“This is very troubling,” said the judge.
Gaines jumped on the sentiment. “Your Honor, this is a blatant violation of a court order to file the complaint under seal and keep the allegations confidential. We demand that Mr. Swyteck remove the posts immediately.”
“Mr. Swyteck, how soon can you make that happen?”
“I’ll look into it as soon as this call is over.”
“Look into it?” said the judge in a reproving tone. “Counsel, you need to remove it.”
“Yes, Your Honor. But I want to be clear that I don’t know how this information even got here. It’s never been my practice to monitor the Facebook pages of my clients, and that’s especially true in this case. Obviously, Celeste didn’t do this.”
“Obviously,” said Gaines. “But it doesn’t take a computer genius to know that these postings could have been made only by someone with account-manager status for Celeste’s Facebook page. Ruling out Celeste doesn’t rule out a single other person in her camp who had access to her username and password.”
“That’s a ridiculous accusation,” said Jack.
The judge intervened. “You’d better hope so, Mr. Swyteck. Because if this violation was willful and done at your direction, the sanctions against you and your client will be severe.”
“Judge, we would like a hearing on the issue of sanctions as quickly as possible,” said Gaines.
“We’ll deal with that in due course,” said the judge. “For now, I’m ordering Mr. Swyteck to remove these postings by midnight tonight. Further, I want a written certification delivered to my chambers no later than nine A.M. stating that the plaintiffs and their counsel are in full compliance with the confidentiality order. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” said Jack.
“That’s all for this evening, gentlemen,” the judge said. A beep confirmed that he had dropped from the conference call.
“I’m checking that page at twelve-oh-one A.M.,” said Gaines. “It had better be clean.”
Gaines hung up. Jack took a deep breath and tucked his phone away. Andie came to him and massaged his neck.
“That didn’t sound good,” she said.
It would have been easy to unload on the spot and tell Andie what he would have liked to have told the judge-that the five horrendous days between Sydney’s release on Sunday and Rene’s murder on Thursday had been the personal and professional equivalent of a tsunami, and that the last thing any human being in his position should be held accountable for was the Facebook page of a client in a coma.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” said Jack.
“Really? Isn’t there anything I can help with?”
Jack appreciated the sentiment, then actually considered it. “Well, maybe there is.”
“Tell me.”
“What do your tech agents know about Facebook?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was league night at Bird Bowling Lanes, and all twenty-two lanes were filled. While each team bore the name and logo of a different sponsor, collectively they had to be the largest display of baby-blue shirts south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Merselus found a small table near the shoe rental counter, sat down with his cheese pizza and beer, and waited. If he’d been at a pizzeria, he would have sent the pie back to the kitchen as too greasy. Funny how being at a bowling alley made it tasty. To a point. He finished one slice and pushed the rest aside.
Merselus checked his phone. Ten minutes before seven. Ten minutes until showtime. He kept an eye on the main entrance as he drank from his longneck. Technically, he was working, but one beer wasn’t against the rules. Especially since he made the rules.
“Could I squeeze by you and get to those balls, please?” a woman asked.
She was dressed in one of those baby-blue shirts, and Merselus was sitting in front of a rack of nine-pound pink bowling balls, so he knew exactly what she was after, but he turned it into something else.
“Lady, your only hope of squeezing by anybody is a ten-week gig on The Biggest Loser.”
She looked more hurt than angry, but she just stood there.
“Take a hike, fatso,” said Merselus.
She hurried away. Merselus watched her ass shake as she made a beeline to another rack on the other side of the alley. He was about to check his phone again for the time, then stopped himself. Patience was normally one of his virtues, but on a night like this, after all the planning, even Merselus had to remind himself to be cool.
His gaze swept the alley. A guy on lane fifteen was in the seventh frame of a perfect game, and a crowd was beginning to gather. Merselus ignored the excitement, his focus shifting back and forth from the main entrance to the men’s locker room.
It took about a week to get approved for a locker at Bird Bowl, and Merselus had reserved one with a stolen ID and fifty bucks in cash. The bait was inside the locker. It was just a matter of minutes before the dumbest fish in the sea came along to take it. Merselus recognized him the minute he walked through the main entrance doors.
The dossier Merselus had compiled on Brian Hewitt was pretty simple. Twenty-seven years old. Unmarried. Unemployed. Two years of community college. He’d lived the fast life during Miami’s real estate boom, once upon a time having owned a town house in Coral Gables, a duplex in Hollywood, and six waterfront condos from Fort Lauderdale to Miami Beach. His typical Friday night had involved two lucky friends and a table full of women who were thrilled to take turns going down on a guy who could shove enough fraudulent mortgage applications through the system to afford a thousand-dollar bottle of Cristal at a South Beach nightclub. The burst of the subprime bubble had left him sharing a shitty two-bedroom apartment with three other losers who had been on a downward spiral since their glory days of high school football. Bankruptcy had seemed like the only answer to seventy thousand dollars in credit card debt. Until Merselus had come along. Not that Mr. Hewitt would ever hear the name Merselus, or have even the slightest idea who he was dealing with.
Merselus allowed himself one more check of the time: seven P.M. Hewitt probably wasn’t as stupid as he looked, but he was prompt. And desperate. Not to mention way out of his league.
Merselus watched Hewitt weave through the crowd, past the game room, past the billiard tables, past the ladies’ lounge. He walked briskly, a man on a mission, a complete newbie who had never been on the receiving end of a drop in his life. The clincher was the telltale glance over the shoulder before stopping at the water fountain. He knelt down and pretended to tie his shoe-ah, very smooth-and found the key exactly where Merselus had promised it would be: in the gap between the loose rubber baseboard and the wall beside the fountain. Hewitt tucked the key into his pants pocket, gave another nervous glance over his shoulder, and disappeared into the men’s locker room.
Merselus drank his beer and waited. He had no fear that Hewitt or anyone else would recognize him. The eyeglasses, the flat-billed baseball cap, and the three-day stubble were disguise enough for this simple task. Across the bowling alley, he could see the agents in plainclothes moving into position, which gave him a rush of excitement and satisfaction. His call to the FBI had been anonymous, and he was pretty sure that he’d shared enough details to make his tip credible. But there had been no guarantee that the bureau would act on it. Thankfully, they’d not only acted on it, but they’d been smart enough to figure out for themselves that flooding the bowling alley with uniformed police officers would have scared off Hewitt and blown the setup.