About That Night (FBI/US Attorney #3)(26)
“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.”