Owen closes his cabin door. He takes a seat at the desk. His computer screens power on. His monitors kick up, their blue light shining back at him. The encrypted phone lines ready. It all comes to life.
Five years, ten months, and twenty-seven days.
It’s time.
No One’s Hands Are Clean
“Teddy, pour everyone a drink,” Frank says.
We are sitting in the back room, a small dining room off the veranda. It’s apparently only used when the weather is poor, when they can’t have dinner reservations outside. It hasn’t been used in a long time. No tablecloths. No pretty lights shining over the large windows. Chairs folded up.
The opposite of the party twelve feet away.
Frank’s security guards pulled the chairs down around a corner table—a rectangular six-top. Nicholas and I sit on one side of the table, Quinn and her father on the other. Teddy walking over from the small bar.
The guards, meanwhile, stand on the other side of the room—by the door leading out to the veranda, to the party. They’re making sure no one else is coming in—or that any of us, apparently, are getting out.
Somehow it doesn’t make this all seem safer.
Teddy hands his father a bourbon, taking the free seat next to him. Frank doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t even look at Teddy. He looks only at Nicholas as he takes a long sip of the drink, leans back calmly in his chair.
“Nicholas,” he says, “I would think you would be the last person I’d need to tell that issuing threats is not the way to negotiate with us.”
“We aren’t negotiating,” Nicholas says. “We already negotiated and your children broke that agreement.”
“So what is this then?”
“A delivery,” he says.
I pull the tablet out of my bag, rest it on the table. But I don’t pass it over. Not to Frank—nor Teddy, nor Quinn. Not yet.
“As I mentioned,” Nicholas continues, “we have a large number of documents that we feel confident you would rather remain… in your family. That I have devoted my life to keeping away from anyone who is not in your family.”
He looks at Frank when he says this part. He looks at Frank and holds his eyes.
Frank doesn’t ask what kind of documents. He doesn’t need to ask. They are the kind of documents and data that Nicholas has collected over decades of working with Frank. Documents that detail every indiscretion, every illegal activity, every capital crime. The documents that Nicholas went to jail for (for the better part of ten years) as opposed to producing them for the authorities.
“All the files have been collated and organized by year and criminal wrongdoing, cross-labeled to highlight individual culpability, redacting any criminal activity for which statute of limitations has expired. As you know, that doesn’t apply to most of them…” he says. “A flash drive has been delivered to each of your homes. Just so everyone is on the same page as to what we are talking about.”
“But you were our lawyer,” Quinn says.
“That is true.”
“So I can’t imagine that I need to remind you that whatever you think you’ve collected here would all fall under the umbrella of attorney-client privilege. Completely inadmissible in the court of law.”
“Well, Quinn, maybe I need to remind you that I haven’t beenyour lawyer for quite a long time,” Nicholas says. “Moreover, I was disbarred when I went to prison to protect your family…”
“That doesn’t necessarily pierce privilege.”
“That’s arguable. But it’s also not relevant. The court found that the nature of my criminal activity, the scope of what I did to protect your family, meant I was not acting in the capacity of your lawyer, but rather as a part of the organization. And that certainly does pierce attorney-client privilege.” He pauses as Quinn takes that in. “In fact, it blows any privilege out of the water. Which, as you should know, makes every document on this tablet admissible by the Feds. In whatever capacity they want to use them.”
Nicholas nods in my direction and I slide the tablet across the table to Frank.
“Password is 080811…” I say.
Frank looks over at me, and I see him clock it. The significance of the password. Of that date. Of the month and the day.
The day that Kate was killed.
