Burden of Proof Read online

  This is it?

  That was why, when Sonya had shown up, he found himself so incredibly eager to transit. More than that, he had been hungry to try to right some of the things he had gotten so wrong. So he had let himself be shot back through time . . .

  “Stop,” Sonya said. “Please.”

  Ethan took that as his sign. “I need to ask a couple of questions.” He gave her a chance to object. When she remained as she was, gazing blindly at the sunlit vista beyond the side window, he went on, “What are you currently working on?”

  “The same investigation since we met.” Her words came out in a monotone. Like she was not fully aware that she spoke at all. “Treatment of chronic pain through brain-wave frequency modulations. You’ve heard Adrian and me talk about this any number of times.”

  He replied as gently as he knew how. “That was thirty-five years ago.”

  She breathed in and out through pursed lips, taking the news in deep.

  Ethan felt a need to add, “To tell the truth, I probably wasn’t listening all that well back then either.”

  She managed to focus on him. “You’ve changed.”

  He nodded. No question about that. “So you don’t have anything to do with, you know . . .”

  “Transfer of consciousness? No. Although there are several different avenues . . .” Her voice drifted off as her vision went back out of focus.

  “You said when the initial test subjects showed they’d transitioned, it caught you totally by surprise.”

  She nodded slowly, but Ethan wasn’t entirely sure she had heard him at all.

  He’d started to ask about the Washington-based group that had invested in her company, when the door leading back to her lab opened. A young Asian woman emerged far enough to call over, “Sonya, we’re late running the test. If we don’t move, the results will be skewed.”

  Sonya rose slowly to her feet. “I have to go.”

  He stood with her. “I’m staying at the Casa Marina if you need to reach me.”

  As he headed back to the car, Ethan hoped he had been right not to warn her about the attack on Adrian. But there was no telling how she would take the news or what she would do. And the last thing he wanted was for her to try to take control and him to wind up with two deaths on his conscience.

  As he started to reverse from the space, Sonya came running through the front doors.

  He put the car in park, opened his door, and stood up. He wanted to meet this incoming assault on his feet. This being Sonya, he expected bitter argument, the sort of cold fury he had always elicited before.

  Instead she halted in front of him and said, “I have questions.”

  “I’ll do my best to answer them.” Ethan hesitated, then decided he needed to repeat what he had told her inside. “I need you to not discuss this with Adrian. Not the money, not my return, anything. Let me do it in my own way, in my own time. Please.”

  She seemed to work through several thoughts so potent they pinched her entire frame. “This is the last thing I expected. To have my research extended in such a profound direction.”

  “Totally out of the blue. I know it must be—”

  “And to have it come through you of all people.” Sonya’s desperate appeal raked his heart. “You haven’t told me everything, have you?”

  “Not even close.”

  “What you haven’t said, it’s bad, isn’t it.”

  Ethan slipped back behind the wheel. “Not if I can help it.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  The Beach Road Diner was a throwback to Jacksonville’s roots, a Deep South restaurant that had been clogging arteries for over fifty years. Ethan’s BMW was far from the only fancy car in the lot, however. Many of Jacksonville’s movers and shakers considered the diner a weekly rite of passage.

  As Ethan rose from his car, Gary stepped out of the porch shadows and tapped his watch. Ethan followed him into the diner. As they waited for a table, the former cop demanded, “What’s so all-fired urgent it can’t wait until next week?”

  “Soon as we’re seated I’ll explain.”

  Other than a fresh coat of paint, the diner’s interior had changed very little since the second World War. The tables were still draped in clear plastic sheaths, the silverware came wrapped in paper napkins, the drinks arrived in twenty-ounce plastic cups, the meals were piled on giant oval plates. Faces and fingers shone with grease. The smell was heavenly.

  Gary waved away the menu and said, “Butterfly shrimp with everything. Extra creamed peas. Sweet tea.”

  “Same,” Ethan said. When the waitress departed, Ethan said, “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “I’ve got to be back at the courthouse in”—he checked his watch—“thirty-seven minutes.”

  Ethan launched straight in. “I have information that Adrian is going to be murdered. Shot in cold blood.”

  “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking to you? Here, take a look at this.” Ethan passed over his deposit slips. “I’m showing you this because I need you to understand I’m not here as Adrian’s brother. I’m a client, and the threat is real.”

  Gary was a handsome man in his early forties, but he was not aging well. Ethan watched the flat brown eyes inspect the documents, cop eyes that gave nothing away. He could see Gary in another ten years, bulked up with a hundred excess pounds. Maybe more.

  Finally Gary handed the pages back. “Tell me about this source of yours.”

  “Not now, not ever.”

  “Look, kid—”

  “See, that’s where we need to reach clarity. I’m not a kid.”

  Gary gave him the cop’s version of a graveyard stare. Dark, bottomless eyes that promised a world of hurt if Ethan dared get out of line. “You think money in the bank and a new set of flashy clothes make you a man?”

  Ethan breathed in and out, waiting for the rage to dim. “I don’t have time for this, and neither do you. I came to you first because my brother thinks you’re the best there is. I want to hire you. In return, I expect you to treat me as a bona fide client.”

  The waitress delivered their meals. They ate in silence. Ethan spent the time reviewing alternative next steps. Not having Gary agree to take him on meant building a relationship with people he had never met. He had researched the city’s three other security firms. Sinclair would be his first call. But going in cold probably meant no better reception than now.

  Gary broke into his thoughts. “Say I agree. Which I haven’t. Not yet. What are you after?”

  Ethan pushed his half-finished plate aside. “Protect my brother. The attack is supposed to take place tomorrow at four in the afternoon, as Adrian exits the courthouse.”

  “They’re going to shoot your brother in broad daylight?”

  “Exactly.”

  Gary spooned up the last of his peas. “What else can you tell me?”

  “The gunman is Anglo, mid-forties. That’s all I know. I don’t have a name. His escape vehicle is a stolen minivan. I’ll cover all costs.”

  “You sure this is legit?”

  “I am.”

  Gary balled up his napkin tighter and tighter. “That it? We stop an attack and we’re done?”

  One look into that hard, suspicious gaze was enough. Ethan wanted to discuss his concerns and his suspicions with someone. But Gary Holt still viewed the world from a cop’s point of view. He was as addicted to hard evidence as Adrian. Before Ethan went any further, he would have to prove the threat was real.

  So all he said was, “The message I received was incomplete. This might be a lone gunman, it might be more. Once this first attack has been foiled, I’m going to try to convince Adrian to accept a security detail on him and Sonya both. Round the clock.”

  “Kid, you have no idea . . .” Gary smiled, and in doing so he rearranged the grim lines. Ethan remembered him then as their fishing buddy, the man who knew the Saint Johns River like the back of his hand. “Sorry, that just slipp
ed out.”

  “It happens.”

  “What I was going to say was, this could get extremely expensive.”

  “Would a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer do for a start?”

  It was Gary’s turn to take it in. “All right. I’m your man. At least for the next two days.”

  “You need to get this in place today. That includes hiring people we can rely on to secure the street in front of the courthouse.”

  “Soon as I’m done with this deposition, I’ll get started.”

  “And you treat this as you would any other confidential assignment. Nobody in the firm hears a thing until I decide and I act.”

  “Understood.” Gary waited while Ethan paid, then followed him outside. He offered Ethan a second grin. “Guess I won’t be calling you kid ever again.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Ethan used the phone on the restaurant’s outside wall and called Gina’s home. Her mother’s voice came on the answering machine, which was good for a shock. In his first go-round, his future ex-mother-in-law had passed away twelve years before. Ethan fumbled over the words, managed to say he was driving down, and hung up sweating from far more than the heat.

  Once he hit I-95 south, the miles flowed smoothly, which only granted his memories more space to roam. Gina had spent that entire summer backpacking through Europe with her sister and two friends from UF. Three days before she departed, Gina had asked him not to write or call or make contact in any way. For the entire summer. She felt conflicted, she explained. And scared. She needed time to sort things out and see if indeed they were meant to build a future together.

  Of course Ethan agreed. He felt all of those things himself.

  They had met at the beginning of their junior year at UF. They were drawn together with a fierceness that frightened them both, and almost instantly they found themselves fighting. Their relationship remained as it had begun, with their growing love regularly shattered by explosive breakups.

  Right up to the day of their divorce.

  An hour or so later, the vegetation began shifting from temperate to tropical. Pine trees and kudzu vines gave way to palms and blooming oleander. As Ethan passed the Daytona exit, he was struck by a memory from his childhood.

  Like all beach kids, he’d considered himself completely invulnerable. His parents knew he would never be kept out of the ocean, so they had paid good money to have a professional lifeguard teach him about safety and the sea. That particular day, the investment saved Ethan’s life.

  That autumn, the king tide had arrived while a hurricane churned through the Caribbean. The proper name for the phenomenon was a perigean tide, and on its own the rising waters often flooded low-lying coastal towns. Combined with a distant storm, the event carried deadly force. What made it especially dangerous were the day’s conditions: warm temperatures, crystal-clear sky, placid seas that sparkled and beckoned and drew eight-year-old Ethan out farther than he should have gone. And suddenly he was caught in a king-tide rip. Literally one dive under water was all it took. When he went down, he was playing on the edge of deep water. When he came up . . .

  The shore was gone.

  The lifeguard had stressed time and again how, if Ethan got caught by a rip, the only hope of safety would come from moving with the flow, not against. That sounded fine when he was sitting on the beach. But as the currents pulled him fast as a river and fear rose in his throat, all Ethan wanted to do was scream.

  Then the lifeguard’s stern voice sounded in his head. “Do not fight. Do not panic. Swim steady and easy in the flow’s direction. And above all else, keep careful watch.”

  Unlike the sappy films they showed in every Florida school, rips caused by major events like the king tide did not reverse flow in a clear pattern and simply head landward. They were too strong, too big. Rather, they fragmented.

  Ripples tracked the moment when streams broke away and headed inland. You had to watch, stay calm, and be ready when the moment came.

  Now, as Ethan drove the almost-empty highway, he remembered that incredible moment—actually, three of them. The first had come when the tiny feather waves broke free from the current and turned toward the setting sun. And he was ready.

  The second came when the beachfront condos came into view. Nothing in his entire short existence had looked as beautiful as those buildings, gleaming soft and golden in the late afternoon light.

  And the third, that incredibly sweet moment, was when his feet had touched the sandy bottom.

  As Ethan passed the Canaveral exit, he felt that same immense flow of events, accelerating as it pulled him further and further from his own past. The rip was too powerful to fight against, even now, as he was pulled so far out he could no longer even define his own comfort zone.

  He had no choice but to move with the flow. He could only hope that somewhere out there, beyond the empty horizon, was confirmation that he was taking the right course.

  That final hour of the drive probably should have been worse than it was. Ethan turned on the radio and found himself listening to a soundtrack from his own life. Huey Lewis’s “The Power of Love” was followed by Whitney Houston singing “Saving All My Love for You.” Then came Phil Collins and “One More Night.”

  Kissimmee’s main artery was the 192, which drilled a straight line from the Atlantic beaches to Disney’s southern entrances. Already by 1985 the highway was lined with tawdry castoffs—cheap motels, trailer parks, strip malls, and apartment complexes with walls so flimsy the occupants could hear other families breathe.

  Old-town Kissimmee, where Gina’s family had lived for three generations, was another world. Spanish moss dangled from the branches of live oaks that had taken root before America became a nation. Stately homes were framed by blooming perennials. Kids played kickball on emerald lawns. A passing motorist welcomed him with a languid wave.

  Gina’s father was an orthodontist, her mother a nurse who since their marriage had run her husband’s office and served as his surgical aide. The Devoe clan had migrated southeast from the Louisiana bayou country. They were Southern to their roots but with a distinctly Cajun spice. Their bloodline was mixed, their skin the color of sourwood honey, their eyes dark as a cloudy midnight, their women beautiful. Gina’s parents were both quiet, stern, reserved, aloof. Her own nature hearkened back to a more distant lineage. The only way to describe Gina’s personality was effervescent.

  Ethan parked across the street from Gina’s home and sat there, remembering their fights. He had naturally blamed her mercurial nature for their frequent breakups. He had often accused her of knowing which button to press and taking pleasure in setting him off. And that was true enough, but it was far from the entire story.

  A magnolia tree wafted its heavy fragrance through his open windows, and he breathed it as he would a truth serum. Because from this new temporal distance, Ethan realized he had been as much to blame for their quarrels, perhaps even more so. He had set Gina off so he had an excuse to leave. And he had been very good at leaving.

  Ethan rose from his car. Nervous as he was, he found himself grateful for a chance to try to get it right. This time.

  Gina’s mother opened the door, and for a moment she did not seem to recognize him. “Ethan?”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Devoe.”

  “You look . . . Is Gina expecting you?”

  “Not exactly. I phoned from Jacksonville. May I come in?”

  She held herself impossibly erect, this small woman. Ethan had forgotten how tiny Gina’s mother actually was. Of course, the last several years before he and Gina divorced, a stroke had confined Marie to a wheelchair. Several months after the stroke, Gina’s father had been felled by a massive coronary. Gina had returned home so that her mother was not forced to move into hospice care. It was as good an excuse as any to end a marriage that was already over in all but name.

  Gina’s mother surveyed him from polished loafers to freshly trimmed hair, then took a reluctant step back. �
�Do you have a new job?”

  “Something like that.”

  Marie shut the door behind him and said what she always did when Ethan arrived. “You can wait in the parlor. I will see if Gina is available.”

  Marie Devoe had a Southern woman’s ability to dismiss with a single motion, wagging one finger to both point him into the living room and reject him at the same time.

  Ethan crossed the foyer and walked in the direction she indicated. But when he reached the open doorway, he was halted by unwelcome memories.

  He remembered the whiteness. The bone carpet held an ivory sofa set and coral table and a pale sideboard covered with starched damask. The fireplace’s mantel was varnished white. Even the picture frames. How he had despised this place! No doubt Marie had been aware of his repulsion, which was probably why she always insisted he wait here.

  He surveyed the room and recalled the last time he had entered. It had been to sign his divorce papers.

  “Ethan, did you not hear—”

  He turned, and something in his expression seemed to stifle her demand.

  Ethan said quietly, “I’ll wait by the pool.”

  Marie’s crisp footsteps followed him back across the foyer and through the kitchen. “I don’t recall you ever being back here—”

  Again she was halted by Ethan unlocking the French doors and stepping onto the covered veranda. A trio of paddle fans marginally reduced the afternoon heat. Ethan pulled two cast-iron chairs close to the pool’s border and seated himself. “I’ve always loved this place.”

  Frangipani and booming oleander formed a living boundary to the pool. Several dozen palms rose like green sentries around the rear garden. Ethan sensed Marie standing there, probably debating whether she should order him back inside. But finally she moved away, and moments later he heard her calling for Gina to come down now.