High-Risk Investigation. Jane M. Choate
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with an acceptance that He worked on His timetable, not hers. Impatient by nature, she needed the occasional reminder of His eternal plan and His wisdom.
When the worst of the nausea was under control, she started to get up. Stopped. Big mistake.
She hurt all over. Being thrown to the floor by a drop-dead-gorgeous man may make for good fiction, but the reality was less fun than what romance novels made it out to be. Maybe the pain would take her mind off the nightmare and the memories it had engendered.
She took a minute, another, before trying to move again. Cautiously, she pushed herself into a sitting position, paused, lifted one leg over the side of the bed, then the other.
When the room stopped spinning, she stood. Assessed. So far, so good. Every fiber of her body ached, but at least she was moving. Sort of. She hobbled to the full-length mirror attached to the back of her bedroom door and surveyed herself.
Her second mistake of the morning.
Bruises bloomed along her shoulders and arms. Angry red now, they’d soon turn blue and purple, then a sickly green and finally a putrid yellow. It could have been worse. She could have a bullet lodged in her shoulder. Or her heart.
Thanks to the quick actions of Nicco Santonni, she was in one piece. More or less.
Her sense of humor got a toehold, nudging a smile out of hiding. Maybe she’d put in for medical leave. At least it would get her out of covering the month of events leading up to the huge ball where Patrice Newtown, the undisputed queen of Savannah society, would present the mayor with a check large enough to build a new shelter for the city’s homeless.
For reasons of her own, Newtown had requested that Scout be assigned to cover a bunch of boring social events. The order had come from the big man himself, Gerald Daniels, the paper’s publisher.
Scout was fighting her way onto the paper’s crime beat one column inch at a time, and, because of a whim of one of the city’s so-called benefactors, she was now relegated once more to the society page. She had as much interest in society doings as she did in learning how to peel an artichoke. Who cared which designer created the dress the mayor’s wife wore to the country club dance or what entrée was served with what wine?
Gingerly, she made her way to the shower, where the hot water temporarily soothed her aches and pains and allowed her to forget, for a few minutes at least, the reason for them. Though she normally skipped makeup, she applied a light dusting of blush and mascara and dabbed concealer beneath her eyes. A critical look at herself in the mirror confirmed what she already knew. She couldn’t erase the shadows under her eyes or the tiny tension lines that bracketed her mouth.
She braced her hands on the bathroom counter, then dropped her gaze to her splayed fingers, staring at them as though they held the secrets to all the world’s questions, but there were no answers there. Within a half hour, she was dressed and out the door, albeit at a slower pace than normal.
After graduating from college and starting at the paper, she promised herself she’d search for the truth. Finding that truth, wherever it lay, had been her compass for the last five years. That quest had taken on special significance with the murder of her parents a year ago. She’d vowed then to find the truth behind the murders and bring down those responsible.
At the office, she did a fast read of her emails, deleted most of them and prepared to write the piece on last night’s gala while the events were still fresh in her mind. Not the warm-fuzzy piece Newtown had probably expected, but, hey, publicity was publicity. Then she planned on tracking down Leonard Crane.
She tuned out the chatter of computers, the good-natured ribbing that went on between colleagues, and the constant grumbling about the swill that passed for coffee and concentrated on writing the piece. An hour later, she read it, decided it would do and pushed the Send key.
“McAdams, special delivery.” The office gofer handed her a large envelope with no return address. Cold brushed the back of her neck as she noted that it was identical to the other letters.
“Thanks.” Scout signed for it, slit open the envelope and looked at the message composed with words cut from a magazine and pasted on a sheet of cheap paper. Another threat. Okay. She’d dealt with threats ever since she’d earned her first byline in the paper’s city section.
This was no different.
She read the words aloud, testing them. “Mind your own business. Or we’ll mind it for you.” She pinched her lips together even as she shook her head, as though the slight movement would dispel the unwanted picture the letter etched in her mind.
Scout prided herself on her independence and self-reliance, but right now she wished she had someone to stand with her.
She’d thought she’d found that with her ex-fiancé, Bradley Middleton, but, after wooing her and even asking her to marry him, he’d left her. The experience had soured her on men for the moment. Maybe forever.
Forget Bradley and concentrate on the letter. Only, she didn’t want to think about the letters she’d received over the last month. She had never been one to stick her head in the sand, so why was she doing just that with the letters that were coming with increasing regularity? Nothing she’d done lately was like her, including wasting time thinking about Nicco Santonni.
Now that she wasn’t so shaken from nearly getting killed, she’d put it together. Nicco Santonni. Brother to Sal Santonni, her best friend Olivia’s husband.
It didn’t take much to call up a picture of her rescuer in her mind. Inky black hair a little too long for current fashion, ebony eyes hooded beneath slashing brows and sharply angled cheekbones made for an arresting face. Add to that a body that looked like it was forged from steel and you had a man whom any woman would stop and give a second...or third glance to.
She forced her thoughts away from the handsome Nicco Santonni to her self-imposed mission. Digging into union murders meant investigating the unions themselves. When her mother had begun research for her exposé of Savannah’s labor unions, she’d told Scout that graft was most often the cause of murder in unions. Ironically, that same research had resulted in the murder of both of Scout’s parents.
Six weeks ago, Scout had started going through her parents’ papers. She should have done it months earlier, but after her release from the hospital, she’d been too bogged down in grief and pain to look through their belongings. She’d started with her father’s notes for the university physics classes he taught. The clutter triggered a memory of his self-deprecatory comparison to Disney’s absentminded professor. He was a brilliant lecturer but chronically disorganized in his paperwork.
With a sigh, she’d turned her attention to her mother’s research for her latest true-crime book. It was among those notes that Scout had found information about Leonard Crane and her mother’s belief that he was involved with union murders.
For the last six weeks, Scout had been digging for proof behind her mother’s suspicions. Not for the first time, she wished she had plunged into the investigation earlier.
She’d healed from her bullet wound far more quickly than she had the crippling pain of acknowledging that her parents had been taken from her through a hideous act of violence. After leaving the hospital, she’d wandered around in a daze for months. It was only recently that she’d been able to set aside her grief to fix her attention on finding the truth.
She wadded the paper into a ball and then executed a perfect three-pointer into the trash can. Upon reflection, she stood, walked to the trash can, and retrieved the paper.
Why had this threat turned her into a Nervous Nellie? Scout forced a laugh over her uncharacteristic fears. That wasn’t who she was.
Her hometown was a beautiful city, steeped in history and tradition, but it wasn’t without its faults. She had seen firsthand the ugliness that lay beneath the beauty, the violence that destroyed lives and occasionally even took them.
The crumpled paper in her hand yanked her back to the present.
Meticulously,