Suspect. Jasmine Cresswell
Читать онлайн книгу.
me. I like her and thought she liked me. Or that she used to, until this morning. Now I daresay she thinks I’m a vicious killer.”
“Is she right?” Liam asked mildly. “Did you stab your husband?”
She looked straight at him. “No, Mr. Raven, I didn’t stab Jason. I didn’t harm him in any way. When Trudi saw me, I was trying to unbutton Jason’s shirt and look at his injuries. I know it was a crazy thing to do, but when you see somebody you love lying in a pool of blood, you don’t think, you just react. I thought that if I could only get the knife out and pad the wound, then maybe I could give him CPR and he’d start breathing again.”
Her explanation was ridiculous coming from a woman as smart as Chloe Hamilton, especially in view of the knowledge she must have of human anatomy after her years of intensive athletic training. However, that didn’t mean her account was a lie. Liam’s training and professional instincts all suggested to him that Chloe was the most likely murderer, but he also knew that innocent people occasionally ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time—and not only on TV crime shows.
Jenny buzzed the intercom. He picked up the phone, so that Chloe wouldn’t hear whatever Jenny had to say. “Liam, Terry Robbins has arrived.”
“Thanks, Jenny. I’ll be right with him.”
Liam glanced at his watch. Terry Robbins was ten minutes early, but he was a man with a high regard for his own importance—not a good client to keep waiting. Terry couldn’t be shunted aside for a preliminary meeting with Helen, Liam’s highly competent paralegal; his self-importance meter would explode from righteous indignation at the prospect of discussing his failed marriage with a mere paralegal.
Liam started scribbling a list of names onto the notepad on his desk. “Mrs. Hamilton, I’m sorry but my next client has already arrived.” He tore off the sheet and handed it to her. “These are for you. In my opinion, those are the half dozen best criminal attorneys currently practicing in the Denver area. As I mentioned earlier, Bill Schuller is the best, but any of these six would be more than competent. I’ve also included Robyn Johnson’s name on the list. She’s outstanding, but she’s approaching sixty and these days she spends most of her time on pro bono work for people who’ve already been convicted.”
Chloe ripped the list in two and tossed the crumpled pieces onto Liam’s desk. “I don’t want Bill Schuller or the great Robyn Johnson, who probably isn’t available anyway. I don’t want any of these other attorneys. I want you.”
She really was beginning to sound somewhere close to obsessive. What the hell was her problem? There was something going on here that he was missing, Liam decided.
“I’m a good lawyer, Mrs. Hamilton, but I’m not that good and it certainly isn’t to your advantage right now to have a lawyer whose courtroom skills have been rusting for almost three years. You ought to be begging Robyn Johnson to put aside her pro bono work and take you on, if you want truly brilliant representation. Why are you so determined to hire me?”
She looked at him in silence and for a moment he was sure she wouldn’t answer. Then she gave a tiny shrug, as if clearing some final mental hurdle.
“Because you’re Sophie’s father,” she said. “I thought that might give you a vested interest in keeping me out of prison.”
Two
Right up until the moment she spoke, Chloe hadn’t been sure she was going to tell Liam the truth. She’d imagined this scene a thousand times, but it seemed despite all the practice, she’d never envisioned Liam’s reaction correctly. He didn’t shout, he didn’t protest, he didn’t appear angry. He didn’t even look surprised. Disconcertingly, his face displayed no expression at all. She’d decided back in April that he was one of the most self-controlled human beings she’d ever met, but his calm right now was unnerving. He simply fixed his gaze on her, his expression shuttered and his amazing hazel eyes bereft of emotion.
“Sophie is your daughter, isn’t that right, Mrs. Hamilton?” Liam’s question was polite, but distant.
“Yes.”
“How old is Sophie?”
His coolness set Chloe’s jangled nerves on edge. “She’s three and a half. A little more. She’ll be four on the first of October.”
“I see. I thought she was somewhere around that age.” Liam opened a gilt-embossed, leather-bound appointment diary on his desk and flipped quickly through a few pages. Chloe was too emotionally battered even to wonder what he was doing.
He apparently found what he was looking for. Swinging the diary around on his desk, he pushed it toward her so that she could read the entries and pointed to a line in the middle of the left-hand page. Her name—Chloe Hamilton (Mrs. Jason Hamilton)—was written in the space for 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 5 of the current year.
Liam spoke soothingly, as though to a lunatic, or an overexcited child on the verge of pre-Christmas meltdown. “As you can see, Mrs. Hamilton, we met for the first time almost exactly three months ago. In April this year, to be precise. Quite apart from the fact that there has never been any form of sexual contact between the two of us, you’ll understand why I’m quite sure that you’re wrong about the paternity of your daughter. Sophie can’t possibly be my child. She was already three years old the first time you and I met.”
Chloe wished that she had an elegant leather-bound diary in her purse with a notation showing the night when they’d really met for the first time. It would have been eminently satisfying to pull it out of her purse and shove it under Liam’s patronizing nose.
She’d wondered for years if he had recognized her the night Sophie was conceived. In April, when she approached him about the divorce, she’d been almost sure that he had no recollection of their previous encounter. Now, unfortunately, she was convinced he didn’t remember the time they’d spent together. Liam wasn’t trying to evade the fact that he’d fathered a child by denying the fact that they’d been lovers; he was simply humoring a woman he believed to be mentally unbalanced. Presumably he was afraid she would start frothing at the mouth or throwing wild punches if he showed surprise or anger.
“I’m perfectly well aware of the fact that we met on April 5 to discuss the possibility of my filing for a divorce from Jason.” Chloe repeated the exact date of their meeting in an effort to sound as sane and in control as possible. “But that wasn’t our first encounter. We’d met before. To be precise, we met at the Grovelands’ New Year’s Eve party four years ago.”
Liam’s expression remained controlled but she saw a faint flicker of emotion in his eyes before he once again retreated behind his mask of impassivity. “You’re claiming that your daughter was conceived at the Grovelands’ party?”
“She was conceived in a motel on Hampden Avenue, but we met at the Grovelands’ house in Cherry Creek. Do you remember the occasion? It was the year the Grovelands threw a fancy dress party.”
Liam’s eyes narrowed and the faintest trace of color flared along his cheekbones. The color vanished almost as soon as it appeared. “I remember the party,” he admitted.
“You came as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States.” And he’d damn near taken her breath away in the velvet coat and ruffled cravat of an eighteenth century gentleman.
Liam said nothing.
“I came dressed as Cleopatra,” she added.
His head jerked up, but his face still gave away nothing.
He remembers, Chloe thought. Thank God. She was relieved that he had some recollection of their time together, even if the memory hadn’t been scalded into his soul.
Given how smooth Liam’s seduction techniques had been, Chloe suspected that sleeping with a woman he barely knew was his standard operating procedure. But from her perspective, their encounter had been infinitely memorable, and not just because Liam had been a fantastic lover, or even because of the epic fact