Laura Caldwell - Izzy McNeil 05 - Question of Trust Read online

  Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

  But what if you can’t tell which is which?

  When attorney Izzy McNeil’s home is broken into, right after her boyfriend, Theo, moves in, she ignores the coincidence. When Theo is arrested on charges of fraud, she wants to believe he’s innocent. But when a neighbor is found dead, she can’t ignore that something is very, very wrong.

  Izzy also can’t forget how Theo was inexplicably turned down for a mortgage. Or his recent moody silences. Or how a stranger warned her that Theo needs to “accept responsibility…”

  Thrust into Theo’s case, Izzy must walk the line between attorney and lover to prove that Theo is innocent. But only Izzy can decide whether trusting Theo will keep her safe…or throw her into unimaginable danger.

  Praise for Laura Caldwell’s

  IZZY McNEIL novels

  Claim of Innocence

  “Caldwell’s trial scenes, breezy but effective, are key to the unmasking of the real culprit. Izzy’s successful juggling of personal and professional roles should win her more fans.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Red, White & Dead

  “A sizzling roller coaster ride

  through the streets of Chicago, filled with murder,

  mystery, sex and heartbreak. These page-turners

  will have you breathless and panting for more.”

  —Shore Magazine

  “Chock full of suspense, Red, White & Dead is a

  riveting mystery of crime, love, and adventure at its best.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Gayle Lynds

  Red Blooded Murder

  “Red Blooded Murder aims for the sweet spot

  between tough and tender, between thrills and thought—

  and hits the bull’s-eye. A terrific novel.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child

  “Izzy is the whole package: feminine and sexy, but also smart, tough and resourceful. She’s no damsel-in-distress from a tawdry bodice ripper; she’s more than a fitting match for any bad guys foolish enough to take her on.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  Red Hot Lies

  “Told mainly from the heroine’s first-person point of view, this beautifully crafted and tightly written story

  is a fabulous read. It’s very difficult to put down—

  and the ending is terrific.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Former trial lawyer Caldwell launches a mystery series that weaves the emotional appeal of her chick-lit titles

  with the blinding speed of her thrillers…

  Readers will be left looking forward to another

  heart-pounding ride on Izzy’s silver Vespa.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Laura Caldwell

  IZZY McNEIL NOVELS

  CLAIM OF INNOCENCE

  RED, WHITE & DEAD

  RED BLOODED MURDER

  RED HOT LIES

  OTHER BOOKS BY LAURA CALDWELL

  THE GOOD LIAR

  THE ROME AFFAIR

  LOOK CLOSELY

  THE NIGHT I GOT LUCKY

  THE YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY

  A CLEAN SLATE

  BURNING THE MAP

  LONG WAY HOME: A YOUNG MAN

  LOST IN THE SYSTEM

  AND THE TWO WOMEN WHO FOUND HIM

  Look for Laura Caldwell’s next novel

  ART OF THE MATTER

  available September 2012

  QUESTION OF TRUST

  For AMB, who believes.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I didn’t know Kim Parkway very well. Sure, she moved into the condo below me. And yes, she reached out to me on a day when I really needed it. She even borrowed something a few days later because she hadn’t completely unpacked yet.

  What I knew of Kim, I liked. I think she enjoyed me, too. But ultimately, she would have been one of those friends—an acquaintance, really—who fades from your life, remembered once in a while, and even then somewhat foggily.

  But now I know that Kim Parkway will be in my life forever. I’ll never forget her. Because on a Monday night in November, I found her dead.

  1

  “We’ve got a boatload of cocaine. Literally.”

  I looked at my friend Maggie, barely five feet tall, standing in the doorway of my office. (Technically it was her office, since I was employed by Maggie and her grandfather, Martin Bristol, at Bristol & Associates.)

  “You know,” I said, “when I met you in law school, I never thought I would hear you say things like that.”

  Maggie frowned for a second, pushing her blond, wavy hair out of her eyes. “It’s the Cortaderos.”

  “Oh.” I leaned my elbows on the desk, interested. I’d been hearing about the Cortaderos for a long time. They were clients of Maggie and Martin’s. They were a Mexican drug cartel family (allegedly a cartel family, I should say), but I hadn’t been privy to the details of any cases.

  She sighed and waved a hand. “They’re always getting into trouble.” This was not said without fondness. Maggie had a soft spot for most of her wayward clients.


  Q, short for Quentin, stuck his bald, black head in my office, as if he’d been lingering outside the door. “Did I just hear something about a drug bust?” Q had been my assistant when we were at the white-glove firm of Baltimore & Brown. He was the office manager now at Bristol & Associates. But more important, Q loved a juicy story, especially on an otherwise slow Monday afternoon.

  Maggie slumped into a seat across from my desk, then waved Q inside. “Have you ever seen the boats parked on the river? By Lower Wacker?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sam and I did a sunset cruise once. We went through the locks and out onto Lake Michigan.”

  “They did a post-Pride cruise one year,” Q said. “Epic.” He cleared his throat. “That was before I was monogamous, of course.”

  “Of course,” Maggie and I echoed.

  I nodded at her to continue.

  “Right. Well, the Cortaderos own one of those boats. It was about to be taken down the Mississippi for winter, but it was seized today.”

  “And cocaine was found on it?”

  “A lot.” She sighed the way a mom would when discussing a teen who spent too much time in front of the computer. “Forty-five kilos.”

  “What’s that worth?” Q asked.

  “Millions. Many.”

  “Many millions?” Q said.

  Maggie nodded. “They usually wouldn’t have that much in one place. Strange. I don’t know what’s going on with the Cortaderos.” She looked out my window, lapsing into silence. There was nothing to see there except the blue-tinted high-rise across the street.

  Q and I exchanged glances. Maggie had been like this lately—a little distracted, and also a little secretive, closing her mouth suddenly when she seemed about to disclose something, lapsing into long, thoughtful silences. I wondered what was going on behind the scenes at the firm.

  “What were you saying, Mags?” I prompted her.

  She blinked a few times as if clearing something, coming back to us. “Oh, um…” She looked at me. “Right. Right. So, I need you on this, Iz. I have a motion to suppress that’s taking a lot of time.”

  The other thing Maggie had been doing lately was throwing a lot of casework my way. I appreciated that, since I was a civil lawyer by training now learning the oh-so-different criminal defense world. In general, I would do anything in the world for Maggie. Now that she was my boss, I’d certainly do anything she needed for one of her clients, no matter who they were. Drug lords from Mexico, though? Interesting, sure, but actually representing them? That made me nervous.

  But this was my job now, I reminded myself. I had to make a living, and although I’d been on top of the world a year ago, I was far from that now. So, I was a criminal defense lawyer. When Maggie threw work my way, I would perform. Because this was my job. One of them. For better or worse.

  I sat up straighter. “You need me on this in what way?” I asked Maggie.

  “Well, in the short-term, I need you on the boat. Can you go now?”

  2

  I have known mad love. And once you have known that sort of thing, you don’t forget. So you don’t lightly enter into it (or what you sense could be it) because you know the absolute high that resides there is matched by a crushing low if it ends.

  If you’re fortunate enough that the rest of your life is fairly good, you might think maybe you don’t need that high again. You certainly know you don’t need the crush.

  I thought about this as I took a cab down LaSalle Street toward the Chicago River and the boat owned by the Cortaderos. I thought about how I had started to tell my boyfriend, Theo, that I loved him when I knew he couldn’t hear me—when he was asleep, when he was in the shower with the water pounding, when he worked on his laptop and the music from his earphones (some combination hip-hop, head-banging-type stuff) was so loud and screeching, it leaked into the room.

  “Love you…” I’d say, my voice low, testing the feel of the words, experiencing a slight thrill and at the same time relief that Theo had no idea I was uttering them. Really, was I ready to go there?

  It’s such a cliché when people say they’re “not ready” after getting out of a big relationship, but hell if I didn’t understand that concept now. Sam, my former fiancé, and I had broken up a little over a year ago. Then we’d considered and rejected putting our relationship back together at the end of the summer. (That’s making it sound easy. It wasn’t. But life’s struggles are always more simple in the rearview mirror.)

  What I’ve learned is that plans only exist in the quiet space of our minds, because the fact is, the universe doesn’t respect them. Or at least the gods in my universe don’t. So I had taken great pains to weed the term fiancé from my vernacular, just like I was cleaning it of that plan thing. But also, if I were honest, I was unsure if Theo would return the sentiment.

  A few months ago, we decided to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. I had blurted it out unintentionally once during a fairly random discussion. Panic had flooded my brain at what Theo might think, but he just smiled that sexy smile of his and called me his girlfriend, over and over again. Never before had that word made every inch of my body tingle.

  Now we were using the terms loosely—boyfriend, girlfriend. But I kept asking myself, what would the three words—those three little, but oh-so-big, words—do to him?

  My cell phone bleated from my purse, as skyscrapers on LaSalle streaked across the cab window in a smear of white and gray.

  I snatched the cell phone out of my bag, keen to get away from my musings. “Hello?”

  “McNeil. I need you for a thing.” Ah, Mayburn. I could always count on him to dispense with the pleasantries.

  “What kind of thing?”

  John Mayburn was the private detective I occasionally moonlighted for. It was sometimes fun, though often I found myself in big, big trouble and had to do a fast scramble to escape. But Mayburn had helped me way too much to not at least listen. Plus, my father worked for him now.

  “Super easy,” he said. “I need you to dress kinda…well, slutty and then open a checking account at a bank in the Loop tomorrow morning. Simple.”

  I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. Nothing was ever simple with Mayburn. A simple undercover retail job at a lingerie store had almost gotten me killed once. “What aren’t you telling me, Mayburn?”

  “Lots of stuff. But seriously, that’s all we need you to do. Christopher and I have the rest covered.”

  Christopher. My dad and Mayburn had the rest covered. My world was so weird.

  “All right,” I said. “Text me the info.”

  A year ago, I almost married Sam. Shortly after, I’d been accused of a friend’s death. Then the father I thought was gone had returned. It had been a hell of a year.

  But really, my life was returning to normal now. I was a full-time lawyer again. I had a wonderfully hot boyfriend. And the first holiday of the season, Thanksgiving, was just two and a half weeks away. What harm could a little P.I. work do?

  3

  By the time I reached the dock at murky Lower Wacker Avenue in the shadows of the Merchandise Mart, any contents of the riverboat were gone, removed, wiped out.

  I headed toward a government evidence tech who was wearing gloves and a mask. I tried to put an officious jaunt to my walk, a concerned look on my face. “I’m here on behalf of the Cortaderos.”

  “Better you than me.”

  I asked him a couple of questions. He claimed not to know anything or have any information.

  I climbed back over the ramp to the dock and called Maggie.

  I waited for quick directives, sharp orders—that was the way Maggie usually worked. But this time she only said, “Umm…” Then nothing.

  “Mags, I need some help here.”

/>   She sighed. “Okay, ask for the warrant,” she said. “Be indignant.”

  Back over the boat ramp, and I did as ordered. No luck from the tech. His boss had the warrant, he said, but his boss was nowhere to be found.

  I called Maggie again.

  “Order them off the boat,” she said.

  “Can I do that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.” Maggie mentioned a couple of federal statutes having to do with evidence collection, warrants and search-and-seizure that the government techs were clearly running afoul of.

  “Sounds fun,” I said, and I meant it. I stood a second, thinking how much my career had altered. Instead of representing refined, elegant media moguls, I was now representing a Mexican drug cartel family. Instead of going into TV stations to negotiate contracts, I was going into a big, ol’ boat that had just recently held a big, ol’ pile of drugs. And I was about to throw some figurative muscle around.

  I clapped my hands like a player in a huddle. “Break,” I said under my breath.

  Once again, I was back on the boat, and this time, I raised my voice. I rattled off the statutes, hoping I was getting them right. Maggie must have nailed it because the evidence tech stopped and glared. He knew I was right. But still he didn’t move.

  I was about to say, Don’t make me call the authorities. But I wasn’t exactly sure who I’d call. The Chicago police? That wasn’t right, because a drug case like this was federal. The Feds, then. But then, what did that even mean—the Feds?

  Luckily, the evidence tech groaned. He then turned, gathered his people and left me alone on a cold, creaking riverboat that smelled strongly of chemicals.

  “The smell is probably the stuff someone used to cut the coke,” Maggie said when I called her again. “We’re gonna put up a knowledge defense,” she continued. “We’ll argue that although the Cortaderos had some ownership in the riverboat, they possessed no information that the thing was about to be used for any packaging or transport of drugs.”

  It was wild how much Maggie knew about the big, bad world of hard-core drug running and Mexican drug lords.

  I made a couple of rounds through the creaking, freezing-cold boat, looking for anything I might have missed. Maggie and I discussed a few more details of our proposed defense, then said our goodbyes. I took pictures of various parts of the boat with my cell phone, but there was little to capture other than a ballroom with a wood bar, the stairwells, the decks and the captains’ lair.