Page 56 of Justice & Liberty

Even Dooley and Franks were closed, which made me wonder how Hunter had gotten her information.

“So how do we catch him before he catches which way the wind is blowing and runs for it?” Parker asked, like we were the law officers in the room instead of him.

Hunter squinted at him. “You don’t think you’re overestimating his ability to do that? The man’s nearly seventy years old. Running isn’t what people that age do, let alone ones who’ve lived their whole lives in Eastern Iowa. At the very least, he’ll be bad at it and you’d track him down easy.”

“He’ll try though,” Parker insisted. “Nobody’s just gonna sit there and wait to be arrested.”

That made sense to me. “What if I met with him?” I finally asked. “Maybe I could draw the truth out of him.”

Hunter pursed her lips, like that was her least favorite idea, possibly ever, but she didn’t speak up against it.

I held up the papers he’d given me. “At the very least, I can raise some major ethical points about this. He’s trying to steal Mom’s shop from me.”

Funnily enough, now that it was out there, on the line, I found that I very much didn’t want to lose the shop. I’d been enjoying running it, and maybe it wasn’t what I’d gone to college for, but it wasn’t like teaching philosophy to undergrads had been my life’s great goal either.

Sometimes it was okay to go where life took you.

Sometimes, life took you to the right place.

You just had to accept that with intention, not simply because you didn’t feel like fighting it. This wasn’t staying with Tanya in LA because she didn’t want to go to grad school. This was...this was one hundred percent what I wanted.

Martin Hayes would pry Mom’s store from my cold, dead hands.

Screw that guy.

“I can meet with him and wear a wire. You have a wire, right? What is a wire, even? Just a recording device? Anyway, I can try to get him to tell me why he’s trying to steal my shop. At least we might get something incriminating, right? Enough to put him in jail until you can get the proof you need from the accountants or whoever?”

They didn’t like it.

Heck, I didn’t like it.

But it was better than nothing, so they agreed to it.

Wearinga wire was less awkward than I’d expected, but maybe that was because of modern technology. I’d expected a whole lot of wires taped to me—which I had not been looking forward to at all—and...well, movie stuff, you know?

But it was a lot simpler, and a lot smaller, than that.

I also didn’t have the slightest urge to insist that Martin Hayes’s secretary talk into my boobs, like an awkward character in a comedy.

She gave me a weird sneer when I walked in, like I was a bad person by my very existence in their office. Or maybe that was just her face, because it didn’t change when I told her I needed to see Mr. Hayes, or when she buzzed him on the intercom.

I wasn’t especially shocked when he had her tell me to wait.

I wasn’t even surprised when I sat there for the next hour in his uncomfortable waiting room chairs, in silence. I played a random sudoku game on my phone, which I was good at, but that always felt like cheating, since unlike the paper version, it wouldn’t let you put the wrong number into a space at all.

There was a buzz on her desk, and the secretary pushed a button. “Yes, Mr. Hayes?”

“You can go ahead and go home, Phyllis. Oh, and send Miss Abernathy in.”

I sighed at his continuing to get my name wrong, but at this point, there was no reason to bother correcting either of them. I wasn’t going to have these people in my life for any longer than absolutely required, and that time limit was directly related to the microphone inside my shirt.

29

The secretary wavedme back even as she grabbed her purse, clearly ready to be finished working for the day. She did shoot me a sort of confused look as she went, as though this wasn’t at all a normal thing, but she didn’t let that stop her from making her escape.

I opened the door, and left it hanging wide open as I marched into the office, manila envelope in hand. What it contained was actually copies of the original papers he’d given me, since the sheriff had been hesitant to let them go. He didn’t know anything more about contracts than I did, but he kept muttering something about how they “should be” illegal.

Which was fair. Cheating someone out of their inheritance should be illegal.

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