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“Jesus, what do you want me to say?” he asked.
“ ‘Oh Katie, I’m so sorry for making you drive to Louisville, skipping our meeting, and then refusing to talk about the case.’ ” Her voice had taken on a singsong quality. She was enjoying this way too much. “And for being a jerk.”
“When was I a jerk?”
“You’re a jerk all the time. Seriously, you don’t know this? Does nobody ever tell you anything?”
He shook his head, and Katie made a winding gesture in the air with her index finger that meant get on with it.
“Fine. I’m sorry for … for dragging you to Louisville and …” His eyes cut to Sean, then back to the ceiling. This was surprisingly difficult. “And wasting your time.”
Katie laughed. “That was terrible.” She gripped his arm and rose onto her toes to kiss his cheek. “We’ll have to work on your apologizing. Come on, let’s sit.”
They settled onto the fussy upholstered chairs of the suite’s sitting room. Ginny had booked them in a place called “The Mansion,” a big nineteenth-century house whose owners believed in window treatments and period furniture. Judah took the couch, perching on the edge and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands spread. “Where should we start?” he asked.
“Why don’t you start by telling us why you hired us?” Katie asked.
“Jamie Callahan said you know what you’re doing, and you’re discreet.”
It was more than he could say for his own security force. When he and Paul wanted something leaked, all they had to do was make sure someone on the security team knew about it. Palmerston was good at keeping him alive but shitty at protecting his privacy. And it would be churlish of him to resent it, considering he’d forked over his privacy to Paul’s management a long time ago.
Judah’s manager believed information was a currency, one they had to guard like gold. Paul didn’t trust anyone, and that philosophy had served Judah well over the years. Only Paul could have quashed the story of what happened with Ben Abrams as effectively as he had. Only Paul could have turned a gay nineteen-year-old from Iowa into America’s heartthrob, shot him to the top of the charts, and kept him in the public eye even when he hadn’t managed to record a song worth listening to in years.
But now Paul was nervous, and Judah was trying his hand at driving the bus. Never mind that he might end up driving it off a cliff. These days, he had trouble remembering what the fuck had ever made him think a career was the same thing as a life.
He had to trust someone. His instincts insisted it be Katie.
“Can we keep it in this room?” he asked.
“Maybe. I can’t promise I won’t need to talk to Caleb.”
“If you trust Caleb, I guess I trust you. But I don’t want any of this getting out to the world at large. Even Paul doesn’t know about all of it.”
Katie glanced at Sean. He inclined his head in assent. “You have our word,” she said.
Judah leaned forward, running both hands through his hair. “I’ve been getting some … disturbing messages. Not exactly threatening. Not at first. Just … weird.”
“When did they start?”
“I’m not sure. They show up different places, sometimes to my public email address, other times in Facebook or on Twitter, you know? I wasn’t in the habit of checking those sites myself, but Ginny will pass along a couple dozen messages most days—the interesting ones, or the ones from people she thinks I might want to write back to for whatever reason. So the strange messages could have been coming in for a while without me seeing them. I got the first one from Ginny in November, right around Thanksgiving.”
“What did it say?”
He leaned back and crossed his legs, his eyes skating over her shoulder and fixing on the window behind her. Already getting dark. “It said, ‘Hey, Jude, be thankful they don’t know.’ ”
“Be thankful they don’t know what?”
“I don’t know.”
This was complete bullshit, but he said it with a smile, which usually worked. People couldn’t resist him when he smiled. It was one reason he got away with so much unconscionable behavior.
He made sure to meet Katie’s eyes when he shrugged. Don’t worry about it, his body language said. Probably nothing.
God, how was he supposed to tell the truth when he was crap at it? Lying was so easy.
Katie frowned. “Any signature?” she asked.
“No. That one was an email from a Gmail account. JudahFan, or something like that. Ginny said she couldn’t find any other messages from that person.”
