Chapter Four-Conflict of Interest

 

Adrian didn't wait to be let in.

Rachel Kim looked up from her desk to find him already standing in her doorway at seven a.m., the press release from the night before folded in his hand like something he wanted to throw at her.

"You knew."

"Close the door, Adrian."

"You knew, and you let me find out from a press release." He didn't move to close the door; he let it sit open, let the anger have room. "I have been running point on this case for two weeks. You didn't think Marcus Aldridge belonged in that conversation?"

Rachel set down her pen with the deliberate calm of a woman who had rehearsed this moment more than once. "Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Fine." She exhaled. "Six weeks ago, before Preston Hale was even dead, compliance flagged an expense pattern on Marcus's corporate card — small stuff, nothing criminal on its face, but odd. Cash withdrawals that didn't match anything. I opened a quiet file. I did not, at that point, have the first idea it had anything to do with a sitting judge."

"And when it did?"

"When your defense counsel subpoenaed six months of Daley Center security logs," Rachel said, "records called me before they called you, because records reports to me. I put the two things together in about four minutes. And then I had a choice to make that had nothing to do with you."

"It had everything to do with me. I'm the one standing in a courtroom with my name on this case."

"You're the one standing in a courtroom with this office's name on this case," Rachel said, and for the first time her voice sharpened. "If Marcus Aldridge is what I think he might be, this isn't your career on the line, Adrian. It's every conviction he's ever touched. It's mine. It's the state's attorney's, whose name is literally on the door. I had six hours to decide whether to let this leak on its own timeline or get ahead of it, and I got ahead of it. I would do it again."

Adrian's jaw worked. "You could have told me first."

"I could have. I decided not to, because the second you knew, you'd have done exactly what you're doing right now — coming in here angry, wanting answers I didn't have yet, wanting to protect a case instead of an office." Rachel's expression softened, marginally. "I need you focused on convicting Daniel Hale, or acquitting him fairly if that's where the evidence goes. I do not need you fighting a two-front war."

"That's not your call to make for me."

"It's exactly my call to make. I'm your boss." She picked the pen back up, a clear dismissal, though her eyes stayed on him a moment longer. "Where did you hear Aldridge's name, by the way? Before the press release."

Adrian hesitated a half-second too long.

"Julian Voss told you," Rachel said, and it wasn't a question. "Of course he did."

"He gave me a warning. Not a name."

"How generous of opposing counsel." Rachel's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "Watch yourself, Adrian. I mean that in every sense you can think of."

§

Marisol found him in the file room an hour later, a printout in hand, her expression unreadable in the particular way that meant she'd found something she didn't love.

"The cross-reference came back."

Julian didn't look up from the box he was working through. "And?"

"Once. Four years ago." She set the printout on the table between them. "People v. Renner. Aldridge prosecuted, Hale presided. Defendant went away for eleven years on an armed robbery charge that, reading the transcript, was not exactly the state's strongest case."

Julian stopped what he was doing. "Eleven years."

"Aldridge and Hale's tower pattern doesn't start until three years ago. Renner was four years back — before the phone, before the storage unit, at least by the data we have." Marisol tapped the page. "Which means either they knew each other before whatever this was officially started, or the pings just don't tell us the whole story."

"Or somebody's been more careful for longer than three years." Julian picked up the printout, scanned it. "Get me everything on Renner. Trial transcript, sentencing memo, appeals history — did he ever try to get this overturned?"

"Denied twice. No money for real appellate counsel."

"Of course not." Julian set the page down, feeling something settle heavily in his chest that had nothing to do with Daniel Hale at all. "Marisol — if there's one Renner, there could be more. I want you pulling every case Aldridge and Hale ever touched together, not just the one that showed up on a five-year window."

"That's a lot of hours."

"Bill them to Daniel Hale's eleven million dollars," Julian said. "He can afford it. And it might be the only decent thing that comes out of any of this."

§

He called Daniel that evening, mostly out of habit, and partly because a defendant who felt forgotten by his own lawyer stopped trusting him, and Julian needed Daniel's trust more than almost anything else right now.

"Marcus Aldridge," Daniel repeated, testing the name. "That's the one Preston mentioned. You found him."

"I found him. He's on administrative leave as of last night. I can't tell you much more than that yet."

"Is he the one? The one Preston was—" Daniel didn't finish the sentence, like saying it plainly might make it more true than he could stand.

"I don't know yet. I think it's likely." Julian kept his voice level, the same voice he used for juries, for judges, for anyone who needed steadiness more than comfort. "I need you to understand something, Daniel. If this is what I think it is, it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to be in the papers. People are going to say things about your husband that you're not going to want to hear."

There was a long silence on the line. "I already know things about my husband I don't want to hear," Daniel said finally, quiet. "At least this way I'll know if I was wrong to love him as much as I did."

Julian didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't try to give one.

§

Nora tried Aldridge's apartment twice that afternoon. Both times, nothing — no answer at the door, no car in his reserved spot, a stack of mail starting to collect in the box downstairs that the building super hadn't touched.

"His union rep says he's not required to talk to anyone right now, on leave or off it," she told Julian over the phone. "His lawyer — and he's got one now, moved fast — says the same thing, only less politely."

"Who's the lawyer?"

"Denise Okafor. Employment side, good reputation, not cheap." A pause. "Julian, this isn't a guy hiding because he's embarrassed. This is a guy who got a lawyer within about six hours of losing his job. That's someone who saw this coming, or someone somebody warned."

"Or someone who's scared."

"Scared of what?"

Julian looked out at the gray evening light over the Loop, the question sitting there without an easy answer. "Scared of whoever knew enough to get ahead of Rachel Kim's own compliance office. Because whoever that is, Nora, they didn't do it to protect Marcus Aldridge."

§

Adrian texted him a little after nine: You free.

Not a question, not really. Julian looked at it for a long moment before he answered.

Depends what for.

Not that. I just don't want to be in my apartment right now.

Julian was there in twenty minutes, at a bar two blocks from Adrian's building that he picked because it was dark and quiet and unlikely to be full of anyone from either of their offices. Adrian was already at a table in the back, a glass in front of him he hadn't touched much.

"Rachel knew," Adrian said, before Julian had even sat down. "Six weeks. She had a file open on Aldridge for six weeks and didn't say a word until your subpoena forced her hand."

"That tracks." Julian sat. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry. You're the reason I found out at all." Adrian turned the glass a slow half-circle on the table. "I keep trying to figure out if that makes you an ally or a threat, and I genuinely don't know anymore."

"Can't it be both?"

"That's not how this is supposed to work." But there wasn't much heat in it. Adrian looked up at him, tired in a way Julian hadn't seen since the trial started, tired in a way that made him look younger, less armored. "I put eight years into that office. I believed every word of the mission statement, the whole time, like an idiot."

"You're not an idiot."

"I trusted the wrong people to be honest with me. Twice now." Adrian's eyes came up, steady, and Julian understood exactly what he meant by twice, and exactly whose fault the first time was. "And somehow I'm still sitting in a bar with you at nine o'clock at night instead of anyone who actually has my back."

"Maybe I have your back more than you think."

"Do you?"

The question sat there, unguarded in a way neither of them usually allowed. Julian could have made a joke. Three years of instinct told him to make a joke, to keep it light, to keep every door propped open for a graceful exit.

He didn't.

"Yeah," he said. "I think I might."

Adrian looked at him for a long moment, something unresolved and dangerous moving behind his eyes, close enough across the small table that Julian could have closed the distance in half a second if either of them let him.

Neither of them did. Not yet.

"I should go," Adrian said, not moving.

"Probably."

Neither of them moved for another ten seconds, which felt, in that dim back corner of an unremarkable bar, like the longest ten seconds of the entire case so far.

Then Adrian's phone buzzed on the table, breaking it, and he looked down, and whatever had been about to happen folded itself carefully away.

"It's my office," he said, reading it, and his face changed. "Julian — they can't reach Marcus Aldridge. Nobody's heard from him since this morning. His lawyer's filed a missing persons report."

Julian felt the temperature of the whole night change.

"Since when?"

"Since he didn't show up for a scheduled check-in with his union rep at two. Nobody thought much of it until his lawyer called his cell four times with no answer, went by his apartment herself an hour ago, and says his car's gone, his passport's gone, and the mail's still in the box." Adrian was already standing, pulling on his coat. "Julian — six hours ago, he was a man on leave. Now he's a man who disappeared the same day two lawyers on opposite sides of a murder case both said his name out loud."

Julian stood too, the easy warmth of five minutes ago gone entirely, replaced by something colder and more familiar — the particular alertness of a case turning into something he could no longer control from behind a desk.

"That's not a coincidence," he said.

"No," Adrian agreed, already moving for the door. "It isn't."