Page 50 of The Wrong Side of the Law

Chapter Fifteen

Gabriel

With sandwiches ordered, Emily listens attentively while I recap the conversation with Lopez, occasionally jotting down a note on her ever-present pad. I’m the one who’s having trouble following the details, and that sucks because I’m the one telling the story.

Was she flirting with me? At the beginning, I thought I was maybe reading too much into the way she played with her hair as we talked, the way she bit her lower lip while thinking about the answer to a question. That all had to have been unconscious, purely unintentional. There’s no way that she could really be trying to send signals, right? Not after the way we’d been at each other’s throats those times.

But then came that question. She was fishing. She absolutely knew what she was doing, then. She was looking right at me, and the way she slowly twisted her hair around her fingers? That had to have been deliberate. I’m completely confused.

“Hey!” Emily says, rapping my knuckles hard with the back of her pen. “Earth to Gabriel.”

“Dammit!” I rub the spot where she hit me, feigning real pain. “Sorry. I got distracted thinking about something else for a minute.”

“I could tell,” she says, but the arch words come out of smiling lips. “Anything relevant to what we’re doing?”

Is she doing that on purpose? Is she inside my head? Relevant to the subject we’re discussing? No. But relevant to us being here together? Hell yes, it is, but I’m not going to admit to that.

“No, no. Sorry. Back on track, then.” I pause to remember where I was going.

“David Birchall-Jones,” Emily prompts. “Local campaign contributions.”

“Right. That’s what I was doing this afternoon. If theydohave local connections, I’d rather not have some certain things in my internet search history at the office—and you probably don’t either, incidentally—so I went home and did the searching from there.”

There’s a little crease on her forehead as she frowns in concentration. I want to reach over and smooth it away with a finger. I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t even think about doing that, not with an employee.

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes and no. Local news archives, there’s been a few stories about one or another of the B-J family over the years. Society page stuff, mostly. Vacations in Palm Beach, that sort of thing. Nothing indicating a permanent sort of family presence here, though. Nothing linking them to any local issues or people that they’d support politically. Secretary of State’s website shows a few campaign donations, hard money, for people running for statewide office, but there’s nothing local here. It’s a lot harder to track soft money, though. Stuff that goes to committees and groups that spend it themselves, rather than passing it on to a candidate.”

“So, that means we don’t know?”

She saidwe, and her use of the word startles me. It shouldn’t, though:weare a team, aren’t we?Weare working together on this.

“Yep. It means I have absolutely no idea,” I confess. “But let me put it this way: I’m pretty sure that everyone from the Governor to the Attorney-goddamn-General—to borrow Diego’s delightful phrase—and all the way on down the line to John Whitehall will find a lot of dollars shoved into their underwear if they’ll dance for it, once Ferry gets a whiff of us looking at him as a suspect.”

Emily frowns.

“I don’t get-” she begins, the frown deepening until she figures it out, and in a blink her face changes to delighted disgust. “Never mind,” she says, laughing. “But, yes. I get where you’re going with this. Any sort of real investigative work, it’s going to raise red flags.”

“Sure will,” I agree. “So many red flags you’d think there was a Soviet army in the back yard.”

Emily closes her eyes, sighing. Her face relaxes, the frown and the crease on her forehead fading.

Is that what she looks like when she sleeps? The stray thought troubles me partly because I had it in the first place, but just as much because I still want to know the answer.

“Now who’s drifting off?” I say.

Emily opens her eyes again, pursing her lips in what might be the faintest of smiles before frowning again.

“I think I have a way in,” she says.

“No. No, no, hell no!” I shake my head vigorously. “I’m not putting you out in the field to do investigative work.”

“What? Me? No, of course not!” Emily laughs, reaching across the table to touch my arm. “Don’t be silly. I have a friend, Rita Rodriguez. She’s in real estate, and-”

“Rita from Golden Coast Realty?” I ask. “I know her.”

“Yes, that Rita,” she answers, showing me a smile that quickly turns impish. “And I know you know her.”

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