Wrecked (Josie Gray Mysteries #3)(3)

He pointed a finger at her. “This is not a joke. You are mocking me, and I won’t stand for it.”

“Mayor Moss, I’m not mocking you. I’m trying to understand why you’re sitting on my couch this early in the morning asking me to destroy paperwork that I haven’t even seen.”

“I won’t be insulted like this. I came to you as one professional to another. I expect you to do the right thing.” He walked to the front door, opened it, and left without another word.

Josie followed Chester to the living room window, where they watched the mayor climb into his pickup truck and back out of her driveway, spinning gravel in his wake. Caroline will kill him, she thought.

*

Josie turned and headed back toward the kitchen, where she found Dillon knotting his tie.

“What was that all about?” he asked. He wore pressed khakis and a starched white shirt and silk tie, the same outfit he wore every day to work, with only slight variations in color.

“The mayor’s got trouble,” she said.

“What kind of trouble?”

She walked up to Dillon and straightened the knot in his tie. “Police business.”

“Sounded to me like he was trying to make his trouble your trouble.”

Her eyebrows shot up.

“I walked into the kitchen and heard you talking to a man. It’s not even seven o’clock in the morning. I was curious.” He cocked an eyebrow and she noticed a nick on his otherwise smooth face. For a moment, she saw him anew, her friend and her lover.

Dillon was a clean-cut, well-dressed forty-three-year-old with neatly trimmed black hair, gray at his temples, and a wide smile he was always quick to use. Josie had been dating him for several years. He’d given up his plea for her to marry him and now appeared content with their arrangement of separate houses and frequent overnight visits. More and more often Josie wondered if one house would do. But it would be up to her to say it. He was through with pressing her.

“You didn’t shave with that razor in the shower, did you?” she asked.

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “You have time for breakfast? Preferably something other than canned fruit?”

“I don’t have to be in until eight.”

“Good. Come help me. You can fill me in on the mayor.”

*

Dillon lived in town, in a small subdivision populated by two-career families who tended to commute to larger cities to earn their rather sizeable incomes. Artemis, Texas, was a remote border town suffering the same budget cutbacks and unemployment woes as the other towns along the Tex-Mex border. Sizeable incomes were hard to earn in these towns without a commute or specialty job. As the sole accountant for fifty square miles, Dillon did quite well. He owned his own business, the Office of Abacus, located downtown. Dillon ran the office with his secretary, Christina Handley, an impeccably dressed knockout who Josie tried not to dwell on.

She watched his back as he bent inside her refrigerator to pull out eggs, peppers, mushrooms, and a pound of turkey bacon, the staples he had brought with him the night before. He opened the crisper drawer and turned to face her, holding up an orange with moldy green spots.

“Since when did you start buying fresh fruit?” He winced at the acrid smell.

“Marta gave me that last week. She claims I need Vitamin C,” she said as she watched him walk to the trash can and drop the orange in with a thud.

Josie pulled a wooden cutting board from a kitchen cabinet and stood beside him at the counter. After washing and drying the peppers he swished a paring knife across a sharpening stone several times and placed it on her cutting board. “Half-inch pieces. Uniform in size.”

“So how much did you overhear?” she asked.

Even though the conversation was sensitive, Josie trusted Dillon. He had worked as a pro bono consultant on quite a few cases for the department and understood the necessity of confidentiality.

He handed her the peppers and began cracking eggs over a glass bowl. “Enough. Think there’s any chance the woman’s on the take?”

“She could be. The mayor’s got a good job and a wife who’s loaded. He’s a pretty easy mark,” she said. “But he’s also a first-rate ass with a wandering eye.”

“What about his wife? I’ve met her a few times. She seems reasonable enough. If it isn’t true, why doesn’t he just tell her what happened?”

Josie grinned. “Caroline? She’s reasonable in social settings. She’s also a political diva.” She glanced sideways at him. “I suspect she married Moss with visions of moving up the political ladder. Her dad was a four-term state senator. But after ten years as mayor, Moss can’t make it out of Artemis. I hear she’s pretty unhappy living out here in the middle of the desert.”

“You know her very well?” he asked.

“Well enough. Several years ago I was seated beside her at a fundraising luncheon for the Red Cross. I’d only met her a few times, but she was a talker. She talked about Moss’s struggles with the county council. She told me he had difficulties in working with a female chief.”

He laughed. “That’s a bit of an understatement.”

“Eventually the conversation turned to relationships between men and women. Whether a woman could ever completely trust the man she is married to.”