That didn’t make sense. Baines had plenty of money. He and Liam had used the small inheritance left to them by their aunt to build a business where they bought and leased a network of warehouses up and down the East Coast. Big companies leased them. They had been growing, looking to expand deeper into transportation and distribution, when Baines died. Now all of that work would fall on Liam.

Baines bragged about having funding and access to money. They had trucks and contracts. Ongoing connections and significant money coming in. A “big deal” on the horizon. She knew some details about the company because she’d helped set up the business years ago and then insisted on seeing every document during the divorce despite Baines’s claims that she wasn’t entitled to look at or touch anything.

“How do you know Rob Greene?” Liam asked out of nowhere.

“What?” She blinked out of her mental wandering and saw Liam staring at the odd business card. “That guy? He was at the funeral, but about Baines and the—”

“Did he ask about Baines or the business?”

She didn’t know how to explain what they talked about. Coincidence, pattern—the words swirled in her mind, so she ignored the question. “How do you know who Rob Greene is?”

“His name is all over the news this morning. He was fired from the Washington Post yesterday, and the paper posted this big splashy statement about how Greene’s articles would all be investigated for accuracy.”

“The Post? His business card doesn’t mention the newspaper.”

Liam frowned. “I doubt it’s a different Rob Greene.”

The weird way her life bumped along recently, it was possible. “How did I miss what sounds like a major scandal?”

“You were out of town with Kennedy, and this sounded like a sudden thing. The downfall of an award-winning journalist.” Liam put his empty coffee cup in the trash under the sink.

The twisty answer about the reporter’s convoluted life should have made her write him off and move on, but the urgency in Greene’s voice that horrible day had tugged at her. He’d seemed so sure Baines’s death matched nameless others.

“The general sense was that he’s a big conspiracy guy and may have lost it.” Liam nodded at the card. “I’d throw that away and forget you ever met him.”

She handed the card to Liam, who ripped it up and stuffed it in his pocket. A second later, she wondered if she’d made a mistake.

Chapter Seventeen
Jessa

No one ignored a call from Loretta Swain. If they did, they only did it once. She was not the type to offer second chances. Jessa knew because the Honorable Loretta Swain, senior judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, happened to be her informal mentor.