by Jenna Rae
After several minutes of noisy, messy grubbing, he gave a loud cry of triumph and pushed his platter away, displacing the tablecloth and nearly knocking her wineglass onto her lap. She caught it in time and pretended to take a sip.
“Never overeat,” he said, flicking his greasy hand at his half-empty plate. “That’s the key. Enjoy, savor, all of that, but know when to stop.”
She smiled again. “Good advice.”
She laid down her fork and blotted her lips.
“You’ve told me things need to change. But how do we make it better? What can we do?” She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on his florid, sweaty face.
“That’s it, right? That’s the key. That’s what makes us different from the animals. The answer is, we work together. We go behind the scenes and pull the strings without advertising what we’re doing.”
“But how do you know who to trust?”
Miller clapped his hands three times, pausing between each clap. “So that’s where I come in. I have two gifts. One is, I know people. It’s a gift. It’s just always been like that. I know when somebody’s worth my time and when he’s not. You notice I’m not asking John Vallejo to dinner. I asked you. Why? Because I know you’re worth my time. My time is valuable. You wouldn’t believe how much I’m worth.”
She smiled again, wondering if she looked as mechanical as she felt.
“Plus, I use the latest in technology. Bleeding edge, all the way. I have cameras everywhere in this town. I know how to hire the best, only the best people. I watch everything that happens in this town. I know who goes where and when, and why. I look to see who’s cheating on the wife in the wrong part of town, women, drugs. I know all the secrets. And if I have to push on people a little, I do it for the good of the city.”
“I have a question, but I’m not sure if it’s okay to ask.”
“Anything,” he said, with a magnanimous smile. “Anything at all.”
“Did anyone notice what Donnelly was doing? The extortion?”
“No.”
“When he was leaving Briarwood, do you have any footage of that?”
“No.”
“Do you think he died by suicide, accident or murder?”
Miller shifted in his seat and shrugged.
“He murdered Tami Sheraton, who was an innocent. His death was no great loss to society.”
“Why are you asking me about this?”
“We’re talking about how your company can make Briarwood safer. Using recent crimes seems like a reasonable test of that theory. If you were already doing the police work, would this all have happened?”
“I see what you’re doing!” Miller laughed raucously. “I said you were smart. You’re right, none of this would’ve happened on my watch. I assume everyone’s a crook. That way, I can watch them all. Everyone’s watching everyone else, and they all report to me. I’m the top of this heap, and I can shape the world the way it should be. Things have changed for the worse, and I can turn back the clock and make this town what it used to be.”
“Can you really do that, turn back the clock?”
“Your department is full of men with secrets, and so is city hall. The state legislature is full of crooks and cheaters and gamblers and drug addicts. You’d be amazed at the things I know. And I use that power to make things better for people. That’s all I do, try to make things right.”
“Wow.”
“I have plans for you. I want you to stay where you are. Trust me, there’s gonna be some big, big shakeups. I want someone I can trust at the top of the heap when it all shakes out. I want you to be our first female police chief.”
“Can you really make all of that happen? I mean, I don’t mean to sound—”
“Yes.” Miller stared hard at her. “I can make you the new chief. But I need to know you’ll play ball with me. I need to know you’ll remember who your friends are.”
She nodded. “Why me? Why not Tori?”
“I thought about her. But I don’t trust her like you.”
“You have no reason to trust me.”
He grinned widely. “Remember what I said? You have to listen. I have the gift. I can see into people. Tori Young is pretty and smart and sexy and slick. But she looks out for herself first. I need someone who can come in, lead the way, and remember who her friends are. I know I can count on you to keep your promises.”
She sat back. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
He nodded vigorously. “I’ll give you two days to think it over. Then we’ll meet for dinner again and I’ll expect an answer. My house, you been there? No, no, you’ll love it. It’s the best house in town. Needless to say, this discussion stays between the two of us. Our little secret, right?”
She echoed his nodding. “I want to thank you, Mr. Miller. You’ve given me a great compliment.”
He smiled expansively. “You’re right. You’re definitely right. I told you. I know people!”
“One quick thing,” she said, smiling coquettishly at the man across from her, “I need to know.”
“Anything,” said Miller, with only a trace of doubt in his booming voice.
“Just like you need to trust me, I need to trust you and the other people on our team. So who is on our team?”
Miller narrowed his eyes. “You don’t need to know that.”
“I disagree. If you want me to lead this department, I need to know who my friends are. Who our friends are.”
“I’ll tell you, that’s what I like. You’re a straight shooter.” Miller shrugged. “What the hell? Two of the commissioners. One of the other captains. The chief. Two city council guys. The mayor. Both guys in Sacramento. All mine.”
“Names.” She stared at his bloodshot eyes until he broke contact. “You said not Tori. Give me two others that aren’t yours. If I can’t figure out which commissioners you own, you shouldn’t hire me.”
He straightened his collar with a wry grin. “Olivares is not one of mine. Neither is Banks.”
“Okay. When I come to dinner I’ll name the two you recruited.”
“Well, then, we’re halfway to the altar, you and me!” He yanked out his wallet and threw a handful of twenty-dollar bills on the table, winking at her. He stood and watched her rise.
“Thanks for the compliment and for dinner,” she said.
He gestured at her to lead the way to the entrance. As she moved forward, he pulled out his phone and, staring at it, pushed past her. He stopped short, blocking the doorway. She stifled her irritation and waited as he jabbed at his screen.
“I’m happy to share the wealth, Brenda, just remember that. As long as you play nice with me, I’ll play nice with you.” And finally he was gone.
She trailed out of the front door after him and watched him yell into his phone as he roared off in his Land Rover, nearly running down a pair of elderly women on the way.
She escaped to her car, head pounding and stomach churning. She sat in the stillness of the Caliber for a few minutes to clear her head. She peered up at the night sky and saw only gloom. Thick clouds obscured her view of the moon and stars, and somehow that seemed to her fitting. She felt obscured by a cloud of revulsion. Then she took the short way home and, sick with disgust, yanked off her clothes by the hamper so she could drop them directly into it.
Their very fabric seemed stained by exposure to her noxious dinner companion. She took a quick shower to clean the evening off her skin and clear her head. She’d barely made it back to the master bedroom when her phone vibrated.
“You little slut!” Tori’s voice was high with laughter. “Michael called me. He said you practically humped Miller on the table. What are you up to?”
“He’s easy to play,” she said, allowing herself a small smile. “But this isn’t over yet.”
“No, I know, but it will be soon. And then—”
“And then we’ll see.” She chewed her lip. “One thing at a time, okay?”
“Yeah.” Tori sounded subdued now. �
�Of course.”
“Thanks. For your help and your patience. I know I’m not always easy to deal with.”
There was a long silence and then Tori laughed. “Nobody interesting is.”
Chapter Fifteen
The texts and emails poured in over the next few hours. Peterson’s diner pals had put together a dossier on each of the city leaders and department brass, providing surprisingly thorough details of their financial and social obligations and resources. She was stunned to find out how many of the city’s movers and shakers were overextended. The recession had hit many of them harder than appearances suggested.
Unlike many other city leaders, the mayor was reassuringly solvent. He had a fat portfolio of blue chip stocks and only a miniscule percentage of his investments were even moderately risky. He also came from an old money family not unlike Shay’s. The Sheratons were also in excellent shape, having used the recession to snap up both real estate and stocks at bargain prices. Three of the city council members, including the chair, were similarly well situated.
Several individuals of consequence in the district attorney’s office, the police department, the planning office, and the big-money circle were of much greater interest. They were, almost to a man, on far shakier ground. Illicit affairs with rather desperate women and men, gambling debts, drug abuse, shady business practices and scores of secrets—it was an embarrassing wealth of evidence.
Staggered by the amount of data, she created a spreadsheet to quantify the strengths and weaknesses of the town’s elite. Even in politically and socially moderate Northern California, the power structure excluded women almost entirely. There were two women on the city council, but there was no evidence they had any particular sources of weakness. One of them had a teenage son with a drug problem, but it had not yet reached the stage of catastrophic consequences. The other drank too much, but she was still functioning successfully.
Miller had not exaggerated the vulnerability of Briarwood’s leaders. Between the sex scandals, shady deals, gambling debts, poor investments, drug and alcohol abuse and shortsighted spending habits, the city’s elite were practically begging to be blackmailed and extorted. She assigned each vulnerability a numerical value, based on how damaging public disclosure would be. Given the wealth of secrets delineated before her, she had to do a lot of math.
She was stunned by the amount of information the diner crew had collected. For nearly every rumor, tidbit of family history and conjecture, there was a body of documentation to back it up. She shook her head and laughed. She’d assumed Peterson’s pals would offer unsubstantiated gossip, but she’d underestimated the men badly. To be sure, she fact-checked the more important data, and it was consistently reliable.
Reviewing her conversation with Miller, she tried to decide which of the commissioners he’d insisted did not dance to his tune. One of them was likely to be crooked, she thought, based on the salesman’s limited intellect. She examined their columns on her spreadsheet. Olivares was cheating on his wife and had put a second mortgage on his house to finance his twins’ college tuitions. But for many years he’d stolidly saved his money, paid his bills on time and lived his upper-middle-class life with care. His vulnerability score was three.
Walton was cheating on his wife with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and he lived well beyond his means. He’d done so for decades and had somehow managed every several years to pay off his considerable debts with a sudden and generous infusion of cash from ill-defined sources. He gambled via the stock market, and it was entirely possible some of his higher-risk investments had actually paid off. She gave Walton a vulnerability score of eight.
Banks’s bad habits were numerous: driving expensive cars recklessly, engaging in multiple adulterous affairs with dangerously young women, spending too much on bespoke suits, overpriced clothes, gobbling great quantities of rich food, and falling for get-rich-quick schemes. Worst of all, he continued to tunnel further and further in debt by trying to hide the fact his long-suffering wife had essentially cut him off financially some years back. Her family’s substantial money and holdings were held in trust for her and for their children, and good old Marty got only a modest stipend for the rest of his working life.
Once he retired, he’d be stuck with his pension and whatever money he’d managed to acquire on his own. If the couple divorced, he got nothing. If his wife predeceased him, he got nothing. Yet he’d saved nothing. He’d spent, lost and failed to capitalize on truckloads of money. Banks had a vulnerability score of eleven.
And on it went. By midnight she had nine good suspects, three of them inside the department. She continued to assess each one, examining the behavioral patterns with care. She looked at each of them as an opportunist might. If she wanted to corrupt the department, if she wanted to burrow inside the power structure of the city that was already straining under its burgeoning growth, how would she do it?
An image came to her then of an innocent-looking cotton boll taken over from the inside by weevil larvae. The burrowing pests were protected from insecticides and predators by the cotton’s own structural integrity. There would be a mark somewhere on the outer layers of the boll, small but visible to the keen eye. As she eyeballed the spreadsheet on which she’d recorded the information and her evaluation thereof, she felt like an exterminator examining a cotton boll. A healthy boll would be most appealing because the cotton fibers would provide food for the larvae. How did the weevil know which boll was best? She wouldn’t go where another mother had already been. She would not choose one likely to attract predators.
“Okay, little cotton bolls, which one did this weevil pick? Or which ones, maybe.”
She put herself in the place of each individual and imagined all the ways things might have happened. She sat on the sofa with her legs stretched out under the coffee table, her cell phone plugged in and resting beside her hand. It was closing time at the local bars when she gave in to her exhaustion, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
She awoke as the morning’s first thin rays started peeking through the heavy clouds. She checked her phone but saw no missed calls. That was a good sign. It meant no one had encountered one of the troublesome contradictions she had anticipated might arise.
She felt surprisingly well rested and hoped that was a sign she’d done enough to prepare for the day. It was going to be a busy one, and if she was mistaken it would be busy for no good reason. An hour later she was in her disguise, with a backpack full of kit on the passenger seat. She called Andi to ask a favor and then drove to the boardwalk.
She borrowed Lauren’s old Volvo, which Andi kept parked at the public lot in case of emergencies. A quick thank-you text later, she began surveillance on her first subject. She made meticulous notes, going over and over her theory to ensure she wasn’t missing anything.
She sat in the Volvo in front of Nic’s Knacks, a tourist trap a few doors down from Dave’s Bistro. She’d chosen the spot because the owner of the kitsch shop updated her website weekly, and Brenda knew what day she spent compiling the new photographs. She figured the retailer was too busy on this particular morning taking pictures of the current wares to notice the salt-pitted sedan parked in front of her store. A blond wig, bright pink lipstick, and oversized sunglasses were enough to disguise her identity. She fit in with the other window shoppers as she examined the overstuffed display from the sidewalk.
The thickening clouds made using the window reflections tricky, but she took her time and eyed each passerby. Still, she was able to see no one she was looking for. Glancing up, she wondered if the coming rain would interfere with her plan. A short circuit up and down tourist row netted her an overpriced bag of peanuts and a view of her quarry entering Dave’s. Without reacting to the sight, she ambled back to her car and ate peanuts while feigning interest in something on her phone.
When her subject finally exited the popular eatery two hours later, she smiled to see his companion. Dave’s Saturday morning brunch was always bo
oked well in advance, especially this time of year when the weather was usually fine. That thought made her look up to see the storm she’d smelled was just starting to coalesce. The air was heavy and thick under the ominous daytime gloom.
The brunch companions shook hands and parted ways, and she followed her new subject’s very nice car to Livingston Plaza, only a quarter mile away. The crowd was even bigger than usual at the plaza’s weekly farmers market and at the nearby boardwalk on this late Saturday morning, despite the turbulent weather. She wondered if locals had been inspired to visit the fun parts of town by the food truck festival.
A few sprinkles dropped here and there, and at a gust of wind dozens of faces turned up to examine the clouds. There were umbrellas over many arms, she was glad to see, and someone had erected a series of large open-air tents over the benches and picnic tables. The wind was just beginning to whip the flapping canvas. A particularly strong gust rocked the Volvo back and forth, and she hoped the weather wouldn’t overcome her timeline.
The call she was waiting for came after several minutes sitting, parked and impatient, in Andi’s merchant spot. The darkened sky and low-hanging mist helped render her nearly invisible, and she watched her caller while she answered his phone call.
“Brenda Borelli speaking,” she said, her tone light.
“Do you know who this is?”
“What can I do for you, Commander?”
“I’d like to see you on the QT.”
“Sure, of course,” she said, trying not to smile. “What’d you have in mind?”
“I have a boat,” said Banks, his voice too casual. Wind blasted the microphone of his cell phone, and she squinted at the intrusive sound. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair when the wind ruffled it again. He looked up at the sky in what appeared to be consternation. His jowls shook as if in outrage.
“In this weather?”
“Don’t tell me you’re worried about a little rain?”
