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Over the next thirty minutes, Jack got the complete download, from the Wagner Group mercenaries to the superyachts. The legal attaché did most of the talking. Jack listened, all ears.
Jack caught the morning flight from Heathrow. He slept the entire flight.
Pointless as it might have been, he was at the station house until after midnight filling out a police report. By the time he’d finished with the Metro Police, his neck was so sore that he’d presented himself at the ER for pain medication. The physician had warned him not to take it until he was on the plane, or he would surely oversleep and miss his flight. The pain kept him awake until he was in his seat, then he popped two pills. The flight attendant had to wake him once to buckle his seat belt for landing, and then wake him again to deplane in Miami. He wanted to text Andie to let her know he’d landed, but his cellphone battery was completely dead, drained by hours of streaming inflight entertainment, even though Jack had slept through every minute of it. By the time he got through customs, it was late afternoon.
A mob of reporters surrounded him the moment he left the restricted area and stepped through the sliding glass doors to the main terminal. An “Action News” television reporter pushed her way forward and thrust a microphone toward his face.
“Mr. Swyteck, what is your reaction to the indictment?” she asked.
Jack suddenly felt like Rip Van Winkle. “Indictment?”
More questions followed, and Jack picked up bits and pieces of information.
“Is it true that Tyler McCormick was Imani’s lover?”
“Why is the charge second-degree murder and not first?”
“Will you be defending both Imani and her husband at trial?”
Both charged?Jack took Mark Twain’s advice—“Better to keep your mouth shut and appear ignorant than to open it and remove alldoubt”—and forged ahead toward the exit. He spotted a limo driver holding a sign with his name on it. Jack hadn’t ordered a limo, but he quickly realized that someone had planned ahead for him. The driver handed him a handwritten note. It was from Imani.
Why don’t you answer yourfucking phone. I need you NOW!!!
The flock of reporters followed him and the driver out of the terminal and all the way to the waiting car at the curb. Cameras rolled, and reporters continued to fire questions, as Jack climbed into the backseat and the driver pulled away.
“Somebody really needs your help,” the driver said, clearly meaning Imani.
Jack plugged his cell into the USB port in the center console. It slowly came back to life. “Yeah,” said Jack, thinking of Theo. “That makes two.”
Chapter 20
The bridge to Star Island is a stubby finger that projects north from the busy east-west causeway that connects Miami to Miami Beach. As Jack’s limo approached the guarded entrance to the island, about a dozen reporters were waiting right outside the gate. Jack looked straight ahead, not pandering to the barrage of cameras aimed at the passenger-side window, as one photographer after another snapped soon-to-go-viral images of Imani’s lawyer arriving at her waterfront estate. Jack was pretty sure he recognized Gloria and Emilio Estefan’s house on his way to Imani’s place. Nice, but not quite what Imani had. According to the media coverage, the house Imani had rented was a truly unique property on 1.4 acres at the tip of the island, offering unobstructed views of both sunrise and sunset, a ballroom-sized living room, and a wine cellar for a thousand bottles, all with enough dock space for a 250-foot superyacht.
The wrought-iron gate at the end of the driveway swung open, and the limo driver dropped Jack at the front entrance. One of the servants brought Jack inside. Imani was in the kitchen, baking chocolate chip cookies. Over the years, Jack had seen clients invoke a variety of strategies to cope with an indictment, most of which landed on Jack’s list of “don’ts.” The smell of Toll House cookies was now officially at the top of the “do” list.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said, and she hugged him, but not in the way that had made him uncomfortable in front of the cameras in the courtroom. This one simply felt like someone who needed a hug.
“Where’s Theo?” she asked. “I thought he would come with you.” She removed a sheet of cookies from the oven and placed them on the countertop to cool. “I made cookies,” she said with a shrug.
As if that would make up for the hell he was going through. “We won’t be hearing from Theo until he feels it’s safe.”
She seemed to appreciate the import of his words. They sat on the barstools at the island, facing each other from opposite sides of the polished granite slab, as Jack gave her the two-minute version of the great adventures of Theo Knight.
Imani held her head in her hands, elbows on the counter. “I should never have trusted Amongus. But how could I have known he was going to try to pull off something like that?”
“The goal now is to make sure Theo doesn’t end up like Amongus.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll deal with that and Theo’s situation. Let’s focus on you.”
She breathed in and out, regaining her focus. And her anger. “First off, what kind of games is this prosecutor playing, announcing an indictment at three o’clock in the afternoon while my lawyer is on an airplane?”
Jack had seen it before. “It’s a holdover strategy from the days when people used to catch up on the entire day by watching the evening news on one of the networks. Prosecutors would hold the press conference in the afternoon so the defense couldn’t get in a response in time for the evening news broadcast.”
“So, where’s this prosecutor from, 1985?”
“Fair point. There’s always time to respond in the modern world of social media and real-time news, twenty-four/seven.”
