Page 6 of View from Above

“There’s nothing to talk about.” First thing she’d do as the firm’s CEO and owner? Cut Kiera Wood’s lifeline. Mallory wasn’t going to pay to keep one of her father’s mistresses comfortable. Nervous energy pooled between her shoulder blades, and she hit the elevator call button again. A low ringing developed in her ears, but she’d do everything in her power to keep herself together.

“If that button could talk, I think it’d call you a liar,” he said.

An unexpected laugh escaped up her throat. Temporary. Fleeting. The past few weeks had congealed into a solid mass to the point she couldn’t remember the last time she’d let herself show any kind of emotion. She’d put her practice on hold, been there for her mother, made the funeral arrangements, and given into the nagging thought none of this made sense. The soft concern in Payton’s voice coerced her into a moment of peace, and her head cleared. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Waiting at the elevator?” He scanned the length of the hallway. “To be honest, I’m not keen on taking the stairs again. I got my workout in this morning chasing you across that rooftop.”

“You know what I mean.” Mechanical whirling and movement from the other side of the steel doors threatened to pull her out of the moment. Mallory forced herself to stay engaged, to talk this through with someone who didn’t know the reality of her father’s life. An unbiased third party outside of anyone who knew him as the titan he’d been. “This. Trying to find out what happened to my father.”

Confusion quirked Payton’s mouth to one side. “Considering what you told me about him back at the station, I take it the simple answer of ‘because he was family’ doesn’t apply.”

“No. It doesn’t.” The finality of admitting the feelings she’d kept to herself for so long protested release, as though her drive to see this through had solely depended on them. Standing there, exposing herself to a detective she didn’t even know, urged her to retreat to the small corner at the back of her mind where she’d always been safe. The one her father had never been able to break through, but without Payton she wasn’t sure she’d ever have had the guts to confront Kiera Hood on her own. Or learn the truth.

“Why didn’t you follow in your father’s footsteps? You were already in law school. Top of your class at Stanford from what I’ve been able to find out.” The weight of Payton’s attention pitched her heart into her throat. “You had the entire world practically laid out at your feet on a silver platter, and you walked away. Why?”

“Because it was his world. It was his dream, and I wanted… I wanted to prove I was more than Roland Kotite’s daughter. I was above the hell he’d put us through.” It all seemed so pointless now. She’d ended right back where her father had wanted her. Heading his firm. “My plan when I went to Stanford was to beat him at his own game. Problem was, I never had the grades to get into that school alone. Fortunately for me, his pride wouldn’t let any child of his accept anything less. He bought my way in, but I felt like everyone knew. My professors, my fellow students. I was a fraud and an imposter. I didn’t… belong.”

The doors parted in front of them, but Mallory didn’t have the inclination to step into the car. “I struggled. Not academically, but I pushed myself physically, even more emotionally. In my second semester, I was up for an internship at a top law firm usually only available to the seniors, and in a moment of weakness, I convinced myself it would be enough to make him proud of me.” She shook her head, not entirely sure why she was spilling her darkest secrets to a stranger. Not just a stranger. The detective responsible for the investigation into her father’s death. If anything, she should walk away. From him. From the investigation. From her theory her father hadn’t committed suicide. But there was something in the way he held her gaze that drew the words from her mouth. A trust that shouldn’t have been there at all.

“I take it he wasn’t impressed,” he said.

“No. It wasn’t enough, and I realized standing there in the middle of his office that no matter what I did, how closely I followed his plan to take over his firm when he was gone, I wouldn’t ever be enough.” Her eyes burned despite years of practiced conversations like this in her head, but in less time than it took to inhale fully, Mallory pulled out. Detach. Detach. Detach. “So I dropped out. I left Stanford, came back to Seattle, and moved out of my parents’ house. I got my first job waiting tables and rented the crappiest little apartment imaginable to be able to support myself and pay for a degree I wanted. After a while I moved up to hostess, then left that place for another job with a pay raise enough to afford seeing a therapist.” Warmth flooded through her. “In the end, I walked out of that first session knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

“All that led you to wanting to be a therapist?” A hint of resentment coated his words, and the warmth she’d felt recounting stepping out on her own vanished.

“Yes.” No one had understood that. Not her mother who’d begged her to come home to appease her father’s anger. Not her friends or former coworkers who wouldn’t have walked away from the life she’d given up, even at the expense of their well-being. Every one of them had wanted her to fit into the box her father had built from the ground up and find a way to make it work. But the man she’d looked up to at such a young age had never existed. Not really. He’d been nothing more than well-timed and well-received lies. Some of which he couldn’t even remember. “Men—and women—like my father are all too common. Emotionally immature, controlling, manipulative. No matter how many boundaries you set or how many times you try to escape, they don’t respect your needs or wants. They will keep pushing. What matters to them is their own desires, and you’re just a toy soldier who refuses to fall in line. That brand of mental abuse stays with people, but having those traits in a parent can cause lasting damage. During that first session, I found out I wasn’t alone. And I thought because of my experience, I could help others confront the abuse in their lives. To heal.”

He hit the call button and stepped back. “Or what you’re really doing is charging people a ridiculous hourly rate to mess with their heads.”

Her heart rate ticked up a notch, and the feeling they weren’t talking about her any longer squeezed the air from her lungs. The ping of the elevator burst the bubble they’d created between themselves and reality, and Mallory swallowed to counter the slight flinch. For the briefest of minutes, she’d accomplished what she’d set out to achieve from the beginning: a life separate from her family. She’d lost herself in the cadence Payton offered and run with it. It’d been almost freeing, really, but using him as a relief valve for the pressure building inside of her the past few weeks wouldn’t serve either of them. “I take it you’re not a fan of therapy.”

“No. I’m not.” He stepped into the elevator car and held open the door until she was inside. The doors slid closed, reflecting the image she tried to avoid looking at every day; the one too similar to her father, but Payton didn’t seem to notice. “It’s simple, Doc. Convincing yourself your daddy was murdered and that you need to find out what happened is your way of finishing what you started when you dropped out of school.”

“You mean closure.” She hadn’t thought of that. Her stomach lurched as the elevator dropped, and Mallory instinctually took a step closer to him. “You say that as though you’ve been through something like this yourself.”

Ice infused his expression as the elevator doors parted on the main level of the condo complex, but he refused to answer.

Defensive. Interesting. She followed him through the expansive courtyard and out onto the street where he’d parked his vehicle. Slivers of shimmering ocean peeked through the brick shops and old apartments that gave Belltown its charm, but none of it calmed the clawing anxiety burning up her throat. “So what happens now?”

Kiera Hood had accused her father of having multiple affairs with not only clients but anyone Roland could bed. Colleagues’ wives, several assistants, paralegals. The list went on—for years—and her mother hadn’t known about any of them. That would be a conversation for another day. If they wanted to find out who’d murdered Roland Kotite, they had to start with the women who hadn’t wanted to share him with anyone else and the men who would’ve taken offense at her father’s tactics.

“Now you go home. I’ll drop you back at the station to get your car.” Payton rounded the hood of the SUV and wrenched open the driver’s side door.

Shock sucker punched her in the gut. “Wait. We had a deal. I give you access to Kotite Litigation Group, and you let me see this through.”

“I did what you asked, Mallory. I looked into the threats against your father. I did you a favor and interviewed one of his mistresses despite the ten other cases concerning actual homicide victims on my desk, and all we managed to learn was your father was a son-of-a-bitch horn dog who liked to conquer as many women as possible.” He dropped his head slightly, as though in defeat, then brought his gaze back to hers. “I told you before we got into this, unless I have proof Roland Kotite was murdered, there’s nothing else I can do. I’m sorry.” He climbed behind the wheel and slammed the door behind him.

She didn’t know what to do then, what to think. The connection they’d shared on the elevator fled to the back of her mind as anger, pent up betrayal, and bludgeoned confidence took control. No. This wasn’t the end. Finding who murdered her father… It was all she had standing between her and the rest of her life. Between her and finally being able to put his psychotic abuse behind her, to being happy. That was worth fighting for.

Mallory circled the front of the SUV as the engine caught and set her hands on the hood. Pain ignited across her palms and jarred the joints in her wrists and elbows as she gripped the heating metal. “I’m not walking away, Detective. I don’t care how long it takes or how many people I have to piss off before I get answers. I’ll find the evidence proving my father was murdered, and you’re going to help me.”

She didn’t have anyone else.

Fire burned down her spine as doubt crept into her veins. He had all the power here. He had the ability to cut her off before she’d even started, and she hated the idea of handing over that absolute control. Question was, was he the kind of man to use it against her?

He gazed at her through the windshield, hands tight on the steering wheel. The engine died, and Payton pushed free from the vehicle. “Civilians who run their own investigations without the proper training get themselves hurt or worse. Killed. Is finding out what happened to a man you spent years escaping worth your life, Mallory? Because that’s where this is heading.”

Her fingers tingled from the force of holding herself in place. “You said it yourself. As long as there’s still a question about my father’s death, I haven’t escaped. Not really. I need this, but more importantly, the ME might’ve been wrong about his death. Do you think you can just walk away?”

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