She knew he was lying about where he’d been. He always downplayed every mission whether he disappeared for hours, days, or weeks at a time. She understood he couldn’t talk about his job, but at the same time, she hated that he had to lie to her about it.
“Enough about me,” he added. “What’s going on with the trial?
Kyla sighed and sat back in her seat, her gaze going to the front of the room where the prosecutor and defense attorney were talking quietly with the judge at the bench. “Very little. They’ve been in a sidebar with the judge for the past twenty minutes. I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“Any chance they’re talking about Nesbitt taking the stand himself?”
Wes leaned in close as he spoke and the sensation of his warm breath against her neck sent goosebumps chasing over her skin. She closed her eyes for a moment as she imagined what it would be like to feel that same warmth along a few other places on her body.
Stifling a moan, she gave herself a shake and told herself to focus.
“I doubt it.” She looked at him. “According to the prosecutor, Nesbitt would be an idiot to open himself to cross-examination. It’s more likely they’re asking for another continuance. Apparently, months upon months of billable hours isn’t enough for his clown car full of lawyers.”
Wes turned his attention to the defendant’s table near the front of the room. Kyla followed his gaze. William Nesbitt, former city councilman and current scum-sucking piece of crap, sat calmly in his chair, as if he was simply waiting for the barista to bring him a cup of coffee.
Hatred wasn’t an emotion Kyla had ever been familiar with—until recently. But when it came to Nesbitt, hatred barely scratched the surface of what she felt. It wasn’t a stretch to say she wanted the man to suffer as much as her father had.
As much as her mother had.
As much as she had.
Sometimes, when she woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, her face wet with tears, she found herself wishing Nesbitt was dead. Sometimes she even imagined killing him. Especially when she thought about his trial ending with anything other than a guilty verdict.
Kyla tried not to let herself think like that, but over the course of the past several months, as she’d watched Nesbitt and his high-priced lawyers working the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the media, she realized she didn’t have a lot of faith in the American justice system. Money talked. And Nesbitt had a lot of it.
“Maybe Nesbitt is planning to plead out like he should have done months ago,” Wes murmured, his warm breath once more tickling the skin of her neck and ear. “The guy has to know the trial is going to end with him going to prison. The cops found the murder weapon in his frigging hands. There’s no talking your way out of that.”
Kyla snorted. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Nesbitt is a career politician. He made himself rich by knowing all the right people and making deals under the table. I’m terrified this whole trial has been one big game to him.”
Wes took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. The feel of his warm skin against hers made her pulse flutter. “Nesbitt’s going down, Kyla. And so is whoever he hired to murder your father.”
She hoped Wes was right. Because while Nesbitt might have had the gun in his possession, she wasn’t convinced he’d actually pulled the trigger.
As much as she hated Nesbitt, it didn’t make sense he’d do his own dirty work and gun her dad down at a stoplight in the middle of town, even if he did have reason to want her father dead. As a city councilman, Nesbitt had been in the perfect position to make sure a certain construction company—Alpha One to be precise—won the very lucrative contract for the Navy’s new Imperial Beach Complex on Coronado.
The problem was, Alpha One had a sizable skeleton in its closet. The company had recently built a pedestrian overpass in San Clemente that collapsed due to poor workmanship, killing two people. If word of something like that got out, Alpha One would never have gotten the Navy contract. Her dad, who’d been a civil engineer for the city, had been doing the investigation and Kyla knew for a fact that he’d been about to point the finger at Alpha One.
That’s where Nesbitt came in. In exchange for getting rid of her father before he could file his official report, Alpha One had agreed to set aside the most profitable sub-contracting jobs associated with the Imperial Beach contract for Nesbitt’s business cronies, who in turn funneled millions of dollars into the councilman’s campaign funds…and from there straight into his pockets.
Connecting Nesbitt to her father’s murder hadn’t been nearly as easy. When her father had been gunned down in his car at a stoplight, the police concluded he’d been the victim of road rage and the investigation had quickly gone cold. Kyla and two of her friends from college, Owen Cobb and Andrew Brock, had done some digging and linked Nesbitt to a freelance security consultant who worked for him—Nestor Stavros. A traffic camera placed Stavros in the car directly behind her father minutes before his death. Unfortunately, that same camera hadn’t seen the man murder him.
It had been pure chance the police caught Nesbitt at all, but since it was with the same weapon that had killed her father, they’d charged him with murder. Kyla had expected Nesbitt to give Stavros up in exchange for a deal and was still stunned he hadn’t.
“Maybe Nesbitt’s lawyer is talking to the judge because he’s finally about to roll on Stavros,” she said to Wes. “That’s fine with me, as long as Nesbitt doesn’t get off the hook completely.”
“It’s not fine with me.” Wes’s jaw was tight. “They were both involved in your father’s death. They both deserve to go to prison for life.”
He was right. Ultimately, Nesbitt was the reason her father was dead and she wanted him to pay.
Kyla was still wondering what Nesbitt’s lawyer could possibly be talking about when Owen and Andrew sat down on the bench beside her.
She smiled at them. “I didn’t know you guys were coming today. I thought you had class.”
“We did, but we blew it off.” Owen grinned. Thin with shaggy dark hair, he wore black-rimmed glasses he insisted made him a chick magnet though no one had ever been able to corroborate that. “Considering how many privacy and internet laws we violate on a regular basis it’s safe to say engineering ethics is a wasted subject on us.”
Kyla couldn’t argue with that. In addition to being there for her after her father had been murdered, her two friends had jumped into the world of computer hacking alongside her with both feet. It was safe to say none of them would get an A+ in that class.
“Everything going okay with the trial?” Andrew asked, leaning forward to see around Owen. Blond with dark eyes, he was built like a football player but without the athletic ability. “You both looked kinda serious when we walked in.”
“Nesbitt’s lawyer has been talking to the judge for the past thirty minutes,” Wes said. “We were trying to figure out if we should be concerned.”
“Not if the prosecutor’s files are any indication,” Owen said softly. “Andrew and I hacked into his computer last night and everything seemed fine.”
Wes shook his head with a chuckle. “Don’t you think it’s a little ballsy to be snooping around the DA’s computers in the middle of a murder investigation?”