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“Avon, I have dummies for you to look at,” Bess said, bringing over a set of hard copy pages with ads and boxes for news that she’d prepared for next week’s paper.
I nodded, trying to focus on what I could control. Right now, it didn’t feel like there was much that met that definition.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Avon
“You said this is anonymous, right? Is that the word for it? No one will know it was me?” Carla Swift, a city council member, asked as she looked over each shoulder.
“I’ll identify you as a city source who asked not to be named,” I said. “No one will ever hear from me that you talked to me.”
She lowered her brows in question. “Not even Chief Grady? I heard you two are dating.”
“Not even Grady. No one. I promise you. The only way anyone will find out it was you is if you tell them.”
We were meeting in the back of the ceramics shop she owned on the outskirts of town. I’d been trying to get every city council member to talk to me for follow-up coverage about the missing money, on or off the record, and she was the first one who had agreed.
She’d been a wealth of information. Investigators had discovered that the mayor had been taking money from Leo Bardot, depositing it into a city-owned account, and then writing him checks from the city. It was money laundering, with the mayor getting a ten percent cut, and it had been going on for fourteen years, since a year after the mayor was elected.
The total amount of money he’d laundered was close to $2 million. The story had made national headlines, and people were eagerly awaiting the next edition of the Chronicle, where they expected to find new details that the other news outlets didn’t have yet.
“Thanks again, Councilwoman,” I said. “You have my number in case there’s anything else you have to share as things develop.”
She took a long drag from her cigarette. “I should have been the mayor pro tem, but it’s an old boys’ club. People have a right to know how things are done at City Hall.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Smiling, she stubbed out her cigarette. “Grady’s a great guy. He’s been alone for a long time. It’s nice to see him with someone again.”
I smiled back, unsure how to respond. I awkwardly said, “Thanks,” and saw myself out of the ceramics shop. I’d walked there so no one would see my eyesore of a truck, and it was about a quarter of a mile walk to Tipper’s from here, where I planned to eat lunch.
Grady and I had texted, but we hadn’t spoken since he left the newsroom on Monday, and it was Thursday now. He was buried in the search for Leo Bardot and the investigation into the money laundering, but I wondered if that was just a convenient excuse for avoiding me.
I’d really started thinking about how hard it was going to be to leave all this behind and go back to San Diego. If things were solid with me and Grady, I was considering staying, which was a shock. But if he didn’t want to be with me anymore, I couldn’t stay. Not with the Chronicle across the street from City Hall. Not when we’d be running into each other all the time. Not when I’d had a taste of how it felt for him to look at me with reverence and warmth, like being with me was his happy place.
My phone rang and I took off my glove to dig it out of my pocket, seeing Grady’s name on the screen. My heart jumped with joy.
“Hi,” I said.
“Where the hell are you?” he barked.
Not the reception I’d been expecting when we hadn’t talked all week.
“I’m walking to Tipper’s for lunch.”
“You deliberately shook Denton, didn’t you?”
Oh. I couldn’t explain to him that I’d had to shake the officer he had following me so I could meet with a confidential source.
“I had to take care of something,” I said, keeping my answer vague.
“What the hell, Avon? You’re getting death threats and someone broke into your office. I’ve got an officer on you around the clock for a reason. You can’t just go places by yourself.”
The calls were still coming, all of them from burner phones. And Tuesday night, someone had thrown a rock through a window at the Chronicle and broken in, but they’d run away when they heard the night shift police officer coming to check things out. I couldn’t be a prisoner, though. I still needed enough latitude to do my job.
“Sorry, I’ll let him know next time,” I said.
“You’ll let him know?” Grady moved the phone away from his ear and let out a string of curse words that were a little muffled but fully understandable, then returned to the call. “Look, I’m under a lot of pressure right now. I’d be there if I could, but the next best thing is to send one of my officers. Don’t go off on your own again, you get me?”
