“Leave it there,” he said and pointed to an armchair in the corner.
Amelia offloaded the folder with a quiet breath.Done.
She could apologize and promptly leave. It was well past midnight, and the ordeal had gotten Burt out of bed. He paced the room in a tatty robe and striped pajamas, his snowy hair a disheveled mess.
She’d never seen him that out of sorts before. He was brilliant in the courtroom, hawkish but affable. Judges respected him, prosecutors envied him, and Amelia admired him but never wanted the internship. For the first time she could remember, Burt wore his years, all seventy-something of them.
“Burt, it was an accident,” Amelia said and caught sight of herself in the mantle mirror.
If he was a mess, so was she. With a clammy hand, she brushed away strands of frizzy hair plastered to her cheek.
“It was careless,” he said, sounding eerily reminiscent of her father, right down to the clipped tones and vague disappointment. “Careless of me to misplace it. Careless of you to rummage through it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
The transgression seemed beyond apology, and Amelia figured it was only fair that he fired her. She was moving to Arizona soon, anyway. In three weeks, none of it would matter.
“How much did you see?” Burt asked, unusually pallid as he massaged the base of his neck.
At a loss for how to quantify, Amelia shrugged. Enough to know it wasn’t for her, enough that the folder sat in her work bag like a telltale heart pounding on her morbid curiosity.
She’d sensed the wrongness of it, the soft chime of something amiss. That chime wailed with a warning as Burt inched closer. He dropped his voice as if the walls themselves might absorb his secrets.
“No one can know about this. Not even your father.” He paused and added forcefully, “Especiallynot your father.”
“Why? He might be able to help.”
Burt shook his head and motioned to the newspaper on his desk. “He can’t stop what’s coming.”
Amelia skimmed the headline.Crime Syndicate Suspected in Spate of Gruesome Murders.Violent crime made for splashy headlines, but something sinister had cast a long shadow over the summer as rival crime syndicates, the Velascos and the Moriartys, courted war after a decade-long truce.
And that was the crux of the folder’s contents—a wealth of sensitive information on the Moriartys. It seemed benign at first, nothing that wouldn’t be uncovered during discovery—a roster of Moriarty associates, known locations and patterns of life, vulnerabilities to exploit. That wasn’t what piqued her curiosity, though. Page after page, she encountered a name on repeat.
Emory Holt.
Amelia had said it out loud once and felt silly after. On her lips, his name started with a hum and ended on a sigh, the syllables perfectly lyrical. The enigma sparked Amelia’s intrigue, and it spread like wildfire when she found Emory Holt’s mug shot in the folder.
He was strikingly handsome with bronze skin and long, jet black hair framing quintessentially masculine features—strong jaw, high cheekbones, heavy brow. A smoldering intensity gathered behind piercing amber eyes. Those eyes were hypnotic, she decided, but that felt silly too.
Why then did she keep going back to his name, to his picture? A girl like her knew when to quit, and yet she scoured the folder for more of him but got more than she bargained for.
Whoever Emory Holt was, the Velasco family wanted him dead, and the folder’s contents detailed how they planned to do it. The Velascos didn’t intend for it to be a fair fight or his death to be clean. Amelia had seen enough of the folder then and wanted no more dirty knowledge of Emory Holt and his grisly fate.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Amelia asked Burt.
They waltzed along the edges of something dangerous, but Burt refused to acknowledge it. His distraught gaze dropped to the parquet floor.
“The police…” Amelia began gently, but Burt sunk the suggestion with a bitter laugh.
“Who do you think pads their payroll?”
Amelia didn’t honestly know, nor could she say if he meant the Moriartys or Velascos. Maybe both. She had so many questions. Why did Burt have the folder? Who was Emory Holt? And why did the Velascos want him dead?
Burt rummaged through the liquor cabinet beside the fireplace. “Do you drink?” he asked but had already fetched two glasses and poured a finger of scotch in each.
“Not really,” Amelia answered as Burt handed her a glass.
“In business and in life, I close the deal with a drink,” he said and lifted his glass in salute. “It’s ceremonial. Sacred. Secrecy is sacred too. Sometimes our lives depend on it. This is one of those times. You will forget what you saw in that folder. No matter what happens or who asks. Your father, the police, anyone. And I do meananyone.”
