“She’s a smart, interesting teenager. I’m a bit perplexed that we get along so well, considering. She’s far more easygoing than I was as a teen. And even with everything that happened to her this year, she’s naturally optimistic.”

Sean glanced at his watch. “Dinner’s just about ready. Give me five minutes.” He called upstairs, “Jess! Kitchen time.”

Jesse ran down the stairs with Bandit, the playful two-year-old golden retriever, on his heels. “Hey, Lucy,” he said as he walked by and followed Sean to the kitchen.

“You met Jesse?” Lucy asked Max.

“Yes, I got here just after Sean returned from Jesse’s soccer practice. Dillon told me what happened over the summer, but without much detail. Sean filled me in on the rest.”

Lucy didn’t know why she was so tense with Max knowing so much about her and her family. Max had promised she wouldn’t write about any of them without their explicit permission.

“Relax, Lucy. My case isn’t even connected to the FBI. I’ll admit, I’ve really enjoyed working with Sean. He’s unusually smart and quite uncanny in how he finds information I’m looking for.”

Lucy couldn’t help but smile. “From you, high praise. Sean hasn’t talked a lot about the case, but he said he was intrigued.”

“In September, Realtor Victoria Mills was stabbed and drowned. One of her business partners, Stanley Grant, confessed shortly thereafter, claimed that Victoria learned he had embezzled money from the company and he killed her in the heat of the moment, came clean a week later because the guilt ate him up.”

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

“I want to hear it from him directly. There’s a few … well, I don’t want to say yet, but he pled guilty and no one questioned it.”

“Usually if someone pleads guilty, they’re guilty—there are cases of false confessions, but cops are pretty good at weeding those out.”

“His lawyer and the prosecution were working on a plea deal to avoid the death penalty and give him a chance of parole. Then this morning, Grant changed his plea. I wish I was there. Sean developed a contact at the courthouse, who claimed that it was spontaneous. His lawyer quit right then and there—told the court that they didn’t have the time to take on a capital case and his client didn’t inform him of the change. Judges don’t like it when there’s a change of attorney, it can delay everything. He suggested that Grant and his lawyer work it out, but Grant said he didn’t trust his lawyer to have his best interests at heart. In the end, Grant agreed to a public defender and tomorrow they’ll be back in court for a procedural issue. I’m meeting the lawyer tonight.”

“This late?”

“I can be persuasive.”