A Good Marriage(79)

“You and these fucking referrals, Lizzie.” He laughed and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Nope. No thank you. You need to see this through.”

“Zach, I am not representing you. You can’t force me to,” I said. “This is over.”

I turned for the door. I needed to get outside, to the fresh air.

“You know, Young & Crane asked for that financial disclosure for a reason,” Zach called after me. “They don’t hire associates with significant credit issues.”

Breathe.

“What are you talking about?” I asked without turning around.

“Come on. Your husband’s lawsuit is a joint obligation. You knew that,” Zach said. “Creditors can go after you just as much as they can poor wayward Sam, the drunk writer. And because that debt is a joint obligation, you were required to include it on your financial disclosure form. And yet you left it off.”

I reached out to the wall to steady myself, then turned back to face him.

“How do you know about that?”

“That’s a valid question,” Zach said. His voice was restrained, but the look in his eyes could only be described as glee. “But the more important question is, if I found out, how can you be sure Young & Crane won’t, too? Honestly, Lizzie, it’s pretty brazen, lying to that kind of law firm on that type of document. And you, of all people. Has Sam destroyed your ethics, too?”

My stomach lurched.

“What do you want?”

“I didn’t kill my wife, Lizzie,” Zach said. “All I’m asking is that you stick around and help me prove it.”

“And if I won’t, you’ll get me fired?”

“If you won’t, I’ll be sure your firm knows the truth about what you did,” he said. “So you’ll get you fired. Blame yourself. Or blame Sam. He’s the drunk.”

My hands trembled the whole drive back from Rikers. At one point, I had to pull over on the frenetic Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to dry heave. Was Zach always this monster, and I’d somehow missed it? Or had I known deep down? Was that why I’d been glad when he cut ties? It didn’t matter now, of course. I just needed a way out. But every path I considered ended in the same brick wall: the financial disclosure form. Young & Crane would almost certainly fire me if they found out—they might even bring me up on ethics charges. And without my job, my professional reputation, what was I? An orphaned, childless, disbarred liar, married to an alcoholic and saddled with massive debts. So much like my parents in the end. Except the person who had defrauded me wasn’t a stranger. It was my own husband. And now Zach.

The only way to wrest myself from this situation was to get Zach out of Rikers. That meant a trial, which could take months, if not years. I couldn’t survive living under Zach’s thumb for that long. Find the real killer—that was a much better alternative. If I did that, and could prove it at least to some reasonable degree, maybe even get some press, Wendy Wallace would have no choice but to dismiss the charges against Zach.

Of course, this approach depended on one critical fact: that Zach hadn’t actually killed Amanda. And right now, he seemed guilty as hell.

Lynch, it turned out, was an extremely popular last name in St. Colomb Falls, shared by more than a dozen men. I studied the list of names on the computer screen once I was back in my office at Young & Crane. I was trying to focus on the task at hand—find Amanda’s dad—and not on the fact that I was being blackmailed into doing it. That was the only way forward now: to pretend.

A search on Amanda Lynch had already yielded nothing; not a single Facebook account or article, not even a reference from an old school paper. But then, Amanda Lynch had become Amanda Grayson at only seventeen or eighteen. She’d barely existed before she met Zach.

I sorted the male Lynches by age—I guessed Amanda’s father would now be at least fifty—and was left with a list of eight people: Joseph, Daniel, Robert, Charles, Xavier, Michael, Richard, and Anthony. I cross-referenced those with the sex offender registry. If Amanda’s dad had assaulted her, maybe he’d assaulted others. But every name came back clean. Within a few minutes, I had a phone number for each of them. A direct approach wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was efficient. And I was pressed for time.

I dialed the first number: Joseph Lynch. It rang and rang before I finally got a voice mail. My entire investigative approach was predicated on people answering a call from a number they didn’t recognize. Who did that anymore? But I had no better options.

“Hi, this is Josephine,” a gruff woman’s voice intoned. “Leave a message at the—”

I hung up. “Joseph” was probably Josephine. I took a deep breath and moved on to the second number: Robert Lynch.

I was startled when somebody actually answered on the second ring.

“This is Robert.” His voice was loud and excessively jovial.

“Oh, hi. My name is Lizzie. I’m trying to find Amanda Lynch. We went to high school together, and we lost touch.”

The old friend: a casual, innocuous gateway to disarm Amanda’s father into accidentally identifying himself.

“Amanda?” Robert Lynch repeated enthusiastically. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe I know any Amanda Lynch. I’m afraid you’ve reached the wrong number.”