the best of the best.
“I hate to ask this, Maggie, but whose side are we on?” Ted asked.
Maggie stiffened and locked her gaze with Ted’s. “Whose side do you think you’re on, Ted?”
Ted looked at Espinosa. “Your side, boss, which—if I can read you correctly—is the madam’s,” Ted said, opting to take the high road.
“I knew that,” Espinosa said airily. He already felt sorry for the men they were about to start tracking.
“Good choice. I want hard proof, two sources, every little thing on background on every one of those miserable creatures. If it ever comes to court, the madam will be represented by Lizzie, with Cosmo Cricket in the background, but that is not our concern right now. Are we clear on that?”
Ted and Espinosa both nodded, their faces serious as they tried to imagine what was going to go down and how it was going to work out.
“I want sterling headlines. I want impeccable sources. I want material that deserves to be above the fold. I want people standing in line waiting to buy the paper, and I want special editions with one-of-a-kind reporting and dynamite pictures. I want my competitors to hate the hell out of me and both of you. We’re number one, and I want to stay at number one! Tell me you’re going to make it happen. I have people straining at the leash waiting for your answer. Oh, yes, a really nice bonus and a five-day vacation in Hawaii will be your reward. It’s okay to call it a bribe, but I’m tossing it out there.”
“We’ll make it happen, Maggie,” Ted said.
“Yeah,” Espinosa said.
“You’re still standing here! Move!”
“I thought we were going out to dinner,” Ted grumbled.
“I’m going out to dinner. You’re going to work. Go, already!”
Maggie knew her dinner was going to be a street vendor’s hot dog, which she would eat on the run. She took the thought as a lucky omen. Hot dogs and scoops equaled a Pulitzer.
Chapter 5
Cosmo Cricket lumbered out to his state-of-the-art kitchen, where he made coffee. While he waited for it to drip through, he walked back down the hall to the front door to pick up the morning paper, which had been shoved through the mail slot. He carried it back to the kitchen, his thoughts on Lizzie Fox and her arrival later in the day. Right then, right that minute, right that second, that nanosecond, all he could think of was Elizabeth Fox and how good it was going to feel when she was snuggled in his arms. Whatever news the paper held was of absolutely no interest to him. That wasn’t usually the case. Normally, he read it from cover to cover, line by line.
But Cosmo Cricket was a creature of habit, and his habit was to get up, brush his teeth, shower, shave, and have his first cup of coffee while he skimmed the headlines of the Las Vegas Review-Journal before he got down to serious reading.
Cosmo picked up a pair of reading glasses off the kitchen counter. It made him nuts that he had to wear the eye-cheaters, but when Elizabeth said he looked like a forbidding, crack-the-whip law professor, he bought a couple dozen pair and had them everywhere. He had three pairs in his briefcase, four or five pairs in the office, and a pair in every room in his house, even in all three bathrooms.
Glasses in place, Cosmo checked the weather. Cool and dry. He moved on to the horoscope section, read his daily blurb and Elizabeth’s, too. He smiled. Perfect. He’d die before he would admit, even to Elizabeth, that he religiously read his daily horoscope.
As he sipped coffee, which seemed exceptionally hot that morning, he flipped the pages of the newspapers. Iraq, Afghanistan, National Guard from somewhere going someplace. Like he could do anything about it. A flood in Florida from some kind of tropical storm that dropped twenty inches of rain. Nothing he could do about that either except to stay home and out of Florida. A woman was just getting out of jail even though her missing child hadn’t been found. What kind of mother was she for refusing to tell what she knew, and what kind of authority would let her out of jail to begin with? Some people didn’t deserve to have children. His own parents would have turned the world upside down if he’d gone missing. A crane collapse someplace in New York City. No injuries this time around.
Cosmo turned the page, looked at the kitchen clock. Seven o’clock. Ten o’clock in Washington, D.C. In six hours Elizabeth would be at his side. He could hardly wait. The big problem was, what was he going to do during the six-hour wait? He replenished his coffee and sat back down. He almost turned the page until he realized he hadn’t yet scanned the page he was on. It was just a small article and he almost missed it. He bolted upright, his coffee forgotten as he read the short piece.
Local woman, 44-year-old Lily Flowers, crashed her Honda Prelude on the Cajon Pass last evening as she was leaving Las Vegas when the front tire of her car blew out. The air bag did not deploy, and authorities said Ms. Flowers was killed on impact when the Prelude struck a guardrail. The investigating state trooper said a hotel reservation in San Bernardino was found in the woman’s wallet in the console of the car, which leads them to believe San Bernardino was her destination.
Motorists who stopped to render aid said the woman was not driving at an excessive rate of speed. The trooper said there were no signs of drug usage or alcohol involved. Authorities are currently searching for next of kin. Anyone with information concerning Ms. Flowers is asked to call the sheriff’s office.
“Son of a bitch!” The words exploded out of Cosmo’s mouth like bullets. Well, now he knew what he was going to be doing for the next six hours, since he knew for a fact that there was no next of kin to notify concerning Lily Flowers’s untimely demise.
Suddenly Cosmo was like a caged lion as he stormed his way around the kitchen, the floor rumbling and creaking as he stomped about. Accident? Or a crash made to look like an accident?
Lily Flowers had struck him as a woman who had her stuff together in one sock, or rather one giant handbag. Single-minded, with tunnel vision. Her only objective was to get away to a safe place as soon as possible. Which meant she had to have had a plan in place, which she had indeed verified. Some plan, since she was now dead. She would have had her car checked from top to bottom, down to the tires. He could almost guarantee it. She would have been traveling light, no baggage to speak of to drag her down and certainly nothing in her purse to incriminate her. She probably had a small suitcase or one carry bag. He didn’t know all that much about women, but he assumed that Lily Flowers would buy whatever she needed when she got to the first leg of her destination, which apparently was San Bernardino. From San Bernardino it was anyone’s guess where she had intended to go. Somewhere far from American shores was his first thought. He knew in his gut that Lily Flowers had been a woman with a long-range plan.
“Crap!”
Cosmo tried to remember what exactly it was that he had secured in his safe when Lily Flowers came to see him. He knew better than anyone that you always followed the money trail. He wondered what he would find when he got there. Nothing good, he was sure.
Cosmo spent another ten minutes tidying up the kitchen before he poured the last of his coffee into a traveling cup, grabbed his briefcase, and left for the office.
The minute Cosmo got there, he called his secretary into the office and rattled off a list of things she was to do ASAP. “Put everything on hold. This takes precedence. I want to know the name of the trooper, any witnesses, and where they took the body. Call a funeral home, make arrangements.
