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If the image hadn’t done so already, the smell of sex made Finley want to gag.
“Sorry, Ray,” the receptionist, who had also turned her back, said. “She wouldn’t listen to me.”
Finley had been accused of much worse. Right now, she just wished she could hold her breath long enough for the smell to dissipate.
“Ms.O’Sullivan,” Ray said breathlessly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The young woman who’d been sprawled across the man’s desk rushed out of the room, frantically attempting to right her clothes. The receptionist followed, paused long enough to glare at Finley, then marched out the door, slamming it behind herself.
“You can turn around now,” Johnson said. “Please have a seat.” He indicated the chairs in front of his desk—the desk that had been decluttered, since most of what had been on top of it now lay on the floor.
Finley had no choice but to take a breath, barely resisted a gag as she stepped forward and settled into one of the chairs. She blanked the previous images from her brain. She suspected they would haunt her for a long time to come.
Johnson took his seat, and she was grateful since one shirttail still hung free of his hastily fastened trousers. She didn’t need any reminders of what she had witnessed.
There were things you could not unsee no matter how hard you tried.
Finley kicked the thoughts out of her head and summoned the frustration and anger she’d felt before walking into his office. Whatever the hell game this guy was playing, she was not interested in continuing. At least not on his behalf.
“When you are a client of our firm,” Finley began, sounding far calmer than she felt, “our primary condition is that you be truthful with us. We cannot adequately represent you until you tell us the truth. It’s that simple.”
He scrubbed at his beard-stubbled face. Finley winced inwardly at the idea of what was likely on his hands. Damn. Her gut clenched.
“You’re going to have to be more specific, Ms.O’Sullivan. What is it you think I’ve been untruthful about?” He leaned back, propped his feet on his desk, then crossed his ankles.
“First, about your brother. Your father mentioned that you didn’t get along with Ian. In fact,” she went on, improvising a bit, “I actually got the impression he felt you may have had something to do with his disappearance.” When he would have spoken, she held up a hand to stop him. “I don’t like playing games, so why don’t you tell me yourself about your relationship with your brother and what you believe happened to him.”
He laughed, long and loud. Anger steamed through her, but Finley kept her mouth shut in hopes her tirade had prompted at least a sliver of truth.
When Johnson pulled himself together and laid his eyes on Finley’s once more, he said, “Look, I hated my little brother in some ways. This is true. He was a nuisance. Pop petted him like he was a lapdog—fun to look at but worthless for anything else. It was frustrating since I did all the work and got less recognition. Even when the old man pretended to try and toughen Ian up, he went easy on him. So, yeah, I said a lot of crap and even gave him hell sometimes. Kid stuff.”
Finley chose her words carefully. “At the time of his disappearance, he was twenty-three. You were thirty-two. That’s hardly kid stuff age.”
He smirked. “I get it. Pop told you about the bathtub incident. I was fourteen when I tried”—he made air quotes—“to drown him in the tub. Did he also tell you that he beat the shit out of me for that? I wasn’t really going to kill the kid, just scare the hell out of him for messing with my stuff.”
Finley had saved the biggest surprise for last. Her mind worked that way. “Did you set all this up with the handbag and the cigarette butts to prompt an opportunity to prove your innocence to your father? Is that what you’ve been doing all this time? Trying to prove something to him?”
He didn’t laugh this time. “My father is dying. He’s a bitter old man because he didn’t do a good job with his youngest son. He let our mother make him soft, and then he left me to straighten out the mess they had made. Considering the pain meds the old man is on, you can’t trust anything he says.” He shrugged. “In the grand scheme of things, we both know fathers don’t always tell the whole truth.”
Finley bit her teeth together. As badly as she wanted to demand to know how he knew her father and why he would visit this office, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t give this bastard that much leverage. He would only use it against her. She needed to understand the dynamics first.
When she would have tossed another question at him, he held up both hands to stop her. “As far as this evidence goes, I have no idea how that happened. You can believe me when I say that if I had found it, I would have for sure put it some place that was not connected with me or my family. Saved myself all this trouble and that big fat retainer your boss commands.”
He appeared sincere enough, kept eye contact during his entire monologue. But she still wasn’t sure she believed him. There were people who lied with such ease that the usual tells didn’t appear. She did not trust this guy one iota.
“Here’s my problem with the evidence,” Finley said, giving him nothing of how she felt about his insistence. “First, the handbag may very well have been tucked away unnoticed on that top shelf all that time, but the cigarette butts on the floor beneath the bottom shelf, that just doesn’t jibe for me.” She shook her head. “The cops will latch on to it if it helps solve their case, but that’s a reach, and I can’t see any DA, much less a jury, going for it. Secondly, it’s just too pat that it was found in a warehouse that belonged to your family. A clean warehouse that had been emptied and obviously swept in recent months. I’m guessing you’re smart enough that if you or a member of your close family were involved with a murder, you would clean up the mess. So you can see how this just doesn’t work for me.”
His lips quirked into a grin. “I’m glad you think I’m smart. I was beginning to wonder.”
“Which is why I believe there’s an underlying motive for the evidence being found where it was found.”
The cocky humor in his expression vanished.
“Just like the car wash receipt left in her purse. It was from a car wash owned by your family. You might remember it—one of three you owned and the only one that was torn down mere days after her murder. Now that intrigues me. Tells me something is not quite what it seems.”
His face hardened, magnifying his lean jaw and blunt nose and making his thin lips look even thinner. “Gimme a break. It was a damned public car wash. How the hell do I know who patronized it? The fact is, you should be happy instead of here busting my chops. I agreed to your test,” he snapped.
Like that was supposed to impress her. She hadn’t heard the news from Jack just yet, but she wasn’t surprised at all that he had worked the Finnegan magic and gotten Johnson’s agreement.
