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I was asking about the receipt letters and she encouraged me to leave it alone. Doesn’t that mean something?”
    He nodded. “I’ve got some stuff too. All the ones Doug has been able to find so far were incorporated around the same time. Also, they all used the same lawyer.”
    Alyse inhaled sharply.
    He did a little eyebrow thing. “Ryan Scott.”
    “Oh
shit
.” Oops, she hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
    “Yeah.” He didn’t seem shocked by her language. “Doug said he thought it seemed really fishy. He was skeptical at first, but you made him a believer.”
    “Wait, this is bad. I don’t want him to be a believer. I don’t want it to be fishy because then I’ll never get another job.”
    Liam dismissed this with a shrug. “Don’t think about it like that. You’re going to be a whistleblower.”
    This was not at all helpful. “Call me crazy, but that was never an ambition of mine. And I sincerely doubt anyone will see me as anything other than the stupid girl who let this awful thing happen.”
    She hadn’t known she felt that way, hadn’t let herself think about it like that. Once she’d said the words, however, she knew they were true. She bit her lip to try to stop the sudden outpouring of emotion before she did something truly stupid like sob.
    He moved his laptop onto the table at his knees and captured one of her hands in both of his. “Listen to me. I know you’re scared, but it’s going to be okay.”
    The blasé dissolved, leaving the same confidence she’d found comforting last night. She felt his warm, steady hands wrapped around hers, looked in his eyes and
believed
. Almost believed. Maybe if he’d pull her into lap and hold her she could get all the way there?
    Two weird, intimate thoughts about the guy in as many minutes? It didn’t mean anything. She didn’t want him; she was just responding to the fact he was cute and calm. He wasn’t her type. That wasn’t what this was about. He just looked like he gave really good hugs.
    “All right.” It was inadequate and silly, but that was all she could muster. If he thought she was going to be okay, that was all the reassurance she was getting today.
    “All right,” she repeated, tugging her hand out of his grasp and back into the solitary coldness of her lap. “Promise me that whatever else, we’ll nail Ryan Scott.”
    “What are we nailing me for?”
    The voice came from behind and over her shoulder. Alyse closed her eyes and filled her lungs with a deep, low sip of air, not wanting to turn to face the tall, blond, no doubt immaculate and quite possibly criminal lobbyist standing behind them.
    Oh shit
.

Chapter Four
    Liam watched disbelief and fear twitch across Alyse’s features before she squeezed her blue eyes shut, as if she could blot the situation out of being through denial. He understood the impulse. This was definitely not an ideal development.
    He stood up and offered the other man—Ryan Scott, no doubt—his hand. “Liam Nussbaum. A friend of Alyse’s.”
    “The guy from Poindexter?” Yeah, everyone had heard of the blog, at least among the District’s political types. This guy seemed impressed; Liam wished the feeling were mutual.
    Ryan Scott was in his late thirties. Fussily dressed, he had the look of the basic corporate lobbyist with just the barest hint of snake oil salesman: expensive suit, shiny tie, the works. He smelled like he wore cologne and looked like he got manicures. Also there was product in his hair.
    A man was entitled to do all these things in the twenty-first century—hell, Parker probably did—but in this case, they had combined into something too polished. He was a walking façade and there were fifty exactly like him within a mile of where they stood, except most of the rest weren’t scrubbing money through nonprofits for their own benefit. Presumably.
    “That’s me,” Liam said. Only through sheer force of will did he keep from glancing down to assess his own clothing. He wore