French Silk(109)

"Which is?"

"Josh admitted to me that Jackson Wilde was a tyrant who psychologically abused both of them. He had been Jackson's whipping boy all his adult life. He finally had had it up to here. So he gathered his meager courage and disposed of his old man, only to have his stepmother and lover elbow in and overshadow him. Talk about frustrating."

"He traded one despot for another."

"Right. To get rid of her, he makes her out the killer. Or maybe…" Now that he had opened a new channel of thought, other possibilities came to mind. "Maybe they plotted together to off Jackson. Then, for the reasons I cited before, Josh has turned into Judas."

"Sounds feasible either way. Have you discussed it with Glenn?

"Not yet, but he'll do backsprings. He figured all along it was either Ariel or Josh. He'll want to put them under a microscope and probe until we know them inside out. I'd like to put tails on them."

"The P.C. will shit if you ask for more men."

"You gave me until the end of the week, Tony. Play fair. Help us out. Run interference with the commissioner."

Cassidy returned to his office feeling as though he'd had an internal battery recharged. For the first time in days, adrenaline was coursing through his veins. He had a purpose, a new plan of attack. He would stay with it until he'd exhausted all possibilities, as well as himself.

The first thing he did was make a series of telephone calls. There was no need for Cassidy to identify himself on the first call. He simply asked, "Are you still feeding info to that TV reporter?"

The informant system was a two-way street. The D.A.'s office used the same sources as the media, sometimes transmitting information that, like a pistol firing blanks, was loaded with half-facts and innuendos that were intentionally misleading.

Cassidy said, "I had a lengthy and private conversation with Joshua Wilde this afternoon. He left my office looking angry and upset. That's it for now."

He dispatched a clerk to check all the car-leasing agencies in the city. "Find the one that leased a car to Joshua Wilde during the week of his father's murder. I want to know the make and model he rented, the mileage he put on it, and the condition it was in when he dropped it off. If it was a Chrysler product with blue carpet, I want the car chased down and taken immediately to the police lab. Thanks." Perhaps the lab boys would find a speck of dried blood that would turn out to be Jackson Wilde's and—bingo!—he'd have a bona fide suspect.

"This'll be the easiest stakeout ever," Cassidy told the police lieutenant who had been placed in charge of the surveillance team Crowder had weaseled out of the commissioner. "Joshua and Ariel Wilde are more visible than drag queens on Bourbon Street. They can't possibly give you the slip."

Once those responsibilities had been delegated, Cassidy sat back in his chair and sighed with a heightened sense of optimism. Something was bound to turn up. A piece of previously undisclosed evidence would point the accusing finger at either Josh or Ariel and away from Claire.

He had tried not to think about her since their bitter quarrel at Rosesharon, but to no avail. She remained uppermost in his mind—her body, her sweet lovemaking, and her angry allegations.

It was as if she had opened the closet of his soul and found the skeleton there, and she couldn't have rattled the bones of it any louder. She had accused him of deceit and manipulation. At one time that might have been true. As a defense attorney, he'd exercised whatever means were necessary to get an acquittal. He'd used theatrics, tears, laughter, scorn, whatever it took to have his clients walk from the courtroom cleared of all charges.

If his conscience ever pricked him, he justified his actions. Defending criminals was his duty, wasn't it? Even felons deserved their day in court. Somebody had to plead their cases before the judge and jury, so why not him? He was only doing his job, he told himself.

He had known those were justifications. There were ethical and reasonable ways to defend an accused without resorting to courtroom tricks, which he'd often used for no reason other than to show off.

Look at me, clever Robert Cassidy, the boy wonder who didn't go to an Ivy League prep school and didn't earn his law degree at Harvard. Turned out pretty damn well for a boy from rural Kentucky, didn't he?

Winning had been his ultimate goal, not seeking justice … until that one case he'd won, and the stakes had been far too high. When Claire had accused him of deceit and manipulation, she didn't know how close she was to being right about him, as he'd once been. But not as he was now. He brought the bad guys to justice and put them away where they could no longer hurt innocent people.

This case was no exception. He would go the distance to see that justice was done for whomever was found guilty by a jury of his peers of the murder of Jackson Wilde.

God help him if that person turned out to be Claire Laurent.

But it wouldn't, he told himself stubbornly. She was innocent. No woman who was that warm and giving in bed could have killed in cold blood. He'd touched not only her lips, and breasts, and thighs, and belly. He'd touched her soul. If it was poisoned, he would have known it.

But, contrary to what she believed, determining her guilt or innocence wasn't the reason he'd slept with her. That had been as inevitable as the tide. From the day they'd met, that part of their fate had been sealed.

As soon as she was vindicated, he'd go to her and humbly apologize for having put her through this awful ordeal. After all, she couldn't respect him if he didn't take his job as a public prosecutor seriously. Once they had apologized for their misgivings about each other, they'd make love again.