Page 108 of The System

“Okay. Well, now I really do have to go. Tonight. My place. You bring yourself. I’ll cook.”

“Sounds good.” Kieran laughed, and Carina smiled as she walked back to her office, thinking about that laugh and how she wanted to hear it over and over again.

???

“Carina, my office.”

The voice belonged to her boss, and he’d caught her just before she’d walked into her office, which meant he’d been there waiting for her to get back from lunch.

“Everything okay?” she asked after walking in and closing the door behind her.

“Did you pressure Kevin to give you info on the May case?”

“What? No,” she replied. “I asked him to keep me in the loop since I’m not on it anymore, and he did.”

“What are you doing, Carina?” Jason asked as he sat behind his desk. “You’re months away from announcing your campaign for my job. You’re a year away from having it, the thing you’ve been working for your entire career. But you’re having to recuse yourself from a case because of a possible conflict of interest, and now, you’re hanging onto the case and making Kevin tell you about his progress over lunch with the defendant’s own sister? He said you even told this sister what to tell her attorney to argue.”

“Kieran came up with her own arguments. I just questioned Kevin calling this so-called statement evidence. Have you read it?”

“No, I haven’t read it,” he said as if that was obvious.

“Jason, he’s just going to get laughed out of court if he tries to get this admitted in and call it pattern. He has no physical evidence. And even the timeline is off because they weren’t able to conclusively say when she died. They said it was sometime between midnight and nine in the morning because the weather made it tricky to pinpoint. You’re telling me that you’d take that to court? No time of death. No one to tell you that Marin May was out of her bed. I bet they shared rooms in that foster home. Kevin hasn’t even met with any of her foster sisters yet to see if they can say she was in bed or not. He’s got work to do. He’s admitted as much that he still needs the investigators to work it. That’s what I said. It needs work.”

“With the sister sitting right there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The sister that you’re not sleeping with?”

Before, Carina could deny it, and she wouldn’t be lying to her boss, but after last night, she couldn’t avoid this any longer.

“Jason, we were friends when I was on the case.”

“Shit, Whitlock.” He ran a hand over his face. “You’re kidding me.”

“We’re dating now, but we weren’t then.”

“But you still had romantic feelings for her, and now, you’re sleeping together. Come on, Whitlock. You’re killing me. I thought it would be okay, but you’re getting Kevin to share information and talking about it in front of her.”

“I’m sorry, but nothing happened until after I recused myself.”

“When the judge forced you to.”

“If I’d still been on the case, nothing would have happened. I would’ve waited.”

“You’re still on the damn case, Carina. You just made Kevin debrief his evidence with you with the sister present.” Jason clasped his hands together and leaned over the desk. “I’ve got no choice now. You’re risking our case.”

“I’m not risking anything, Jason. He needs to argue it in court, and he’s not prepared. Frank Richard is going to petition for a speedy trial. He might have already. Kevin won’t have a ton of time to prepare, and he’s spending his time in the wrong place.”

“Just go home, Carina.”

“What?”

“Work from home for the rest of the day. Hell, the week. Are you in court?”

“Not until next week,” she said as her heart thundered in her chest.

“Good. Better you’re not right now.”

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