Blood Money (6 page)

“No, there’s been no change there. Mrs. Laramore just seems to be having a moment. I think she needs you.”

He glanced at Jack, who could only wonder how many of those “moments” were in the pipeline. “I should be going,” said Jack.

“No, come with me. Please. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“It sounds like your wife is upset. Maybe now isn’t a good time.”

“I meant my daughter. I want you to meet Celeste.”

Jack hesitated, a bit embarrassed that the very idea of “meeting” someone in a coma had caught him so off guard. The man was so sincere, however, that Jack quickly got over it. “I’d be honored to meet her,” said Jack.

Jack followed him out of the lounge and back into the ICU. As they walked in silence to room six, Jack could almost hear the growing weight of concern in a father’s footfalls. The door was open, but they stopped before entering.

“Wait here for a sec,” he told Jack.

Jack did so. Laramore entered alone, and although Jack couldn’t make out the words, he could hear him speaking to his wife. A moment later he emerged and said, “Just so you know, Celeste’s mother and I firmly believe that Celeste can hear us. So if you say anything, be positive.”

Jack nodded and went inside.

Celeste’s bed was slightly elevated, allowing her to rest comfortably in less than the full upright position. The soft lighting was soothing, though her eyes were closed. Fluids fed into her veins from three different tubes that connected to a cluster of clear sacks hanging from the IV pole. The blood pressure cuff on her left bicep connected to a cardiac monitor, which beeped to the rhythm of her heart. An oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth. She was not yet on a ventilator, but Jack quickly recalled Mr. Laramore’s mention that a pulmonologist had come by to make that assessment.

Celeste’s mother was seated in a chair at the bedside. Her skin tone was off, a clear indication of too much stress and too little sleep, and her eyes were puffy, undoubtedly from crying. She leaned closer to her daughter and spoke in a gentle voice. “Celeste, there’s a man here to see you. His name is Jack.”

Then she signaled him closer and added, “Jack is going to help us. He’s going to help us get the care you need to get all better, baby.”

It felt like a dagger to Jack, one that sliced through his professional skin and laid bare his reluctance to get involved.

He came forward, his gaze fixed on Celeste. The blanket was chest high, and a few inches of the striped hospital gown showed above it. At first Jack didn’t notice the bruising, but only because the marks were so high up on her neck, right beneath the jawbone, and the shadows obscured them. Jack tried not to stare, but it pained him to see such telltale signs of the senseless attack.

Celeste’s mother reached over and removed the oxygen mask, and Jack felt his own breath slip away.

Her nose, the mouth, the beautiful young features framed by the chestnut hair—Jack didn’t say a word in front of her parents, but he was certain that it was written all over his face: The resemblance to Sydney was uncanny.

Jack glanced at Celeste’s mother, and he sensed that it was time to leave. Ben Laramore was of like mind, and he guided Jack out into the hallway.

“Please give serious thought to what we talked about,” he told Jack.

The nurse was right outside the room, and Jack was feeling the weighted stare from two pairs of eyes. There was no question that the nurse had recognized him as Sydney Bennett’s lawyer. Jack had seen that look of contempt before.

“I will,” said Jack. “I’ll definitely think about it.”

Chapter Nine

J
ack thought about it—nearly all night long.

Of course he felt sorry for the Laramores, felt their pain for Celeste. A personal profit in the form of legal fees, even on contingency, would have made Jack public enemy number one in Faith Corso’s war against blood money. The pro bono route would silence the critics, but taking on another case for no pay was no small commitment. Legal fees aside, the out-of-pocket cost of bringing a case like this to trial—experts, court reporters, investigators, and more—could easily push fifty grand. Probably more.

At six o’clock the bedroom began to brighten, hinting at a new day. Jack had a severe case of the Monday-morning blues. He was staring at the ceiling, having drifted in and out of sleep since retiring around one
A.M.
Andie was sound asleep, her head and torso on Jack’s side of the bed, her legs and feet on hers. Andie’s idea of sharing a mattress was a bit like their golden retriever’s notion of sharing the couch. At least Andie didn’t drool when she kissed him.

“Quiet, Max,” he whispered.

Max was the most talkative dog Jack had ever known. Mornings especially. It was a throaty rumble that preceded the insertion of a big wet nose into Jack’s ear and seemed to say,
I just love Andie’s shoes—they’re delicious!

Jack snatched a slipper from Max’s mouth and rolled out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Andie. Max happily followed him to the bathroom, the kitchen, the backyard for a pee—the dog, not Jack—and then back to the bedroom and into the walk-in closet. Weeks had passed since Jack and Max had started the week with a Monday-morning run to the beach and back. As Jack pulled on his cycling pants and shoes, Max was obviously fooled into thinking that today was the day when life returned to situation normal: Dogs rule. Jack hated to disappoint him, but he was cycling into work—a one-way trip, no dogs allowed.

“Sorry, pal,” he said. “Andie will have to take you.”

Max didn’t understand a word of it, but he looked sad, and part of Jack imagined that it was because Andie could actually outrun Max.

Jack filled his water bottle, sneaked into the garage without Max, and hopped onto his eighteen-speed with the titanium frame. The touring bike had been a fortieth birthday present from a group of friends who swore they were just trying to save his knees from running. Jack wondered if they were trying to get him killed. Key Biscayne had bike trails—some of the most scenic in the world. But cycling just about anywhere else in Miami was the great battle of man versus automobile, where most drivers were of the mind-set that anyone with the audacity to enter the roadway on two wheels deserved swift and severe punishment. After several brushes with instant death, Jack attached an extra water-bottle carrier to the frame to hold an air horn. It was useless against true homicidal maniacs, but it would at least save him from the growing number of idiots who thought they could text and drive at the same time. Jack gave it a test blast before leaving the driveway. The ringing in his ears confirmed that it was still in working order.

By six thirty Jack was on his way. He didn’t need to be in the office until after eight
A.M.
, which meant that he had time to pedal over the bridge, onto the mainland, and into Coconut Grove for breakfast. He was a regular at Greenstreet’s, a corner café on Main Street where an hour or so at an outdoor table beneath a shade umbrella could feel like a visit to the Left Bank. Jack made the mistake of checking his e-mails over coffee, and his quick breakfast turned into an hour of thumb exercises. It was after nine o’clock by the time he got back on the bicycle and reached his office. Central Grove had the canopy of a rain forest, and tucked behind a stand of oaks and royal poinciana trees that lined Main Highway was an eighty-year-old house with yellow siding and bright blue shutters. It didn’t look like a law office, and that was what Jack liked about it. He carried the bike inside, along with his helmet and trusty air horn. His assistant was already at her desk and on the phone.

“Morning, Bonnie.”

She hung up the telephone and glared in his direction. From the tense expression on her face, Jack might have guessed she’d been negotiating a hostage release.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“What’s wrong? You want to know what’s
wrong
?”

The phone rang. Bonnie didn’t flinch.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” he asked.

“No. You answer it.”

Jack didn’t know what was up, but he’d worked with Bonnie long enough to know that tone. He got it himself: “Swyteck and Associates.”

“And associates?” the caller said. “Who in their right mind would
associate
with you, scumbag?
Scumbag, scumbag, you are a scum—
”

Jack hung up. Immediately, the phone rang again. He glanced at Bonnie, who breathed out through her nose with the force of a charging bull.

“Go right ahead,” she said. “Answer it again.”

He did. “Swyteck and—”

“How do you live with yourself, you disgusting piece of—”

Jack slammed down the phone.

Bonnie shot him a look of desperation. “This has been going on all morning,” she said. “It’s even worse than when the verdict was announced.”

A third call. Jack answered and braced himself.

“This is blood money of the worst kind, you repulsive—”

Jack held the phone away, put the air horn to the mouthpiece, and gave it a five-second blast. Then he checked the line. The caller was gone.

“Here,” he said, handing Bonnie the horn. “This ought to take care of it.”

Bonnie took it and smiled. Jack wheeled his bicycle down the hall toward the back bedroom, then stopped when he heard Bonnie’s phone ring in the other room—followed by a blast from the stadium air horn.

“It works!” she shouted.

She was actually using it, which made him chuckle. He checked the closet to make sure he had a business suit—charcoal gray would do—and then headed to the bathroom for a shower. Bonnie headed him off in the hallway, telephone in hand.

“It’s Andie,” she said, wincing apologetically. “She might be a little perturbed. I blasted her by accident.”

“Oh, boy,” said Jack. He stepped away and took the call in his office.

“Has Bonnie lost her mind?” said Andie. “She nearly busted my eardrum.”

“Sorry,” said Jack. “I really gotta get her to lay off the breakfast burritos.”

“What?”

“Nothing. What’s up?”

“Just—please tell me it’s not true,” said Andie.

Jack wadded up a stray Post-it and pitched it into the trash can. “Tell you what’s not true?”

“I’ve heard this from a half dozen people already. Faith Corso was on one of the morning talk shows. Her latest ‘exclusive’ is that you went to Jackson last night and tried to talk the Laramore family into filing a lawsuit with you as the lead attorney.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it? On our car ride home, you were awfully vague about what you and Mr. Laramore talked about.”

“That’s because an attorney’s conversation with a prospective client is no less confidential than a conversation with an existing client.”

“So it
is
true? You’re going to be their lawyer?”

“No. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it didn’t go down the way Corso is reporting it.”

“Oh, my God. Jack, you can’t be serious. You are actually trying to convince these poor people that they should sue BNN?”

“What?”

“That’s what Corso’s sources are saying—that you are cooking up a lawsuit against BNN for getting the crowd so whipped up that someone attacked a Sydney Bennett look-alike.”

“Wait a second,” said Jack. “First of all, I’m smart enough to know that no one has ever succeeded in suing the media for inciting some nut-job TV junkie to commit a violent act. Second, I could get disbarred for going to a hospital and trying to talk the victim’s family into filing a lawsuit. I’m not an idiot.”

“Faith Corso says you
are
an idiot and that you
will
be disbarred.”

Jack gripped the phone, amazed that just ten hours earlier he had been trying to convince Ben Laramore that Corso had a good heart. “Very odd to me that Corso is the first journalist in the country to find out that I went to the hospital last night. And even more interesting that she presumes to know what Ben Laramore and I talked about.”

“Are you saying the invitation from Mr. Laramore was a setup?”

“I’d hate to think so.”

There was a blast of the horn from the other room. Bonnie was fighting off another attack on line two.

“But stranger things have happened,” he said, as he got up to close the door.

Chapter Ten

J
ack wanted to blow his brains out, which, generally speaking, is a predictable reaction to defending a client for seven hours in a deposition taken by the newest member of the Florida Bar.

At five o’clock he grabbed a cab back to the office to catch up on other work, hopefully something that would remind him why he had become a lawyer in the first place. Monday-evening traffic was even worse than usual, and it could have pushed him over the edge, had he let it get to him. Instead, he savored a random “Miami moment,” finding amusement in the company name on the stalled landscaping truck that was blocking the road:
Jesus & Sons
. Jack wondered if the proprietor had ever read
The Da Vinci Code
.

Bonnie was still at the reception desk when Jack stepped through the door.

“Phone calls stopped yet?” Jack asked.

“What does this tell you?” she asked, then pressed the button on the air horn. It peeped, as spent and exhausted as she was.

“Maybe we should just stop answering the phone for the next day or so.”

Bonnie reached all the way down to her New Jersey roots and shot him some attitude. “Brilliant, Jack. And if that doesn’t work, we can put up the hurricane shutters, fly out to Vegas, and see if we win enough money to pay next month’s rent. You can’t run a law office that way. And if I ignore the landline, they’ll call your cell.”

Jack removed his tie and laid it aside. “That’s already started. It was vibrating all day in the deposition from hell. Not sure how these people got my cell number.”

“From the Web site.”

“The BNN Web site?” asked Jack.

“Not directly,” she said, “but it’s kind of linked to it—‘no-blood-money.com.’”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Take a look.”

Jack watched over her shoulder as Bonnie brought up the site on her screen. He was of course aware that blogging and other online chatter about the Sydney Bennett trial had been rampant. It was news to him, however, that in a matter of days the no-blood-money campaign had organized to the point of developing an official Web site.

Bonnie dragged her cursor to the About Us button. “The site manager is the same woman who started the Justice-for-Emma Web site when trial started.”

The home page was a three-paneled display. On the left was the infamous photograph that the prosecutor had shown on a projection screen during her closing argument, a candid shot of Sydney dressed in a tight halter top and belting back a shot of tequila on the night of Emma’s disappearance. On the right was a photo of Jack with links to daily coverage of the trial. The middle panel was for Latest Developments. The feature du jour was a prominent link to the BNN headline about Jack’s alleged solicitation of the Laramore family, together with “a personal message” from “special guest blogger” Faith Corso:
TELL JACK SWYTECK WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT HIM. CALL TODAY! NO BLOOD MONEY!
Jack’s office and cell phone numbers were in bold red letters.

A pop-up suddenly took over the screen. It looked like an advertisement for red wine.

“What the heck is that?” asked Jack.

“Monataque,” said Bonnie.

“Mona-what?”

“Mona-taque
. It’s a juice they make from some exotic tropical berry. Sells for about forty dollars a bottle. It’s supposed to be good for you. Cures acne. Hemorrhoids. Cancer. You name it.”

“That’s
who’s sponsoring the Web site?”

“Not directly. Monataque is one of those multilevel marketing programs.”

“You mean a pyramid scheme?”

“Not all MLMs are pyramids. I sold cosmetics for two years and actually made some money. But to your point: From what I hear, Monataque is a classic pyramid. It’s all about recruiting members at five hundred dollars a head, and ninety-nine percent of them never sell enough juice to earn it back. The husband and wife who run this Web site also happen to be one of Monataque’s top recruiting teams.”

“So the no-blood-money Web site is also a recruiting tool for snake-oil salesmen?”

“It takes all kinds, Jack. This is a grassroots movement.”

“Yeah, and grass is green. Like money. I wonder how much the kickback to Faith Corso is.”

Bonnie logged off, switched off the computer, and grabbed her purse. “I’m beat. I’ll see you in the morning, chief.”

Jack thanked her for slogging through a rough day, locked the door after her, and went back to his office. He kept more clean clothes at the office than at home, and as he changed out of his suit, the phone rang with eleven separate calls, each going to voice mail. On the twelfth, he pulled the cord from the jack.

The best therapy would have been to dive into his work and forget it, but the distractions had gotten to him, and after an hour of wasted time, he gave up. He’d managed to get through the Sydney Bennett trial without too much second-guessing, but now that the case was over, regrets were flooding in, some from the distant past. More than a decade had passed since his defense of Eddie Goss, a confessed sexual predator who stood accused of savaging a teenage girl. After the verdict, protesters had pelted him with exploding bags of animal blood on the courthouse steps—no subtlety in the blood-is-on-you symbolism. Bonnie had been there for him, pleaded with him not to resign from the Freedom Institute. But
State v. Goss
was the trial that had pushed Jack out of the world of defending the guilty, the most gut-wrenching, controversial case of his career.

Until this one.

Jack switched off the lights and locked up the office. It was just a few minutes past sunset, but the leafy canopy that provided shade by day made dusk seem like the dead of night. Riding his bicycle all the way back to Key Biscayne wasn’t an option, the spent air horn being the least of his concerns. It was a recurring transportation problem that Jack solved once or twice a week by walking six blocks into the Grove for a beer at Cy’s Place and catching a ride home from Theo. He shot Theo a text to let him know:

Need a ride tonight. Walking over now.

To his surprise, Theo actually responded:
Watch out for the boogeyman.

It was funny, but it wasn’t.

The asphalt trail was a familiar path, and in the darkness, he was able to avoid the biggest potholes and tree roots almost from memory. This was one of the safest stretches in Coconut Grove, where churches and synagogues butted up against some of the oldest and most prestigious private schools in Florida. Hundreds of schoolchildren made this walk every day, no problem. Preschoolers, hand in hand with a parent. Teenage girls dressed in the traditional plaid uniforms of Sacred Heart Academy. Ivy League hopefuls in their new Range Rover or BMW convertible. Some even arrived by boat on the waterfront side of the lush campuses. Five days a week, a mixed parade of innocence, wealth, and privilege—all without incident.

And every last one of them was on Cape Cod or in the Hamptons during the dead of Miami’s summer, the Grove a virtual ghost town.

Stop it.

Jack kept walking, and he was about a quarter mile from Cy’s Place when he noticed the sound of footsteps behind him. They had the rhythm of his own footfalls, seeming to match his pace and direction. He stopped, looked back, and said the first thing that came to mind—something a little less paranoid than
Is anyone out there?

“Theo, are you messing with me?”

Nothing.

“Theo?”

A car passed, then more silence. Uncomfortable silence. Then another car passed, and in the glow of the headlights Jack spotted the orange reflective tape on the heels of a jogger across the street. She obviously had no problem being alone on Main Highway. It gave him a sense of relief, which quickly turned into anger at himself.
Main
Highway. Which fed into
Main
Street. This wasn’t a side street or a back alley. He could almost hear Theo laughing at him as that text message replayed in his mind’s eye:

Watch out for the boogeyman.

It was essentially the same thing Neil Goderich had told him right out of law school, when Jack had joined the Freedom Institute: Threats came with the turf. Over the years, Jack had gotten plenty of them from cops, clients, witnesses, and even the creepy anonymous source. Any criminal defense lawyer who couldn’t handle a dose of intimidation needed to find a new career.

Still, as Jack reached the darkest part of the trail, he found himself walking faster. Streetlamps were of little help, their glow smothered by sprawling banyan trees on either side of the highway, the highest and longest limbs reaching across both lanes, as if to join hands. It was the lush, tropical version of a tunnel—one without lights. Jack had just passed the gated entrance to Ransom Everglades Upper School when, out of nowhere, it felt as if he’d been broadsided by an all-pro linebacker. The force sent him tumbling over the waist-high wall of coral rock that extended the full length of the trail. He landed facedown in the grass on the other side of the wall. The attacker was on him immediately.

“What the—”

Before Jack could finish his sentence, much less react, his hands were behind his back, a nylon loop closed around his wrists, and another loop joined his ankles. He was hog-tied, unable to move. The man rolled him over and grabbed Jack by the throat.

“Don’t move, just listen,” the man said.

The man’s grip was atomic, the fingers of a mountain climber, and the pressure around Jack’s neck made it difficult to focus on what he was saying. The thick, slurred speech didn’t make things any clearer.

“Where is Sydney Bennett?”

Where ish Shyndy.
It wasn’t that he was drunk. He had something in his mouth—a wad of cotton or some spy toy to make his voice unrecognizable.

Jack could barely breathe, let alone talk. “I don’t know where she—”

“Don’t lie. If you lie, you die.”

Jack was having trouble following even that simple line of logic. The pressure around his neck had his head pounding and lungs burning as he struggled to breathe. Jack couldn’t see the man’s face, couldn’t see much of anything. His attacker, like everything else, was a blur.

“If you don’t know where she is, then it’s your job to find her for me.”

“I don’t—”

“Shut up!”

The grip tightened. The burning sensation in Jack’s lungs was unbearable. A hint of blood flavored his mouth, the pressure somehow having triggered it. Jack fought for air, but his attacker was in complete control.

“You
are
going to lead me to Sydney,” the man said, his hand like a vise around Jack’s neck, the words slurring through the wads of cotton in his mouth. “If you don’t, I promise you this: Someone you love will get what Sydney deserves.”

The hand around Jack’s throat rose higher on his neck and closed even tighter. Jack had one final burst of resistance left in his body, and then nothing more. The pounding in his head seemed to explode into his ears, and then the night went from black to blacker—to nothing.