Frisk Me(42)

“Ah. So no recent escape then.” He sounded disappointed and Ava game him a disgusted look.

Davis had the decency to look ashamed. “Right, right. Glad the perp’s still behind bars. Still not getting why we’re talking about this then. What am I missing?”

“Maybe nothing,” Ava said. But her pencil was moving at warp speed now. Her reporter instincts were buzzing.

Something wasn’t right.

She opened her mouth.

Shut it.

Opened it again.

“It’s just…something’s strange about it. The case was high profile for the entire week she was missing. The little girl was the daughter of a city councilman. But her death barely registered a blip on the local media scene. The story just said that the suspect had been apprehended, but sadly, authorities were too late to save Shayna.”

“And this is related to the Moretti story how?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she mused. “Give me time.”

Davis rolled his eyes, pushing off her desk. “Thanks for leading me down the rabbit hole for nothing.”

“Anytime,” she said sweetly, giving him a little finger wave as he waddled away.

After Davis was out of earshot, a permanently scowled forehead appeared over the wall, followed by shrewd blue eyes, then a long nose and sulky mouth with a red and yellow gummy worm hanging out the side.

“I’m dismayed you weren’t forthcoming with our boss,” Mihail said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Absolutely appalled.”

“How do you know I wasn’t telling the truth?”

His expression didn’t change as he chewed his gummy worm, watching her.

“Okay fine,” she said on a sigh, lowering her voice. “I may know more than I said.”

“And?”

Ava hesitated, then immediately felt guilty. She told Mihail everything. He was her sounding board, her partner, her ball-and-chain when she chased a story that simply wasn’t there.

The fact that she was hesitating showing him this meant that she might have deeper feelings for Luc Moretti than she thought.

And since that scared the crap out of her, she quickly unlocked her computer screen and gestured Mihail to come around to her side before she could change her mind.

Mihail grunted when he saw the masthead on the website she’d pulled up. “That website is trash. Beyond trash. It’s paparazzi bullshit.”

“I know, I know, but look,” she said, scrolling down to a post from two years ago.

“What am I looking at?”

She pointed at a police officer on the right.

“Recognize him?”

Mihail leaned in and squinted. “That Moretti? Sure. So he was there when shit went down. So what?”

Right. So what?

Luc Moretti was a cop. There was nothing unusual about him being on the scene when a kidnapper in a high-profile case was arrested.

It was nothing, and yet…

Why was there so little about the resolution to this story?

Ava suddenly remembered her first reaction upon meeting Luc that day in his captain’s office. She’d thought then that something had been off, but then she’d gotten so wrapped up in, well, him, that she’d gone and forgotten all about it.

But her reporter instincts were buzzing now, and they’d never led her astray before. And Ava loved the thrill of a good story. Particularly one people didn’t want told.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN



Finally, finally Luc typed up the last sentence on the last report for the week, putting one fist in the air.

Victory.

“You know, for some reason, it never really occurred to me that cops could take sick days,” Ava mused, never looking up from the magazine she’d been flipping through for the past half hour.

Luc dropped his arm. He’d almost forgotten he wasn’t alone. The operative word being almost, because it seemed his subconscious was always aware of Ava Sims.

He reached for his Coke. “Well here’s something to know about Lopez; his ‘sick’ days tend to come on heavy paperwork days. Write that down.”

She scrunched her nose. “You think he’s faking it? He sounded pretty stuffed up on speakerphone earlier.”

“That’s because he thinks he’s allergic to paperwork. It’s psychosomatic.”

“So we’re all done?” she asked, finally flipping her magazine closed.

“I’m done,” he said, giving her a pointed look.

“Hey, I’ve been here too. You think hanging around until eight o’clock in a deserted precinct is my idea of a good time?”

Luc snorted and stood. “Don’t even. I wasted thirty minutes trying to get rid of you. I think we can both agree that the ‘American public’ you’re so anxious to impress isn’t going to give a shit about all the filing we cops have to do.”

“No,” she admitted. “They want the sexy, jumping into rivers, saving babies stuff.”

“So why are you still here?”

She stood as well, putting her hands on the small of her back to stretch. “I need to understand the full picture of Luc Moretti the cop. Even if the boring stuff doesn’t make it into production, our interview will be richer if I’m informed.”