Deadline

“I didn’t see any reason to mention it,” she informed him. “Besides, I was happy to hear from you—even if you did only call me for a favor.”

“Darling, you know I like hearing that sweet voice of yours.”

“Then prove it and come pay me a visit.”

Not about to go that route, he said, “And just when would you manage to see me if I did come down? From what my momma tells me, you’re being wined and dined by those two fine gentlemen seven nights a week.”

“Your momma’s exaggerating,” she said.

“You mean Shane hasn’t been sending you flowers from my momma’s shop every day for two weeks now?”

“Well…”

“My momma said she’s having to get roses from Jackson because she’s gone through all her local suppliers filling Shane’s orders to you.”

Mary Lee giggled. “It is kinda sweet, isn’t it? Shane is such a nice boy.”

Spencer winced. “Darling, no male over the age of twelve likes being referred to as a boy and sending a woman flowers every day isn’t sweet. It’s serious. The man’s obviously in love with you.”

Mary Lee sighed. “I suppose he is.”

“Let’s not forget poor old Donny either. From what I remember, that fella’s got it bad for you, too. Darling, you need to put those two men out of their misery and marry one of them.”

“I just might do that,” she informed him. “That is unless a certain newspaperman gives me a reason not to.”

“Mary Lee,” he began, a warning note in his voice because he didn’t like the direction of the conversation.

“Come on, Spence, haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like if you and I got together?”

“Sure I have, darling. I’m a man, aren’t I?” He laughed. “But you know as well as I do that it would never work. Aside from the fact that I’m too old for you—”

“You’re only ten years older than me,” she protested.

Ignoring her, he repeated, “Aside from the fact that I’m too old for you, the two of us as a couple would never work. We’re too much alike. We both like getting our own way too much. You’d want to be out partying and I’d want to chase down a story. We’d end up breaking each other’s hearts and ruining a good friendship. You wouldn’t want to see that happen, now, would you?”

“No,” she conceded. “I suppose you’re right. We probably wouldn’t work.”

“We wouldn’t. But if I thought we had even a snowball’s chance in hell, I’d be first in line knocking on your door,” he said, stretching the fib to ease her bruised ego.

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to satisfy myself with us being friends.”

“That’s my girl. And as much as I love talking to you, darling, I’ve got a deadline staring me in the face. So I need to get back to work.”

“Wait,” Mary Lee said. “For a minute there I almost forgot why I called you. Remember you asked me to let you know if a woman named Abbott showed up here in Grady?”

Spencer went still. He’d called Mary Lee after he’d received that last call from the mystery woman, chiding him for not attacking Caine outright in his column. When she’d claimed that Tess Abbott was in Mississippi asking questions about her father’s suicide and the long-ago murder case handled by Caine, he hadn’t put much faith in it. He’d come to the conclusion that the woman was probably one of Caine’s jilted lovers, but that she wasn’t going to provide him with anything he could use. Even if she had, given the records of the nation’s top politicians, he doubted that documentation of an affair would derail the man’s campaign anyway. He certainly hadn’t put any stock into her claims about the Abbott woman. Still, on the off chance that the lady knew what she was talking about, he’d called Mary Lee. When Mary Lee had told him that no one named Abbott was in Grady, he had written it off as another lead that went nowhere. He certainly hadn’t expected anything to come of it.

“Spence, you go to sleep on me, sugar?”

“Sorry, Mary Lee. Yeah, I remember asking you about her. You said no one by that name had been in Grady.”

“Well, she hadn’t. But she’s here now. And she’s staying right here at Magnolia Guesthouse. She checked in not ten minutes ago.”

“What did she look like?” Spencer asked, wanting to be sure it was the right Tess Abbott, the one whose picture he’d found at the TV news Web site in D.C.

“Tall, dark-haired, late twenties. Nice eyes. Kind of pretty, I guess, if you like your women on the skinny side. She seemed nice enough, but very serious. She didn’t talk much. Not even to Miss Maggie, and Miss Maggie’s so nice, I swear even a mute would talk to her.”

Spencer didn’t bother commenting on Maggie O’Donnell. It wasn’t her he was interested in. “And she registered as Tess Abbott?”

“Sure did. I ran the credit card myself.”

So, Jody Burns’s daughter really was in Grady—which meant the mystery caller had known what she was talking about after all. Maybe she was also right in claiming that Tess Abbott would be able to provide him with the information he needed to take down Everett Caine.

“Don’t I even get a thank-you for spying for you?”

“Thanks, Mary Lee. You’re a real sweetheart,” Spencer told her.

“So who is this Tess Abbott anyway? She an old girlfriend or something?”

Spencer laughed and imagined Mary Lee’s baby blues turning a shade of green. “Hardly, darling. I’ve never even met the woman. She’s just a means to an end, a connection to a story that I’m working on.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. But then I don’t know why I’m surprised, I mean, she’s really not your type. Seemed a little cool, if you ask me.”

Spencer didn’t comment. From the photo he’d seen of Tess Abbott on her station’s Web site, she’d struck him as cool and sophisticated. He knew the type, had come across them often enough in his thirty-four years—rich, cool beauties who might not mind playing footsies with a journalist, but when it came to getting serious they’d look for somebody at daddy’s stock brokerage firm. Or in Tess Abbott’s case, probably an up-and-coming attorney at some D.C. law firm. Not that it mattered to him one way or another. Like he’d told Mary Lee, Tess Abbott was nothing to him but a means to an end.

“But then as my momma’s always telling me, I shouldn’t go making judgment on a person just because of the way he or she looks, should I?”

“If you did, I’d hate to see what you’d think of me,” Spencer teased.

Mary Lee laughed. “You don’t want to know what I thought about you the first time I saw you.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Spencer told her. “I owe you one, darling. Next time I’m in Grady, dinner—on me.”

“And just when is that going to be, Spencer Reed?”

“Soon. Real soon,” he promised.

“Well, be forewarned. I fully intend to collect on that dinner.”

“I’ll remember that, darling,” he said, and after thanking her again he ended the call.

Leaning back in his chair, Spencer cupped his hands behind his head and thought about Tess Abbott’s arrival in Grady. He’d reviewed what he could find about her father’s murder trial after the mystery woman’s last call. He’d been surprised to discover that the man’s four-year-old daughter had been allowed to testify against him. Given her age and relationship to the defendant, he would have thought any judge in his right mind would have rejected her as a witness. But then Jody Burns’s dead wife hadn’t been just anyone’s daughter. She’d been the daughter of a U.S. senator, and the little girl in question had been his one and only grandchild. Spencer had come to the conclusion that it had been with Senator Abbott’s approval that the four-year-old had been put on the witness stand. He couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the senator’s idea or Caine’s. Either way, the decision sucked. And if the mystery caller was to be believed, Caine had rigged the trial.

If he had rigged it, the guilty verdict had paid off in spades for Caine, Spencer thought. With the notoriety of the trial, Caine had quickly moved up the legal ranks from assistant D.A. to D.A., and then he’d made a successful run for lieutenant governor. Now he was only a few weeks away from the election that could make him the state’s next governor.

Unless he found a way to stop him. And right now the only way it seemed he might be able to do that would be to prove that the mystery caller had been right—that Caine had somehow rigged that long-ago trial resulting in a man’s conviction and eventually, his suicide.

The television screen across the room flashed with an image of Caine on the late-night news. Spencer reached for the remote and hit the sound button.