The Kiss Plot by Nicole French

Twenty-Eight

Itried to tell him. I really did.

I mouthed the words to myself in the mirror as I put on the diamond drop earrings Eric had gifted me upon our return to New York. Apparently the twenty bolts of fabric weren’t an adequate Christmas present.

And the words were on the tip of my tongue when I walked out in the red dress and a pair of sky-high Giuseppe Zanotti heels, my hair pinned up in a mass of shiny black coils. Unfortunately, one look at Eric’s face told me I needed to take the dress off immediately or find a new one. Skylar was right about the Valentino—I did look fabulous in it. So off it went, along with the rest of our clothes for the next twenty minutes. The shoes, however, stayed on.

And then I tried again when I had to redo my hair and makeup next to him in the master bathroom, but the smell of him was too distracting, and this time he was the one who was shoved against the sink while I fell to my knees, right before he turned me around and fell to his too.

An hour later, we were standing next to each other for the second time in the bathroom, trying not to make eye contact lest we miss the party completely.

“It’s nice to have you back,” Eric murmured with a sly grin that I only caught out of the corner of my eye as I carefully lined my lips with a deep red that matched my dress.

I rolled my eyes. Apparently, pregnancy hormones made me a cross between a Lifetime tearjerker and Pornhub’s hall of fame. There was no in-between. I was such a cliché, and I couldn’t have cared less.

“Is it, Petri dish?” I asked as I pulled the makeup brush out of my cosmetics drawer.

He narrowed his eyes playfully at me through the mirror as he fixed his bow tie for the third time, and then, without warning landed a sharp swat to my backside.

“Oh my God!” I yelped. “I’m going to look like a clown if you do that when I’m putting on makeup.”

“You know there’s a consequence for using that name, pretty girl. I’m not above dispensing it in the middle of a party.”

A shiver ran down my spine. Promise? I wanted to say. Except I didn’t, because my eyes drifted down to the still-flat expanse of my stomach. Was I imagining that it had grown already?

“Hey,” Eric said. “What is it?”

I opened my mouth, but before I could get it out, there was a briskknock on the front door. Eric and I both jumped. We didn’t really get unannounced visitors before, and we certainly never got them now—not since Tony and his security squad had been installed in a newly empty apartment downstairs precisely to monitor situations like this.

We crept out of the bathroom and peered at each other for a moment.

“You don’t think it’s…”

Eric shook his head. “I don’t know.” He stared at the door like he expected a herd of cattle to come charging through it.

“You want me to get it?” I asked. “He might be kinder to his own flesh and blood.”

Eric swallowed, pulled at his collar, and set his jaw. Then, as he pulled on his jacket, he strode to the door and peered through the peephole.

“Oh,” he said with surprise and an odd note of tension. “It’s Zola.”

He opened the door, and indeed, there stood Matthew Zola, looking pretty damn tired, a little bit wet from the snow, and very cold.

“Hey,” he greeted me with chattering teeth after Eric invited him in. He took in our formal wear with a bit of surprise. “Bad time?”

Eric glanced between him and me. “Well, it is New Year’s Eve. And yeah, DVS is holding an event. There’s an announcement I have to be present for.”

“Eric was unanimously voted chairman!” I bragged, unable to help myself.

“Oh, shit. Hey, that’s great.” Zola shook Eric’s hand, though he seemed a bit dazed.

“Would you like to come with us?” I offered, ignoring Eric’s sharp look. He got along with Zola now that he was helping us investigate John Carson, but that didn’t mean he liked him. I wasn’t going to lie. I still kind of enjoyed poking that bear.

“Ah, no,” Zola said. “That’s all right. I’ve got a stack of police reports and a bottle of grappa at home to help me ring in the New Year.”

I nodded sympathetically. Even though I was still planning to start working again in the spring, I did not particularly miss bringing my work home with me every night of the week.

“Besides,” Zola said. “I have a feeling I’d be underdressed.”

“Probably,” Eric agreed, earning an elbow in the gut from me. He lifted his shoulders, as if to say “What?”

“That’s, uh, some dress, Jane,” Zola said, to the point where I wondered if he did it just to get back at Eric, who was now glowering openly.

I ignored him and turned back to Zola. “Thanks. So, what’s up?” I asked. “You’re the first DA I’ve met who makes house calls. Do you want something to drink or anything?”

But Zola just hovered around the door, keeping his coat on and his hands shoved in the pockets.

“I…well, first I wanted to tell you what I know that my boss does not yet. But he will, because he’s very good at his job.”

I leaned against the breakfast bar while Eric crossed his arms to listen.

“What is it?” Eric demanded a little too sharply.

But Zola met his gaze, his dark brown eyes shining almost as much as his sleek dark hair. He wasn’t a billionaire, but this was a guy who had been going after the worst of New York for a long time. He wasn’t scared of Eric or anyone. I respected that.

“I looked into John Carson. Found stuff you probably did too. Places of birth, things like that.”

I nodded. I had a whole file from friends in Chicago to go through that had been compiled while we were away, along with some extra stuff from the investigator.

“But I also, uh, took it upon myself to take his New York assistant out for a drink one night,” Zola said, looking really uncomfortable.

“Oh?” I asked playfully. “Was she cute?”

Zola just looked mildly disgusted with himself. “She was, ah, lonely. And kind of a lightweight. But also had a lot of information on her computer that would probably not be permissible in court.”

Carson’s assistant, as it happened, had access to his travel records since they had been stored on computers—which, since his company was in the tech business, meant since the early eighties. All of the company’s records were in the process of being moved to the cloud, and by some oversight of its IT department, not all of it had been encrypted yet.

“He was in Seoul around 1989, Jane,” Zola said, somewhat regrettably. “And he did fly on your mother’s airline. It looks like his and your mother’s stories pan out, for what it’s worth. I’d still request a paternity test though, if he really wants to claim you’re his daughter.”

Eric snorted. One of my hands drifted to my stomach before I realized what I was doing and sat on it.

“I, um, yeah. Probably not going to happen,” I said.

“It was odd, though,” Zola said. “He hasn’t been back since. The South Koreans really do not like him. At all. And I don’t know why. Maybe they know what he did to your mom.”

No one laughed. It was a bad joke. Eric folded his mouth into a tight line.

“No one cared about my mother,” I said, guilty once again that she still hadn’t wanted to talk since I’d come home. “That’s why she married my actual dad. He was the only one who did.”

There was an awkward silence between the three of us. Zola eventually tugged at his collar and cleared his throat. “Ah. Sorry.”

“So that’s why you came all the way up here on New Year’s Eve?” Eric asked sharply. “To verify Jane’s paternity?”

Zola looked even more uncomfortable. “Ah, no,” he said. “There have been some other…developments. And I’m not really supposed to talk about them with you. I just thought you would want to know.”

Eric frowned. “That there are developments you can’t tell us? Why would we care about that?”

My stomach dropped as Zola’s warning clicked. “Because we’re objects of an investigation.” I shook my head. “Fuck.”

“We’re what?”

Zola held up his hands in mock-ignorance. “I didn’t say anything about it. Literally.”

“No,” I assured him. “You didn’t. You’re obviously not here either…right?”

Zola nodded and turned to the door. “As far as I know, I’m already halfway to Sheepshead Bay by now, dog-tired after working all night.” He sighed. He knew he’d just dropped a bomb on us, and there was nothing he could do to help us clear it up.

“Any…” I chose my words carefully. “Any idea why the DA would be particularly frustrated by us knowing this information?”

I prayed he would say no. I prayed he wouldn’t say the thing I had a feeling was the case—that Zola had come all the way here on December 31st because something terrible was going to happen almost immediately. Someone was getting arrested. Someone was going down.

He just shrugged. “I really don’t know the answer to that. I’m…well, I’ll put it this way. I’m definitely not telling you everything I know.”

I sighed, but tried to be understanding, though I was just as confused as before. He was already risking his job—hell, his license—to be here and tell us any of this. Why not just go all the way and give us a head start?

But instead, Zola turned to leave.

“Happy New Year,” he said. “And, Jane?”

I turned back. “Yeah?”

“For what it’s worth, the DA isn’t particularly happy with the other investigator that Skylar and Brandon hired. He said he was going to ruin the discovery process today before it even got started. I was surprised, honestly, that he didn’t say I had to keep that fact to myself.”

I swallowed. Well, then. Message received, loud and clear.

Zola looked meaningfully at both Eric and me. “I’ll, um, well, I probably won’t be seeing you. At least not for a while.”

I bit my lip and nodded again. “Thanks, Zola.”

He opened the door. “Bye, Jane. Eric.”

The door closed, and after a few beats, Eric whirled to me.

“What in the hell was all of that?”

I waited until Zola’s footsteps had receded completely down the stairs before I sank back to my stool. “It was a warning.”

“About what?”

I looked up. “Has the last six months knocked out every bit of lawyering sense from your brain? What do you think he meant?”

Eric opened his mouth as if to argue, then shut it again. “Do me a favor. You seem to speak his shady cop language better than I do—”

“That’s because I was a prosecutor too, you goon.”

“I know,” Eric said tightly. “So lay it out for me, will you?”

I took a deep breath. “He was telling us we’re under investigation for something related to John Carson. Either both of us, or you. Which means he can’t talk about it at all.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that part,” Eric said.

“Any idea what it might be?”

I might have imagined the pause before he said, “None at all. I’ve been here the whole time with you.”

“Except when you were disappearing into graveyards.”

“Jane.”

“All right, all right, all right.” I waved his silent protests away with one hand. “Sorry.”

“What did he mean about the other investigator? Why would he be ruining a discovery tonight?”

“Something’s going on.” I crossed to the living room, where I picked up my laptop from the coffee table and opened my email. “The investigator found something they don’t want us to know they know. Something they are trying to verify themselves, but that our investigator apparently discovered as well.”

Sure enough, in my inbox there was a link from Skylar to an encrypted file. I opened it, entered the password we had agreed upon, and started paging through the documents that had been submitted this evening by the P.I.

“This is weird,” I said as I scanned through the report.

“What’s that?” Eric pointed at a few pictures from his seat next to me on the couch.

“The street where I grew up,” I said. “That’s in Evanston. My house is that one on the right.”

I squinted. The blurry surveillance photos weren’t focused on the old house, but instead on the curb in front, where a simple black sedan was parked. There were two figures in the back seat of the sedan, and I thought I could make out John Carson’s long, slightly hooked nose. But the other was too short to see anything notable. Why they were sitting in my old neighborhood was a completely different question.

“Huh,” I said as I scrolled down to the notes below. “There’s nothing that explains this. Maybe the investigator will upload something else tomorrow or on the second. I’ll call then.”

I kept going, looking through the various bit of biographical information the P.I. had collected on John Carson. Some I’d already found on my own. Other stuff, like his collection of known residences or liaisons, was interesting, though not urgent.

“We should go through this after the party,” I said, looking at the clock. “It’s already past ten o’clock. They are probably waiting for you so they can announce the appointment.”

“Wait,” Eric said. “What the hell is that?”

He continued scrolling down in a hurry to a list of transactions that had been noted. Stock movement between companies. Specifically the transfer of quite a few shares of DVS stock to an LLC called “Horse and Chariot Ventures.” Which, with a bit of more careful prodding, appeared to be a foreign business attached to the same account used personally by one John Carson.

“Jesus,” I murmured. “This guy is good. I wonder what kind of Swiss dick he had to suck to get these numbers.”

Eric, however, was already incensed. “That son of a bitch. He’s been buying more DVS stock. A lot more than he said.”

“He has,” I agreed. “Why?”

But before I could prod more, Eric had whipped out his phone and called his assistant.

“Bridget,” he said as he started pacing the room. “Yeah, get me Thomas Clark on the phone. And conference in Nina in about five minutes. ”

Thomas J. Clark. The family’s estate attorney and financial consultant.

“Hey, Tom,” Eric said once his call had been connected. “I just need to know…how much liquid cash do I have access to right now? No, I don’t mean after the will takes effect. I mean now. As of tonight.”

Tom’s voice was indistinct on the other side of the line, but whatever he said made Eric scowl.

“Okay,” he said after. “Okay, thanks.”

He hung up and dialed another number immediately.

“What are you—” I started to ask, but was cut off when Eric started talking.

“Hey, Greg, it’s Eric de Vries. Yeah, Happy New Year to you, too. Listen, I was wondering if you could give me an estimate for this idea I had.”

I frowned. He was maneuvering a stock deal on New Year’s Eve? The market wouldn’t even open for two days.

“How much would it take to up the family’s share to a full sixty percent?”

Apparently, the answer was not a good one, because Eric swore profusely under his breath.

“Fine,” he replied once he was done. “How much could we purchase with our current liquid assets?”

Again, the broker’s voice was inaudible.

“All right,” Eric said irritably. “When the market opens, buy as much as we can afford. Fifty-two is better if we can get there. Do whatever you need to make sure the family owns fifty-one by the first board meeting next week, all right?”

I waited a few more minutes while Eric accepted the conference call he’d requested and instructed Nina to purchase as much stock as she could too.

“What did you just do?” I asked when he was finished.

“What was necessary,” Eric replied. He glanced at the clock again. “Shit. We really have to go.”

“Oh, now you care about making a grand entrance?”

“I need to be the face of this company more than ever,” Eric said. “Because if John Carson is trying to oust me from DVS, I need to make sure the stockholders who are currently invested in the company stay that way instead of selling to him.”