“Can I ask why not?”
“Because it’s too clean. Everything points to you. If you’d done this, you’d have things pointing in a million different directions.”
&nb
sp; “And from what knowledge base do you draw that conclusion?”
“I did my homework. The smart way to run a Ponzi scheme is to create a web of trails, intermixing legitimate ones with the phony ones that are then nearly impossible to trace. When it comes to business, you are a smart man.”
Her implication—that he wasn’t smart in another area—lay clearly between them.
She hadn’t called to insult him. But the way this man treated Liam...had always treated him... Gabrielle had to bite her tongue.
“You’ll pardon me if I find no merit in your opinions?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you for your time.”
She hung up before he could dismiss her as easily as he’d dismissed his son.
Just after three that afternoon, she received a call from Agent Gwen Menard, who told her that she had been granted limited access to their files. Things that they were looking at for any potential connection to Liam. She could pick up copies of the information being made available to her by five o’clock that afternoon.
She was there at four forty-five.
And home, sharing copies with Liam, by five.
He greeted her at his door with a long, grateful look, eye to eye.
She felt it heart to heart. And brushed past him to open her briefcase.
She was there on business. Marie was downstairs. And when Gabrielle had told her she was going straight up to Liam rather than waiting just a few more minutes until Marie could get free and they could bring dinner up to him, Marie had given her a strange stare.
She could be imagining it. But she knew she wasn’t. Marie knew exactly what Gabrielle knew about Liam. They’d talked many times about his inability to settle for one woman for long. About how sorry they felt for the women who inevitably fell for him.
They both knew what would happen if either of them were ever stupid enough to fall for him themselves.
And Gabrielle was not going to do anything that would ultimately destroy their family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LIAM SPENT EVERY minute of the weekend working. Like his father had done when Liam was growing up, he holed himself up in his home office—the newly converted kitchen in his second apartment—and came out only to eat. Sleep. And shower once.
Unlike his father, he didn’t have anyone at home needing his time. Anyone he was ignoring.
He spent hours going over Connelly accounts. And then looking at account numbers in correlation with the somewhat complicated trail of deposits and payables the FBI had presented as evidence that his dad was a crook. There were receivables that didn’t make sense to him, even understanding his father’s business as well as he did. Deposits made into accounts that shouldn’t exist, as far as Liam knew.
Certainly there was information that had never been made available to him as a top-floor executive. What the others had known, and kept from him, he had no way of knowing. Not until Gabi questioned them—if she could figure out a way to get legal access to them, gaining testimony that would be admissible in court if the occasion arose.
Numbers started blurring. His eyes grew weary of following supposed income that showed up as deposits and then disappeared into accounts that weren’t used for official Connelly Investments business. He switched gears.
And focused on the work of his life.
These were the hours that slid into oblivion as far as Liam was concerned. He was reading everything he could find on the Douglas case—the teenager who was suing his parents for the right to go off his antidepressants. While there was case history of children suing their parents, there was no case that he could find similar to this one.
He wasn’t privy to the closed records, of course. To doctor testimony regarding the boy’s mental or physical health. His job would be only to report on the case as it unfolded, and only then on the parts of it that were open to the public.
But as he read, questions formed in his mind. The opening of his article began to present itself.
There’d been a case in Massachusetts not all that long ago. A Boston hospital had filed medical abuse charges against a couple, accusing them of not getting their daughter the medical attention she needed. The parents claimed that they were following the direction from the child’s original doctor, who worked for another, equally well-respected hospital. The doctors had differing diagnoses. And the child had spent more than a year in state custody, with her parents only being allowed to see her on supervised visits while the case was in court. In the end, the parents had won.