Fatal Judgment (14 page)

“I couldn’t if I wanted to.” She moved beside the table and fingered a folder. “But I’d like to get through it as quickly as possible. I’m going stir-crazy here. I stayed up late last night to organize everything so I could get a jump on it.”

That explained the shadows beneath her lower lashes.

“Maybe you could take a nap today.”

She looked up at him. “I’d rather get through some of the files from the last four months that my clerk brought over this morning. Jake . . . I’d like to go back to work next week. Full-time, if I get through the recent stuff over the weekend. Part-time if not.”

“Aren’t you rushing things?” He shoved his hands in his pockets, furrowing his brow. “You’ve been through a lot in the past week, Liz. No one would complain if you took some time off.”

“I have a full docket, Jake. And I’m already behind, after only four months.”

He studied her. “Is that the real reason?”

Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she folded her arms across her chest. “It’s one of the reasons.”

“Want to share the others?”

A few seconds ticked by as she considered his question. Finally, taking a deep breath, she motioned toward the living room. “Have a seat. You want some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I had a glass of juice while you changed.”

“Give me a sec.”

She headed back toward the kitchen, and he heard her fiddling with the coffeepot while he took a seat on the chair beside the couch.

As he settled in, he tried to prepare himself, sensing that whatever she was about to share was going to upend any lingering misconceptions he might still harbor about the woman his best friend had married.

And once that happened, it was going to be harder than ever to maintain his professional distance. Because given the way he was already beginning to feel about her, he suspected he would soon have an even more compelling personal reason to keep her safe.

______

“You look a little frazzled.”

Frazzled?

Jake blinked at Liz, trying to regroup as she sat on the couch and cradled her coffee mug in both hands. That wasn’t a term anyone had ever applied to him.

But it did fit today. Thanks to the appealing woman across from him. A fact he did not intend to share with her.

“I had a busy morning. Starting with my pigheaded sister.”

Her lips twitched as she took a sip of coffee. “What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”

He propped his ankle on his knee and shook his head. “She’s too stubborn for her own good.”

The twitch gave way to the hint of a smile. “Do you care to expand on that?”

He blew out an exasperated breath. “I found out last night she had to drop her car off at the shop yesterday. She was planning on taking the bus to work today instead of asking Cole or me for a ride.”

“And that’s a problem because . . . ?”

“She was in a very bad accident a few months ago. Broke her left leg in two places and had serious internal injuries. She still goes to physical therapy twice a week. According to her, the limp will go away in time. But she doesn’t need to be traipsing to a bus right now. So I strong-armed her into letting me drive her to work this morning. Cole is going to pick her up this afternoon.”

“Sounds like she’s very independent.”

He gave her a disgruntled look. “There’s a fine line between independent and foolishly stubborn. And she crossed it.”

“Did you share that opinion with her?”

At her amused look, he flicked an imaginary speck of lint off his slacks. “More or less.”

“I bet that went over real well.”

Narrowing his eyes, he peered at her. “I should have figured you women would stick together.”

She lifted one shoulder. “I happen to admire independence. And strength. My guess is your sister has both.”

“She does. And for the record, I admire those qualities too.” He held her gaze until the surge of color in her cheeks told him his message had been received. “She needs them too. On top of everything else, her serious boyfriend dumped her not long after the accident.”

Liz’s eyes softened in sympathy. “That stinks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Couldn’t he handle all the medical stuff?”

“That was part of the problem.” He let it go at that. Alison’s love life wasn’t anyone else’s business. Except his and Cole’s.

“Did you two make up before you dropped her off?”

“Yeah. Pretty much. She was a little more amenable this morning. Probably because she knows I’m still aggravated that she wouldn’t let my brother or my mom tell me about her accident until I got back from Iraq.”

“You were in Iraq?” Liz’s eyes widened and she froze, her mug halfway to her mouth.

He hadn’t intended to let that slip. But it was too late to backpedal now. “Yeah. For most of the past six months. The Marshals Service has been sending its Special Operations Group over there for a while.”

She gave him a blank look. “What’s the Special Operations Group?”

“A tactical unit deployed for high-risk law enforcement operations and national emergencies. In between, we function as regular marshals in offices around the country.”

She took a few seconds to absorb this news. “How does Iraq fit in?”

“SOG teams have been going there for almost ten years to try to improve judicial and witness security. All in the interest of helping stabilize the government and provide a more democratic judicial system.”

“Wow. I’m impressed.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Don’t be. Our troops are doing the real work. Anyway, Alison claims she didn’t want me told about the full extent of her injuries until I came home because she was afraid the distraction would put me in danger.”

“I see her point.” Liz took another sip of coffee, her expression thoughtful.

“I see it too. But I don’t have to like it.”

Liz stared into the black depths of her mug. “It’s odd how doing things you think will protect someone you love can backfire.”

He waited, sensing the conversation was shifting toward the subject he was keen to hear about: her relationship with his college buddy.

Lifting her head, she searched his eyes. He tried his best to project empathy and support.

“That’s why I threatened to leave Doug, you know. It was a desperate measure, one I hoped would be a wake-up call. I thought if he believed I’d really leave, he might take steps to get his life back on track. Instead, he . . . drove into a tree.” She choked and dipped her head.

He was tempted to lean over and give her hand an encouraging squeeze. But he held back. Despite his growing feelings for her, he needed to maintain a professional detachment. Just as Alison had worried about distractions in Iraq making him vulnerable, if he was distracted here Liz could be vulnerable. That wasn’t acceptable.

When the silence lengthened, Jake picked up the slack, treading carefully. “I didn’t think there was any official ruling about what happened that night.”

“There wasn’t. But to me, the facts are clear. For once, his blood alcohol level wasn’t over the limit. Meaning his reflexes should have been decent. The road was dry. There were no skid marks to suggest he’d applied the brakes or tried to avoid the tree. And I knew his mental state.” She swallowed. “It wasn’t an accident, Jake.”

He knew all the facts from that fatal night too. He’d made it a point to get a copy of the police report. And the evidence suggested her conclusion had some merit. But the absolute conviction in her voice threw him.

“Why would he do that, Liz?”

At his quiet question, she leaned forward to set her mug on the coffee table. The liquid sloshed, and she wrapped both hands around it, easing it onto the glass top.

She was shaking. Badly.

Once again he had to fight off the temptation to enfold her fingers in his.

“Because his life was a mess for the three and half years before he died.” She brushed back some loose tendrils that had escaped from her ponytail. “Did Doug drink in college, Jake?”

The question took him off guard. It had been years since he’d thought about their campus career, which had included plenty of wild frat parties. He and Doug had made the rounds every Saturday night, drinking the free booze and flirting with the coeds.

“We both did.”

“To excess?”

Oh yeah.
On more occasions than he cared to remember, they’d staggered home in the wee hours, holding each other up, then passed out in their respective bunks.

“Sometimes. All the frat guys were into partying in a big way. I’m not condoning it, but it was part of the campus scene.”

Liz leaned forward, her posture earnest. “What about after college?”

“I didn’t see much of Doug once we graduated.”

“But you kept in touch. Did he ever mention drinking to you?”

“No. It was a college thing. I won’t deny I’ve had a few too many beers on occasion in the intervening years, but my job doesn’t allow me to make a habit of that kind of behavior. Nor do I want to. I get plenty of adrenaline rushes from my work. I don’t need booze to liven up my life. I assumed Doug didn’t, either.”

As she sank back on the couch, Liz’s expression grew pensive. “Unfortunately, he did. Although I didn’t know that until we’d been married for more than a year.”

Now it was his turn to lean forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Are you saying he had a serious drinking problem, Liz?”

“Yes. And it was compounded by depression. Which got worse after he found out our attempts to start a family were failing because of a medical problem of his, not mine.”

Shock rippled through Jake. Doug had always implied the absence of children in their marriage was Liz’s choice. That she’d been more interested in her career than in a family.

“You wanted children?”

She gripped her hands in her lap, her knuckles whitening. “He told you I didn’t?”

Torn between honesty and loyalty, he skirted the question. “Not in those exact words.”

Sadness darkened her eyes, and she took a long, slow sip of her cooling coffee. “I always suspected he might be misrepresenting our situation. And it used to bother me. But I can’t dredge up any anger at this point. He had a lot of issues he just couldn’t deal with.” She wrapped her fingers around the mug, as if warming them. “Did you ever see any indication of depression in him during your college days, Jake?”

He thought back again, digging deep into his memory. Doug had fallen into a funk once after breaking up with his sophomore girlfriend. He’d almost had to drag him out of bed for weeks after that. And there had been other times when his friend had been despondent for a few days. But nothing he’d classify as abnormal. Or clinical depression.

Then again, he wasn’t a psychologist.

“I saw him down a few times. I didn’t think it was anything to worry about.”

“Maybe it wasn’t, back in those days.” She drew a weary breath and ran her finger around the rim of her mug, then fixed her attention on the drawn shades in the room that held back the sunlight.

“Everything started to go bad the second year we were married, after his dad died. They were very close, and he took the loss hard. He turned to liquor to help him get through it, but that made the depression worse. From there, it was a downward spiral. In the beginning, he only drank on weekends. By the end of his life, he was never far from a bottle.

“He could put up a good public front, though, and he held his liquor well. But it was affecting his performance at work, as I discovered at the wake. His boss told me Doug had lost out on the assistant controller job a few weeks before because of mistakes he made on some key financial documents. And that the day he died, he’d been put on probation.”

When she looked at him, the sheen in her eyes twisted his stomach. “I begged him to get help. Offered to make appointments with his internist, with a psychiatrist. To go with him, if he wanted me to. But he refused to believe he had a problem. I prayed harder than I’d ever prayed in my life. Asked God to give him guidance and the strength to tackle the demons that were destroying him. I even considered leaving my law practice.” She dropped her chin, and he could see it quivering. “But in the end, my work preserved my sanity. When things got too bad, I could lose myself in a case and get a brief respite from the nightmare. But maybe I should have . . .”

Her words trailed off and she stood abruptly, her head still bowed. “I think I’ll get a refill.”

Without giving him a chance to respond, she bolted from the couch and made a beeline for the kitchen.

For a moment he thought about going after her. Decided against it. It was clear she needed a few minutes to regroup.

So did he.

From early on in this assignment, Jake had begun to suspect the woman who’d married his best friend, the woman Doug had demonized as a coldhearted workaholic who put career above everything, wasn’t the villain he’d painted her to be. Now that suspicion had been confirmed. The problems in his friend’s marriage had, for the most part, been of his own making.

Meaning for three and a half years of her five-year marriage, Liz had found herself living a nightmare.

How could you have done that to her, Doug? How could you have subjected the woman you loved to such torment?

The silent indictment came from deep within his heart. Yet even as its echo faded, he knew that while his friend deserved censure, he’d also needed help.

And he’d had an inkling of that during their last phone call. Doug had sounded down that night. Jake recalled trying to cheer him up by reminiscing about a few of their college adventures. Instead, the stories had had the opposite effect. They hadn’t talked long, but Jake remembered making a mental note to check back with him in a day or two, to see how things were going. Instead, he’d let a week go by. And his next phone exchange with Jefferson City had been when Liz called to tell him Doug was dead.

“Can I get you anything to drink?”

He looked up. Liz was hovering near the kitchen entry, her eyes puffy, the shadows underneath her lower lashes more pronounced than when he’d arrived.

“No, thanks.”

She retook her seat. Fiddled with the handle of her cup. “Sorry for the data dump. I’m sure that’s more than you wanted to know.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s exactly what I wanted to know.”

She shot him a quizzical look but remained silent.

“I have a confession to make.” He gripped the ankle he’d crossed over his knee. “I haven’t always viewed you in the most favorable light. But I was wrong. I’m sorry I misjudged you. And Doug.” He raked his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “I’m also sorry I didn’t follow up sooner on my last phone call with him. I sensed things weren’t right, and I meant to get back to him. Maybe if I had—”

“Don’t go there, Jake.” She leaned close and placed her hand on his, her slender fingers pale and delicate against his sun-browned skin, her eyes intent. “At that point, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I lived with him. I loved him. I tried everything I could to help him. I even had my pastor come one evening as reinforcement. Nothing helped. You couldn’t have stopped what happened. And I’m finally starting to accept that I couldn’t, either, even if I can’t quite shake the guilt. Or stop the occasional ‘what-iffing.’ ”