The Wrong Man: A Novel of Suspense (22 page)

“Pretty good. And I have the name of a lawyer for you. He’s not a partner so his fee is more reasonable, but he comes highly recommended for this type of situation.”

“Great. And what about on the work front? Any new wrinkles?”

“We have plenty of time to catch up on that tomorrow.”

There was a hint in her voice of something not being right.

“Wait, what’s going on?”

“I hate to lay this on you now, but Dara called and asked if she could take a leave of absence for a few weeks, until things are resolved. She understands that this might result in us hiring someone else and letting her go.”

“Oh no,” Kit said, disheartened by the news. “I know she was meeting with her parents and I’m sure they urged her to do that.”

“Yes. Dara has plenty of gumption, but I think she tends to follow their lead. These Millennials are so entwined with their parents. It’s a bit hard for me to relate to since I was raised pretty much by four Mexican maids.”

“Well, those women did a fantastic job,” Kit said. “Should we hire a temp, do you think?”

“I’ve got a few ideas, but as I said, we can talk in the morning. Do what you have to do now.”

It was all unraveling, Kit thought as she trudged into the bedroom. She was too afraid to work out of her office, Dara was probably leaving, Holt, her hottest new client prospect, appeared to be backing off. And her brain seemed incapable of generating a single worthwhile idea for the bachelor apartment. She felt as if she was staring at a river rushing over its banks.

In the guest bedroom she dumped her phone out of her purse. How could she worm the information out of Kelman? she wondered. If he’d lied to her about his relationship status, it seemed only likely that he’d deny any connection to Sasha other than a work one. Her only hope, she decided, was to catch him enough off guard that he wouldn’t be able to disguise how flustered he was by her question.

As she picked up the phone off the bed, she saw from the screen that she had a missed call from Kelman and a text, neither of which she’d noticed when she’d texted Baby from the taxi. If he’d been playing a sick game with her as a pawn, he was still
all in. She tapped his number and he picked up after the second ring.

“I was expecting to hear from you earlier,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“More or less.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m just still trying to adjust to everything that’s happened.”

“This will be resolved soon, Kit. I promise you. Things are moving along quickly at this point.”

“I have a question for you. Just a loose end I’d like to tie up.”

“Of course. Shoot.”

“Tell me about Sasha Glen.”

A long pause followed. He’d confirmed the truth without uttering a word.

“How do you know about Sasha Glen?” he said finally.

“I asked
you
the question.”

“What exactly do you want to know?”

“Are you two lovers? That’s what I want to know.”

Another long pause. Even more portentous than the first. And then just one word.

“Yes.”

She’d prepared herself for such an answer and yet his words were as good as a kick in the gut.

“I need to explain, Kit,” he said in a rush. “It’s not what it seems.”

Right, she thought, why don’t you spin yet another tale for me and try to trick me into swallowing it whole.

“I’m not interested in your explanation.”

“Kit, give me five minutes. That’s all I ask.”

“No. I’m going to hang up and I want you to stay away from me, do you hear? Nothing good has ever come from any contact I’ve had with you.”

She disconnected, and after fighting off an urge to fling the phone across the room, dropped it on the bed instead. For a few moments, she just sat there, letting the truth echo in her head. He and Sasha were together.

Underneath her fury, there was also an undeniable pang of disappointment. She had
wanted
to believe Kelman,
wanted
to trust him, and yes, as tough as it was to admit now,
wanted
to rekindle that crazy connection with him she’d felt in Islamorada.

The phone rang again—it was him calling back—and she jabbed at the decline button. A moment later the voicemail icon
indicated a message had been left. She ignored it and put the phone on mute.

Was he just a cad and a player? she wondered. A guy who while laying low in Florida had seen the opportunity for some easy sex with her and decided that his chances would be better if he claimed to be completely single? Maybe. And then later, once their lives became entangled in a nightmare and he knew he needed her, he might have decided not to make things even messier by fessing up to having a girlfriend after all.

And yet the other possibility loomed large, that he was a liar in
every
regard. Not a whistle-blower as he claimed but a criminal who’d simply kept her close—and hinted at an attraction to her—so she would provide a constant flow of information.

There was something that needed to be considered: Sasha’s possible role in all that had transpired. Kelman’s admission reframed the cat-and-mouse play the woman seemed so fond of. Maybe Sasha was part of the insider trading scheme and Kelman had asked her to keep tabs on Kit from a separate vantage point, trying to determine if she had a secret agenda. Sasha could have even tipped Kelman off that Kit was coming by her apartment. That was the day he’d followed her.

Of course, Sasha could have decided to keep tabs on Kit all by her lonesome. Perhaps Kelman had admitted to forging a bit of a relationship with Kit for the sake of scoring information—skipping any mention of naked bodies and all-night sex—and Sasha may have worried that there was more going on. There’d been all those weird suggestions from Sasha that she knew Healy better than she did, even the question in the ladies’ room at Ithaka about whether she’d
dated
Healy. That could have been her way of reassuring herself that a certain decorator had no designs on
her
man.

But all the wondering in the world, she knew, wasn’t ever going to provide any answers. What she needed to do instead
was take action, and that meant finally going to the cops. She had promised Kelman she would wait for him to make the first move but in light of her discovery—and all it implied about him—the time for that kind of cooperation had passed. She needed to protect herself, maybe even from
him
. For all she knew, Kelman might never have even intended to divulge anything to the authorities.

She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling for a few moments. It was pale blue in color, probably Benjamin Moore’s Robin Egg, and a slightly different shade than the rest of the room. Baby subscribed to the idea that people slept best in spaces painted in muted hues of blue or green. Kit loved the bedroom but she loved her own more. The sooner she spoke to the cops, the better her chances of finding her way home again.

As she was swinging her legs off the bed, Baby passed the open door to the guest room and poked her head in.

“Did you talk to him?” she asked.

“Yeah, and it’s true. The creep actually admitted it.”

“I’m sorry, Kit. What will you do now?”

“I’ll call the lawyer first thing in the morning. Then schedule an appointment with Detective Burke. He looks like the kind of guy who uses waterboarding for anything beyond a routine interview, but I assume he’s the one I’ll have to deal with.”

First thing in the morning she made contact with the lawyer, Nat Naylor. He sounded young to her, like someone who might still play beer pong on the weekends, but if Baby’s lawyer had recommended him, she assumed he was qualified. After she’d explained to him that she had serious concerns about her safety, he agreed to meet with her at Baby’s that day.

She tried to work after she hung up from the call, but her concentration was shot. To make matters worse, there was a worrisome email from her client Barry Kaplan: “I’ve been
thinking since our phone call, and though I understand that you’re busy, I really need to get moving on this project. If you’re too jammed up to handle the job, it might make sense for me to find another designer.”

Oh
lovely
, she thought in despair. At the rate things were moving, she’d have no clients at all by the end of the month. She replied, saying that she could understand his frustration but she would definitely have ideas to present to him in person early next week and requested that he send her available time slots. She opened her iPad and poured through photos of previous jobs she had done, hoping one of them might spark a concept. At this point she wasn’t opposed to brazenly ripping off an idea she’d executed for someone else. But nothing seemed right for Barry.

Nat Naylor arrived at three, dressed in a pinstripe suit and carrying a black briefcase. He was thirty-two or thirty-three, she guessed, and though his bright blond hair hinted at endless summers, his six-foot-four frame and serious demeanor undercut the sun-bleached locks and made him read smart and lawyerlike.

He gave only a cursory glance around the apartment, obviously impervious to the full impact of Baby’s jaw-dropping style, and positioned himself on one of the leather sofas. He asked if he could use her first name and urged her to do the same with him.

“Why don’t we jump right in,” he suggested, unsnapping his briefcase with two sharp clicks and removing a fresh new yellow legal pad.

She related the full saga, trying to be succinct but not omit any pertinent details. She admitted going to Kelman’s room in Islamorada for a drink but left it at that. If Naylor’s head was spinning from all the bizarre permutations and the roller coaster aspect of her tale, he gave no hint, just took notes with firm, fast
strokes of his pen. Here and there he shot questions at her for clarification.

When she’d finished, feeling unsettled from rehashing it all, Nat leafed for a few minutes through his pages of notes, his look pensive. She wondered if he was simply trying to grasp all the details and commit them to memory, or pondering what truths might be tucked away beneath the story, truths that Kit had hesitated to disclose. Or maybe he was really sitting there thinking, “This woman needs to get herself a normal life.”

Finally he let out a breath and looked up.

“Kit, tell me why you want to go to the police,” he said.

The question stunned her.
Why?
She couldn’t imagine the reason for asking that. “Well, because a homicide occurred in my stairwell and I have information that might prove valuable to the detectives in charge of the investigation, information I should have provided them with sooner. Why
wouldn’t
I go to the police?”

“I see why it’s your first instinct. But you never want to entangle yourself with law enforcement unless you absolutely have to. Once that happens, you have no control. There are just some very good reasons not to do it.”

“But if I don’t report this, aren’t I guilty of obstructing justice? I’d be withholding critical information.”

He hesitated for a moment, as if he was picking his words.

“Actually, I don’t believe you would be. Obstructing justice is when you actively make it difficult for the police to do their job, such as destroying evidence or deleting relevant emails. But failing to divulge that you know a man who is connected to a company whose employees may have played a role in the victim’s death doesn’t fall into that category.”

So what was he suggesting? she wondered. That she do nothing and let sleeping dogs lie? But the people who were after her weren’t sleeping dogs. They were hounds from hell that wanted to eat her alive.

“But if I don’t go to the police, they won’t have everything they need to figure out who killed Avery. I’m partly responsible for her death, and I can’t bear the thought of her murderer never being caught. And I have to also consider the fact that I’m a sitting duck right now.”

“All right, I just wanted to put it out there. There’s one more question I need to ask. Did you have sex with Garrett Kelman?”

She should have known it was coming.

“Yes,” she said, looking him in the eye. “But I don’t understand how that matters.”

“If you’re going to speak to the authorities, it’s critical not to shade the truth or to leave out anything that could be relevant.”

“But how is sex relevant?”

“As far as the cops are concerned, sex can be a motive. They might decide you feel jilted and that you’re exacting revenge by going to them with your story.”

“I’m not,” she said, annoyed that it might come down to having to defend herself against that kind of a suspicion. “I just want the police to know who the possible suspects are. But if it’s necessary to admit I spent the night with Kelman, I have no qualms about doing so.”

“Good. Why don’t we try to set something up for early Monday? I can accompany you.”

“Nat, is there any chance we could go down there later this afternoon?”

A part of her had been wildly hoping that he’d suggest dashing to the precinct right now so that it would all be over and done with.

“I think we need to do some prep work,” he said. “I want you to run through your story again to make sure there are no inconsistencies. And I need your phone.”

“My phone? I don’t understand.”

“I want to make a record of all your calls to Kelman so we
don’t miss one. And then we’re going to create a spreadsheet, listing them, plus every encounter you’ve had with him. We’ll review it all so when you talk to the cops, you leave nothing out.”

“Why don’t we sit in the dining room then?” she suggested. “It will be easier to go through everything there.”

For the next hour they worked side by side at the table.

“I see,” Nat said at one point, “that Kelman left you two voicemail messages that you haven’t opened. “And he’s tried twice today to reach you without leaving a message. What’s that about?”

There was no way she could tell him about the Sasha development. That would only complicate matters, perhaps even cause the cops, as Nat had mentioned, to cast her as a spurned and vengeful lover.

“I gave Garrett Kelman plenty of time to go to the authorities ahead of me, but he hasn’t, and I can’t wait any longer,” she said. “I’m not interested in getting into another discussion with him.”

“Okay,” Naylor said, though Kit wondered if he sensed that she’d just done what he’d warned her against—shading the truth. “But you should listen to his messages before you speak to the authorities. So we know everything that’s going on.”

Next they ran through her story again. It was draining to repeat it, but at the same time she felt a fresh surge of determination. She was
doing
something finally, taking concrete steps to protect herself. The idea of Naylor’s fee made her cringe, but she could see how foolhardy it would be to act without an attorney.

When they’d finished their work, Nat took a minute to organize his notes. As he tucked them in his briefcase, Kit saw him look off, as if he was weighing something.

“I have a thought,” he said, looking back. “After reviewing everything with you, I’m wondering if it would be better to skip the police and go straight to the FBI instead.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, totally caught off guard again.
“If you’re worried about me being entangled with the New York police, couldn’t the FBI be even worse?”

“I actually think they’ll be easier to work with. And besides, you’d have to deal with them eventually. Insider trading is a Federal offense and since the murder may indeed be related to that, the FBI will need to be involved. They’ll work alongside the cops but they’ll be the ones calling the shots.”

Kit exhaled slowly, considering his words. She hadn’t a clue what the best strategy was—how could she?—so it seemed like the smartest course of action was to follow her lawyer’s lead. At least this way she’d be able to avoid Detective Burke’s squirm-inducing stares.

“If you think that’s the right move, fine,” she said.

“I’ll call you this weekend and let you know for sure. I just want to give it a bit more thought before we pull the trigger.”

Love the analogy, she thought grimly as they both rose from the table.

Once she was alone again, she plunked down on the sofa, allowing herself to decompress and relish the relief she felt. Naylor, despite the blond surfer locks, seemed very together, a good hire. And though the idea of speaking to the authorities on Monday—whether it was Burke or the FBI or whoever—wasn’t pleasant, she would get through the experience. And there’d be no more endless fretting about whether to do it or when.