by Misty Evans
“Thank you, but I’m not allowed. It’s confidential.” She bit her bottom lip, scrunched her face together in her best sad-girl-woe-is-me look. Being a petite blonde and batting her eyes didn’t hurt either. “Just shoot.” She sighed. “My boss will kill me if I don’t deliver this.”
“Oh, honey.” the doorman said.
Yes, my love, come to me.
“Don’t get upset. Let me give him a ring. I have his cell number in our files.” He winked. “I’d say this is an emergency.”
Putty.
In.
Her.
Hands.
She offered up a grateful smile. “It sure is. Thank you so much.”
Hope pushed through the revolving door of the Corner Tap, a place known to locals for their fancy martinis and young up-and-coming crowd. Singles flocked to the place in hopes of meeting Mr. or Mrs. Right, who also happened to have a Master’s or law degree. Yep. This was the place to get hooked up, in whatever fashion necessary, with a future CEO.
Or a Supreme Court Justice law clerk.
The bar was packed, the noise level ear-shatter worthy from all the different voices mingling together. Music played in the background, but for as loud as the place was, the music only served as an annoyance. She focused straight ahead and her skin began to itch at the thought of shoving through the crowd lined four deep at the bar. She glanced left where a single row of tables extended to the back wall of the long, narrow building. At best, those tables were built for three people. Four if they were midgets like Hope. From what she could see, every table had a least five people crammed into it.
Which meant she’d definitely be bumping bodies trying to squeeze through. Chances were, she wouldn’t escape without some pig copping a feel, but a girl had to do what a girl had to do.
“I’m going in,” she muttered.
Halfway down the bar, she’d managed to not get groped as she reached a group of twenty-something guys about to slam a shot home.
And...hello Joel Bigley. She’d never met him in person, but she’d seen enough photos of him to know, without a doubt, this was him. For one, he had the dark-haired, sexy looks that could have put him on the cover of GQ if his law career went bust.
Given that he was clerking for the Supreme Court, she didn’t anticipate he’d need that GQ gig. By the time his one year commitment to the Court was fulfilled, he’d have the nation’s top law firms wooing him with six figure jobs and a signing bonus that could top $200,000.
I should have been a brilliant law clerk.
Nah. The money would be great, but she had a taste for something different. Something like the White House. And not as President.
She stopped behind Joel and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and his dark eyes met hers. A little glassy. Hmmm...she’d have to be careful here. What she didn’t want was to take advantage of an inebriated law clerk. Had she been a journalist chasing a story for her next column—or a lawless blogger like Mr. Hawkeye—she’d go for the kill, maybe even buy him a few more cocktails to get him talking a little more.
Not now though. They were, after all, on the same team and part of her wanted to smack him for being fool enough to be out drinking the same day his boss had gotten killed on a bridge. Dumbass.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
He roamed his gaze over her in an appreciative I-will-give-you-the-orgasm-you-so-desperately-need look. If only he wore a cowboy hat and boots.
“Hi. And I’m not ‘Gorgeous’, I’m Hope. Your doorman called you about me.”
“Oh, right. The delivery.” Again, he eyeballed her up and down, his eyes dragging over her boobs. “What’s this delivery?”
And right then she decided that no, she would not let him slide for the ‘gorgeous’ comment or assaulting her with his eyes. What did he think? She was a stripper sent into a packed bar. For God’s sake!
She jerked her head toward the door. “Can we talk a second?”
A sly grin drifted across his face and her last working nerve dropped dead. Bye-bye.
“Relax, sailor. Whatever you’re thinking, this is not about me—or you—getting naked and bumping uglies.” Joel’s friend coughed up part of his beer and Hope gave his back a few good whacks. “Easy there, pal. You okay?”
“Uh, good,” the guy choked out. “Thanks. I think I might love you though.”
“Excellent. On both counts.” She turned back to Joel. “Let me clarify who I am. I’m Hope Denby from the Public Information Office.”
“Shit,” Joel said.
“Yeah. Let’s head outside for a few minutes.”
“Don’t leave,” Joel’s friend said. “I’m serious. I might love you.”
Men. But heck, it’d been a rough day and a little playful banter never hurt a girl. While waiting on Joel to ditch his glass, she spun back to his friend, hit him with her flirtiest smile. ”Do you own a cowboy hat and boots?”
“If I need to, I can.”
“Wrong answer, handsome.” She offered up a little finger wave. “Gotta go. Bye.”
Once again, Hope pushed through the crowd with Joel on her heels. She’d even glanced over her shoulder to make sure he hadn’t bailed on her. He certainly looked spooked enough and she wasn’t taking any chances.
Outside the bar she strode to the corner of the building away from the few folks milling around the front door.
“What’s this about?” Joel wanted to know.
“Well, if you’d returned any of my calls from the last three hours you’d know it’s about Justice Turner.”
Joel leaned against the brick and sighed. “I’ve had reporters calling me all day. I haven’t responded. I swear. You guys told us no contact with the press. I’m sticking to it.”
“That’s good.”
“So why are you hunting me down?”
She eyed him, taking stock of his slightly glassy eyes. “Are you drunk?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
He shrugged. “I’m working a buzz. Rough day at the office.”
“And you think it’s wise to be in a bar where any reporter might find you? I found you easily enough by flirting with your doorman.”
He boosted off the wall, started walking toward the bar entrance again. “I don’t need this. Whatever you want, too bad.”
Silly, silly boy. As if she’d let him get away that easily. “Joel, I had a call from a blogger today. He had an interesting tip he wanted to confirm. One intriguing enough to get me to leave the office and find you on a night when my co-workers are probably still working the phones.”
Joel stopped walking—yes, now you’ve got it—and turned back to her. “What?”
Refusing to move from her spot, she crooked one finger, urging him back to her. He hesitated a moment, which she found amusing since she didn’t have a doubt that he’d give in.
He stopped about a foot from her. “What tip?”
“That’s the thing. He didn’t have details, but this particular blogger is known for his corruption stories. He can sniff it out like a hound dog on a duck. Some bloggers are careless with their facts. I’m not saying he’s not, but from what I’ve learned today his track record is spot-on. Which means his contacts aren’t just good, they’re solid as hell.”
“And?”
“He claims the Chief Justice was about to make an important ruling. One so critical that what happened on the bridge might have been a setup.”
Joel’s eyebrows shot up. “Ridiculous. It was road rage. The guy went psycho and when Turner tried to calm him down, he got shot for his troubles.”
“That may be it. Frankly, I’m praying it is, because then we’d get rid of this nutty conspiracy theorist.”
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but maybe you should ignore him.”
“And risk him writing a blog post that could go viral and create all sorts of havoc? That’s asking for trouble. What I need is to steal his thunder, take the air out of his sails and all that other cliché s
tuff. What I need from you is a list of cases the Chief Justice was reviewing to possibly be heard by the Court and might be important enough that they’d risk killing the Chief Justice if he planned on ruling the wrong way. Any ideas?”
A cell phone rang. Joel’s apparently because he dug into his suit pocket and silenced it. “I only work some of the cases.”
Silly, silly boy.
The justices split their cases between their four clerks, eliminating the risk of four opinions on each case. By splitting the workload, each clerk took ownership of an individual case and did everything from drafting memos on the legal issues to prepping the justice. In some instances, the clerk wrote the first draft of an opinion and the justice did the editing.
Hope knew all this and Joel knew she knew. Only, she wasn’t falling for the idea that he wasn’t aware of what other clerks might be working on. Maybe they couldn’t talk to outsiders about cases, but they also had access to a private dining hall in the Supreme Court cafeteria. In that dining room, Hope had heard, all the good gossip about what went on in the judge’s chambers happened.
“Joel?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t con me. I’m a journalist at heart. I know you and your fellow clerks discuss cases and I don’t believe, not for one second, you haven’t discussed the meaty stuff behind the walls of your private dining room. Now, if there’s even a chance Justice Turner was murdered on that bridge, I need to know before someone gets ahead of us on it.”
Joel squeezed his eyes closed, blew air through his clenched teeth. “I can’t talk about it, but we had a heater of a case. We all wanted it. It’s career-making stuff.”
As if being a clerk for the Supreme Court wasn’t? “Was it Justice Turner’s case?”
“Yes, but he didn’t assign it to me.”
“What case is it?”
Again Joel hesitated and for the first time she wondered if Mr. Loose Lips would actually keep those lips shut. Maybe Rob had his info wrong and Joel wasn’t the chattiest of the clerks. She inched closer to him, met his gaze in the dark where only the neon bar sign threw shadows over the sidewalk. “I’ve got less than thirty minutes until this blogger starts putting together a post that will cause rampant speculation. That speculation may or may not prompt scrutiny over all of Turner’s cases. Including ones you assisted with. You ready for that, Joel?”
He gave her a pained look.
“Thought so,” she said. “Tell me the case. I promise you I will not reveal who told me. Not even to my boss. All I need is the name and I’ll do the rest.”
He straightened, adjusted the sleeves on his coat, buttoned it and turned away.
Dammit. She thought she’d had him. He took two steps and stopped.
“Kenton Labs,” he said. “Don’t contact me again.”
Hope stood on the sidewalk, shivering at the dropping temperature because her lightweight coat was so not the apparel for standing outside on a frigid March night. But she needed to speak to her boss and moving inside or into a cab where she’d be overheard wouldn’t do. She’d rather take her chances on the street where she could freely move out of earshot.
She’d tried Amy’s office line and her two cell phones, but the only answer she’d received was voice mail. Next she dialed Rob. Without a doubt, he’d still be at his desk. When it came to dedication, they were the rock stars.
He answered on the second ring.
“Rob! Are you at the office?”
“The Chief Justice is dead. Where else would I be?”
Right. Whatever. Dumb question. “I need Amy. ASAP. I tried her office and her cells and she’s not picking up.”
“She’s in another meeting. Gave us the fire or death speech again. What’s up?”
Ohmygod. She checked her watch for the thousandth time. Fifteen minutes to deadline. “I can’t say specifically, but I think I have a lead on this crazy blogger’s tip. I need Amy to sign off on me talking to him or he’s going to run what he has. Which can’t be much. Or accurate.”
“Then call him.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know. Tell him something that’ll keep him from causing rampant speculation that may or may not be true and may or may not make the stock market crash.”
The stock market. Yikes.
“Rob!”
“What?”
She gripped the phone, squeezing so tight the screen should have popped off. Her friend was a drama enthusiast, but he could be right. “I don’t know.” She checked her watch again. Twelve minutes. “I have to call him and stall. I’ll tell him I want to meet. That’ll buy us time. Sit on Amy’s office. If she gets out of that meeting, tackle her and call me before this blogger creates pandemonium.”
Chapter Three
FBI SEEKS TO LEGALLY HACK YOU
Brice hit the return key. Denby had never called him back, and while he’d told her he’d run with the Chief Justice story if she didn’t contact him by eight, he really had nothing more than a tip. Not enough to create a full-fledged theory that maintained any sort of credibility.
The other breaking news stories had failed to show promise of any conspiracies, and nine o’clock was quickly approaching. This was the best he could do on such short notice.
It was still a damn good story. One his followers would eat up. A recent tip he’d received from an old friend of Grey’s still inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation had put him on the trail. The FBI had quietly requested that the Department of Justice make a change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure dictating how law enforcement agencies had to conduct criminal prosecutions from investigation to trial. The specific rule the FBI was targeting outlined the terms for obtaining a search warrant for computers whose location had been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network.
Like Brice’s.
Most of his followers were in the same boat, so this would be a hot topic for them as well. Civil rights and privacy, even in one’s own home, had been trampled to death by The Patriot Act. The NSA tracked every wire and every airwave, as the Snowden scandal had revealed.
Not that Brice hadn’t seen that coming long before Edward Snowden went public. Homeland and the FBI were simply playing catch-up to the NSA’s ability to bring Orwell’s 1984 into the twenty-first century.
Another reason he didn’t trust anyone. Not the government, not the people in authority, not even his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tilly. Well, maybe Mrs. Tilly. The widow didn’t have a devious bone in her body and made him a tuna casserole once a month.
He finished the article, did a spell check, and scheduled the blog to go live at nine o’clock.
Time for a break.
Thank God Grey’s fiancee, Sydney, felt sorry for him like Mrs. Tilly and regularly left food on his doorstep. She respected his privacy—something Grey didn’t—and never tried to barge inside his home. For whatever reason, she felt indebted to him. Maybe it was his help on the AG case, but Syd had taken a liking to him, and like Mrs. Tilly, she might even be trustworthy. He grabbed a stack of her delicious Toll House chocolate chip cookies and shoved one in his mouth just as his phone rang.
Not his private cell, his computer phone. Another tip on a story?
Dropping the cookies, he answered with his usual quote and ID.
“Um, hello?” A female voice, soft and nervous drifted from his speakers, half-muffled as if she were trying to keep this quiet. “Mr. Hawkeye? It’s me, Hope Denby.”
Finally. The brat from the Public Information Office.
She didn’t sound as fired up this time. He hit the button on his computer to open his recording software anyway. Maybe she would give him something he could run with. If nothing else, he liked listening to her smoky, but oh-so-innocent sounding voice. No wonder they had her on phone duty…she could make any man—even a die-hard man on a mission like him—forget what he’d called for. “Just Hawkeye, Ms. Denby. Like the comic book hero. Do you have a quote for me?”
“Not exactly.”
Brice had spent all evening trying to pin down the list of cases Turner had been prepared to review. He gotten through about half of them before he’d had to quit and get the blog written and posted. “Then why are you calling me?”
“I think I know the case your source was referring to. The one Chief Justice Turner was about to rule on.”
“And?”
“Can we meet? I’d rather not discuss this over the phone. It’s...sensitive.” She heaved a breath that sent his mind swirling in lascivious ways. “I know you’re on a deadline. I can come to your office.”
Oh, no she couldn’t. Still, something made him hesitate. Regardless of the sex on a stick intonation in her voice jacking up his thoughts—and teasing his cock—this was definitely not the confident, flippant information officer he’d talked to earlier in the day.
Hope Denby was freaked out. Freaked out meant there might be something to Lodestone’s tip. His pulse quickened. He heard himself repeating Mitch’s earlier statement. “I imagine every case that comes before the Supreme Court is considered sensitive. Can you give me more than that?”
“Not over the phone.”
She was stubborn. Turn on the heat. “I’m on a deadline, Ms. Denby. At least give me something so I know how sensitive this case is.”
“Sorry, no can do. Just tell me where your office is, and I’ll come right over.”
She wasn’t taking him seriously. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I don’t have time for it.”
He hung up. Waited.
The phone rang. He smiled as he answered.
As expected, it was the brat. Her tone was assertive again, and highly annoyed. “Did you just hang up on me?”
He couldn’t help it. He smiled to himself. “Look, I realize you have no real interest in helping uncover a conspiracy against the Chief Justice, but I don’t appreciate you wasting my time so I miss my deadline.”
“I’m not blowing smoke, here, Mr. Hawkeye. I really need to meet with you.”
Damn it. The itch he’d felt earlier when Lodestone had called flared to life right under his breastbone. He never met his sources face-to-face. Too dangerous. But he had to know what she’d found out.