all by themselves, turned the wheel of his car. He was following the groom.
And he did a bang-up job, considering they went faster and faster and red lights became more suggestions than actual rules. This wasn’t good. Barry didn’t like traffic tickets. And he didn’t want to antagonize the cops, since they’d proven to be a good source of material in the past and he was still trying to mend fences there. And yet, as the speedometer inched past the speed limit—then galloped past it—he kept up with the van.
Ah, the adrenaline rush of a breaking story. He missed this.
And then the van pulled a maneuver straight out of the Action Movie Stunt Guide for Beginners. Maybe Intermediates. It ran up onto the median, pulled a U-turn against a red light and entered traffic on the other side.
There was no way Barry was taking his car over the curb. He couldn’t believe the van had made it. Swiveling around, he watched the van slip through a strip-center parking lot and down a service alley behind the stores until honking cars alerted him that the light had changed. By the time Barry managed to get his car over to the other side of the street, he’d lost the van.
Lost the van. Lost a big, solid white van that gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Man, was he rusty.
Barry parked his car. Okay, now what? There was something going on. He knew it. And he wanted to find out what. Needed to find out what.
He’d been a good boy and had taken his punishment for months, which was how long it had been since he’d sunk his teeth into a story meatier than caterers jacking up prices when it was too late to book anyone else.
He stared at the van’s license-plate number and tapped his notebook. What was with the best man? No one seemed to know him—they barely knew the groom. Barry checked the wedding info he’d been given for a last name. There it was. Best Man: Derek Stafford.
It would be interesting to find out about those two, and it was his job to write about the wedding party. Details, his new editor was constantly carping.
So she wanted details. Barry checked his Palm. Who in the police department could run the license plate for him? Stephanie? No. They’d dated and it had ended badly. Didn’t it always? Gina? Maybe. Barry had maintained his contacts as best he could, but even he had to admit that the atmosphere in the police department was chilly these days.
His last story had been an incredible piece of detective work. It had just been published too early, that’s all. But nobody held a grudge like a cop.
Barry mentally sussed out the Dallas squad room, eliminating the men—he’d taken enough guff from them over the society reporting—and settled on Megan. There had always been an unacknowledged something between them. The question of who was going to acknowledge it first and when added a nice zing to their dealings.
Barry had to admit that he missed seeing Megan at briefings more than he missed the briefings. In the cynical world of journalism, she’d been a beacon of honesty. She’d made him believe when he hadn’t wanted to. How corny was that?
Way too corny. He had to push the zing aside and snap out of it. The point was that Megan was his best bet to run the plate. He sent her a quick e-mail.
2
MEGAN ESTERBROOK STARED at her computer screen. The nerve! Her squeak of outrage alerted Gina, a fellow policewoman whose desk faced hers.
In answer to Gina’s arched eyebrow, Megan opened and closed her mouth inarticulately, then pointed a finger at her computer monitor.
“What?”
Megan stared at the return e-mail address and felt her hands sweat and her heart pound. How intensely annoying. Not trusting herself to speak, she jabbed her finger at the computer screen again.
From where she sat, Gina couldn’t see Megan’s screen. After walking around the desks, she stood next to Megan’s chair. “Barry.”
“Yes!” Megan hissed. “He e-mailed me!”
“So I see.”
Gina apparently failed to understand the depth of Barry’s 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