perfidy.
“How can Barry Sutton just expect me to ignore the fact that he’s the reason I’ve been banished to a desk for months?”
“Hit the delete key. Problem solved.”
Yes, that would be the logical thing to do. Megan could pretend she never got it. E-mails went astray all the time. And yet just the appearance of Barry’s name made her heart pound harder than it ever did with her police work. Maybe that’s because she was trained for police work. Nothing had trained her for Barry.
“Megan?” Gina prompted. “We’ve talked about this.”
“I know.”
“Deep breaths.”
“I know.”
“Now hit delete.”
She made it sound so easy. “I—”
Gina leaned over, her finger headed for Megan’s delete key. Megan grabbed her wrist.
“Megan!”
“I know he’s only e-mailing me because he wants something.” And not because he’d suddenly developed a grand passion for her, she didn’t say aloud. And from Gina’s expression, Megan figured she didn’t have to.
“And you know what happens when Barry asks for favors?”
“I give them to him. And bad things happen,” Megan recited in a monotone.
“Very good. Delete the e-mail.”
Megan stared at Barry’s name. “How can he make me feel guilty when he’s the one asking for a favor?”
“Because that’s what he does.” Gina spoke in slow, measured tones—her “talk them off the ledge” voice. “He is an expert. He’s like a legit con man. You’ve studied them. You know how they read and manipulate people.”
Megan nodded, her eyes never leaving the “Barry Sutton” on the e-mail. “You know he has different smiles?”
“Most of us—”
“Not like Barry. I know he’s practiced them and cataloged them. I’ve watched him watching other people. Then he’ll paste a smile on his face and approach them. You see, he always smiles first. He decides how he’s going to appear. He can make himself have dimples, or not. He regulates how much of his teeth he shows. It’s never spontaneous. And once you respond to him, that’s the smile you always get. You know what mine is?”
Gina carefully shook her head. Her eyes had widened slightly, as though she thought she was dealing with a crazy person. Maybe she was.
Megan continued anyway. “I get the single-dimple smile with the slightly lowered brow. A pseudo-private smile, as though there’s something between us that no one else knows about. Then, after I helplessly blab everything he wants to know, he takes one side of his mouth down a notch and flashes the other dimple. And then he winks. I hate winking. Hate it. But he’s always turned away by then. Once I told not to wink at me and he just gave me a double-dimpled smile and said he knew I loved it.”
Gina stared at her. “Have you been practicing your Barry aversion therapy?”
“Sort of.” It just made Megan think of him more.
“Now would be a good time.”
She was really lucky Gina was being so patient with her. Megan felt so gullible and so stupid and so silly and so weak when it came to Barry. But Gina said everyone had weaknesses. She, herself, couldn’t speak in public. Appearing on camera the way Megan had—before her reassignment—made Gina freeze up. Megan had seen Gina in action, or nonaction, so she knew it was true. It was Gina, who had studied psychology, who’d helped her devise the Barry aversion therapy.
Megan slid open her desk drawer and withdrew a set of lined index cards. On each was written one of Barry’s transgressions.
“Read one aloud,” Gina instructed.
Megan drew a breath. “He smiles at me even though he knows it makes my face go all red.”
“What is it with you and the smiling?”
“People will think there’s something going on between us!” Megan defended herself.
“Oh, please. Get over yourself and give me that card.” Gina took it and tore it up. “There are plenty of other more serious consequences to dealing with Barry, and you know it.” She pointed to the stack of cards. “Write another one—write that his requests for special treatment disrupt your peace of mind and affect your work.”
“They don’t affect my work!”
“Have we not just spent ten minutes obsessing over Barry?”
“It’s not obsessing.”
Gina nodded toward the computer. “Delete the e-mail.”
Megan swallowed. “I…should read it first.”
Gina leveled her stern policewoman’s stare at Megan. “Deep breath. Read the next card.”
Megan inhaled and exhaled. “Barry called me in the middle of the night—”
“At your unlisted home number.”
Megan hoped that Gina wouldn’t ask how Barry got her unlisted home number. “He knew I would be asleep,” she continued, “and took advantage of my grogginess to trick me into giving him the mayor’s meeting schedule, which then confirmed that the mayor was meeting with out-of-state candidates for the new assistant police chief.” An echo of the anger she’d felt then calmed her pounding heart now. Hey, this aversion-therapy stuff might work.
“It was a dirty trick, but it was very clever,” Gina commented.
“I still should have been prepared.”
“He woke you up at one-thirty in the morning! On purpose!”
“He had a deadline.”
“You are not defending him.”
Megan stared at the card. She was defending him, drat it all. “Okay. You’re right. Thanks, Gina. I can handle things now.”
“You’re deleting the e-mail?”
“I’m going to write a refusal before I open and read it.”
“Megan—”
“Gina.” Megan stiffened her spine. “I have no business deleting e-mails unread. If I do, then he is affecting my work. I have to be able to deal with him when I’m department spokeswoman again. This is good practice.”
Gina gave her a look with just a touch of pity in it, then headed back to her own desk.
Pity, huh? Megan brought her fingers to the keyboard, mentally composing a polite, yet firm, very firm, refusal, when another
