Improper Influence

by Melissa F. Miller

  She bristled. “I know all this. What’s your point?”

  He let out a long, loud breath. “My point is we live in a civilization. If your friend’s in danger, call the police, you big dummy.”

  He leaned across the mat and gave her a playful shove, breaking the tension.

  She feinted as if she were going to topple over and then charged him. They grappled. They were both fast, strong, agile. But she’d surprised him, and a moment later, he was on his back, pinned to the mat, her hand on his throat.

  “Who’s the big dummy now?”

  He managed a smile.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Detective Burton Gilbert, the senior detective on the elite Homicide Squad, which operated out of the Pittsburgh Police Bureau’s central headquarters, was no more a friend of Sasha’s than District Attorney Jeffries.

  But, she told herself, as she loitered in front of the ugly square building, waiting for the shift to change, he was less of an idiot.

  She’d taken Daniel’s suggestion to heart. So here she was, skulking around in the parking lot at three o’clock, as a small blue tide drifted into the building, and another drifted out. The first wave of night shift officers were reporting for duty, laughing and calling greetings across the lot, and their counterparts on the day shift were beginning to fan out into their personal vehicles to head home, tired and quiet.

  She stretched, loosening her tight muscles, still achy from the drubbing Daniel had handed her, and paced a small circle around the lot. For all she knew Gilbert was working another shift, staying late to catch up on paperwork, or had the day off and was chasing a golf ball around. She hadn’t wanted to call and ask him to see her. She put a fair amount of stock into the element of surprise. He would be more likely to help her if she caught him unaware.

  And, even if he blew her off, as she suspected he might, she’d be able to gauge his reaction in person. The phone was lousy for reading people. You had to sit across from them and watch their eyes. Diana Jeffries, for instance, had been scared. Of what, Sasha couldn’t say. But for all the woman’s practiced mannerisms, she’d given off a cloud of pure fear when Sasha had hinted that the highest levels of city government were corrupt. Sasha didn’t get the sense that Diana was in on it, just that she was terrified to dig her teeth into the issue.

  She could only hope the detective had a stronger appetite for the truth.

  She checked her watch. She’d give him another ten minutes. If he didn’t show, then she’d have to find something useful to do with her time. Like practice law.

  The door opened again. Gilbert stepped out. He was alone. He paused on the walkway and blinked into the sunlight. Then he pulled a pair of aviator glasses from his breast pocket and jammed them on his face. His face gave no indication that he’d seen Sasha, but he beelined toward her.

  “Counselor,” he rumbled in his deep voice as he stopped in front of her.

  “Detective Gilbert.”

  “I don’t suppose you just happen to be in the neighborhood?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And it’s too much to hope you’re coming to report a stolen trash can?”

  She smiled at the banter. Maybe she should have started with him instead of Diana. At least he had a sense of humor.

  “Afraid not.”

  He nodded gravely. “Figures.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about some deaths.”

  “Thought you swore off criminal law,” he observed.

  “I thought so, too, and yet here I am.”

  “Here you are.” He exhaled and snuck a peek at his watch. “Well, let’s go inside.”

  “How about I buy you a cup of coffee instead?”

  He smiled. “You’re a big shot lawyer. I’ll let you buy me breakfast.”

  “It’s 3:15.”

  “If you try Dot’s breakfast, you’ll want to eat it three times a day.”

  “Lead the way.”

  “Where’s your ride?”

  Sasha pointed to her Passat, parked three rows back.

  “I’ll wait for you at the end of the lot.”

  She hurried to her car before the detective could change his mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Leo hunched over the lace-topped table with his knees jammed against the underside, feeling like an elephant. A ridiculous elephant.

  A smiling waitress materialized.

  “Good afternoon. My name’s Cindy. Have you joined us for afternoon tea before?”

  Leo threw her an are you serious look?

  “Uh, no. Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, you’re in for a treat.”

  He suspected she had no idea how true that was.

  “I look forward to it. But, I’m actually waiting for someone, Cindy. She’ll be here shortly.”

  The waitress painted him with a look of her own. “Girlfriend?” she asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  A light sparked in her eyes and her smile grew brighter.

  Uh-oh.

  “Future mother-in-law,” he clarified.

  “Oh. Oh, well, I’ll just leave you with the menus, then.”

  He gave her a gentle smile and took the proffered menus.

  How he ended up at the William Penn for high tea with Valentina while Sasha was skulking around some greasy spoon with a homicide detective, he couldn’t say. But here he was.

  He scanned the menu. Scones? Clotted cream? Cucumber sandwiches?

  Based on her enthusiastic text message about a fried egg platter, Sasha seemed to have scored a better mid-afternoon meal. He took a swallow from the goblet of sweating ice water that Cindy had deposited in front of him. The beer he’d nursed while he’d been babysitting Bodhi at The Carlton lingered on his breath. The last thing he needed was for Valentina to think her unemployed future son-in-law spent his days drinking while her daughter busted her butt at the office.

  He gulped another swallow at the thought and wished for a breath mint.

  Valentina came gliding toward the table, trailing the hostess.

  He stood and Valentina present her cheek for a European kiss.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  “Don’t be silly.” He pulled out her chair and tried not to breathe on her.

  “Julian woke up fussy after his nap, and I couldn’t leave him with Grandpa like that,” she explained.

  “Of course not.”

  Leo was fairly certain Sasha’s father knew his way around a cranky baby, having had four kids of his own, but he wasn’t about to contradict her.

  “I’m so glad you were able to meet me,” she continued. “I’m sure you’re very busy ... job hunting?”

  He tamped down a smile. He’d figured she’d suggested this little get together so she could probe him about his financial situation. He figured it was a fair point for a parent to wonder about. Although Sasha would be livid if she knew Valentina was prying.

  “I’m not really focused on looking for another position, to be honest. I’m enjoying spending time with Sasha too much to think about rejoining the daily grind.”

  The skin around her eyes tightened, and she plucked at the napkin in her lap.

  “Well, that’s ... nice, I guess.”

  He decided to cut her a break. He leaned across the table and pierced her worried eyes with his own. “Mrs. McCandless, I promise you, Sasha doesn’t need me to take care of her, but I fully intend to.”

  The worry eased out of her face and she relaxed.

  “That’s comforting, Leo. But, I’ve told you, call me Val or Mom. And, I know Sasha thinks she doesn’t need anyone—”

  “She’s right.”

  Valentina stiffened. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “She doesn’t need me, but she wants me around anyway. That’s even better. You should be proud to have raised such a self-reliant woman, Val.”

  A pleased flush spread across her face.

  “That’s
kind of you to say. She is very accomplished—if a little prickly.”

  He’d humor her to a point, but he was pretty sure it would be bad form to agree with her. The niceties of navigating Sasha’s large family kept him on his toes. The only son of single mother who moved around a lot for her job as a traveling nurse, he had no experience dealing with the dynamics of an extended family.

  He dropped his eyes to the menu and changed the subject. “I’ve never had tea before. What should I order?”

  He half-listened while she expounded with great enthusiasm on matching the different loose teas with the miniature foods.

  “—of course, Russian teacakes would be a bit heartier, but we take what we can find,” she finished with a smile.

  He nodded.

  A small silence fell over the table.

  She looked around the opulent dining room and smiled at the Old World glamour.

  “Have you and Sasha considered having your reception here?” she asked in a perfectly casual voice. Her face was the very picture of innocence.

  He had to stop himself from laughing aloud.

  He’d been snookered. Had. Suckered. He had stumbled right into a trap set by a Russian-American grandmother. This was all a move to get a say as to the reception venue.

  Well played, Val. Well played, indeed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Bodhi was sitting at the conference table meditating on Sonny’s job offer when Naya banged into the room.

  He had no intention of allowing Sonny to buy him off, but the idea of teaching had resonated with him, so he was sitting with the idea to see how it felt.

  He opened his eyes warily.

  Naya had been in a fierce mood when he’d returned from the meeting with Sonny. She’d received the news that Leo had gone off to have tea somewhere with a fair amount of grumbling and some unkind comparisons between Leo and Queen Elizabeth. Then Sasha called in to say she was headed to some diner with some homicide detective, and Bodhi had the unusual experience of watching a black woman turn red.

  She’d been fuming ever since, so he’d made himself scarce—and quickly.

  “Do you need something?” he asked mildly as he turned to look at her.

  Instead of a face clouded with anger, he found himself looking into triumphant eyes and a victorious smile.

  “I found it! Well, I think I found it,” she said, shoving a sheaf of documents toward him with hands that trembled with excitement.

  He recognized the exuberance in her eyes. She’d had a breakthrough.

  “Show me.”

  She launched herself into the chair next to his and stacked the papers on the table.

  “Let me walk you through it.” Her voice was a half-octave higher than normal but steady.

  He rolled his chair closer to peer over her shoulder as she grabbed the first document.

  “See here, this is the agreement between VitaMight and Greenway. After the contract renewal, Herbal Attitudes took over the account from VitaMight, and agreed provide the supplements pursuant to the terms of the existing contract.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, while they were in the process of acquiring VitaMight’s natural supplements business, they were also out drumming up new business. That same month, they signed a contract with Better Life Beverages. Problem was, it’s also a requirements contract—”

  “What does that mean, exactly, a requirements contract?”

  “Okay, instead of a set amount of herbal ingredients, they agreed to supply all the herbals Better Life needed each month.”

  “Why would they do it that way? Isn’t it more advantageous for both parties if Better Life places an order each month at the prevailing market rate? That way no one takes a big hit if the market price changes dramatically.”

  Naya’s mouth twitched into a small smile and she nodded.

  “Exactly, although in this case, Better Life traded nimble pricing for a guaranteed supply. They apparently had big plans—the bottling plant, the sport team sponsorships—they needed to know they’d get as much of the four herbal ingredients as they needed, as quickly as they needed it. They were streamlining operations.”

  “So, they chose efficiency over economy.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “So, everything was fine for a few months, but then they ran into trouble. They couldn’t procure enough of the specific ingredients to fulfill Greenway’s and Life Juice’s orders and meet Better Life’s needs.”

  She placed an internal memorandum on top of the contract. He skimmed the short memo. As she’d said, it indicated that the company was having trouble getting sufficient quantities of ginseng from its existing sources.

  “Okay.”

  “The first thing Better Life did was to take over Life Juice. They bought the smaller company, siphoned off their herbals, and shuttered the smoothie joints.”

  “Ruthless.”

  “Efficient,” she corrected. “But, it wasn’t enough. They still needed more product—especially the wild red ginseng.”

  She leaned over and added a printout of an e-mail to the stack.

  “The team responsible for the Better Life account went to management and pled their case that the beverage company account was more lucrative and more important than the Greenway account.”

  A quick scan of the email confirmed her summary.

  “Let me guess? That’s when Herbal Attitudes decided to just breach the contract with the pharmacy.”

  “Right. It was a business decision. They knew they’d make a lot more money from the Better Life Beverages contract than they would from Greenway. So, they weighed the costs of breaching and decided it was worth it. They probably also correctly guessed that if Greenway sued, it’d sue VitaMight first.”

  “Okay. So?”

  A spiral-bound booklet landed on the table.

  “So, that decision paid off. Get a load of these financials.”

  She flipped the booklet open to a page marked with a red sticky flag and pointed to a spreadsheet.

  He gave a low whistle at the seven-figure income statement. “Wow, they’re doing well.”

  “Right. And their biggest customer is none other than Better Life Beverages. It’s not surprising, then, that the head of procurement fired off this nastygram to the guy in charge of buying the herbals.” She shuffled some pages and handed him a one-page sheet.

  Derek, I don’t care if the wild red ginseng is harvested by child laborers working under the most horrific conditions this side of a Taiwanese sweatshop. I don’t care if the growing methods don’t comport with accepted practices and the product itself is crap. Get me more. I need as much as we can get our hands on, regardless of source, cost, or purity.

  “Regardless of purity?” Bodhi read the last phrase aloud, and a chill tickled the back of his neck.

  “Regardless of purity,” Naya echoed.

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Bodhi didn’t know what was going through her head, but his was spooling images of four dead women in their twenties. He blinked, but the pictures remained.

  “Uh, are there any documents that show what this Derek person did?” he asked, trying to drive the slack faces from his mind’s eye.

  She shook her head.

  “But, you can connect the dots because two weeks later, according to the purchase order and invoice, they shipped Better Life Beverages a metric buttload of wild red ginseng.”

  He followed the pen she used as a pointer and felt his eyes widen at the amount. Metric buttload, indeed.

  “Any clues as to where they got so much, so fast?”

  “Nope.”

  “But, it’s clear they went outside their usual supply chain.”

  “Yep.”

  She gathered her documents into a stack and straightened them with a tap against the table.

  “You think Better Life knows they’re selling crap?”

  Her only answer was a small shrug. “Does it matter? If they d
on’t know, it’s only because they’re being willfully blind. That’s no better.”

  She had a point.

  “This is good work. You’re going to make a great attorney.”

  Her smile faded and a cloud passed over her face but she didn’t respond. She grabbed her documents and left the room without another word. She didn’t exactly slam the door shut, but she didn’t close it gently.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Sasha jumped when Naya stormed into the office with a bang.

  “What’s this?” Sasha asked, holding up a crumpled piece of paper.

  Naya glared at her. “It’s the summer reading list for incoming law students at Duquesne. Did you forget how to read?”

  Sasha shot back, “What’s it doing in your trash?”

  “Isn’t the better question what were you doing in my trash?”

  Naya tossed her a furious look and threw a pile of papers on her desk. They landed with a thud.

  Sasha took a moment to formulate a response. She’d faced down some evil people in the past—murderers, madmen, violent, abusive control freaks—but a pissed-off Naya was still a scary prospect.

  Naya’s highs were high, and her lows were low. And her temper was legend around Prescott & Talbott.

  Sasha squared her shoulders.

  “I was throwing away a tissue, and the paper caught my eye. I’m sorry for snooping. Now, why’d you throw away your reading list?”

  Naya clenched her jaw and gritted her teeth but didn’t answer.

  Sasha dropped her eyes to the paper. “I have some of these if you want to borrow them. To Kill A Mockingbird, A Man for All Seasons. I don’t think I have Inherit the Wind anymore, but you could probably fudge it and watch the movie instead of reading the play.”

  Naya snatched the list out of her hand.

  “I don’t have time for leisure reading.” She balled it up and threw it back into her wastebasket.

  “It’s not leisure reading. These books are designed to introduce all the bright-eyed idealists to the moral quandaries that go along with practicing law. I know you’ve had plenty of first-hand experience with the sticky decisions, but most of your classmates are going to be fresh out of college, Naya. Some of them have probably never held a job, any job—”