Chapter 35
No One’s Hands Are Clean
“Teddy, pour everyone a drink,” Frank says.
We are sitting in the back room, a small dining room off the veranda. It’s apparently only used when the weather is poor, when they can’t have dinner reservations outside. It hasn’t been used in a long time. No tablecloths. No pretty lights shining over the large windows. Chairs folded up.
The opposite of the party twelve feet away.
Frank’s security guards pulled the chairs down around a corner table—a rectangular six-top. Nicholas and I sit on one side of the table, Quinn and her father on the other. Teddy walking over from the small bar.
The guards, meanwhile, stand on the other side of the room—by the door leading out to the veranda, to the party. They’re making sure no one else is coming in—or that any of us, apparently, are getting out.
Somehow it doesn’t make this all seem safer.
Teddy hands his father a bourbon, taking the free seat next to him. Frank doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t even look at Teddy. He looks only at Nicholas as he takes a long sip of the drink, leans back calmly in his chair.
“Nicholas,” he says, “I would think you would be the last person I’d need to tell that issuing threats is not the way to negotiate with us.”
“We aren’t negotiating,” Nicholas says. “We already negotiated and your children broke that agreement.”
“So what is this then?”
“A delivery,” he says.
I pull the tablet out of my bag, rest it on the table. But I don’t pass it over. Not to Frank—nor Teddy, nor Quinn. Not yet.
“As I mentioned,” Nicholas continues, “we have a large number of documents that we feel confident you would rather remain… in your family. That I have devoted my life to keeping away from anyone who is not in your family.”
He looks at Frank when he says this part. He looks at Frank and holds his eyes.
Frank doesn’t ask what kind of documents.
He doesn’t need to ask. They are the kind of documents and data that Nicholas has collected over decades of working with Frank.
Documents that detail every indiscretion, every illegal activity, every capital crime.
The documents that Nicholas went to jail for (for the better part of ten years) as opposed to producing them for the authorities.
“All the files have been collated and organized by year and criminal wrongdoing, cross-labeled to highlight individual culpability, redacting any criminal activity for which statute of limitations has expired. As you know, that doesn’t apply to most of them…
” he says. “A flash drive has been delivered to each of your homes. Just so everyone is on the same page as to what we are talking about.”
“But you were our lawyer,” Quinn says.
“That is true.”
“So I can’t imagine that I need to remind you that whatever you think you’ve collected here would all fall under the umbrella of attorney-client privilege. Completely inadmissible in the court of law.”
“Well, Quinn, maybe I need to remind you that I haven’t been your lawyer for quite a long time,” Nicholas says. “Moreover, I was disbarred when I went to prison to protect your family…”
“That doesn’t necessarily pierce privilege.”
“That’s arguable. But it’s also not relevant.
The court found that the nature of my criminal activity, the scope of what I did to protect your family, meant I was not acting in the capacity of your lawyer, but rather as a part of the organization.
And that certainly does pierce attorney-client privilege.
” He pauses as Quinn takes that in. “In fact, it blows any privilege out of the water. Which, as you should know, makes every document on this tablet admissible by the Feds. In whatever capacity they want to use them.”
Nicholas nods in my direction and I slide the tablet across the table to Frank.
“Password is 080811…” I say.
Frank looks over at me, and I see him clock it. The significance of the password. Of that date. Of the month and the day.
The day that Kate was killed.
He taps in the password. And the tablet clicks on.
The screen divides into six squares, revealing six houses.
One house in Indian Creek, one on Fisher Island, two in Silver Lake, one in Nashville, and a final home in downtown Miami.
Six live camera streams, into each of those houses.
The living rooms and home offices, the kitchens and sunrooms. The basements.
“What the hell is this?” Teddy says.
Because he recognizes those houses. The home in East Nashville (his brother Dominic’s home), the two houses down the street from each other on the Reservoir in Silver Lake (the houses belonging to his twin sisters), an apartment in South Miami (his baby brother Bradley’s home), the house on Fisher Island (the house belonging to Quinn).
And of course he recognizes, especially, the home streaming in the first box—the Indian Creek home, his home.
“You’ve been surveilling our fucking houses?” Quinn says.
“Did you not, seventy-two hours ago, have a man at my house?” I say. “And at my kid’s place?”
Quinn leans forward toward me—that red suit, her polished hair, all of it still somehow in place.
“All due respect, this all started a long time before you got here,” she says.
“Which is why it would have made sense to leave me out of it…”
I shoot her a look, refusing to stand down.
“Everything would have gone on exactly as it had been going on,” I say. “If you didn’t feel the need to break things. To break the seal. Because now you’ve threatened me. And far worse you threatened my kid. And Nicholas’s grandchild. So now it’s very much about us. It’s about all of us.”
“All of us?” Frank says.
“I knew that you weren’t particularly trusting of the outside world, Frank, but even I was surprised how much you moved through your children’s properties,” Nicholas says.
“And we have it all. Every wire transfer. Every package coming in and out of each residence. Everything on the home computers. Which means even your younger children, who have decided to start fresh, who, if you will, have tried to stay away from the family business… they are implicated too.”
Frank’s eyes go steely.
“Racketeering. Money laundering, mail fraud. Extortion. Conspiracy. Possession with the intent to distribute. No one’s hands are clean.”
“I don’t need the list.”
“Nevertheless. It’s all in the documents.”
Nicholas turns toward Teddy and Quinn. “It’s particularly unfortunate that you chose to take that phone call at your brother’s condominium in September of last year,” Nicholas says.
“Even without Bradley’s direct knowledge, conspiracy to commit happening on an ADA’s property?
The Feds won’t believe he wasn’t involved if you were careless enough to use his home and phone to conduct business.
Not just on that occasion. But on five others that we documented. ”
“Fuck you,” Teddy says.
“Fuck me?”
“You are involving innocent people in this.”
“I think, Teddy, if anyone should understand involving innocent people, it would be you and your sister…” Nicholas says.
Nicholas turns away, but Teddy is still staring at him, confused suddenly. And I see him start to wonder if Nicholas is referring to just the organization coming for Bailey and me. Or, rather, if Nicholas is referring to something else entirely.
Frank stops Teddy. He’s heard enough. “This kind of surveillance,” he says. “This has been years of planning.”
“I guess when you leave someone with nothing,” I say. “All they’ve got is time.”
Quinn looks at me. Then she turns away as she starts to put the pieces together.
The pieces that lead this all back to Owen.
Everything Owen had to do—had to risk—to hack into each of their systems. Everything he was able to get away with.
Because at the end of the day he is smarter. He is smarter than all of them.
“So Owen is behind this?” she says.
“One could argue that you are, Quinn,” Nicholas says.
“How do you figure that?”
“None of this was put into action until we learned what you intended to do in regard to my family.”
She looks down at the tablet, zooms in on her beautiful sunroom, staring back at her. And I can see it going through her mind—everything that may have been witnessed there. And by whom.
“You can thank your son-in-law for anything that is happening to your family,” Quinn says.
“I think we’re playing way past that at this point,” Nicholas says.
“Is that right?”
“Focusing on him isn’t particularly serving you. Focusing on the past isn’t serving any of us. Not when we all need to focus on what happens now.”
“Which is what exactly?” Frank says.
His tone is so quiet and serious that it’s almost hard to hear him. As if he wants it to be hard to hear him. As if Frank wants to convey to Nicholas—and only him—what has been started here. What Nicholas has started here. And what the price will be if he doesn’t figure out a way to stop it.
“They get to go on with their lives now,” Nicholas says. “All of them. Your children. And mine. Charlie and the kids. Hannah and Bailey. And Owen too.”
“Owen too?”
“Yes. All of them. This all fucking ends here.”
Frank doesn’t say anything, not at first.
“If my children were sloppy enough to allow this to happen, who is to say that I care enough about them that I won’t just let them go down?”
“Isn’t that the one thing we have in common? Even now, Frank?” He pauses. “We’d do anything for our children.”
Frank meets Nicholas’s eyes. He looks him right in the eyes, and he pulls out a gun. He pulls out a gun, and I think he is bluffing. Of course he is bluffing. Isn’t this what you do when you are bluffing?
Except then he shoots.