“Yes. But, as you are well aware, I’m very, very good at ferreting money from the most unlikely places.” Knowledge was power. Her clients never failed to give generously. Elizabeth Drake had nothing on her.
“You apparently have some powerful clients.”
“Name any powerful man in this city and I can put a checkmark on my client list.” She looked Carson dead in the eye. “Including Drake and Wainwright.”
He still didn’t completely believe her; that was obvious. But he would. Very soon now.
“What did you mean, money andmarkers?”
That part had been her idea. Otis had praised her for her resourcefulness. A man like Otis Fleming didn’t offer praise often. “I never complete a service for cash only. There’s always a marker held in reserve. If I ever need a favor, the marker is called in.”
She lifted her chin in defiance of what he no doubt thought of that. “I never fail a client and a client never fails me,” she explained. “We have an unwritten contract, and we never meet in person after the initial contact. There is never any link between us. I take clients by personal recommendation only.” Any meetings after the first one were accomplished by videoconference via a secure link. The link bounced all over the internet. No one could trace it back to her.
“What exactly,” Carson ventured, “is the nature of your business relationship with Fleming?”
That one was simple. “I provide him with secrets he can use to manipulate the cooperation of those who might otherwise block his efforts. Occasionally I resolve a problem with someone who isn’t cooperating, but that doesn’t happen often. I don’t have direct access to his business dealings, but I’ve made it a point to know what he does.”
“And what does he do?”
“He facilitates the needs of anyone who offers the right price.” Her pulse sped up at the idea of what she was about to say. “If someone in, say, New York needs something to happen in Birmingham, Otis arranges it. If a drug cartel needs to extend territory, he buys the real estate, if you know what I mean. Men like Wainwright and Drake protect him.” Protected her until recently.
Carson sat forward, bracing his forearms on his knees. “I’m not saying I believe Drake and Wainwright are or were involved with you or Fleming, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. Right now, I need the whole truth about what happened to my family. And how Dane plays into it.” He leveled a look at her that related just how serious he was. Dead serious. “If you lie to me on any part, no matter how insignificant, I will see that you spend the rest of your life in prison—your mentor, too.”
Poor Carson. He still thought truth and justice would prevail.Not a snowball’s chance in hell.No matter. She had made her decision. Let him believe what he would.
“Fair enough.” She crossed one leg over the other and, to her dismay, savored the way his gaze followed the movement. “As I told you, August fifteenth Wainwright hired me to carry a proposition to Stokes. I was to inform him of the deal and then ensure that he was persuaded. Not that it was difficult. Stokes knew he would get caught sooner rather than later and that he would most likely be facing a death sentence. Under the circumstances, my job was simple. He added only one addendum to the proposal.”
“Five minutes alone with me.”
She nodded.
Carson considered that a moment then said, “But you can’t prove Wainwright hired you to go to Stokes.”
“Other than Stokes’s word,” she admitted, “which you heard for yourself. Then on the eighteenth, Wainwright visited him personally. There is, of course, no proof of that, either.”
“You suggested that Wainwright went to these lengths to cover up the identity of the real murderer?”
“He wanted to help Senator Drake. Dane is his only son, after all, and the senator has taken extreme and numerous measures to keep him out of trouble. I can vouch for that.”
Carson shot to his feet. “That’s certainly convenient.” He threaded his fingers through that thick dark hair. Her fingers curled into balls of resistance. “The man is dead. He can’t exactly defend himself.”
“What it is,” she said, “is damned lucky for you that I’m willing to give you this information at all.” Fury tightened her lips. She forced it back. “This is what I do. It’s all I have, and the steps I’ve taken in the past twenty-four hours end it. I’ll have nothing.”
He braced his hands on his hips and turned another of those fierce glares on her. “All right, for the sake of argument, let’s go with that. Why would Dane murder my family?”
“I can’t answer that question. I can’t even guarantee that he did. I only know that he had the rings in his possession and was frantic to get them back. He kept going on about some secret.”
That muscle that always ticked in Carson’s jaw when his tension rose had started its rhythmic flexing.
“But Dane knows something about it,” she considered aloud. “And if he didn’t kill them, someone he knows did, otherwise he wouldn’t have had the rings.”
Carson lowered back onto the sofa.
Annette concentrated hard to remember all Dane had said that night. She’d been focused on hiding the rings and getting rid of the murder weapon and the body. “He mentioned something about all the blood and how he hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone.”
Yeah, that was right. He kept repeating the same things over and over.
“But ... that doesn’t mean he killed anyone,” Carson argued. “There was a lot of talk and media pandemonium about the ... scene. The drugs probably skewed his memory.” The low monotone of Carson’s voice told her he was fighting a serious case of denial.
