by Suzie Quint
And there was more.
An alleged half-sister, confirmed by DNA matches with other family members, whose DNA showed a relationship with the man who claimed to be Elvis.
It seemed like the kind of crazy Cleo had seen only in tabloids, but the production values were professional. And their claim that the court was allowing the case filed by the alleged sister against the Presley estate to go forward lent it credibility.
If it were all true. A little digging would undoubtedly reveal crucial pieces of the story to be false or exaggerated, but she could understand how the gullible could be taken in.
She moved to the next topic on Alec’s list: Bigfoot. She watched some videos, hating that Alec was right. Not about Bigfoot per se, but about the people. Yes, some of the stories were ridiculous and melodramatic, but a surprising number of videos were of intelligent, normal-seeming people, relating stories of unusual events in the wilderness. Those tended to shy away from claiming actual Bigfoot encounters. Maybe that contributed to her willingness to watch all the way through.
As she watched, she couldn’t help hearing Alec work his connections as he built a story that was pure hype. The crime beat, he called it. In Cleo’s mind, the crime was that he was writing it at all. He was too talented to waste it on drivel. But what really ate at her was that all his sources appeared to be women whose mother’s had named them Babe. Did he even know their real names? It was disgusting.
Not that it stopped her from having a fantasy that put him under her side of the desk, her panties tucked away in the top side drawer, her in her chair with her legs splayed to allow him room to bury his face in her crotch.
Even distracted by her fantasy and the videos, when he said, “What?” the change in his tone tripped her reporter’s instincts. He’d had his feet propped on the corner of the desk, but they came off, thumping the floor as he reached for a pen. “When did this happen?”
Cleo quieted her breathing, so she wouldn’t miss anything. She tried to see what he wrote. His handwriting generally resembled chicken scratchings, but this was clear as a child’s primer even from her side of the desk.
KTNV.
“Thanks for the heads-up, Babe. I’ll see what I can do with it.” He hung up the phone only to pick it up again and dial another number.
“Hey, Babe, it’s Alec Ramirez . . . Yeah, I’m good. I don’t need to ask about you. You’re always good.”
Whatever “Babe” said got a laugh out of him.
“Look, I’m following up a lead. Don’t you know someone in TV news in Vegas? . . . Yeah, KTNV? Super . . .”
He wrote down a phone number.
“I don’t know yet. Nothing’s confirmed. It’s just . . . Yeah, I’ll do that. Take care of yourself.”
He disconnected and dialed again. While he waited for someone to answer, he started tapping on his keyboard, his attention riveted to the screen.
Cleo couldn’t take it any longer. Whatever it was, it had kicked him into high gear, and the reporter in her needed to know what had him so focused.
She rose and rounded the desk to peer over his shoulder. Just as she got there, he started another Google search.
LAS VEGAS SEBASTIAN KOBLECT
The fine hairs on her arms rose as a chill washed over her. “What are you looking for?”
Instead of answering, he said in that voice one uses to leave messages, “This is Alec Ramirez. Colleen Simmons gave me your number.”
Babe must be her middle name.
“I work for a weekly,” Alec continued without pause. “I’m following up on a story that’s supposed to be breaking there involving the death of Sebastian Koblect. Are you . . . ?”
Cleo couldn’t hear the rest of Alec’s spiel over the sound of blood rushing behind her eardrums. Her breath came short and fast as she dug her fingers into the back of Alec’s seat, trying to wrap her mind around what he’d said.
Sebastian Koblect owned three high-rolling casinos on the Strip, including the one where her mother had worked as a showgirl and where she now choreographed. Cleo had known him since she was nine when her mother began a relationship with him that wasn’t even exclusive enough to be called an affair. He also held the note her bonus had gone toward paying off.
If Sebastian was dead . . .
“The rumors are already starting that there’s foul play,” Alec said into the phone.
Her stomach lurched.
Her mother didn’t owe Sebastian all that much money—not the way he counted money. There was no reason to believe this had anything to do with Annaliese. Absolutely none. Sebastian had all kinds of enemies. You didn’t run Las Vegas casinos if you were a teddy bear.
That didn’t stop her reporter’s instinct from vibrating through her body. She felt as though she might throw up.
Fingers snapped in her face. She jerked back hard enough to give herself whiplash.
“Earth to Cleo.”
“What?” When had Alec left his chair?
“Are you okay?”
“Sure. Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” Cleo forced herself to let go of his backrest and went back to her side of the desk. She tapped her keyboard, bringing her computer to life, and stared at the list of YouTube videos. She couldn’t cope with these stories now. To look busy, she switched over to one of the online news archives.
She was all too aware of his curious gaze resting on her. He slouched in his chair, his butt barely on the edge of his seat, the way teenagers half-sat, half-reclined to watch TV. He held his pen horizontally between his hands, twirling it with his fingertips.
“You grew up in Las Vegas, didn’t you?” he asked, proving beyond any doubt they had indeed all researched her when she came on board.
She kept her gaze firmly on her screen and clicked her mouse on a random link. “Yeah.”
“Do you know Sebastian Koblect?”
She gave him a one-shoulder shrug. “He owns a bunch of casinos on the Strip.”
“Yeah, I got that. Do you have any contacts in any of them?”
Without moving her head, she looked over the top of the screen to meet his eyes. “One or two.”
His eyebrows twitched, revealing a heightened interest. “You think you might want to call them?”
“Why? This is hard news. Not the sort of thing The Word reports.”
His eyebrows buckled as he made a noise in the back of his throat like a repressed snort. “Are you kidding? This is exactly the kind of story The Word reports. There’s money and murder involved. If we can confirm a sex angle, we’re golden.”
Her smile felt anemic. “Why don’t you just make one up?”
He tipped his head back and forth as if her suggestion was worth considering. “It’s not out of the question, but we shouldn’t have to. Koblect was a womanizer. We ought to be able to dig up something juicy.”
“I thought you were opposed to gossip.”
“There’s a world of difference between playing musical sex partners in Hollywood and doing some guy to death.”
She opened her mouth to ask what he meant by that remark, but his phone rang. He was on it like a striking cobra. She’d barely leaned back in her chair when her own phone rang. She stared at it for a moment. It had to be someone in the building; she hadn’t given the number to her direct line to anyone yet.
When she picked it up, she recognized Linny’s voice. “I’ve got a woman on an outside line asking for you, Cleo. Normally, I’d put it right through, but she sounds, well, a little hysterical, so I thought I’d give you a heads-up.”
“Did you get her name?”
“I’m not sure. She’s kind of hard to understand. I think it’s . . . Ada?”
Cleo’s heart picked up an extra beat, and she felt as if she was about to break out in a cold sweat. Her voice sounded thick as she said, “Put it through, Linny.”
She heard a click then soft burbling noises.
“Jada?” she asked softly, still hoping she was wrong. Knowing in her bones she wasn’t.
The burbling didn’t change.
“Are you there, Jada?”
“You have to come home, Cleo.” Jada’s voice broke on her name. “You have to. I can’t do this.” A couple of hiccupy sobs interrupted. “They won’t listen to me.”
Cleo’s chest felt as though it were being shrink wrapped. “Jada, calm down. Tell me what’s happened?”
“I don’t know what to do. Anna―” Another broken sob. “Annaliese always handles the tough stuff.”
“Jada―”
“She knows what to do. Always. Always, always.”
“Jada―”
“But they won’t let me see her.”
“Jada―”
“You have to come and fix this. They won’t let me see her, Cleo!”
Cleo jerked the phone away from her ear to keep Jada’s shrill whine from bursting an eardrum. When she sensed Jada had paused to take a breath, she asked, “Who’s ‘they,’ Jada? Who won’t let you see her?”
“The cops.”
Cleo felt an arctic breeze brush her skin, and the shrink wrap tightened. “The cops?” she repeated. She didn’t want to ask the question that came next. She didn’t want to hear the answer she knew was coming. The words felt surreal coming from her mouth. “What do they have to do with this?”
“They’ve arrested her, Cleo.” The whine turned into a wail that forced Cleo to hold the phone away from her ear again to preserve her hearing. “They’ve arrested Annaliese, and they won’t let me see her!”
Chapter 7
Alec was only marginally paying attention to Cleo until the color drained from her face as if she’d sprung a leak. Her eyes flickered up. She caught him looking and spun her chair away almost fast enough to mask her panic.
“Hang on a sec,” he said into the phone. He held the receiver against his chest to muffle any protests and listened hard.
Cleo’s voice dropped, but he still caught “lawyer.” It was said with the inflection people used when the word was preceded by “have they called a.”
His reporter’s intuition went off like a tsunami siren. “Listen,” he said into his phone. “I’ll have to call you back.” Before his contact had time to object, he hung up.
“Call Danny Bonner,” Cleo said as he walked around the desk. When he reached her, she spun back around to face her desk. “Call him anyway and tell him to get down there.”
Alec followed her around so he could see her from the side.
She swung her chair toward the window, lifting the cord over her head so she wouldn’t get wrapped up in it. “Tell him I told you to call.”
He walked around to see her face, but she swiveled her chair as he moved, keeping him at her back.
“Promise?” she said into the phone.
He grabbed the back of her chair and gave it an extra spin. Unprepared, she came around to face him.
“I’ve gotta go, but I’ll call you in an hour to get an update. Bye.”
Apparently, she didn’t wait for other people’s parting words any more than he did because she pushed off with her foot to continue the spin. When it came into reach, she dropped the receiver onto its base. She stopped the chair when she faced her computer screen and tapped a shortcut on the desktop. Reuters’ home page blossomed on the screen. She started drilling down into a story about the latest pollution-ending legislation, a story he was sure appealed to her refined taste but wasn’t going to fly at The Word.
He stepped back around the desk, sat in his chair, and picked up his pen. Twirling it with his fingers like it was a baton, he asked, “Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“A friend in need of a lawyer?”
She didn’t lift her eyes from the screen. “It happens.”
“Does this friend happen to be in Las Vegas?”
She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “I have friends in other places, you know.”
“I’m sure you do.” He tapped the pen on his day planner in a 3/4 rhythm. “Is this one in Vegas?”
“Don’t you have a Bigfoot story or something to write?”
He smirked. “I had my doubts, but this partnership just might work out.”
Her brow furrowed. “What partnership? You’re showing me the ropes. That’s not a partnership.”
“No?”
“No.” She turned back to the computer.
He wasn’t fooled. “You don’t see anybody else on this floor sharing an office, do you? A desk?” He hiked his eyebrows. “Looks like a partnership to me.”
“And what makes you think a partnership between us would work anyway?” She clicked her mouse twice, her eyes glued to the screen, but he wasn’t buying her disinterest.
“Because you don’t like to lie. You won’t even tell me your friend’s not in Vegas―”
Her gaze was hot on him. “You think I can’t lie? You think I got that story on border corruption by politely asking people to tell me what they knew? You think―”
He held up his hand to stop her. “I didn’t say you couldn’t lie. I suspect you’re very good at it when you want to be. What I said was you don’t like to.” He leaned back in his chair, holding the ends of the pen as if it were corn on the cob. “That can be a real handicap in this business. I, on the other hand, lie like a rug.” He leaned forward over the desk. “A very cheap rug.” And then he flashed his most charming grin at her. “You need me.”
“Puh-lease.” She stood and set her glasses on the desk. “I have to go to the ladies’ room now to throw up.”
“Take your time.” He waved goodbye. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
She muttered something that sounded like, “Lucky me.”
Nothing, he decided, would ever take precedence over watching Cleo walk away when she was annoyed. That extra swing in her hip seemed to say ignore the man behind the curtain; look here. She could deny it until they served ice cream cones in hell—and maybe it wasn’t something she did consciously—but her lips weren’t the only part of her body trying to distract him from whatever was going on.
So he’d look, but he wouldn’t forget the man behind the curtain either.
When the door closed behind her, he stared sightlessly for a minute at his day planner. Then he jotted down everything he remembered about her conversation and doodled dramatic question marks around the name Danny Bonner. Instincts a lot less honed than his could figure out she had valuable contacts in Vegas, so why was she so resistant to sharing?
Well, duh. She was still caught up in that uber-competitive mainstream media crap where you had to guard against the guy at the next desk. It wasn’t like that at The Word. Even people who disliked each other became team players when the rest of the profession ridiculed and dismissed them. Cleo was still fighting her fall from grace. Still relating to where she came from instead of where she was. She thought she had to protect her sources or risk him stealing a killer story.
She wouldn’t give up that mentality without a fight. If he wanted a crack at her connections, he’d have to glue himself to her backside.
Not that that sounded like a bad idea.
He was contemplating the backside in question when Cleo’s phone rang again. Without thinking twice, he reached across the desk and answered it. “Yup.”
Silence. Then a hesitant, high-pitched voice. “Is Cleo there?”
“She’s in the loo.” Everyone at The Word adopted Nigel’s Britishism. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
He heard a shaky breath drawn. “She told me to call Danny, but I can’t find his number.”
Hearing the name Cleo had just spoken not ten minutes earlier, he fought to keep his excitement from leaking into his voice. “Maybe I can help.” He pulled the phone onto his half of the desk, so the cord wasn’t stretched across three counties, and pulled up DexKnows on his laptop. “Would this be Danny Bonner?” he asked, checking the day planner where he’d jotted the key items from Cleo’s earlier call.
“Yes.” The voice was st
ill pitched high, but the threat of tears seemed to have receded a bit.
“What city are we looking in?”
“Las Vegas.”
Bingo.
“I’m Alec, by the way,” he said while he filled in the search engine blanks.
“Hi, Alec.” The mystery caller’s voice was getting steadier. She sounded sweet. And young. As if she should have an adult looking after her.
He waited a few seconds then asked, “And what do I call you?”
“I’m Jada.”
“Hi, Jada. So you live in Vegas?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jada, I just looked up Danny Bonner online. The only phone number is for a lawyer. Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Oh, yes. That’s it. There’s a pen here somewhere. Annaliese always keeps one here. She’s got this tether thingy . . .”
He caught his breath. This kept getting better and better. “So you know Annaliese too?” Jada sounded so young, but she called Annaliese by name, so she probably wasn’t Annaliese’s daughter. He’d had only one phone conversation with Annaliese, but it had been enough to make the idea of her in the role of mother kind of scary. But if Jada wasn’t her daughter . . .? He dismissed that question, relegating it far down the list of things he needed to know at that particular moment. “How’s Annaliese doing?”
“She’s in jail.”
He could hear tears threatening again. He wanted to kick himself for upsetting her, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “In jail? Why?”
In her soft, sweet voice, she said, “Because Sebastian’s dead.”
Every hair on his body rose. He’d thought Cleo might have some worthwhile Vegas contacts. He’d never imagined she might know someone in the thick of things.
“What the hell!” Cleo’s hands were balled on her hips. She glared at him so hard he expected deadly rays to shoot from her eyes.
He held out the receiver. “Your phone rang.”
Three long strides and she snatched the phone from his hand. “You son of a bitch.”
He didn’t kid himself; just because the words were softly spoken, it didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to gut him like a fish with a belly full of high-priced caviar.
