It will either still be where it belongs, which makes her complaint false on its face, or she’ll arrange for it to be missing in a way that points to me, which means she or someone she’s sent will need to come to this estate and move it.”
Calloway looked at her. “You’re very calm.” “I’m terrified,” she said. “But terrified and calm aren’t mutually exclusive.”
A brief silence. “She’s trying to make you choose,” Imani said, “between the fiance who’s been with you for eight months and the cleaning woman you hired three weeks ago.
She knows that in most situations that’s not a close call.” “This isn’t most situations,” he said.
“I know.” She looked at him steadily. “But she doesn’t know what you know. She doesn’t know about the lab results.
She doesn’t know you watched the camera footage. She thinks she’s making this about my credibility and she doesn’t know that you already decided whose credibility you trust.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “DeMarco,” he said without looking away from her.
DeMarco, who had been standing near the study door, straightened. “Check the jewelry, then lock down the estate’s perimeter access for the next 48 hours.
No one enters without my personal authorization.” “Yes, sir.” He looked at Imani. “Is there anything you need?”
She thought about Reuben in the ICU bed, his mother’s eyes, the IV in his left hand, the failing fistula and the surgery the trust would cover and the weeks of uncertainty that were going to follow regardless of what happened in the next two days.
“I need this to be over,” she said, “and I need it to be over in a way that means she can’t come back from.”
He nodded once. “Then let’s make sure it is.” DeMarco returned 18 minutes later. The jewelry was exactly where it belonged, all three pieces.
The pearl earrings in their case, the gold bracelet on its stand, the watch, his mother’s watch, in the cedar box in the back of the bedroom closet where it had been for 11 years.
“File a counter complaint,” Calloway told his attorney. “False report and get me a meeting with the DA’s office for tomorrow morning.”
He paused. “And call the SEC. Tell them we have documentation of pre-IPO securities fraud and we’re prepared to cooperate fully.”
From the laptop speaker, his attorney said something that sounded like the careful exhale of someone who had been waiting for this call.
Imani sat in the chair across from Calloway’s desk and looked out the study window at the Chicago skyline where the late afternoon light was doing complicated things with the glass faces of the towers along the lakefront.
