I shook my head. “I don’t have an attorney.”
“What do you mean you don’t have an attorney? You spoke to the police without having an attorney present?”
“I know, it was stupid. They said they had a few questions, that I could come in and help them clear things up regarding my brother’s killer. I was just so desperate for answers. It was only after they started questioning me that I realized who they suspected.”
“So what did you tell them?”
I scarfed down another Oreo cookie and shrugged. “The truth for a change. But they seem to have some crazy theory that I put my brother up to killing Michael and an attorney he was working with so that I could become the general counsel. Then I killed my brother when he didn’t want to cooperate or something. It’s all lunacy.”
“Okay, we need to get you lawyered up. We can take care of that—”
“Um . . . Grace, it’s pretty bad. You know when you asked me about my boss? You asked whether I was sleeping with him?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t respond. I just stared back at my feet.
“Girl, I knew you were sleeping with him. But how does that factor into all this?”
I gave a long deep sigh. “Because I discovered his body the day he was murdered, and I didn’t call the police.”
Grace stared at me for a beat before she patted my hands. “It’s gonna be okay. Let’s just figure out a way to get you out of this mess.” Grace shook her head. I think she was starting to see what a dumpster fire my life really was. “Girl, I always knew you were an overachiever, even when you step in a pile of it, huh?”
We laughed and it took the edge off.
“So, this Jonathan guy, what’s his deal?”
“Jonathan Everett. He has a freaking dossier on me. He tracked down my brother and hired him to trail the lawyer that was found dead with my brother.”
She removed her suit jacket and slung it across the back of the chair, like she was about to get down to work. “Okay, we have to fight fire with a flood. You got any dirt on this Jonathan guy?”
“He’s laundering dirty money for a company in Mexico. They’re into all sorts of illegal stuff—drugs, human trafficking, and gun running—and Jonathan was the one who set up the scheme inside the company.”
“Drugs? Guns? Damn, girl! When we get you out of this mess, I’m going to write a book about it!”
I smiled. Grace was doing what any good friend would do. She was trying to keep me from falling into a bottomless hole of despair over how bad things were. But she would need to be more than Chuckles the Clown to help me see my way out of this mess.
“Grace, it gets worse.”
“Please don’t tell me that.” Grace leaned back in her chair and placed her palms flat on the table, like she was steadying herself. “It can’t get worse.”
I leaned over to the laptop, clicked a couple times, and pulled up the Brethren manifesto. I slid the computer back to face her. I picked up another Oreo and ate the entire cookie, no bites. I watched her read it, her mouth open, her eyes widened in shock. She finished and stared up at me with a look of horror, like she’d just discovered a badly decomposed body.
I handed her the gun shop flyer. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Michael left this in a duffel bag here a few nights ago. I just thought it was the place where he bought a gun when we all thought he committed suicide. But I think it’s part of the gunrunning the company is involved in. The CEO has Alzheimer’s, and I think Max and Jonathan have run amok. The two of them are behind all this.”
“Who’s Max?”
“Maxwell Lumpkin. He heads up Operations. Max was trying to recruit Michael to join the Brethren. I think Max made arrangements to ship the guns on the company’s trucks to the Libertad company, the criminals down in Mexico. A month ago, they started shipping guns south of the border. And by the way, Max also threatened me.”
Grace tilted her head and folded her arms. “Let me get this straight. You work with a group of white supremacists who are involved in money laundering and all manner of criminal activity. And they promoted a Black woman to join their executive ranks. And one of them even threatened you. And they promoted you because . . . ? I would think they wouldn’t even want to sit in the same room with you.”
“They promoted me because they could prop me up as the figurehead Black employee to the protesters and the people suing Houghton for race discrimination. With that dossier, I guess they thought my secrets were bad enough to blackmail me into going along with all the criminal crap they’re doing.”