About That Night (11 page)

She gave Rylann a moment to process this.

“So we’ve got a prison guard who doesn’t like it when inmates step out of line,” Rylann said. “But instead of getting his own hands dirty to retaliate, he uses other inmates to do the job for him. This time, however, he got carried away, picked the wrong inmate, and a man ended up dead.”

“Thankfully, the undercover agent tipped us off. Otherwise, this might have gone unnoticed, just a fight between two inmates gone wrong.” There was a gleam in Cameron’s eye. “Which brings me back to your question—whether anyone heard Quinn threaten Brown.”

Rylann had a feeling she knew what that look meant. “I’m guessing we have a witness.”

“We
may
have a witness,” Cameron said. “The FBI has identified an inmate who was also in disciplinary segregation on the night Brown claimed Quinn threatened him. In the cell right next to Brown, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, we don’t yet know what, if anything, this other inmate actually heard.”

“Why not?” Rylann asked. “Is he refusing to talk?”

“For starters, this inmate isn’t actually an inmate anymore. He was released from MCC just before Brown was killed. It’s likely he doesn’t even know that Brown is dead.”

Rylann was still missing something here. “Why didn’t the FBI simply talk to him at home?”

“They tried,” Cameron said. “So far, they haven’t been able to get past his lawyers. Which is why they brought the case to us. If we want to talk to this man, we’re likely going to need a grand jury subpoena to do it. I doubt he’ll cooperate voluntarily.” She peered across the desk at Rylann, looking slightly amused. “He’s probably feeling a little prickly toward the U.S.
Attorney’s Office these days. Especially since we called him a ‘terrorist’ and a ‘cyber-menace to society.’ ”

Rylann blinked. “
Kyle Rhodes
is potentially our key witness?”

“Potentially
your
key witness,” Cameron emphasized. “Starting now, Rylann, the case is all yours. One Twitter Terrorist included.”

So much for out of sight, out of mind
.

“Strange, how he keeps popping up in my cases these days,” Rylann said. She hadn’t seen the guy for nine years, and now he kept turning up like a bad penny. A
very
bad penny.

Wickedly, dangerously bad.

Cameron acknowledged this with a nod. “The motion call was pure happenstance. I needed a senior AUSA in special prosecutions to cover for Cade, and you, being the new kid on the block, had an open schedule. But when the FBI brought the Brown matter to me yesterday, admittedly, yes, you were the first person I thought of. If anyone in this office stands a chance of getting Kyle Rhodes to voluntarily cooperate, it’s you. I read the transcript from Tuesday’s motion. From Rhodes’s point of view, you’re the one person here who has actually argued
for
his release.” She grinned. “Hopefully you can now use those persuasive powers to get him to talk.”

Or maybe he’ll just slam the door in my face.

Probably not the best time to tell her new boss that she’d
kissed the defendant in her first case, then given him the cut direct in court.

“And if that doesn’t work?” Rylann asked. “How far do you want me to take this?”

“All the way.” Cameron sat forward in her chair, turning serious and appearing every bit the U.S. attorney right then. “When I took over this office after my highly unesteemed predecessor, I made a vow to take down government corruption at all levels. Based on what the FBI has told me, we’ve got a federal corrections officer who’s been exacting his own form of justice against inmates, and his actions have now led to a man’s death. He’s not getting away with that on my watch.” She looked Rylann in the eyes. “If Kyle Rhodes heard that threat, I think we’ve got enough for an indictment. Let’s make that happen.”

Seeing the look of determination on her boss’s face, Rylann had only one answer to that.

“Consider it done.”

NOT HAVING ANY plans that evening, Rylann stayed at the office until eight and ordered Chinese takeout for dinner when she got home. She changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then settled into the couch to call her parents. They’d retired several years ago and now spent the winters in a two-bedroom townhome they’d bought near Naples, Florida. Over the course of the last few years, Rylann had noticed that her parents’ definition of “winter” seemed to be significantly expanding, and thus had a sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t see them north of the Mason-Dixon Line anytime before June.

“Well, if isn’t the woman of the hour,” Helen Pierce said with a note of pride when she answered the phone. “Why didn’t you tell me you were working on the Twitter Terrorist case? I’ve been showing off your photograph to everyone in the neighborhood. The one they got of you in the courtroom, standing next to that Kyle Rhodes.”

“It was a last-minute thing,” Rylann explained. “My boss needed me to cover for someone else.”

“I think he’s staring at your chest.”

It took Rylann a moment.
Right
, the photograph of her and Kyle. “He’s not staring at my chest, Mom.”

“Then what’s with the look? That’s the kind of look a man gives you when he’s seen you naked. Or wants to.”

Immediately, Rylann thought back to the daring way Kyle had held her eyes the moment that photograph had been taken.

He’d remembered her, all right.

“I didn’t notice anything strange about the look,” she fibbed.

Helen didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Hmm. Good thing your work on that case is done, or I’d probably have to give you some kind of lecture about staying away from boys like that. Motherly duty and all.”

Rylann smiled at that. “Kyle Rhodes is hardly a boy, Mom.”

“Oh, believe me, I noticed.”

Ewww.
Rylann was about to change the subject, deliberately failing to mention that her work with Kyle wasn’t quite finished, when her mother beat her to the punch.

“So aside from the Twitter Terrorist case, what else do they have you working on?” Helen asked. Before retiring, she’d been a paralegal at a criminal defense firm in Chicago and enjoyed talking shop about Rylann’s cases—even if, as she often joked, her daughter played for the “other team.”

For much of Rylann’s childhood, the traditional gender roles had been reversed in the Pierce household. In fact, her mother had been the primary breadwinner during most of those years. Rylann’s father, an HVAC repairman, had injured his back when Rylann was seven years old, and despite treatment and physical therapy, he had never been able to work more than a part-time schedule after that. Thus, her dad had been the parent who would drop her off and pick her up from school, working a few repair jobs in between, and at six o’clock her mother would walk through the door, change out of her business clothes, and join them for dinner—usually entertaining them with stories about the cases she and “her lawyers” were working on.

Even as a young girl, however, Rylann had quickly realized one thing about those stories: she didn’t like it when the bad guys won. And from those seeds, her career as an assistant U.S. attorney had sprung.

Rylann spoke with her mother for a few more minutes, until her door buzzer rang. Then she ran downstairs to collect her food, and settled in for the night with her case files, a carton of kung pao chicken, and a glass of a Riesling she’d
scored in the post-breakup division of the wine collection she and Jon had owned. Yet another quiet Friday evening, like many others she’d had over the last six months.

And, wow, she’d just come dangerously close to feeling sorry for herself there. Good thing she had work to focus on—that, at least, never changed.

Seated at the kitchen counter, she read through the files. Despite the fact that the Brown case was neither the biggest nor the most glamorous case she had ever handled, she’d already bumped it up to the top of her priority list. First of all, a man had been brutally beaten to death. Not much got the prosecutorial juices flowing more than that. Second, the case was clearly important to the U.S. attorney. And if the case was important to Cameron, there was no way that Rylann, the “new girl,” was going to screw it up.

Which meant that she and Kyle Rhodes had some unfinished business to tend to.

ON MONDAY MORNING, Rylann strode into the office charged and ready to take on a certain billionaire heir ex-con.

As soon as she’d settled in at her desk, she looked up the phone number for the law firm representing Kyle. Technically, she was permitted to contact him directly, since the matter she wanted to speak to him about wasn’t one for which he had obtained counsel or was under investigation. Nevertheless, she thought it prudent to reach out to his attorneys first as a courtesy.

A courtesy that, unfortunately, was not returned.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the FBI, Ms. Pierce. You’re out of your goddamn mind if you think I’m letting you talk to my client,” was the blistering reply from Mark Whitehead, Kyle’s lead defense attorney. “Not after the way your office railroaded him five months ago.”

“This has nothing to do with Mr. Rhodes’s case,” Rylann said in her best let’s-be-friends voice. “I’d like to speak to him about an ongoing investigation pertaining to an incident
that occurred two weeks ago at Metropolitan Correctional Center. While I’d prefer not to get into specifics over the phone, I can assure you that your client isn’t under suspicion for any criminal activity in this matter.”

Mark scoffed at that. “My client wasn’t even at MCC two weeks ago. He’d been released prior to that.”

“Even more reason for you to trust me when I say he isn’t under suspicion.”

“It’s still a no. If you want to talk to Kyle Rhodes, go get a subpoena,” Mark said.

“With all due respect, we both know that I don’t need your permission. I’ll contact Mr. Rhodes directly if I have to,” Rylann said.

Mark laughed. “Good luck with that. I’m sure the Twitter Terrorist has several things he’d
love
to say to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Although I doubt any of them would be helpful to your investigation.”

“We can do this the easy way, Mark, or I can go to the grand jury and drag him in. And if I have to do that,
you
don’t get to be there,” Rylann pointed out. It was the best card she could play, the fact that witnesses weren’t permitted to bring counsel into the grand jury room.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Mark sighed. “And I thought Morgan was a pain in the ass. All right, I’ll call Rhodes. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

Rylann hung up the phone, satisfied to have made at least some progress. She wasn’t sure what Kyle’s response would be given his history with her office, although she’d fully prepared herself for something along the lines of
Kiss my felonious ass, counselor
.

She smiled to herself at the thought. Let him try to ignore her. She could be quite persistent when she wanted to be.

A few minutes later, Rylann heard a knock at her door and saw a tall, very attractive man with brown hair standing in her doorway—a man she recognized from the press coverage of the Twitter Terrorist case.

The elusive Cade Morgan had finally made his appearance.

“I think I owe you a cup of coffee,” he said with a grin.

Rylann gestured to a Starbucks cup already sitting on her desk. “You’re off the hook. I’m fully caffeinated.”

He walked over to shake her hand. “Cade Morgan. I hear you covered my case on Tuesday.”

“No problem. I was happy to help.”

“Sorry I didn’t drop by earlier to introduce myself,” he said. “I was on trial all last week. Just got my jury verdict.”

“How did it go?”

“Convicted on all five counts.”

“That explains the victorious glow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I heard you picked up an interesting homicide case yourself,” Cade said. “Since I handled the Twitter Terrorist case, Cameron thought I should know that Kyle Rhodes might be one of your witnesses.” He leaned back against the bookshelf, looking casually self-assured in his navy pin-striped suit. “I don’t know if Cameron warned you, but I wouldn’t expect much cooperation from Rhodes. I probably burned that bridge by calling him a terrorist.”

Personally, Rylann had always thought that was extreme. But since she generally tried to avoid judging how other AUSAs handled their cases, she went with a more diplomatic answer. “You were obviously very passionate about that case.”

“It’s fair to say the Twitter Terrorist case was at the top of somebody’s agenda. Just not mine.”

Rylann looked at him quizzically. “You lost me there.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I stand behind all charges we filed against Kyle Rhodes,” Cade said. “He broke the law and caused a whole mess of trouble.
Worldwide
trouble. No way could we have let that slide with a mere slap on the wrist.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But?”

“But this office was a different place five months ago. And I suppose you could say that we were a bit…overly vigorous in the way we handled that prosecution.” Cade’s expression changed to one of annoyance. “My former boss, Silas Briggs, made it clear that he expected nothing less from me. He was always looking for an opportunity to get this office—and
himself—into the public eye, and he figured that the Twitter Terrorist case was the perfect chance to do that. No one cares when you pick on a billionaire heir.”

“Except the billionaire heir,” Rylann noted.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly thinking we’d need his help down the road.” Cade flashed her a good-natured grin. “Good thing that’s your problem now and not mine.” He pushed away from the bookshelf and paused in the doorway. “Hey—in all seriousness, if you need anything, I’m just down the hall. Feel free to stop by anytime, new girl.” He pointed. “And tomorrow, the coffee’s on me.”

Not bad
, Rylann mused appreciatively after Cade left. He was definitely good-looking in an all-American kind of way. Perhaps a little on the overly confident side, but this was not uncommon among AUSAs, especially those in the special prosecutions division. Regardless, Cade Morgan was off-limits, and she’d known that before he’d even stepped into her doorway. Office romances had too much potential to get messy—and, as a rule, she didn’t let things get messy when it came to work.