“What?! Are you insane? Jonathan’s the one who brought this deal to the company. He’s the one who’s in bed with a bunch of criminals. Subpoena the company’s financial records. This was all Jonathan’s scheme.”
“We plan to do just that,” said Bradford.
“So after your brother helped you get promoted, what happened? Did the two of you argue or did you just decide you didn’t need him around anymore risking the details of your secret climb up the corporate ladder? If he disappeared, no one would be the wiser since you told people you didn’t have a brother.”
Her insinuation that I might have killed Sam was the final straw. We squared off, eye to eye. I didn’t care about her badge or her hotshot reputation.
Detective Bradford finally released her stare and moved on. “Mrs. Sayles said she gave you some documents she found in her safe-deposit box, some documents she said pertained to Houghton’s business deal with Libertad. Why didn’t you bring those documents to our attention?”
“Did Anna tell you why she gave me those documents?”
“She did. But you’re a lawyer, an officer of the court. We’re wondering why you didn’t refuse to help her and encourage her to come to the police. Maybe because you knew the documents might incriminate you in your boss’s murder?”
“That’s ridiculous! Anna asked me to find out what was going on inside Houghton without dragging Michael’s name through the mud. She didn’t think you guys were taking her concerns seriously and insinuated she killed Michael. At the time, I didn’t know that Michael’s and Gallagher’s murders had something to do with what she’d given me. And I certainly didn’t think my brother was involved.”
“But once you found out your brother was involved, you made the decision not to involve the police?”
I stared back at the sliver of daylight forcing its way through the small window and wondered why my life always seemed to go in vicious circles of pain and death. What lesson was I not learning? It was Chillicothe all over again except this time I wasn’t fourteen and Vera couldn’t save me.
“Your company’s engaged in some sort of transaction that may have led to the deaths of three people—one of them your own brother—but you don’t bother to go to the police with information that might help find the killer.”
Detective Bradford wasn’t asking a question and I had no answers even if she had asked.
She continued, “Did you ever think that maybe you might have prevented your brother’s death if you had brought this information to our attention?”
I shot a look at the detective. Did she not know that would become the biggest regret of my life? With everything we’d survived, it was finally my own selfishness in trying to hide the past that had caused Sam’s death. I’d mangled this whole affair so badly that even I was starting to question my involvement in it. I should have insisted more forcefully that Anna take the documents to the police. I tried to protect Sam like I always had and instead, I got him killed.
“Where are the documents now?” Detective Bradford asked flatly.
“At my house.”
“We’ll need those documents, too.” Bradford and Burke looked at each other again, this time like they’d run the end of their course. “Ms. Littlejohn, you are the single thread through all these murders. Trust me, we’ll figure this out. Better that you come clean now,” Detective Burke insisted.
Come clean. There was nothing else I could say. I took a deep breath, backed my chair from the table, and stood. “I have to get back to work.”
I turned on my heels and headed out the door.
Chapter 30
If the police considered me a real suspect, they would have arrested me while I was sitting in front of them. They had nothing. But that didn’t mean I was out of the woods yet. I had lied so much that my credibility was shot with the police. And if they continued to eye me, I was facing two options: going to jail for a murder I didn’t commit or climbing into bed with a group of executives who were knee-deep in corporate fraud and crime, including the murder of my brother. I hated both those options, which meant I needed a third one. My hope for getting out of this mess was somewhere up on the twentieth floor. I just had to find it.
I pulled into my reserved parking space inside Houghton’s garage a little after four o’clock. I sat in the car and parsed through everything that had happened. My life had spun out of control almost since the day I accepted the general counsel position. The speed at promoting me to the executive suite. The odd vibe at Nate’s party. The argument between Max and Jonathan. What was it that Max didn’t want connected to Libertad? What was too risky?