The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(77)

Plus the secondary headline:





Suspect Behavior from Wolves Owner


with Cop “Investigating” Her



I slumped back into my chair.

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“Are you sleeping with him?” Megan said.

“None of your goddamn business. But no.”

“Jenny,” Megan said, “there’s no way for you to spin this. Or for us to ignore this. What the whole world is about to see is you and the detective investigating two murders in your family gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.”

“Would it matter to you if I told you how badly that particular dinner date ended?”

“Not even a little bit.”

Her phone pinged again. She nodded.

“Okay. TMZ is running with it.”

“You make it sound as if that’s the paper of record.”

“With stuff like this, it pretty much is.”

“We aren’t obligated to run with the crowd on this,” I said.

“There is no we right now,” Megan said. “There’s just the paper. And so you know? We are going to run with the crowd on this, fast as we can. When you gave me this job you told me to edit the paper my way. So let me do that now. If you’d like to give me a quote, we can throw it into the news story. If not, we need to get this up now.”

I leaned forward and looked at the photographs she’d spread out on her desk. My eyes had originally passed right over the one of Ben and me standing on his front porch the night he’d invited me in.

I pointed to that one now.

“I didn’t even go inside that night. But that doesn’t matter, either, does it?”

“You’ve been in the crosshairs for weeks,” Megan said. “You ought to know the rules of engagement by now.”

I leaned back in my chair, feeling very tired at the moment. Tired of just about everybody and everything.

“Is it even worth asking where these pictures came from?”

“Sure,” Megan said. “It was Bert Patricia.”

“Private detective to the stars? I don’t even know why he calls himself private. He’s in the papers almost as much as I am.” I held up a hand. “Wait—didn’t Bert Patricia go to jail?”

“On the phone hacking thing,” Megan said. “Somehow he beat the rap.”

“So he doesn’t care that people know he’s the one who’s been following me?”

“One of the people following you,” she said. “Are you kidding? He wants people to know it was him, even if he can’t come right out and say that himself. It puts him right where he wants to be: in the middle of a big story.”

“My brother Jack must have hired him. When Jack wasn’t having one of his reporters following me from time to time.”

“Nope,” Megan said. “If he had, the only place where you’d be able to see these pictures would be at Wolf.com.”

“So if he didn’t, who do you think did?”

“I was getting to that,” Megan said. “I don’t think. I know who did.”

“I thought private detectives didn’t reveal who their clients are.”

“The ethical ones usually don’t,” Megan said. “But Bert couldn’t resist telling one of our reporters, who’s been covering him for years. On background, of course.”

“So who did hire him?”

“The commissioner of the National Football League,” Megan Callahan said.





Ninety-Two



WHEN I CALLED JOEL ABRAMS, he denied ever having heard of Bert Patricia and tried to act offended that I would accuse him of stooping to such a thing.

“Our league is better than that,” Abrams said.

“Really? Since when?”

“And this isn’t about my behavior, anyway,” Abrams said. “It’s about yours.”

“I just hope you’re as intrepid the next time one of your other owners gets caught with his pants down.”

“I’m not the one having an inappropriate relationship.”

“Neither am I,” I said, and hung up on him.

I had chosen not to give a quote to my own paper or anybody else about what the whole world was calling an affair, even if both Ben Cantor and I knew it wasn’t an affair, never had been, and never would be, the way things were going.

What I did instead was leave town.

I made my first road trip of the season with the Wolves, for our Sunday game in Seattle against the Seahawks, even leaving a couple of days early. While I was away, my principal at Hunters Point, Joey Rubino, coached the Bears on Saturday to a tie. It wasn’t a win, but it wasn’t a loss, either, and the team held first place in our league with the playoffs not far off.

Then the Wolves won big against the Seahawks on Sunday, in perhaps Billy McGee’s best performance since he’d returned to the league. With a month left in the regular season, the team was closing in on its first playoff spot in years.

I took one call over the weekend, from Ben Cantor, while waiting for our team plane to take off for the flight back to San Francisco. He said he wanted me to know that he wasn’t being taken off either case—my father’s or Thomas’s.