Blanche Larson had a face like a bulldog, a bark like a junkyard cur, and the personality of a border collie. She liked order. She herded facts into neat arrangements and spotted every stray datum, every outlier. Caleb had worked with her on other cases, and she’d never let him down. If there was a questionable transaction, an unsubstantiated expenditure, the merest blip in a financial record, she would find it.
“I’ll need everything,” she reminded Caleb. Even over the phone, her voice conjured an image of a large, angry mutt baring its pointy teeth. Fortunately, he knew her well enough not to be daunted by her growl. “Valenti’s financials as well as Felton’s, and the town’s,” she said. “I need everything.”
“I’m working on it,” he assured her. “I’ve requested Valenti’s info from the DA. I don’t think he’s looked at it yet. He just took her word for everything, and she dumped all the blame on Jerry Felton. Of course the DA wants to believe her. Indicting a high-ranking public official gets him a lot of media attention.”
“You’re getting media attention, too,” Blanche noted. “I saw that press conference you held at Town Hall Tuesday afternoon on the local news. You’re a TV star.”
“Unlike the DA, I don’t want to be a TV star,” he said. “I just want to clear my client’s name.”
“You’re so noble,” Blanche muttered. She was sixty. She was an accountant. She was allowed to be sarcastic. “Get me the financials as soon as possible.”
“Will do.” After saying good-bye, he hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair and gazed out his office window, which overlooked the street. A maple dense with foliage cast a shadow across the building’s façade. When a breeze danced down the street, the leaves threw mottled, undulating silhouettes against the window pane.
Staring at the shifting leaves relaxed him. He’d been poring over documents for most of the day, reviewing the past five years of Brogan’s Point treasury reports filed by Sheila Valenti and her predecessor. His eyes swam from all the print, all the numbers. He didn’t know how Blanche could stand to analyze spread sheets day in and day out.
He usually had no trouble concentrating. He loved picking through records and documents. He loved searching for evidence. He especially loved that aha! moment when he found exactly what he needed to cement his defense.
But he hadn’t been able to throw himself into Jerry Felton’s case as thoroughly as he ought to. One significant wedge of his brain was fixated on another case, a non-case. An almost client.
He should just call Meredith and ask her out. He should tell her he owed her dinner because she’d treated last time. He should tell her he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He should tell her how tempted he’d been to kiss her the other night, when they’d stood together on the wharf by the Lobster Shack, gazing out at the ocean. He should tell her she was like a heat wave burning in his heart.
Why not? She wasn’t really his client, after all. He hadn’t billed her.
Then again, she’d given no indication that he was like a heat wave burning in her heart. What he’d sensed from her was gratitude, nothing more. Whatever he was feeling was craziness inside himself.
Maybe he should give Ellen a call. If she was between boyfriends, she might want to see him. He and Ellen had been a happy enough couple for more than a year, after he’d finished law school and taken a job with the Boston firm where he’d done his internship the previous summer. When Niall had invited Caleb to join him and Heather in forming a private law firm up on the North Shore, Caleb had jumped at the opportunity. As a junior associate in Boston, he’d been boring himself to tears doing document reviews and stressing out over his billable hours, when all he’d wanted was to defend clients in court—something he’d be able to do from the get-go if he, Niall and Heather founded their own firm. And Brogan’s Point was a beach town, right on the ocean.
He’d told Ellen he was going not just to enter into a partnership with Niall and Heather but also to move to Brogan’s Point. He’d thought she would be excited for him, maybe even consider moving to the North Shore with him. Instead, she’d wished him good luck and kissed him good-bye. She was an urban creature, she’d insisted, and she liked the security big firms offered. If Caleb wanted to risk his career on a small start-up, that was his business. But she didn’t wish to come along for the ride.
It was an amicable, affectionate parting. No hard feelings. She started seeing other men, and Caleb—when he wasn’t working his ass off—saw other women. Sometimes, when he and Ellen were both free, they saw each other, for old time’s sake.
Yeah, he should call her and spend a night down in the city with her. That would delete Meredith Benoit from his mind.
He shook his head. He couldn’t use Ellen to help him forget another woman. That wouldn’t be right.
“Knock-knock.” Annie, the firm’s paralegal, cracked his office door open and swept inside, her slim laptop tucked under her arm. “I finally got Jerry Felton to agree to let the bank release his account records for the past three years. It wasn’t easy. I think I deserve a raise.”
“Absolutely,” Caleb shot back. “When the firm gets a gusher of income, we’ll discuss it.” He could have increased the firm’s income by charging Meredith for taking care of her citation—but not by enough to bump Annie’s pay. “When can I access his bank accounts?”
“Felton said he’d go into the bank tomorrow and sign a release. Let’s hope he actually does.”
Caleb peered up at his trusty assistant. As always, she looked unruffled, her plain brown hair held back from her face with a barrette, her crisp white slacks and bright green polo shirt lending a decidedly preppy flair. “Is there a chance he won’t?”
“He gave me a song and dance about his loss of privacy. I told him he’d lose a lot more privacy if he wound up in prison. I told him he’d have to go to the bathroom in his cell, without a door. Everyone would see him sitting on the can. I think I scared the stuffing out of him.”
Caleb grinned, but that stubborn, distracted wedge of his mind wandered off again. “Did you ever get a song stuck in your brain?” he asked.
Annie placed her laptop down on a corner of his broad oak desk and settled into one of the upholstered chairs facing him. “Are we talking about any song, or a particular song?”
“‘Heat Wave,’” he told her. “I think it was a Motown hit, back in the sixties.”
“Oh, sure—I know that song. Linda Ronstadt did a cover of it. My mother’s a huge Linda Ronstadt fan. ‘Burning in my heart,’” she sang.
“That’s the one.”
“How did it get stuck in your brain? Are you listening to oldies radio these days?”
Caleb shook his head. “I was in the Faulk Street Tavern the other day, and it played on that jukebox against the wall there.”
“Oh.” Annie grew serious, her dark eyes widening with something that could be interpreted as alarm. “The magic jukebox.”
“What?”
“The Faulk Street Tavern jukebox. It’s magic.”
Caleb snorted.
“Seriously. They say that sometimes it’ll play a song that casts a spell on someone in the room.”
Stifling his skepticism, he asked, “What kind of spell?”
“I don’t know. You can’t control what it will play, and you can’t control if it casts its spell on you. It never cast a spell on me.”
Caleb wasn’t given to mysticism or woo-woo crap. His only interest in magic was figuring out how tricks were performed. Sleight of hand, distraction, razzle-dazzle showmanship, special equipment—a sleeve with a pocket stitched into it that held colorful scarves, or a sword with a retractable blade, or a stacked deck of marked cards. He could appreciate a good performance. But he sure as hell didn’t believe in magic.
“Then again,” Annie needled him, “unlike some people, I don’t hang out in bars.”
“I don’t hang out in bars, either,” Caleb said, hating the defensive edge in his voice. “I was there only because our air conditioning wasn’t working.”
“And the only place you could think of with working AC, in the entire county, just happened to be a bar.”
“I wanted to go to Felton’s office, but he didn’t want to be seen talking to a lawyer there,” Caleb explained. “He was the one who suggested that we meet at the tavern.”
“Right.” Annie’s lips curved in a mischievous grin. “They don’t call that lawyers’ organization the American Bar Association for nothing.”
“Ha ha.” As if Caleb hadn’t heard that joke—and a million other lawyer jokes—plenty of times before. “Forget about the raise, Annie. You’ve just un-earned it.”
“I wasn’t holding my breath,” she said with a shrug, opening her laptop and tapping a few keys. “Sheila Valenti is invoking the whistle-blower law. Do you need to look into that?”
“She isn’t a whistle-blower if she’s the perpetrator,” Caleb noted. “If she thinks she’s entitled to a percentage of the money she’s already embezzled—”
The phone on his desk rang. Annie smoothly reached across the desk and lifted the receiver. “Caleb Solomon’s office,” she recited pleasantly. “Can I help you?” She listened for a moment, her eyes narrowing on Caleb, then said, “If you’d like to make an appointment to see him… Let me see if he’s available.” She pressed the hold button on the phone, then addressed Caleb. “A woman named Meredith Benoit wants to talk to you.”
He smiled, then frowned. Smiled because the woman dancing to that earworm song wanted to talk to him, and frowned because she’d called on his office line. She had his personal cell phone number, since he’d texted her on that phone two days ago, when he’d gotten Sulkowski to void her citation. She wasn’t calling him for a personal reason. This was business.
Still, talking to her was better than not talking to her. He plucked the receiver from Annie’s hand, pressed the hold button to release it and spoke into the phone. “Hey, Meredith. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a problem,” she said. Her voice sounded calm, underlined with that velvety southern drawl, but he heard something more than just her words in it. A faint tremor, maybe. An edge of tension.
“Something to do with the citation?”
“Yes. No. The citation isn’t the problem.” She sighed, then said, “There’s a video.”