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are over with, perhaps you could explain this to me,” Adam said and pushed the file with all the evidence across his desk. It stopped at the edge and Alicia reached out to take the file, the only expression on her face was one of professional curiosity.
    Jim watched intently as the woman calmly opened the file and searched through the documents. She shook her head several times. “I’m sorry, this isn’t right,” she said as she ran a tapered fingernail down several checks that had been made out to a dummy bank account. She turned the page and shook her head again, her brow furrowed in confusion. “This isn’t protocol either,” she said and glanced up at Adam. “The accounting rules don’t allow this to happen,” she said but kept flipping through the documents.
    Adam put his hands on his hips and waited impatiently until she got past all the checks for large amounts. The evidence that convicted her was after the checks. It showed her name as the beneficiary of all the dummy accounts with her own signature at the bottom. There were also several pages of her signature that had witnesses to it, as well as the security signature that compared her signature to the dummy accounts in case they were different.
    He knew the exact moment she realized she’d been caught. Her finger stopped moving along the document, right at her signature. “This isn’t right!” she said, gasping but her hands continued to sift through the following pages.
    She saw her own picture and directly behind that, the most damning evidence possible, at least in his own mind. It was an article about her father that described his conviction for embezzlement ten years ago and how he’d subsequently been killed in a prison fight. By the time she picked up the article, her fingers were shaking. Her eyes went to Adam and she was already shaking her head. “It isn’t true,” she said forcefully. “I didn’t steal this money.”
“Isn’t that what all thieves say?” Adam asked sarcastically, sneering with contempt at her act of innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence.
    Her fingers clutched the papers to her lap and she looked up imploringly to Adam. “You have to believe me. Yes, my father embezzled money from the company he worked for but I know what effect it had on my family. I would never jeopardize them in this way.”
Jim stood up and cleared his throat. “Should I make the call?” he asked Adam.
     
Alicia had forgotten his presence in the room but she turned to him now, willing the older man to believe her. “I didn’t steal this money! I promise,” she said.
    “I believe that’s for a jury to determine,” Jim said softly but firmly. He was trying to be hard line about the situation, but there was something in her expression and the way she reacted to the initial documents that was bothering him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Adam stared at Alicia, his features tight against his bone structure. He was watching her, his jaw clenched as she read through the evidence against her once more.
    Adam finally acknowledged Jim’s question after coming to a conclusion himself. “No. I’ll take it from here,” he said brusquely to the other man, not bothering to look his way as he continued to watch Alicia with a steely glare. “I’ll call you if I need you.”
    Alicia was having a hard time breathing as she watched the older man leave the office. The soft click of the door as he left sounded like the click of a prison door. She was in a panic. Even the smallest accusations like this would destroy her mother who hung on to reality with only a fine thread of sanity. And Maggie! Her career would be ruined. She’d only been working in her current job for two months. A senator would never be able to keep the sister of a criminal, even a suspected one, on his staff.
Lifting her tear brightened eyes to Adam, she implored him, “You have to believe me! I promise you, I had nothing to do with this.”
    “All evidence