His phone only rang these days for a very select handful: his parents, his agent, and his lawyer. He’d considered adding Aidan to that list, but Dawson was beginning to suspect he’d abuse that privilege, with the number of times he’d called, “just to check in.”
Dawson sighed and answered. It was, as he suspected, not his parents or his agent, who all knew better than to call him the afternoon before a game.
“Hey,” Simon Burns, his lawyer, said. “Glad I managed to catch you.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said. Whenever Simon called, it was not usually good news. For a victim, he’d imagined that hearing from his lawyer would make him feel better every once in a while, but that never seemed to happen.
“There’s a new plea on the table from Ackerman and the defense,” Simon said. “The prosecutor wanted me to discuss it with you.”
“Is it going to piss me off?” Dawson asked archly.
Simon chuckled under his breath, which probably meant,yes.
“We’ve talked about this, Dawson,” Simon said. “He’s going to probably plea out. It’s a white-collar crime.”
“Does it matter what kind of crime it is? It’s still a fucking crime. Richard Ackerman stole from me. From a whole bunch of people.”
“I know.” Simon at least sounded understanding. He’d been invaluable during this whole process. Been the one to call up an old friend in the district attorney’s office and get more eyes on the case. Get it bumped up in the case load.
Dawson didn’t need to be reminded that there were far worse crimes out there. Criminals who’d killed and raped and stolen.
Stolen shit that couldn’t be given back.
“So what’s the plea this time?” This was not the first time Ackerman and his defense team had come up with a way for him to wiggle out of this.
Sometimes Dawson felt guilty for using all his football player privilege to make sure Ackerman got adequately punished, but then he remembered that it wasn’tonlyhis money that his father-in-law had stolen.
He’d siphoned funds out of lots of people’s accounts, including a bunch of middle-class households that couldn’t necessarily ever replace what had been lost.
“Still trying to avoid jail time,” Simon said. “His defense team is pushing hard for house arrest, because of how high profile this case has gotten.”
“And? What does the prosecutor think?” Dawson demanded. He wanted Ackerman to go to fucking jail. He wanted him to sit in a tiny little box and think about how Dawson had been his son-in-law, with a front seat to how goddamn hard Dawson worked to earn every cent, but he’d stolen everything from him anyway.
But Simon just sighed.
Yep, Dawson had fucking called it. Nobody had any balls. They wanted Ackerman to get by on a technicality. To only be restricted to his cushy-ass house.
As far as Dawson was concerned, that wasn’t even a punishment. Not enough of one. Not even remotely.
“Shit,” Dawson muttered.
“And I talked to Alex,” Simon said, referring to Dawson’s agent, “and he thinks it would be better for everyone if Ackerman settled with a plea bargain. Less distracting press, less media focus on how that affected you last year.”
Dawson took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He doesn’t want me to testify.” He couldn’t blame Alex for being wary.When he’d been in the middle of all this shit, last season, there was no question it had negatively impacted his game.
And like all bad cyclical shit, the worse it had gotten, the more impossible it had been to pull himself out of it.
“You doing the deposition was tough enough.”
It hadn’t been easy, that was for sure. But the truth was while Dawson was a victim, he wasn’t the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. That was the forensic accountant he’d hired when Brynn had filed for divorce and suddenly nothing was what it seemed with his accounts.
“You said they wouldn’t even ask me to testify if it went to trial,” Dawson reminded his lawyer.
“If the prosecution keeps rejecting the pleas? If I was Ackerman’s defense team, I’d make it a media circus, and you’d be the key to that, Dawson.”
“Fuck,” Dawson muttered.
“Think about it. I’ll send the particulars over by email. Review it. I know you have a game tomorrow.”
