Still. He was the boss. And like him or not (she absolutely did not), he was a key part in her path to anchorwoman. Not that he was high enough on the food chain to make the final decision, but he was certainly a gatekeeper.
So even though she itched to tell him to get his bulging thigh out of her personal space, she smiled.
“Sorry, this story’s taking up all of my mental capacity.”
He smirked. “It should be. A three-hour prime-time special is no fluff piece. It’s the real deal. The rest of the girls are yapping behind your back.”
“Good to know,” she muttered. Though she wasn’t all that surprised. There was no such thing as real friendship at CBC. Mostly it ranged from two-faced, to backstabbing, to cutthroat.
“Hey, are you familiar with the name Shayna Johnson?” she asked, tapping her pencil against her notepad.
Brent Davis may be a lecher, but he was a good newsman. His memory for stories, no matter how small, was legendary.
He folded his arms across his beefy chest, blue eyes scrunching as he went into what she thought of as his thinking mode.
“Kidnapping case gone wrong?” he said.
“If by wrong, you mean she died, yeah,” Ava said, glancing at her notes. “And sadly, not all that unusual, especially in the rougher area of Harlem.”
He frowned. “Wasn’t that a couple years ago? What are you doing looking at a story that’s stale and common? You’re not chasing a cold case, are you?”
“No, they caught the bastard,” she said distractedly, her pencil tapping more quickly against the notepad. “He’s rotting in prison.”
“Ah. So no recent escape then.” He sounded disappointed and Ava game him a disgusted look.
Davis had the decency to look ashamed. “Right, right. Glad the perp’s still behind bars. Still not getting why we’re talking about this then. What am I missing?”
“Maybe nothing,” Ava said. But her pencil was moving at warp speed now. Her reporter instincts were buzzing.
Something wasn’t right.
She opened her mouth.
Shut it.
Opened it again.
“It’s just…something’s strange about it. The case was high profile for the entire week she was missing. The little girl was the daughter of a city councilman. But her death barely registered a blip on the local media scene. The story just said that the suspect had been apprehended, but sadly, authorities were too late to save Shayna.”
“And this is related to the Moretti story how?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she mused. “Give me time.”
Davis rolled his eyes, pushing off her desk. “Thanks for leading me down the rabbit hole for nothing.”
“Anytime,” she said sweetly, giving him a little finger wave as he waddled away.
After Davis was out of earshot, a permanently scowled forehead appeared over the wall, followed by shrewd blue eyes, then a long nose and sulky mouth with a red and yellow gummy worm hanging out the side.
“I’m dismayed you weren’t forthcoming with our boss,” Mihail said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Absolutely appalled.”
“How do you know I wasn’t telling the truth?”
His expression didn’t change as he chewed his gummy worm, watching her.
“Okay fine,” she said on a sigh, lowering her voice. “I may know more than I said.”
“And?”
Ava hesitated, then immediately felt guilty. She told Mihail everything. He was her sounding board, her partner, her ball-and-chain when she chased a story that simply wasn’t there.
The fact that she was hesitating showing him this meant that she might have deeper feelings for Luc Moretti than she thought.
And since that scared the crap out of her, she quickly unlocked her computer screen and gestured Mihail to come around to her side before she could change her mind.
Mihail grunted when he saw the masthead on the website she’d pulled up. “That website is trash. Beyond trash. It’s paparazzi bullshit.”
“I know, I know, but look,” she said, scrolling down to a post from two years ago.
“What am I looking at?”
She pointed at a police officer on the right.
“Recognize him?”
Mihail leaned in and squinted. “That Moretti? Sure. So he was there when shit went down. So what?”