re going to say. This morning-today’s newspaper. The article about Tatum.”

“Yes?” he said tentatively.

Kelsey took a breath, obviously struggling. “I don’t know how to say this to you.”

Jack felt a pain in his stomach, sickened by the thought, but the words came out in anger. He looked her in the eye and said, “Did you talk to Deirdre Meadows?”

She blinked twice, then averted her eyes. And he knew. He wasn’t trying to be judgmental, but he couldn’t help shaking his head in disbelief.

“Why?” he asked.

When she looked up, tears were welling in her eyes. “I was afraid to tell you. I knew you’d think I was an idiot. She tricked me, Jack.”

“Tricked you? How?”

“She called and told me that she already knew that Tatum met with Sally before she was killed. She had all the details that Tatum gave us-the rainy night, the meeting at Theo’s bar where she tried to hire him to kill her. The thing she had dead wrong was the timing. She claimed to have it from a reliable source that the meeting took place less than twenty-four hours before Sally turned up dead. I told her that her source was wrong. And then she got nasty.”

“What do you mean, nasty?”

“She made it absolutely clear that unless I told her differently, she was going to print the story as written: Tatum and Sally met twenty-four hours before her death. I told her she really needed to talk to you, but she said you hadn’t returned her call and she was on deadline.”

“So what did you tell her?”

“I was totally firm. I said, ‘I can’t tell you whether there was a meeting or not. All I can tell you is that there definitely was no meeting twenty-four hours before Sally’s death.’”

“Good answer.”

“But she wasn’t happy with it. She said, ‘Tell me when it happened, or I’m sticking with twenty-four hours.’ I didn’t know what to do, but in the heat of the moment I couldn’t imagine that the smart thing was to stand aside and let her print something I knew was false. So I told her it wasn’t twenty-four hours. It was more like two weeks.”

Jack groaned. “Damn it, Kesley, how could you not have known that she was fishing for confirmation that the meeting had taken place at all?”

“Because she already knew everything about the meeting.”

“She made you think she knew about it. All she had was a rumor. She couldn’t print that. She was bluffing. But after talking to you, she had a source.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sure you are. But for God’s sake, you can’t let a reporter manipulate you like that.”

“I don’t know what to say. I screwed up. You have to know that I haven’t exactly been in my best frame of mind lately.”

“We’ve all been through a lot.”

“No, you don’t understand.” She sniffled and said, “That man threatened Nate.”

“What?”

“The man who attacked me outside the law library. He said that if Tatum didn’t drop out of the game…” Her voice cracked, as if she couldn’t even say it.

“He’d do what?”

“He said-” She glanced at the framed photograph Jack kept on his desk, her boy perched on Jack’s shoulders. Her lips quivered as she said, “He told me Nate would go the way of Sally’s daughter.”

Jack felt his anger rise. “That son of a bitch. You didn’t even have to tell me, I knew that’s the way that lowlife would operate.”

“That’s why I sent him to stay with my mother, like you said.”

“I wish you’d take the rest of my advice and call the cops.”

“No. I can’t. He said he’d hurt Nate if I did, and I’m not taking that risk. But don’t you see what I’m going through, how I could have screwed up? I’m terrified. You know how a threat like that must have made me feel. It’s horrible enough what happened to that poor little girl. But Nate-I told you the whole drowning story the first time you took him on Theo’s boat. I still have nightmares.”

“When it comes to you and Nate, you won’t find anyone more sympathetic than me. But you have to hold yourself together. You can’t be putty in the hands of some reporter.”

“I accept that. But I hope it at least explains it. A man threatened to drown my own son if Tatum Knight doesn’t drop out of the game. I was confused, not sure what to do, what to tell anyone. Out of the blue this reporter called and started asking questions about a conversation Tatum Knight had with Sally Fenning before she died.”

“You should have cut it off right there.”

“I know, but I swear, Jack, she already had the whole story. I thought I was helping our client by telling her that the meeting didn’t take place just twenty-four hours before Sally ended up dead.”

Jack gave her a hard look. He almost couldn’t believe what he was about to say, but somewhere deep inside him the lawyer had taken over. “Did you really think you were helping, Kelsey? Or did you think it was a way of giving your attacker exactly what he wanted: Get Tatum Knight out of the game?”

Her mouth fell open. “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of that.”

“I’m just asking the question.”

“The answer is no. Hell no.”

Jack was starting to regret he’d asked the question so bluntly, but as Tatum’s lawyer, he had to be firm.

Her voice shook. “Do you really think I’d intentionally violate the attorney-client privilege? I’m not about to put myself on the blacklist of the Florida Bar before I’ve even graduated from law school.”

Jack took a moment, breathed away some of his suspicion. She seemed too shaken by the whole experience to be able to lie about her intentions now. “Okay,” he said. “You screwed up. We’ll leave it at that. But what you did is still so wrong.”

“Stop it, Jack.”

“Stop what?”

“I’ve apologized fifty times. That reporter just caught me at exactly the wrong moment. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since the attack. All I’ve been able to think about is Nate, that little girl, and some psycho holding them down in this tub of bloody bathwater, their little legs kicking and-”

She lost control, and the tears were flowing. She was practically slumping. On impulse, Jack went to her. She rose, and she seemed to want him to take her in his arms, but he stopped. He was suddenly feeling more like her employer than her rock. “Hey, hey,” he said as he laid a somewhat reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”