Glass House (38 page)

Because he knew them, she realized. Waldoch
was fighting to keep his attention on his attorney because he knew
Claire Alexander, and, more important, he knew Jackson Hanley. He’d
recognized the FBI agent who was working to bring him down. Megan
could see it in the struggle he was making.

Waldoch coughed again, lightly. His hand
touched his throat. He coughed harder, and he looked at the
judge.

“Could I take a break?” he asked.

“Counsel?”

McCallum rose. “We’d like an answer to the
question, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Davis?” the judge asked.

“He can answer, Your Honor.” She stepped up
to the witness stand, and she spoke, quietly and kindly, to Jeremy.
“You need a drink, Mr. Waldoch?”

He cleared his throat loudly. “Apparently
not.”

“And the question? Did you give that
necklace to Lora Alexander?”

“No,” he answered. “I didn’t do that.”

“And you say that unequivocally?”

They could have been the only two people in
the room. Everyone and everything – the judge and jury, other
attorneys, watchers, courtroom and court reporter – it could
all be taken away, and the answer came down to the same thing,
because Waldoch only had one answer he could give her at this
point.

He’d committed himself to it again and
again. And now, with Megan standing in front of him, asking these
questions once more, and with everything and everyone else that
did
exist, he certainly didn’t have room to back away from
the answers he had given. They were his case. They were his
position. These were the questions she’d discussed with him, and
Megan knew that Waldoch’s answers and his version of the truth were
what he had to accept now.

“I say it unequivocally,” he told her. His
throat sounded dry.

Megan took a step forward, hands clasped in
front of her. “Just a couple more things,” she said. “You didn’t
have sexual relations with Ms. Landry, is that right?”

McCallum was on his feet. “Objection! We’ve
been over this topic, and –”

The judge waved him back down. “Sustained.
Let’s move on, Ms. Davis.”

Megan’s hand was resting on the witness
stand. “I apologize, Your Honor.” She stepped away.

Waldoch was left staring at the spot she’d
touched. The red diamond was there. The diamond that Hanley had
shown her that night rested on the top of the stand’s frame, near
the judge’s bench and out of sight of everyone but Megan and
Waldoch.

“Last question,” Megan was saying. Waldoch
looked at her. “Did you fire Kathy Landry because of a broken
relationship?”

Waldoch eyed the diamond. He looked out past
Megan, toward the spot where Hanley sat with Lora Alexander’s
mother. He turned to Megan herself.

“Mr. Waldoch?” Her expression was blank.
Empty. “What’s your answer? Did you fire her because of a broken
relationship?”

“No.” Waldoch’s voice was low and rasping
now. “I didn’t fire her to get back at her for anything.”

“And you say that unequivocally.”

Waldoch coughed. He shifted in his seat,
impatient now. Angry now. Trapped now. “I say it
unequivocally.”

Megan didn’t look away from him as she
spoke. She moved up, her hand resting on the diamond. She collected
it in her palm. “I think we’ll need that break now, Your
Honor.”

“Ten minutes,” the judge said. He sounded
the gavel.

Preparation

“We could ask the government for help
first.”

Krelis studied Denys Ronhaar, sitting across
from him in the office at the Consortium mine. Ronhaar was
assistant super, a trusted friend and coworker whose personality
and outlook were more aggressive than Krelis’s. Krelis was
surprised to hear a suggestion of restraint and conservativism
coming from Denys.

“And what?” Krelis said doubtfully. “Go to
SAPS? Maybe the Army? I’m sure both of them were tried by Ariacht
and any others at various points, and they plainly didn’t have any
ability to stop Laurentian. Or maybe it was willingness they
lacked.”

“The authorities should be involved.”

“They will be.” Krelis looked from Ronhaar
to the four other men in the room, each of them handpicked to be
there, and each of them just as reliable as the next. “We will call
them in due course, and they will arrive at the same time they
arrived after each raid on a shipment by Laurentian – after
the work was done and all that was left was mopping up.”

“But they’ll be mopping up after us this
time,” Ronhaar said flatly.

“That’s the idea, yes,” Krelis told him.
When he spoke next, it was to all of them, gauging their reactions
with each word. “Each of you gets to choose. Each of you gets to
decide whether to participate or not, and there’s no shame either
way. Not in this room, not in this mine, not in this company.”

He stood and moved to the window behind him.
It looked out onto the devastated pit of Dutch Consortium Number 2.
A fire was still smoldering under the collapsed walls, firefighters
tending to it to make sure it didn’t flare, while others worked
carefully to remove the debris that had filled the pit halfway to
the top. A black-blue haze hung over the scene.

“I’ve been here a long time,” Krelis said as
he watched the men work. “Just like each of you. Seen good things
and bad, with not a single time like this. I’ve seen competition
and fighting among the mines, even deaths and murder, but my eyes
had never come across a scene like the one out there right now.” He
tipped his head at the window.

“We’ve sixty-six dead so far, another
forty-plus still to account for, and a new list on the hour.” He
turned back to face them. “It’ll be fifty unaccounted for by early
evening, and seventy by dawn. Better than half of those will be on
top of the sixty-six gone.”

“Most of the workers on the shift are lost,”
Ronhaar said. “Either known to be dead or suspected so.” The men
murmured behind him, whispering on the numbers being mentioned.

“By my measure, we’re owed,” Krelis said.
“We’ll give them a day in exchange for the one they’ve given us.
We’ll build a scene for them like the one we have to watch.” He was
studying the five men in the room with him again.

“Each gets to choose,” he said once more. He
waited for a few seconds, and, when none of them left, he went
on.

Two
Choices

“What the hell are you doing in there?”

The courthouse had two attorney conference
rooms, tucked in behind the library but full of law books
themselves. Attorneys dragged their clients there during breaks. It
was a place to sit, out of the way of wandering jurors and any
press that might be interested in a case. Someplace you could
actually have a discussion.

“I’m asking questions,” Megan said. “That’s
the way it’s done, remember? The other side asks their questions, I
ask mine, and twelve of those handsome people in the chairs off to
the side get to go to a little room of their own and decide which
of the answers they like best.”

“You think those are just questions?”

“They’re the ones we discussed last night.
We got in your denial of the gift to Landry. The denial of sex with
Landry. The denial that you fired Landry for some relationship that
went bad. The denial of gifts to Lora Alexander, not to mention any
relationship with her. That’s what we went through. They’re the
questions that fit your positions, and they’re the questions I
asked.”

“I’m not talking about the fucking
questions,” Waldoch spat. “I’m talking about these.” He pointed at
the earrings. “And this.” The necklace. “I’m talking about the
goddamn diamond you dropped on the witness stand.”

“It’s only jewelry. You see something more
in it?”

Waldoch smiled bitterly. He pushed a chair
away from the small conference table in the room’s center. He sat
on the table’s edge, arms crossed.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he said hotly.

“Don’t fuck with you?” Megan replied, just
as angry. “
I’m
not supposed to fuck with
you?
Then
tell me about this case. Once and for all, level with me on what’s
happening out there, because all you’ve been doing is fucking with
me, Jeremy. And I don’t just mean about Kathy Landry, either. I
mean ever since you strolled into my office with your Lora
Alexander problem three years ago.”

“Lora Alexander. You weren’t even supposed
to raise her name in there.”

“I told you I might.”

“
Might
,” Waldoch shot back. “You said
might
, so what the hell do you think that was out
there?”

“I think it was questions you’ve answered
before. Nothing more. You told everyone you didn’t have a
relationship with her, and you told them you didn’t give her the
necklace. Perfectly appropriate questions for the argument you’re
making, with answers that weren’t any different from anything you
already said in your deposition, or for that matter to me.”

Megan moved up close. She stood face to face
with Waldoch, who hadn’t moved.

“McCallum brought her up in his
questioning,” she said. “That means we addressed it in ours. But
you seem to have a problem with Lora Alexander, so I’ll ask
you – is there something particular that’s bothering you about
her? Apart from the fact that she’s dead, I mean?”

Waldoch was silent, and he was furious. He
rose and pushed past Megan, starting to pace the room, one finger
tracing along the book spines. The sound of the contact was a
softly puttering engine.

Megan had seen his reaction at Claire
Alexander’s appearance. At seeing Jackson Hanley. At the earrings
and the necklace and the red diamond. She knew the truth behind
that reaction – Hanley’s information was right. But that
information was only part of this. The rest of it – the things
Hanley didn’t know about but was hoping were there – that part
of the story was here, much closer than whatever happened in
Africa. And those things were true, too.

“Tell me something,” Megan said. She watched
Waldoch move around the room, weighing what she knew and what she
guessed, picking her words from all of that. “What is it about Lora
that made her different for you? What happened with her that meant
she ended up dead but Kathy Landry didn’t?”

Waldoch stopped. His back was to her, his
body close to the bookshelf that filled the room’s wall. He flicked
a finger against a book near his hip. It made a steady tapping
sound. He leaned his shoulder against the bookshelf’s
framework.

“Was she too tenacious about something?”
Megan asked, probing. “She wouldn’t …
give up?
Was that
it? She wouldn’t go away?”

Megan stepped nearer to him. She moved until
she could see his face, as dark and heated as it was. He didn’t
turn to her.

“Or was it maybe something else?”

She lifted her hand. Her arm stretched in
front of her, and she opened the fingers of her clenched fist
slowly, palm up, unfolding them from the red diamond that was still
there, hidden inside.

“It was these, wasn’t it,” she said. “Lora
somehow found out about the diamonds, about your other life, and
that meant you couldn’t settle for ending the relationship and
getting a gift or two back. Not the way things ended up. Just
recovering the gifts wasn’t enough, because Lora knew something
more – she knew about the diamonds – and she was suddenly
in a position to really work you over with it. It didn’t matter
that she lost her own case before, because Lora had Kathy Landry
now, and Kathy and this trial were her chance to get on a
particular soapbox she didn’t try the first time around. That about
right? You knew she’d show up here, and she’d sit in that stand
with a brand new and bigger story, so you had to erase her
knowledge altogether.”

Waldoch eased at that. The finger stopped
tapping. His shoulders slipped down, relaxing. His brows, heavy and
knotted, smoothed. When he spoke, his tone was deliberate and
thoughtful.

“Lora doesn’t matter.” He nodded toward the
diamond in Megan’s hand. “How did you get that? How did you find
out?”

“Investigation. Just normal –”

“Bullshit,” Waldoch interrupted, no anger in
it. Only impatience. “I saw Hanley out there.”

At the mention of Hanley’s name, Megan
closed her hand on the diamond and slipped it away, inside her
pocket. “Why would you know him?”

“Why would you?”

“Because it’s my job.”

“Your
job
. Jesus! He came to you,
didn’t he?”

Megan didn’t answer, and Waldoch went on. “I
always wondered if he might show up, nosing around on this side of
the ocean more, since he didn’t have anything on the other side. It
took him longer than I thought.”

“What’s he looking for?”

“Whatever he can find, I’m sure. But you
tell me. You’re apparently the one who has the relationship with
him.”

“Maybe he’s looking for something like Lora
Alexander.”

Waldoch’s smile had no humor in it. “Does it
all come back to her?”

Megan stared at her client. He straightened
from the bookshelf, turning toward her. The fury she’d sensed in
him was gone. Something deader – realization, rationalization,
resignation – was in its place.

“It may,” Megan said. “Tell me.”

Waldoch was calm. He’d collected
himself.

“You can’t reveal this, can you. The things
I tell you are protected.”

Megan didn’t answer. She wanted him to
speak, and she wasn’t offering anything that would stop that.

“You’re right,” Waldoch said then, filling
the silence. He pulled a chair out. He sat. “Lora found out. That
was back when I actually kept paperwork around, you see, something
I don’t do anymore. Too many …
prying eyes
.”

He looked at her. Megan figured they were
thinking about the same things. The office in his home. The safe
that had held the jewelry until recently. The empty drawers and
file cabinets Megan had also seen there. Maybe even the map and
documents and picture. Megan didn’t blink, didn’t move.