Suspect. Jasmine Cresswell
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four months ago than he’d realized.
“There must be a pencil somewhere,” she muttered.
“You definitely need to find something to write with. I’ll hold while you look.”
It was a full minute before Chloe picked up the phone again. “Thank you for waiting, Mr. Raven. I’m sorry. I’m not usually this disorganized. I have a pen now.”
“Write down this phone number and office address. It’s for a friend of mine, Bill Schuller. Bill is an outstanding criminal defense attorney and you need to call him before the police question you again.”
“But I don’t want Bill Schuller to be my lawyer!” Chloe protested. “I want you to represent me. That’s why I called. Mr. Raven, please, you have to help me.”
“I am helping you. Trust me on this. Bill Schuller is the best criminal trial lawyer in Denver—”
“No, you’re the best. Everyone says so. You won an acquittal for Sherri Norquist when the experts all predicted you were going to lose.”
Liam’s stomach knotted at the mention of Sherri’s name, and he was immediately angry with himself for reacting to a case—and a woman—that were now more than three years in his past. He’d been a complete idiot over Sherri Norquist. He’d allowed himself to be manipulated into falling in love with a murdering bitch. But hey, shit happens. It was time to move on. God knew, Sherri certainly had, and seemingly without the smallest trace of guilt or regret.
He spoke crisply, skilled by now at keeping a barrier between his outward demeanor and what he was really feeling. “I appreciate the compliment, Mrs. Hamilton, but it’s undeserved. The bottom line is that I just happened to make a big splash with a couple of my early cases. I haven’t practiced as a criminal defense attorney in several years. These days, I deal only with divorce cases.” Which not only kept him away from an unsavory assortment of accused murderers, drug dealers and armed robbers, but provided him with the added pleasure of saying a mental fuck you to his bigamist father every time he took on a new case or signed off on a completed one. Liam understood that many worse things could happen to a kid than discovering his father had two wives, and two separate families. And he hadn’t even been a kid, really, when he learned the truth about his father’s second family. Still, his disdain for his father ran deep; even the fact that Ron Raven had recently been murdered hadn’t put an end to his anger.
He brought his attention back to Chloe. “You need to call Bill Schuller, before the police come back to question you again, Mrs. Hamilton. And keep in mind that the cops aren’t joking around when they warn you that anything and everything you say can be used as evidence against you. Here’s Bill’s office phone number. Call him right now, before you do anything else. It’s important.” He reeled off the number, repeated his condolences on Jason Hamilton’s death and hung up before Chloe could protest any further.
Just as he finished the conversation with Chloe, No-Name came out of the bedroom, wrapped in a towel. She looked sleepy-eyed, cute and appallingly young. Jesus, what had he been thinking last night? Or not thinking, more like it, Liam reflected grimly.
“Oh, you’re still here,” she said, smiling in relief. “I was afraid you’d left already.”
“No, I’m still here, but only just. I was answering the phone and didn’t want to disturb you.” He returned her smile with all the warmth he could muster. No-Name couldn’t be much more than twenty-one, which would make her almost fifteen years his junior. There was still an appealing hint of hopeful innocence in her expression and he felt a sharp twinge of remorse for having exploited her naiveté. He had years of experience in developing pickup lines that worked, and she’d fallen for them all. True, he’d met her in a LoDo bar notorious as Casual Sex Central. Still, even for a one-night stand, she deserved somebody a hell of a lot less cynical about relationships than he was. Three months ago he would almost certainly have dismissed her as off-limits, but since his father died at the beginning of May, it seemed as if the small store of human kindness left to him in the wake of the Sherri Norquist fiasco had vanished, rotting deep in the Atlantic Ocean alongside the bodies of his father and his father’s mistress.
“I wish I could stay.” Liam aimed another smile in No-Name’s direction, a rueful one that suggested if only his job were not so demanding he’d be thrilled to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to let her down lightly. Or perhaps he wanted to convince himself that he hadn’t been a total asshole to have slept with her in the first place.
He tapped his cell phone. “I’m sorry. I just answered an urgent call from my office and I have to leave right away. There’s a family crisis involving one of my clients and they need me to catch the fallout.”
“Now?” she asked, pouting. “So early? It’s not even six-thirty!”
“I know. Wild, isn’t it? I swear, lawyers get more emergency calls than doctors.”
“But you’re a divorce lawyer. I wouldn’t have expected divorce lawyers to get any emergency calls.”
“Oh boy, are you wrong.” He chucked her under the chin, feeling a hundred years old as he coaxed a smile. “I sometimes think divorce lawyers get more emergency calls than anyone else. Especially on a Monday morning. Weekends are tough on couples who are splitting up. That’s when all the custody battles erupt and sometimes they aren’t just battles of words.”
“Tell me about it.” No-Name’s eyes turned sad. “My parents divorced when I was fifteen. As far as I’m concerned, they’d have done us kids a huge favor if they’d split ten years earlier. They weren’t physically violent, but the shouting was horrible.”
“Failing marriages are rough on the kids, whether you stick it out or cut through the pain and file for divorce.” Liam really didn’t want to get into a discussion of the problems associated with couples who weren’t willing to admit their marriage was over. That was a subject that cut too close to far too many bones.
He walked back into the bedroom, wondering if it was a custody battle between Jason and Chloe that had precipitated the mayor’s murder. People killed their spouses over custody issues almost as often as they killed them over money, and a lot more often than they killed them because of unfaithfulness. He’d barely been fifteen minutes into his first consultation with Chloe Hamilton when he realized that her daughter was the focus of her life. She might well be capable of killing in defense of her daughter, Liam reflected, even if such an act would be impossible for her in other circumstances.
When Chloe first came to see him, his professional instincts had shouted that there was more going on than a simple desire to get divorced. Equally, there had seemed to be something more behind her decision to stay with the mayor than a straightforward decision to reconcile. Despite his efforts to persuade Chloe to confide in him, she’d insisted she was the one who’d changed her mind and now wanted to give her marriage a second chance. He wasn’t sure he believed her, then or now. At the time, he’d suspected that Jason Hamilton had applied some sort of blackmail to prevent her walking away from their marriage. If the mayor had threatened to fight her for custody of their daughter, Chloe might have decided to end the emotional blackmail by getting rid of her husband.
No-Name followed Liam into the bedroom, forcing his attention back to her. She leaned against the doorjamb, her towel slipping provocatively as she watched him dress. “Don’t you want to take a shower before you leave? Or at least have some coffee?”
Liam tucked his shirt into his pants, zipping his fly as an excuse to pretend he hadn’t noticed No-Name’s bare breasts. “Thanks for the offer but I need to go home and get some clean clothes. I’m scheduled to appear in court today and my client is paying big bucks for the privilege of having me turn up wearing a starched shirt and a silk tie.”
No-Name protested some more, but not too forcefully, as if she didn’t quite believe his excuses but didn’t want to push too hard in case he told her something she didn’t want to hear. He managed to get out of her apartment in less than five minutes. It would have been easy to lie, to promise to be in touch, but a final