Don't Call Me Hero (26 page)

I leaned in, trying to pick up a few words from the OEC office, but they sounded muffled like Charlie Brown’s parents.

“You don’t?” He frowned. “Could you at least confirm if it was a match grant or if it was fully funded?”

I held my breath and waited for the answer.

“Okay. Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” He carefully returned the phone to its cradle.

“Well?” I asked, impatient. His face was unreadable.

“The woman on the phone said they don’t keep those kinds of records for very long—too much paperwork.”

My face fell. “So they don’t have our grant application.”

He shook his head. “But she did she tell me that every grant that has come out of their office in the past year for emergency communications has been fully funded.”

I swallowed hard. “So that means …”

A grin slowly took over his handsome face. “We’re back in business.”

+ + +

Wendy Clark was a busy woman—too busy to be bothered to reply to my repeated e-mail requests and voicemails to view the paperwork on the city’s general fund. Her negligence had me in the Office of the City Clerk for the second time of my short employment. We had confirmation that the interoperable radios should have been free through a grant with the OEC; now we required tangible evidence that neighboring agencies had actually paid the city of Embarrass for the free equipment. To do that, we needed to look at the records for the city’s general bank account.

Wendy Clark was an older woman, probably in her early fifties. Her dishwater blonde hair was permed in loose curls that fell just above her shoulders. She was deeply tanned and wore minimal makeup. As city clerk, she was one of the most powerful and influential women in the city, but her wardrobe didn’t match the title. That day when I caught her walking out of her office, she wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt.

“Mrs. Clark,” I called after her. “I need to look at the city’s bank account statements.”

“This isn’t the First National Bank, Miss Miller,” she clipped.

I forced out a laugh as if she’d told me a hilarious joke. “No, I know that. It’s for a case David and I are working on. We need the account information for the city’s general fund.”

I bet this woman was unbeatable at poker. Her face didn’t move. “Then I guess you’ll also need to get a warrant.”

If I could melt the city prosecutor, I should have been able to at least coax a smile out of the city clerk. But she clearly wasn’t having any of it. I wished I had Rich with me; that kid could sell ice cream in winter. He and David should team up: between David’s Boy Scout manners and boy-next-door good looks and Rich’s unique brand of bad boy charm, they would have been able to get away with anything. But all I needed was one lousy bank statement.

“Did I do something to offend you?” I asked.

“This has nothing to do with if I like you or not, Miss Miller. This isn’t high school. I’m simply not allowed to give you that account information.”

“When I get the warrant, you’ll have to fork over the information anyway,” I pointed out, “so why don’t you save us all some time and give me those transaction records?”

Her thin lips were pressed into a straight line. “I’ll see you when you have your warrant, Officer.”

David was sitting in the same place I’d left him when I returned to the department.

“I should have sent you to sweet talk the City Clerk.”

David looked up from a game on his cell phone. “She’s ornerier than hell isn’t she?”

I flopped down in a tired chair that looked older and more damaged than me. My boots immediately went on top of David’s desk. “Whatever happened to Minnesota nice?”

“I think she’s from Illinois,” he grinned.

“Well that explains it.”

He pulled a stack of forms out of a wall cubical. “Guess I’d better start on the warrant paperwork.”

+ + +

It took a few days of impatient waiting, but a judge finally granted our warrant and the City Clerk’s office released the account information for the city’s general fund. I had assumed it would be easy to notice a dozen or so five-figure deposits, but it wasn’t like the city’s general fund was used to fill up a car or buy groceries. Nearly every deposit, transfer, and withdrawal was in the tens of thousands of dollars range. I’d underestimated how many fiscal transactions a town made on a daily basis, let alone trying to uncover multiple deposits that had been made months ago.

We had a rough date from the original radio purchase order, but no way of knowing if the local agencies had paid Embarrass before or after that date. Narrowing down a timeframe when the deposits most likely occurred had helped expedite my research, but from the moment I saw the size of the file, I knew it was going to take a while.

I tossed a highlighter pen onto my kitchen island. My apartment had once again become investigation central. I had suggested asking Chief Hart directly what he knew about the OEC grant, but David had insisted that more than ever we required secrecy. Chief Hart was currently our number one suspect. According to every local chief I’d been able to get a hold of, he had been the one who’d e-mailed the local emergency responders about the collaborative grant application. My gut told me that Chief Hart had nothing to do with this. I owed him this job, so I owed him the benefit of the doubt. But if he wasn’t responsible, then who was?

“The money’s not here, David. It never went into this account.” I’d gone over the spreadsheets again and again for the months over which the payments should had been made, but I’d found no record of the money ever being deposited into the account.

“It’s there,” he insisted. “We just haven’t found it yet. Or maybe there’s a special bank account that was created specifically for the radios.”

Maybe, but I was starting to lose hope.

“My eyes are starting to cross,” I complained.

“Mine too.” David checked the time on his watch. “Shit. I’ve got my shift soon.” He stood from the kitchen stool. “Call me if you find anything?”

I nodded and went back to the never-ending spreadsheets. I had been expecting a searchable excel program, not the mountain of paper the Assistant City Clerk had dumped on the spare desk in the police department. I didn’t know if she was still annoyed because of David’s failure to follow through on dinner and she wanted to make things more difficult for us, or if there was something else going on.

I dialed Julia’s number before my apartment door had even closed with David’s departure.

“Hey,” I said when she picked up.

“Always so eloquent, Miss Miller.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Finishing up some work at City Hall. Why?”

“Do you want to come over?”

Julia’s laughter filled my ears. “Is this what a third-shift booty call sounds like? You call me at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

“We don’t have to do anything. We could just talk.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

I bit my lower lip. I missed her. I missed her beautiful face. But I couldn’t say that, not without risking scaring her off. “Maybe you could help me with the case. I think we’re at another dead end.”

When David and I had discovered the discrepancy with the OEC grant, I had filled in Julia on all the new details. She was smart, she knew the city and proper procedures, and we needed that. Plus, it gave me an excuse to talk to her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“If the money’s not in the city’s general fund, how do we prove any wrongdoing?”

“There could be another bank account specific to the police department,” she noted.

“David suggested that too,” I said. “But do I really have to look over the bank records of
every
account associated with the city?” I could hear the whine in my tone.

“No, dear. Just ask one of the other cities for the account number they made the deposit to.”

“You’re a genius. I knew I kept you around for a reason,” I breathed. “I never would have thought of that on my own.”

“Stop working,” she ordered. “I know they don’t pay you nearly enough for all the extra work you put in.”

I set down my highlighter marker even though she couldn’t see me. “Will you come over if I promise to stop working?” I could hear her hesitate. “It would only be until my shift starts.”

“Fine,” she relented. “Give me half an hour to wrap things up. Then you can work a little overtime on me instead.”

+ + +

It was hard enough to go into work each night, without knowing that Julia was in my bed. We’d both fallen asleep after dinner, and as much as I wanted to stay with her curled in my arms, I couldn’t neglect my shift. I quietly locked up my apartment, trying to be considerate of the woman sleeping in my bed and the residents of the two other apartments in my building. I need not have been so careful, however, as I bumped into Grace Kelly Donovan coming home as I was leaving for work.

“Hot date?” I teased. I rarely saw her out of her apartment after dinner time.

“Hardly,” she scoffed. “Just another late night at the newspaper.”

“I hope there won’t be any surprises waiting for me in the morning.”

She held up her hands and smiled. “Your secrets are safe with me, Cassidy. I promise, no more front page stories.”

I wiped at my forehead in an exaggerated manner. “Phew.”

“How
is
Julia, by the way?”

I’d never been good at lying. My friends said it was one of my most endearing qualities. Instead of pretending like I didn’t know why she was asking that question, I stayed silent.

“Is she still in there?”

I shifted my body and strategically positioned myself between the closed door and Grace, even though without x-ray vision she wouldn’t have been able to see into the apartment.

“Yeah, she is.”

“You two have gotten close, huh?” she pressed.

“Is this on or off the record?” My tone was sharp, but her question had blindsided me, and I was left feeling defensive.

“Oh, totally off the record.” She held up her right hand as if taking an oath.

I was keenly aware that Grace’s job was one step short of gossiping, and I could guarantee that a relationship between the aloof city prosecutor and the rough-around-the-edges new police officer would be considered a legit news story.

“I can’t really speak for her, so you’d have to ask Julia.”

“You’re really going to pretend that you’re not the reason why Julia Desjardin smiles?”

I shrugged and tried to look noncommittal even though my chest constricted at the thought that I could make someone happy. “Maybe she got tired of frowning all the time.”

“And this rare phenomenon just happened to coincide with you moving to town.” Grace looked unconvinced. I was no lawyer; I needed Julia here to spin a masterful explanation that would satisfy my neighbor’s curiosity.

“Stranger things have happened, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, like the city prosecutor being gay.”

I bristled. “That’s ridiculous.” I needed to end this conversation immediately, but this was no fighter jet and there was no ejection button.

“Not so ridiculous when I see Julia disappear into your apartment in the middle of the afternoon, promptly followed by the sounds of two women having sex.” Grace made what I thought was a particularly smug look. “The walls are thin in this building, Cassidy.”

I couldn’t really deny that. I sometimes heard Grace’s workout videos before my evening shift.

I swallowed hard as I gathered my thoughts. “Look, it’s okay to tease and poke fun of me about this, but don’t drag Julia into it. You know Embarrass is too small to handle this kind of news; it could ruin her.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You’re not worried about your reputation?”

“I’m already an outsider,” I dismissed. “I don’t have any disillusions that Embarrass will embrace me as one of their own. But this is Julia’s home. Don’t ruin that for her.”

“I told you—no more stories.”

“So you’re not going to say anything? I’m not going to wake up tomorrow to see I made front page news again?”

“Not by my hand,” Grace avowed. She shook her head and barked out a laugh. “I can’t believe you seduced the most unapproachable woman in town.”

I grinned. I wished I could have taken credit for that, but it had actually been the other way around.

“So are you two, like, dating? Or just fooling around?”

“I honestly have no idea.” I let out a deep breath and rocked back on my heels. It was kind of refreshing to have someone to talk to this about. “I kind of let Julia take the lead on this one, and I’m just along for the ride.”

“Well from what I’ve heard through the walls, it sounds like it’s been a fun ride.”

I could feel the heat of my blush reach the tips of my ears. “We’ll try to keep it down in the future.”