LOVING HER SOUL MATE (14 page)

“But doesn’t the police oversight
committee investigate all homicides?”

John snorted angrily.
 
“Give me a break, Shay.
 
Those guys are nothing but patsies for
McNamara.
 
Hand-picked
and family-owned.
 
They will
report that the chief handled everything perfectly fine.”

“The public will be outraged by
this, you know that?”

“I know.”

“They’ll demand McNamara’s
resignation.”

“I know that too.
 
They’ll demand mine too.”
 
John exhaled, ran his hand across his
face.
 
“But that’s beside the point now.
 
You’ve got to go public before another woman
dies.
 
I just got wind of what was going
on and I can’t remain silent.
 
Going to
McNamara or his cronies on the oversight committee would be like a convict
complaining about the warden.
 
They’ll
just plant evidence on me or declare I’m insane or do something to discredit
me.
 
But they will never admit the
truth.”

“Unless the truth is revealed
before they know a damn thing.”

John smiled.
 
He loved how quick she was.
 
“That’s right, Shay.
 
That’s exactly right.”

Her doorbell rang and both of them
looked surprised.
 
Shay stood up and
walked over to her bay window.
 
Saw
Ronnie Burk standing on her porch.

“It’s Ronnie,” she said.
 

John gathered up the photos.
 
“Put these away,” he said.
 
“I don’t want Burk’s paws on any of
this.
 
He’ll just take it straight to
McNamara.”

This was news to Shay.
 
“You think Ronnie would do that?
 
Really?”

“Really,” John said as Shay walked
over and accepted the photos.
 
Their
hands touched.
 
John didn’t remove his
hand.
 
“And I’d better go.”

Shay nodded.
 
“Okay,” she said.

John stared into those wondrously
big, bright eyes of hers.
 
Leaving was
the last thing he wanted to do, but fate had spoken.
 
Ronnie had arrived.
 
“Take care of
yourself
,
Shay,” he said.

“I will.
 
And thanks for the information.
 
I won’t name you at all in my story.”

“You do so if you have to.
 
Don’t protect me at the expense of this story
getting out, you hear me?
 
You get the
story out, no matter what.
 
Even if
Ronnie mentions the fact that he saw me at your place tonight, and he gets word
to McNamara, you get that story out.
 
I’m
depending on you, Shay.”

Shay felt a swell of respect for
this man.
 
This move by him would more
than likely cost him his job, but he was still willing to do it.
 
She nodded.
 
“I’ll get the story out,” she assured him.

John was certain now that he had
made the right decision.
 
He clasped her
hand tighter as his heart swelled, too, with feelings for this woman.
 
And he leaned to her, to kiss her on the
lip,
he needed to feel her soft lips on his.
 
He wanted just a small, sweet kiss from
her.
 
But she looked at him.

“I’m sure your ex-wife wouldn’t
approve,” she said.

Before John could respond, the
doorbell rang again.
 

They continued to look into the
other’s eyes.
 
Both were experiencing
that kind of
what could have been
regret that always came along at the worst possible time.
 

“I’d better hide these,” Shay said
of the papers and made her way to her bedroom.

John exhaled, amazed that he was
beginning to have the kind of feelings for Shay he hadn’t had for any female
since he was a young man in love.
 
But
that so-called love only got him heartache after heartache and then a train
wreck of a marriage.
 
So much for love,
he thought as he made his way to the front door.

Ronnie Burk walked into Shay’s
home with a silly smirk on his face, as if he was certain he’d just interrupted
some hot n’ heavy sexual workout.
 
When,
in truth, John hadn’t been able to get a kiss out of Shay.
 
Not a chaste little kiss.
 
Not that it wasn’t his
fault.
 
It was.
 
He was the one who threw up that sorry-ass
ex-wife of his like some roadblock against Shay’s real or imagined
interest.
 
A strong lady like her wasn’t
going to just overlook that fact and let him slobber all over her anyway.

      
But
Ronnie, here, on the other hand, he thought, was single.
 
She would have no problem with his chaste,
sweet kisses.
 
But then he dismissed that
idea.
 
Shay had better taste than that.

“Captain Malone, hi,” Ronnie said
as he entered, his hand extended.
 
“Funny to find you here.”

“I was just leaving,” John said,
shaking his extended hand.

“Not on my account, I hope.”

John never did like this guy.
 
“You flatter yourself, Burk,” he said as he
stepped past Ronnie to get out of the door.
 

Ronnie laughed.
 
“Oh, but I speak truth to power, my
friend.”
 
John glared at him.
 
And then kept going.
 
“And I still need to talk to you about the
Broadman case, Cap.
 
You promised me an
exclusive.”

“Come by my office tomorrow,” John
yelled without looking back.
 
“We can
discuss it then.”

“Sure thing, Cap,” Ronnie said,
still smiling, as he watched John Malone leave.
 
Then he closed the front door.
 

And his smile disappeared.
 

SIX

“Burk! Turner!
In
my office!”
 
Ed Barrington stood
at his office door and yelled across the Brady Tribune newsroom.
 
Ronnie immediately jumped from his desk and
hurried into the office.
 
Shay finished
the last of the sentence she was typing on her desk computer, grabbed a pad,
pen, and her secure-lid cup of coffee, and hurried to the office.

When she walked in, Ronnie was
already seated in front of the desk and Ed was seated behind it.

“What’s up?” she asked as she took
the seat beside Ronnie’s.

“The shit has hit the fan,” Ed
said, “and McNamara’s talking about libel suits and defamation of character,
he’s hot.”

“We told the truth,” Shay said.

“But you told the truth with no
sourcing,” Ronnie said in his know-it-all voice.
 
“Nobody was willing to go on record.
 
That’s always a weak story, Shay, you have to
know that.
 
McNamara may just have a serious
point here.
 
I don’t think we should have
ran
with the story to begin with.
 
If I would have been informed prior to the
running of the story, if you would have asked my advice, which you or nobody
else did, I would have said to not run it.”

“We did the right thing,” Ed said
and Ronnie frowned.
 

Shay inwardly sighed relief.
 
Ed knew how it worked around these southern
towns.
 
Nobody was going to talk on the
record, not this early in the game, anyway.
 

“There’s a press conference at
noon,” Ed continued.

“McNamara?” Shay asked.

“That’s right.
 
And he’s going to put on the righteous
indignation performance of the year so be prepared for it.
 
But the mayor’s going to be there too.”

Ronnie was impressed.
 
Wow
,
he mouthed but did not say.

“Wow is right,” Ed said, reading
his lips.
 
“And get
this
guys
: he’s not going to be on stage with McNamara, but in the audience
with the press.”

Shay shook her head.
 
“He wants to separate himself from his now
embattled police chief,” she said.

“That’s exactly right.
 
So you know McNamara’s coming out with both
barrels blazing.
 
I just want you to be
prepared for the incoming, Shay.”

“Me?” Shay asked, surprised.

“That’s right.
 
It’s your baby now.
 
You’re the one who got the evidence and got
us that front page exclusive.
 
I want you
to represent the Tribune at that press conference.”

Shay smiled.
 
“Thank-you, sir,” she said.
 
And if John Malone was there, she’d be
thanking him too.
 
Because of his
decision to trust her with this big breaking news story, there may just be a
victim spared tonight or tomorrow night or whenever the killer had hoped to strike
again.
 
And, to a far lesser degree, her
career just might begin to get off of life support.

“I’ll go with her,” Ronnie said as
he stood to his feet.
 
“To
keep her in line.”
 
He said this
with a smile, although it stung Shay.

“No need for that,” Ed said.
 
“Shay can handle it.
 
You take over the story about those Queen’s
Ridge burglaries.”

Shay wanted to smile and tell
Ronnie that that was what he got for keeping his mouth shut, but she didn’t go
there.
 
She, instead, kept her own mouth
shut, hurried out of the office, and began to prepare herself for her very
first Brady, Alabama close-up.

The City Hall press room was
jam-packed with reporters, from print reporters to television and radio anchors
to bloggers, and Shay took her seat in the middle of the pack.
 
She was so nervous she could barely breathe
comfortably.
 
The story broke this
morning, headline news, and her phone hadn’t stopped ringing from local news
channels who wanted more information.
 
Now
the mayor was standing against the side wall, a big, burly man with a scowl on
his face.
 
A scowl that
became even more animated when Chief Walt McNamara and Captain John Malone
stepped into the press room.
 

John wore his customary press
conference get-up: a tailored, double-breasted suit that made him
look
hunky and gorgeous as usual, and his expression was
decidedly stoic.
 
He, in fact, fit in so
well with McNamara and the entire cop culture that Shay almost had a difficult
time reconciling the man standing there with the man who put his entire career
on the line to expose a miscarriage of justice.
 
He put his entire career on the line for
victims who
many in society would conclude wasn’t
worth the price.
 
But he was still willing to pay it.
 

And McNamara had the look of a man
ready for a fight.

“The reason I called this press conference,”
the chief began, “is because of that weird story that appeared in the Brady
Tribune this morning.
 
It was the
headline story, it was.
 
Written by some
cub reporter, some Shay Turner, who frankly wouldn’t know her ass from her
head.
 
But I digress.”

There was a smattering of laughter
throughout the room.
 
Shay, however,
didn’t crack a smile.
 
There was nothing
funny about her report, or McNamara’s reaction to that report.

“This nobody reporter,” McNamara
went on, “decided to defame my good name, folks.
 
And she probably did it as payback for the
way I put her in her place the last time she was here.
 
You
remember,
when
she called me a racist?
 
But I
digress.”
 
Some
laughter again.
 

“In this nonsensical article she
wrote, an article that inexplicably made the headline of this morning’s paper,
I guess it was a slow news day, I don’t know.
 
But this nobody reporter accused me of participating in body dumps and
cooking books and refusing to alert the public of some so-called serial
killer.
 
I don’t know.
 
She might have even accused me of committing
the murders themselves!”