Question of Trust

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

LAURA CALDWELL, a former trial lawyer, is currently a professor and distinguished scholar in residence at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is an author of eleven novels, including Burning the Map, The Rome Affair and the award-winning Izzy McNeil series. She is also the author of the nonfi ction book Long Way Home: A Young Man Lost in the System and the Two Women Who Found Him, based upon her work on a Chicago murder trial. She is a nationwide speaker and the founder of Life After Innocence, which helps innocent people begin their lives again after being wrongfully imprisoned. Laura has been published in thirteen languages and over twenty countries. To learn more, please visit www.lauracaldwell.com.

Question of Trust

Laura

Caldwell

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For AMB, who believes.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Amy Moore-Benson and Miranda Indrigo for shepherding the book. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, especially Michelle Venditti, Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andi Richman, Andrew Wright, Katherine Orr, Alex Osuszek, Erin Craig, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Michelle Renaud, Kate Studer, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir, Anne Fontanesi, Scott Ingram, Marianna Ricciuto, John Jordan and Brent Lewis.

A massive thanks to Loyola University Chicago School of Law—a vibrant, creative and generous place to work. And especially to Father Michael Garanzini, Dean David Yellen, James Faught, Michael Kaufman, Jean Gaspardo, Alice Perlin, Michael Patena, Alan Rafael and Joyce Marvel.

Much gratitude to my experts—criminal defense lawyer Catharine O’Daniel, former federal prosecutor Professor Mary Ramirez and my Cook Islands insider, Margaret Caldwell. Thanks also to Carol Miller and Liza Jaine.

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.

As shadows fell across the city, they bathed the empty boat with a sinister icy feeling. I left and walked toward the Merchandise Mart. Climbing the stairs to the “L” train, I shivered in the late-afternoon gray mist that had rolled in around the river.

I got on the Brown Line and headed north toward my place. As I leaned my head against the window, I watched vaguely as the train left the Loop and passed over Chicago Avenue. I wasn’t really seeing anything, though. The more I thought about it, the more the Cortadero case made me uncomfortable. Did I really want to represent a large Mexican family who potentially—allegedly—had been storing millions worth of drugs on a boat?

But I had to remind myself that I was no longer the rainmaker I used to be. Maggie and Martin worked hard to pull in cases, and as their associate I had to focus on whatever case they wanted.

There was solace in being a soldier, too. In my former job at Baltimore & Brown, I was responsible for shepherding nearly all the legal work of a large media conglomerate, and after a while the responsibility had overwhelmed me.

My phone buzzed. It was Theo. “Can you go house-hunting with me tonight?” he asked.

I felt a warm flush of flattery. Theo’s lease was up, and he had decided it was time to buy a house and leave behind the rented apartment he’d occupied since quitting college. But so far, he’d been doing this mostly on his own.

“I’d love to.”

“Meet me in Bucktown in an hour?” He named an address in a neighborhood that had been gentrified in years of late but still kept its youthful edge. It sounded perfect. Theo, after all, was a big, gorgeous and decidedly edgy young man with ribbons of tattoos that snaked up his arms and seemed to brush at the tips of his hair, which hung to his shoulders.

“I’ll be there.”

The Bucktown condo was huge—four bedrooms with a modern kitchen stocked with top-of-the-line appliances, three balconies, two fireplaces and a tub in the master bath that could fit a family of five. But Theo kept pursing his lips as we followed the real-estate agent around the place, narrowing his eyes in the way that he did when he was thinking hard about something.

“It’s not right,” he said.

At the next home, I thought we had it. The floors were wide-planked, the feel was casual but cool. It had a game room, which Theo and his friends would love. I could see Theo’s shoes in the hallway, his jeans on the bedroom floor.

But then we saw the “outside space,” which was a metal balcony overlooking the Kennedy Expressway. “Nope,” he said.

The next place, near the Museum of Contemporary Art, had a striking view of Lake Michigan, its perimeter newly frozen like white crust. Theo shook his head again. “It’s just not right for us.”

I blinked a few times. Us? The word was thrilling. “It doesn’t matter if it’s right for me. What matters is if it feels good to you.”

He turned to me. His hand brushed my collarbone, my curls, then briefly touched my cheek. “It has to be good for you, too.”

Theo was discouraged going into the fourth stop, a three-bedroom condo near the Green Door Tavern that had once been a warehouse. But then we walked through the door and saw the raw, wood floors just like Theo wanted. Then we moved farther inside, gasping at the two-story vaulted ceiling, growing more and more excited. The bedrooms were spacious. The bathroom, with its intricately tiled circle tub, made me sigh. The real-estate agent excused herself, ostensibly to take a phone call, but I knew she’d seen our enthusiasm. She was giving us time to stroll some more, to think, to discuss.

I want you to fall in love with me.

I want you to fall in love with me.

I want you to fall in love with me.

That was my internal chant, my mantra, that night. I couldn’t believe I’d found myself here—in love again. It’s not that I didn’t think it would ever happen. I just thought (and I mean I really thought I knew) that my heart needed a while before it could bear weight again. Before it could hold someone there. But now, I wanted Theo. I wanted him there.

And I was scared. He’d said things, lots of things, like, Everyone who knows us tells me we should date for a long time…. You’re like my best friend…. You’re one of the most wonderful people I know…. And he would kiss me with that lush, greedy mouth. After some time, he would slow, then pull back to look into my eyes and it felt, in those moments, like he could see into every cell of me, into everything thought, hidden or not. He had me in those moments. He owned me.

I want you to fall in love with me.

We went into the kitchen, which bore taupe-and-white granite that gleamed, and brand-new appliances. I sat on the kitchen counter. “What do you think?” I asked Theo.

He walked over to me, nudged my legs apart and placed himself between them, his face close to mine. “I think this is it, gorgeous.”

We stared at each other.

Even though I’d been muttering “love you” to him when he couldn’t hear, I was only rehearsing the words. There was hesitation about getting the sentiment returned, and there was also the fact that I wasn’t sure it was a correct statement. I wasn’t sure I recalled what it felt like to fall in love, to be certain.

But at that moment, I remembered.

“I think it is, too,” I said.

Even though I didn’t say anything more, I was sure then of our place in the world. I thought that life could only keep moving one way—upward, and in the direction of good.

4

His office behind the restaurant was much nicer than the restaurant itself. Back here, in his managerial quarters, he had brocade couches and tufted leather chairs. The desk was from the 1800s and it was built to last. Just like him. That’s what his father had always told him, and unlike his younger brother, Vincente, he’d always believed their padre. Still, it pleased him to look around, to see what he’d created, what he was entitled to.

José Ramon sat at the desk now and took in his office. With its carved pocket doors, collection of Mexican art (including one Diego Rivera), and high-tech audio and visual equipment, the luxurious room was second only to his private residences. He hoarded such places, because if one showed too much luxury, he’d learned, people started asking questions. His competition, for example. The government, certainly. The only people to whom he could show the luxury he required, and had acquired, were the few women he took home. He liked best those women who could handle it—who could step into that luxury and not be impressed by it. Or at least not show it—but who could appreciate it. That was the type of women he wanted. They were hard to find.

But he wouldn’t worry about that now. Now, he was worried about the thing that would eventually get him those women. Money.

It fucking killed him that the wealth his family had amassed had been “invested” into a legitimate business—that’s what it looked like anyway, a legitimate business—and now, what the fuck was happening? Where the fuck was the return on that money? And if there was no return—the way he’d been promised—where the fuck was all the money that was supposed to be in that goddamned business?

José slammed his hand on the table and squeezed his eyes shut. But it didn’t help. He could still envision Vincente as a little boy who had always wanted to be like his brother. Except that “Vince,” as he called himself now, was smarter. That’s why he had eventually gotten his MBA after his father sent the boys to the U.S. from Mexico. And that was supposed to be why they could trust Vincente to find legitimate investments when they needed them. But Vincente had fucked it up. That was becoming clear.