Chapter One
The smug look on Reed’s face could only mean one thing. Some juicy financial crime had been exposed overnight, and Reed was already counting the money their firm would make from the case.
Jackson couldn’t help but speculate. Embezzlement? Fraud? Some rich playboy caught with his pants down? He glanced at the deposition he’d been reading, wondering if the pile of workon his desk was more important than whatever Reed had to say. Probably it was. Jackson pushed the deposition aside anyway.
“Did you see the news today?” Reed asked, pulling Jackson’s door closed and settling into the spare chair.
“No. I haven’t had time to look yet. Some of us have jobs to do.”
“Ha. No, seriously, go to theTimeswebsite right now.”
“Or you could save us time andjust tell me what happened.”
Reed had a knack for the dramatic. He sat up a little, waved his arms, and leaned forward. “An as yet unidentified woman was found brutally stabbed in an Upper West Side apartment last night.”
“Jesus.” Awful news, but not the sort of thing Reed would usually bug Jackson with. There must have been an interesting angle to the crime. “That’s terrible. Why do youseem gleeful about it?”
“You know that tech mogul running for Senate? Parker Livingston?”
Jackson’s heart stopped. He froze until he realized Reed was looking at him expectantly. He nodded slowly.
“They found the body in his apartment.” Reed raised an eyebrow.
Good lord. “Is he a suspect?”
“Livingston? Not sure. It wasn’t clear from the story I read. The police haven’t releasedmany details. But if he’s implicated in this at all, I think it’s safe to say his political career is over.”
“Yeah. Christ. What a mess.” Jackson’s words came out more flippantly than he felt.
His heart pounded. He tried to school his face to hide how dizzy this news made him feel.
Reed grinned. “This is a tabloid goldmine. Can you imagine the splashy headlines and lurid photos? Ihaven’t seen thePostyet, but I’m picturing the puns. ‘Senator Slays!’ No, that’s not very good, what about—”
“I get it.”
Jackson closed his eyes and was hit by an unshakable gut feeling: Park couldn’t be guilty. He wasn’t the violent type, first of all, but more than that, he was so goddamn careful about his public image that he would never be so sloppy as to leave evidence of a crimein his own home.
Of course, it had been quite some time since he’d seen Park. Five years or so. More than that, probably.
“TheTimesis already calling this Livingston’s Chappaquiddick.” Reed ate gossipy nonsense like this for breakfast. “Not to be morbid. I mean, I’m sad that someone died. But Livingston is such a blowhard. Of course he’s got some shady business going on behind the scenes.”
Jackson pressed his lips together to keep from arguing. He wanted to protest Park’s innocence, even if he had no knowledge of it. He wanted to say that Park was a good person, that he knew firsthand about Park’s good heart. And he wanted to shake the sinking feeling in his gut that justice was about to be miscarried if he didn’t intervene in some way.
He never knew what to do with Reed’sdelight in gruesome cases like this. Reed had distance because he hadn’t spent the years prosecuting homicides that Jackson had. He knew what it was like to talk to victims’ families, to work with investigators who had painstakingly pored over every hair and fiber to find crucial evidence, to stare at photos of blood spatter and bloated corpses. Jackson had quit the DA’s office to start his ownfirm precisely because he couldn’t stomach life as a prosecutor of violent criminals. So now he sat in a pillowy soft leather executive chair and worked primarily on cases involving financial crime, never the sorts of cases where someone had ended up in a coffin.
Jackson opened his mouth to ask if any other details had been in the news when his desk phone chimed. He hit the speaker. “Yes?”
“You’ve got a walk-in, Mr. Kane,” said Penny, Jackson’s secretary.
Potential new clients showing up without appointments were rare but not unprecedented. Most showed up without realizing the firm’s hourly rate was well beyond what they could afford. Jackson was too startled—whether by the crime itself, by the mention of Park, or by both, it was hard to say—to humor someone who would balkat his fees, so he said, “I’m not seeing new clients today.”
“I know, but he’s quite insistent. Sir, you can’t—Sir, he’s in with someone, you can’t just walk in—”
Jackson’s office door opened and there stood Parker Livingston, in the flesh.
The first man Jackson had ever loved.
* * *
