Grimacing, and with plenty of tail lights and time in my future, I lead the conversation to the bank, and draw Beck into a debate over their motives, before my mind takes me to a place I don’t want to go. Not with Faith in Sonoma and me in San Francisco. “What if Faith isn’t a killer, but now she’s the one in the way of whoever is?”
“Any time a million dollars plus is missing and two people are dead of the exact same cause two months apart, the possibility of someone else ending up dead exists. But unlike you apparently, I won’t conclude a murder or murders were committed until you get me your father’s, and Meredith Winter’s autopsy reports. And for the record, I’m far from thinking Faith Winter is innocent. She and her mother could easily have been a scam team. Always remember that in the absence of evidence, there is someone making sure there’s an absence of evidence. I’ll warn you again. Watch your back. You have my excessively large bill to pay.”
He hangs up on the warning I’d feel obligated to give me, too, but I’m not a fool. I read people with a lot less of a look into their lives than I have into Faith’s. I dial Abel Baldwin, my closest friend, and one of the best damn criminal attorneys on the planet. “I was starting to think you might be dead, too,” he says, when he picks up. “What happened with Faith Winter?”
I glance at the clock on my dash. “Can you meet me at my place at four?”
“Now I’m really curious. I’ll be there.”
I asked him to help me destroy her. Now I need to pull back the reins and have him help me save her. And I return to: What the hell is this woman doing to me?
Just after four, Abel and I sit in the living room of my house, him on the sectional that occupies most of the room, me on a chair across from him. One of his many Irish whiskey picks he brings by my place weekly is in our glasses, and while the sectional he occupies is a pale gray, my mood is decidedly darker. “Good stuff, right?” Abel asks, refilling his glass.
“One of your better picks,” I say, but when he lifts the bottle in my direction I wave him off. “I need to stay sharp. I have work to do.”
“I’ll hang out and get boozed, and ask stupid questions to piss you off because what are friends for?”
“You’re a hell of a friend, Abel. One hell of a friend.”
He downs his whiskey. “I love watching North geek out and start reciting facts.”
“The kid’s an encyclopedia,” I say, motioning to his severely buzzed blond hair. “You thinking about going back to the army or what?”
“Starting a trial next week,” he says. “The judge is an ex-SEAL.”
“And you plan on reminding him that you are, too.”
His lips quirk. “Gotta work what you got.” He narrows his eyes at me. “And you got me, Nick. Put me to work here. What’s the elephant in the room you want to talk about but haven’t?”
“What’s it going to cost me to get those autopsy results sooner than three weeks from now?”
“We just filed the order,” he says. “You can’t buy your way past a medical procedure. This isn’t a crime TV show and you know it. Toxicology, which is what we’re looking at, will take weeks and even months.”
“Understood,” I say, “but we both know we can move certain aspects of this to sooner, rather than later. Whatever it costs, make it happen.”
He narrows his eyes on me, and after a decade of friendship, I’m not surprised at what comes next. “You fucked her.”
“I’ve fucked a lot of women.”
“This one got to you. Nick, damn it. You got me involved in this because of one word: Murder. Let’s recap. You find a million dollars in checks written by your father to this women’s mother, who is now dead, by the same means as your father, thus making Faith Winter, the biggest suspect, and you choose to fuck her.”
“I’m crystal clear on the details. And murder is still on the table. I just don’t think she did it.”
The doorbell rings and I curse. “Leave it to North to be early.” I scrub my jaw and I’m about to get up when Abel says, “Nick. Man. Many a good man fell over a woman and I’m pretty fucking sure the same can be said in reverse. Watch where you stick your cock.”
“Says the guy who can’t stop banging his ex,” I remind him, standing and heading for the door, my booted feet heavy on the pale wood of the living room floor, only to have him shout out, “She has magnificent breasts.”
I laugh, and she must, because that’s not the first time I’ve heard that. But his warning about fucking Faith has hit a nerve and my own warning replays in my mind, when I swore I wouldn’t let it again. You never find guilt when you’re looking for innocence.
I open the door to find North standing in front of me looking like Clark Kent if Clark Kent was skinny and geeky. But that’s the thing about North. There’s more to him than meets the eye. He will slay you with facts. Superman-slay you. And damn it, there is more to Faith than meets the eye. I know it. I feel it. And I need to find out what and now, before a surprise-slays me.
It’s eleven when I finally have my house to myself again, and I walk into my office and bypass the pine carpenter-style desk that is the centerpiece. Instead, I walk to the oversized brown leather chair in the corner, a floor-to-ceiling window beside it, and sit down. Beside it is a stack of paperwork from my father’s office and another from his home, that led me to Meredith Winter in the first place. I’ve been through it all ten times, and there is nothing that gives me the answers I need. Who killed him? I’ve told myself that it is simply my need for closure, but the truth is, the idea that that man was thwarted by anyone but me in his death, claws at me. Bastard that it makes me, I wanted the man around just to show him his son would always be better. Someone took that from me. And my gift to myself is to find that person. That’s my form of grief. There is no guilt to it.
Guilt.
That’s what I keep sensing in Faith, but my mind goes back to lying in bed with her last night. When she’d asked if I had cried for my father. When she felt she should have for her mother.
Guilt.
Acceptable guilt that I can live with and help her live with. It’s nothing more than that. I let that thought simmer for several minutes, with space between myself and Faith, and I still feel the same. She didn’t kill my father or her mother.
I remove my phone from my pocket and dial her. She picks up on the second ring. “Nick,” she says, and damn it, how is it that my name on this woman’s lips, can make my cock hard and my heart soft.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
“Did you finish your prep?” she asks, once again showing concern about my work that I’ve never given another woman a chance to express. Maybe they would have. Maybe they wouldn’t have. I just didn’t care to have them try.
“We’re ready,” I say. “We’ll kill it at every turn.”
“I’m glad,” she says. “I was worried I’d distracted you.”
“You do distract me, Faith, but in all the right ways. Where are you?”
“My house,” she says.
“I thought you were staying at the winery?”