“IF GEORGE SANDERS weren’t already dead, I’d kill him.”
Kelsey Cox said nothing, knowing better than to interrupt when her boss was this angry. As if validating her silence, the tirade continued.
“He made this mess, opening his mouth when he should have stayed quiet. Feeding Detective Hart gossip that could ruin everything. He didn’t even know what he was talking about, for pete’s sake!” The last two words were punctuated by pounding the conference table.
Sanders had been a small-time criminal with a big-time mouth. He’d tried to implicate Governor Lowell Rollins in a twenty-seven-year-old triple murder. Any other cop would have seen the allegations as laughable. But since Abby Hart’s parents were among the victims, she’d taken every word seriously.
Sensing an opening to calm the situation, Kelsey spoke up. “But he is dead. There’s no way to verify anything he said. Don’t you think she’ll stop?” Kelsey sat across the conference table from her employer.
“Looking into her parents’ deaths? I doubt it. Not if she’s anything like her father.”
“But the Triple Seven case is closed. What could she possibly accomplish? There’s no proof connecting the governor to anything. Gavin —”
“Gavin, like Sanders, should have kept his mouth shut. If he was going to blow his brains out, he should have done it before he said anything.”
Cox flinched. The image of Gavin Kent’s suicide outside Governor Rollins’s Long Beach residence was all too fresh in her mind’s eye. And the fact that anyone could be so callous about his death abraded her heart; she still loved him.
“Oh, don’t get your back up.” Her boss smacked the table. “If you can’t move on, I can’t use you.”
Embarrassed and angry that she let her guard down and was so transparent, Cox gritted her teeth. “I have moved on.”
Standing, she turned her back to the boss and looked out the window. The beautiful blue, early fall sky did nothing to assuage her anxiety. “What do you want me to do about Hart?”
“Keep tabs on her for now. The governor will officially declare he’s in the senate race soon. She’ll have one more chance to accept his job offer.”
Kelsey couldn’t hide the shock, jerking back around. “You want her working here with Lowell?”
“Of course. Keep your enemies close. But if she doesn’t take the offer . . .” A cavalier shrug. “I’ll come up with another, more permanent solution.”
Cox put a hand behind her on the windowsill to keep from sliding sideways. In another time and place the thinly veiled threat her boss made to stop Hart would not have shaken her so. In spite of her long law enforcement career, stepping up and doing the unpleasant —even the illegal —for a greater good was a no-brainer. But the mention of it now rocketed her back to the day she’d watched the governor’s right-hand man, her lover, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. She’d lost her balance that day, feeling as though the bullet had struck her as well, knocking her off a cliff, where she now hung by one hand, like a stuntman in the movies.
Unlike the movies, there was no rescuer rushing to the precipice to grab her hand and pull her up.
And every so often something would happen that made Kelsey feel like her fingers were being pulled back. Any minute now she could lose her grip completely. She hated Hart as much as her boss did —even more —but the woman was not a threat. There was nothing she could prove. Another murder was a risk, a finger being peeled back.
“Hart can poke around until frogs grow beards. All she’ll get is frustrated.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Kelsey wished she could take them back. Her boss did not take kindly to being questioned.
“Nothing, I mean nothing —not Hart, not that irritating PI Murphy, and not you dragging your feet —is going to get in the way of Lowell being a senator. Is that clear?”
Cox nodded, having to look away from the vicious, murderous glint in her boss’s eyes.
“Can you do the job or do I need to find someone else?”
“You can count on me,” she said as she was dismissed for the afternoon.