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She starts to climb inside but pauses. “Make yourself at home. Just don’t burn down the place and everything will be fine.”
Laughing at her play on my warning, aware that she manages to keep the playing field even at all times, I watch as she disappears into the BMW. I shut her inside, backing up to watch her depart, and as she puts the car into gear, I decide there’s something very wrong, and yet right at the same time, about a woman I’m fucking in my pride and joy, my custom BMW Hurricane. But then, there is something about Faith that’s both wrong and right, all the way around. She disappears around a curve, and I sigh. All I can do is hope like hell she’s as good at driving it as she is at riding me.
I cross the drive and march up the stairs. Entering the house, I shut the door and prepare to start a search. But damn it, it’s impossible not to feel the betrayal of Faith’s trust in that act. It feeds my need to prove her innocence and not her guilt, which I’ve already established is a problem. At this point, I’ll take innocence any way I can frame it, and she’s logical and smart. It will be a blow to realize why I sought her out, but she’ll understand. Forgiving me might be another story, but right now, I just need to find a murderer that isn’t her. I glance at my watch: eleven fifteen. I need time to review the material North has certainly already emailed me, but by the time I do this search and eat with Faith, that’s not going to happen. Not willing to compromise the prep for the deposition or my management of North, I snag my cellphone from my pocket and text him:Move to two o’clock.
He responds so damn fast I don’t know how he has time to type:Copy that, boss.
I smirk and shove my phone back in my pocket. “The kid’s eager,” I murmur. “I’ll give him that.”
In the interest of time, I head for Faith’s bedroom, where most people keep their secrets. Once I’m there, I place my hand on a dresser drawer and hesitate. Damn it, I hate doing this, but I have no other option. I pull open one organized drawer after another, finding nothing out of the ordinary. The nightstands are next, and I find more of the same. The bed’s a platform, which means there are no hiding spots beneath it, but my gaze lands on the painting above Faith’s bed—one of her own works, this one of a vineyard, with a streak of red on one vine. She’s talented, stunningly so, which brings my attention to that card from Faith’s father she didn’t want to open. Why do I know that card is all about his confidence and pride in her for taking over the winery, with a negative spin on her art, her passion? And yet, even in death, she wants to please him, craving his love. Not a problem I had with my father. I never craved anything from the man. Hell, he probably only gave Meredith Winter a million dollars so it was a million less that I’d inherit.
Rejecting the grind in my gut with that thought, I turn away from the bed and head into the bathroom, searching the drawers there, and then I move into Faith’s closet. My digging there includes checking pockets and shoes, but the results are the same. Nothing. From there, I make my way to the opposite side of the house, where I find a small library with a couple of overstuffed chairs and art books filling the shelves. I don’t have time to check those books. I need to find an office. There has to be one, or at least a place where she keeps her documents, and this isn’t it.
Glancing at my watch, I estimate I have thirty minutes before Faith returns, and I track a path to the kitchen, do a quick search. Realizing that I have no place but Faith’s studio left to search, I hesitate. That feels like a place she should take me, but there could be an office up there somewhere, and I have to look for that. For now, though, I walk into the dining room, where I’ve left my briefcase, which I retrieved from the car before Faith left. I sit down at the rectangular dark wood table and glance at the credenza, which has no drawers, before I unpack my MacBook and files to make it look like I’ve been working.
Next, I have to make a phone call before Faith returns, even above searching the studio for an office. Moving to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the credenza, I pull back the curtain to keep an eye on the driveway before removing my phone from my pocket, dialing Beck Luche, a tatted-up former CIA agent who now does private hire work, and not for a small price. He also did five years undercover as a rogue US hacker deep inside a Russian hacking operation. It’s a detail about his past I learned when he was under consideration for a hundred-thousand-dollar paycheck from one of my high-tech clients. He got the job, and I hired him personally three days ago after waiting two weeks for him to be free from another job. But I didn’t want this screwed up.
“Nicolas,” he answers, using that name despite me explicitly telling him not to. “How’s the meeting with the would-be black widow if she ever got married?” he asks.
I grind my teeth at the dagger he’s just thrown. “She’s either innocent or a damn good actor.”
“The best criminals are always the best actors.”
He just keeps on throwing daggers. “Macom Maloy. Have you checked him out?”
He snorts. “If you thought I was an amateur, why’d you hire me and pay me so damn much money?” He doesn’t wait for a reply he has no intention of getting in the first place, moving on. “Of course I checked out the ex-boyfriend. And that dude is a tool, but he’s not smart enough to pull off the blackmail and murder, especially living in another city.”
“But he’s got money to pay someone else to do it.”
“That man isn’t thinking about Faith Winter, and he has no connections to Meredith Winter at all. That man is thinking about money, art, and some private fuck club like the one you own. He used to take Faith to it, but now he just takes himself—as in several times a week.”
I had no idea Beck knew about the “cigar club” that fronts for the sex club I bought from a friend and client last year when he went off and got married. But then if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be worth hiring. And the fuck club Macom took Faith to—and replaced her with—explains many of Faith’s references to her sexual past. It also indicates another uncomfortable disclosure with this woman I’m not looking forward to anytime soon.
“Let me run down what I know,” Beck says. “Thanks to the security feed from your father’s house, I’ve determined that Meredith Winter visited your father once a week for six months before she died. The checks he wrote her began at two months.”
I inhale a jagged breath. “So she did visit him.”
“She went to his home during those visits, and she stayed there for hours when she did. I have a few instances of them kissing by his door. He was banging her, but it went further than that. They had regular phone conversations in between their visits. No emails, unfortunately. But the bottom line here. A relationship between the two pokes holes in the blackmail theory. He sounds like he was giving her the money by choice. Paid sex, perhaps.”
“My father liked his women thirty years his junior,” I say. “He wasn’t paying a fifty-something-year-old woman for sex.”
“She was still a gorgeous woman.”
“That’s not it. Moving on. Meredith wasn’t paying the bills at the winery. She was taking his money and the money made at the winery and doing something with it.”
“I was coming to that. Her bank accounts were dry for that four-month window she was taking checks from your father. She’d deposit those checks, let them clear, and then clean every penny out of her accounts. I don’t know yet where it went, but I’m working on it.”
“She was giving it to someone,” I surmise.
“Or stashing it,” he says. “Meredith had a revolving bedroom door. She’d have a great many candidates for cohorts or enemies, but one option stands out. Jesse Coates was seeing Meredith for the few months before your father. Twenty years her junior and a successful stockbroker who moved from New York to San Francisco. He might be behind a scam.”
I scrub my jaw. “My father was too smart to be scammed. Blackmailed, yes, but not scammed.”
“Blackmail is a scam.”
“Blackmail is blackmail. Being seduced by a woman and stolen from is another.”
“You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve seen scammed, my man,” Beck says. “It would blow your mind. And if that’s what went down, it was done smartly. I see no contact between Meredith and Jesse in the six-month window that she was seeing your father, but that really doesn’t matter. That could be part of an end game.”
