“He’s started seeing a therapist,” Tasha went on. “He’s going twice a week. And not just any therapist—Jonathan Levine, Board Certified psychiatrist notorious for overmedicating and overdiagnosing. I’ve seen his name connected to at least a dozen divorce cases. He’ll substantiate Keenan’s emotional distress claims on paper, and he’ll make it look bad.”
“What else?” Shea grabbed her now-empty glass off of the nightstand and made to leave the room, squinting against bright light from the hallway when she opened the bedroom door.
“He’s taken a leave of absence from his companies. At the end of the workday yesterday, a communication was sent to his employees. The email directly referenced taking time off to handle family matters, which I can only assume means you.”
Shea stopped dead in the hallway.
“This changes the game,” Tasha continued. “Now he’s playing ball. And I’m not gonna lie—the money makes things tricky, Shea. The farther he goes to painting himself as a victim, the more he’ll make you look like a freeloader and a gold-digger. He’ll make himself out to be the hero who gave you prospects when you had none. It’ll be all about how he got you your first job and put you through college and how you’re leaving him only now that he gave you wings to fly on your own.”
“Only, none of that is true.”
“It’s not about the truth—it’s about what the courts will believe. You’re young, you’re beautiful and you’re black. A lot of judges will take one look at you and invent all kinds of stories about who you are and why you married Keenan. Misogyny and prejudice are alive and well.”
“I had prospects,” Shea seethed, not angry with Tasha—angry with the situation. “I stood to inherit a restaurant chain—no, an entire franchise, and a successful one at that. And Keenan didn’t get me my first job in New York. I got myself my first job before I even moved there. And when that fell through, my friend Kendrick helped me get another one. I started working for Keenan much later.”
“Good,” Tasha said approvingly. The scratch of a pen Shea heard in the background told her Tasha was taking notes. “I need more of those kinds of details. And we’ll want any documentation you have to that effect—old tax returns that show W-2s from earlier jobs in New York. We’ll also want depositions from witnesses. Especially the restaurant chain. I’m guessing you stood to inherit from a parent or a grandparent?”
“My father,” Shea mumbled, still upset.
“Do you still stand to receive it?”
Shea shook her head, not that Tasha could see her. “When I told him I didn’t want it, he sold.”
“Any idea of the selling price?” Tasha was still writing.
Shea sighed. “A lot.” When she realized how vague that sounded, she revised her statement to, “Probably low eight figures.”
“Good,” Tasha praised again. “We’ll definitely want his testimony.”
The very notion punched Shea square in the gut. She hadn’t spoken to her father in more than two years and was the very last person who should be asking him for a favor. By his standard, she’d committed the gravest trifecta of daughterly sins: leaving home without his blessing, marrying without his permission, and declining his legacy.
“My dad and I aren’t exactly on good terms.”
“We need your case to be as strong as possible, given the situation with the money. We want it to be heard in a divorce court—not a criminal one. And I’ll be honest—given the case I think that Keenan is building, I don’t think you’re gonna get away with a no-fault divorce.”
Shea closed her eyes and rubbed her temples against her headaches, the daylight still bright through her lids.
“So we file before he can,” Shea said, like filing for divorce was nothing—like settling out of court hadn’t been Plan A, and that this Plan B was as light and easy as her voice.
“Alright.” Tasha took a deep breath. “We talked about what that would mean…”
Shea took a deep breath of her own. Finding herself in the kitchen, she dropped down on one of the bistro chairs next to the counter. “It means if I want to win, I would have to go against him with cause.”
“You’ll be kicking the hornet’s nest,” Tasha said plainly, “but I think it’s the right decision. If he’s taking winning to another level, we’ll get the advantage by moving first.”
12
The Mills
Dev
“What do we know so far?” Dev grilled Brody the moment he buckled into the cruiser. The two men had remained silent on their way out of The Big Spoon. Dev didn’t bother confirming whether it was another case of vandalism at one of the plants. If it wasn’t what he thought it was, Brody would’ve already been busy filling him in on something else.
“Explosion at 3-1-2-4-5 River Road—a sawmill built in 1981 on a twenty-two-acre lot. The main building has three floors with a total of eighteen thousand square feet. Suspicious noises were reported at approximately 9:13 p.m.; it was later determined to have been an explosion of some sort.”
“Who called it in?” Dev wanted to know. He was already fishing the second phone out of his pocket—the one that had been issued to him by the Sapling PD. It had all sorts of features and apps meant specifically for law enforcement. If it had alerted him during dinner, he hadn’t heard, maybe because The Spoon had been noisy—or maybe because he’d been too caught up in Shea.
As he listened to Brody with half his attention, he navigated on his phone to see what he could find from what dispatch put into the system. The screen facing Brody in the cruiser was at the wrong angle for him to see.
“Anonymous call,” Brody said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to throw Dev a look he’d seen before. Nine times out of ten, anonymous callers were related to the crimes.
Their inability to trace previous anonymous calls in this string of cases meant the offenders were smart enough not to get caught. But it still didn’t mean they were professionals. In this day and age, anyone who got Forensic Files and Wives with Knives on TV could figure out all kinds of ways around the law.
Solidifying Dev’s point of view was the fact that the mills were far enough outside of town to be out of earshot from neighbors. Anyone close enough to hear the explosion was either out hunting, or hiking, or knew something about the crime. It was too dark to do the former—unless it was teenagers or tent campers trespassing on private property—and no one would have been around to call it in or have cause to keep it anonymous.
“Anyone inside?” Dev asked next.
“Not that we can tell. The fire’s too hot to send a crew all the way in.”
“Scene status?” Dev asked, mentally filing away each tidbit even as he finally got eyes on the transcript of the call report.
“Fire’s on the scene. EMTs are on their way and by now they ought to be…” Brody’s gaze flashed to the clock on the dashboard and he gnawed on his gum as he thought. “…around five minutes out.”
“Did anyone call Cliff?” Dev asked, having half a mind to text the man himself. He pulled out his personal phone to rifle for Cliff’s number.