The Last Invitation (35)
He glanced at his notes. Flipped the first page, letting her see the lines of scribble from a blue pen. “Did anything happen at your previous firm that might show a tendency for recklessness?”
As if she would let all her secrets come tumbling out. She knew not to volunteer any more information. “Let me prove I didn’t do this. This is my reputation.”
He glanced up, giving her full eye contact. “It’s actually your career. If we find you failed to do your duty or acted in contravention of the ethics rules—”
He sounded like a textbook, which sent her anxiety spinning. “Covington, please.”
“—we will join in the request that you be disciplined, including being disbarred.”
“If you’re so sure, or really not sure about me, why not just fire me?”
“That would reflect poorly on the firm. This way you get a fair review and still get paid.” He cleared his throat. “For now.”
One sharp knock and the office door opened. Two building security guards stepped inside. The same men who smiled at her and wished her a good morning every day.
“I need you to stand up and hand me your key card. These gentlemen will look in your bag to make sure you don’t have any firm property. After that, they will escort you out of the building.”
Her muscles refused to move. She tried to concentrate over loud buzzing in her head. “Don’t do this. I’m begging you.”
“Your access to the computer, including the sign-in feature from home, will be terminated, pending the investigation,” he continued as if he was reading from a list.
One of the security guards stepped around Covington and headed for Jessa. Not wanting to be dragged and not knowing how to stop the inevitable, she put her hands up in surrender. “I’ll go willingly. This . . . this isn’t necessary.”
Covington nodded for the guards to continue. “It’s firm policy.”
This would destroy her. Stomp down and shatter her world into a million pieces.
She switched to begging, pleading, trying to appeal to a tiny spot of affection he might have for her. “My reputation won’t recover from this.”
“I did everything I could, Jessa. You should have withdrawn from the case when I told you to.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Gabby
The lines on the papers blurred together. Gabby stared at her empty coffee mug as she stretched. The pinch in her lower back made her groan. “It sucks getting older.”
She blamed Rob Greene. His files littered her dining room table. She’d read and reread and assessed since their meeting. At one point she had to rush and retrieve the computer charger because she’d burned through the battery doing her own research on the various jackasses who abused, battered, and killed the women unlucky enough to veer into their paths.
Alex Carlisle was the most recent peculiar death, and his seemed fitting because of what he did to the women around him—treating women as disposable, only existing for his pleasure—but he certainly was not the only aggressor. Not even the worst, though she wasn’t sure how to weigh one horror inflicted on a woman against another. Every act demanded that a woman left behind somehow overcome and take on the role of survivor . . . but only if the man didn’t kill her first.
Carlisle’s wife went from shuffling on the sidelines to a starring role when she claimed the accusations weren’t true. Fingers pointed at her. Police sources—anonymous, of course—talked about her killing her husband out of revenge. But over the last two days the conversation had shifted again. Unnamed third parties stepped up and offered new stories that cast her as damaged by a decades-long marriage filled with terror due to abuse.
The up-and-down, the rolling in and out of responsibility, reminded Gabby of Rob’s claims and his relentless need to convince her that something bigger was at play here. If his grief and passion were pieces of a delusion . . . she couldn’t see it.
After hours knee-deep in what she’d expected to be nonsense, she had to admit it wasn’t nonsense at all. Damn it. She teetered back and forth, getting sucked into his arguments. To battle that, she supplemented his files with her own online searches into the deaths. The circumstances stacked up until it all looked . . . odd. Each death sounded reasonable when you looked at it individually. But an isolated incident morphed into something else when you looked at them as a group. It was all too coincidental. Too close to a potential pattern.
She hated that the pieces fit together. She’d read a book on confirmation bias. Part of her thought she was watching the idea in action. Rob talked and talked about his theories and planted them in her head, and now she could only see the fragments that supported his theory. She wanted this to amount to an irrational mess promoted by an unhealthy guy fueled by scary paranoia. All the talk still could be that, but she doubted the answer was that easy.
She looked at his cached articles. Nothing raised any alarms. He didn’t spew or rant about secret societies. He and his writing partner had won awards. They’d appeared on television and come off fine. Then the partner had died, and the tone of Rob’s reporting had changed.
She knew from experience grief was a nasty bastard. It wiggled its way in and shrouded every moment in darkness. It leaked and spread until it kidnapped the good memories and created minefields of pain. All of this—the desperate researching and clinging to things he couldn’t see—could be a reaction to loss. She just didn’t know.