Page 55 of Greed
What if Donnie was right? What if she couldn’t get any satisfaction because he wasn’t there, telling her what to do, or how to feel? He’d always been dominant in the bedroom, and for a while it worked. She never had to worry about making the wrong decision, or disappointing him.
Enough thinking about disappointing men.
She turned to her computer screen and opened the file she’d started on the Lazarus family. Despite what Donnie or Griffin thought, she knew she could make her own decisions. She wouldn’t be at the Cardinal Copy if she wasn’t a decent investigator, so it was time to do what she knew best. Time to work out why Griffin had avoided giving her the pictures. He’d coveted them. Had been a little too protective.
Alarm bells had been ringing in her head since, and they sparked an unquenchable curiosity that had Lilo roaming the internet for information about the Lazarus family. On her notepad next to her keyboard, she wrote all the names down, including Mary and Flint—Griffin’s parents. For hours she was lost in news article over news article. She found plenty online about Parker, Tony, Wyatt and even Evan, but rarely any Liza or Sloan. Griffin was virtually invisible. No other family was mentioned. No cousins, no social media accounts. All of their history only started a few years ago. It was like their digital blueprint before ten years ago was a ghost.
Her journalist instincts were buzzing.
There was something about the family. Possibly something big.
Lilo tapped her notebook with her pencil and doodled next to each name. For such a large family, they were blissfully free from run-ins with the law. It was almost too clean.
She jolted as her phone alarm went off and she glanced at the clock. Four-fifty. The meeting with the kidnappers was scheduled at six, and the location was deep in the South-Side district where crime ran rampant, and even the police feared to tread. She’d have to pass through the slums by the river to get there, but she had her trusty cattle prod strapped to her thigh under her skirt. The other thigh holster held a small pistol. She also had her trusty spy-phone in her bag to help capture evidence.
Most people would be indoors because of the cold.
She would be safe.
She could do this.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d ventured to the South-Side alone at night. Once, she’d followed a lead to uncover the source of EZ-m, a new drug made from bath salts. It was snorted by many impressionable youth who missed out on a buzz, but got free trips to the Emergency Department. Lilo’s father had sent her coordinates of the suspected dealers, but she couldn’t take him at his word. She vetted the information herself before handing it over to Donnie for an exposé. She’d trekked deep into the district on her own, staked out a house for twelve hours, and took incriminating photographs, all without being discovered. If she could do that, she could meet her father’s kidnappers and negotiate.
And she could write the story herself. This time, she would see it published in her name, no matter what boy’s club strings Donnie tried to pull.
There were too many things about the kidnapping that didn’t add up. Her mother’s erratic behavior for one. Lilo had the sense her mother knew something about it. Janet had a greedy heart, but never before had she talked about killing her own husband. Seeing her mother’s true colors made Lilo believe her father shielded her from the brunt of the psychopathic behavior, and if he’d done that, then what else had he protected her from?
A flash of her sixteenth party, of her father spending most of the evening indoors with her mother came to mind. Was there more to it? Had her father been keeping her crazy mother away from the revelers for Lilo’s sake?
No.
She’d seen her father’s corrupt ways with her own eyes. Nobody made him pay all those people to lie to her. Nobody made him sell weapons of mass destruction from his den. He was as bad as her mother.
Still, something didn’t sit well.
A sneaky, terrible thought unfurled from the edges of her mind. What if he’d become the way he was because of her mother’s irrational demands? Lilo knew as well as any abusive relationship refugee that sometimes the abuse wasn’t obvious. Sometimes it silently wore you down until one day you found yourself in a situation you couldn’t escape.
Lilo rubbed her eyes until they felt raw. Her brain hurt. She was tired of lies and cover-ups. She was tired of being managed by men. First her father, then Donnie, now Griffin.
Her eyes drifted to her hero vision board with a longing.
“Home time,” Bev said from her side of the partition.
“Yes.” Candy fist pumped the air, and launched from her seat, leaving without another word.
“Five o’clock,” Lilo whispered, heart racing.
It was time.
She put on her coat, wrapped her scarf around her neck and tugged her woolen beanie over her head and ears. After waving goodbye to Bev, she collected her hand bag and made her way toward the exit. As she waited for the elevator, nervous tension crept up her spine, so when someone called her name, she jumped.
“Lilo.” His voice cut through her heart to its aching center.
She turned. Griffin stood behind her, hands in his pockets, blue eyes attentive and focused on her. She’d rarely spoken to him the past couple of days, but had watched from the corner of her eye every time he entered the room, turning beet red with awareness. She’d felt his heat from across the distance and through the walls as though he’d stood next to her desk all day. It had been torture to shut down his every attempt at conversation, but she had pride and dignity. Now he stood there, looking all broad shouldered and manly in his tight black sweater, completely unaware of his effect on her.
He used a finger to adjust his spectacles at the bridge. “Do you need a lift home?”
She blinked and turned back to the elevator, now opening its doors. “No. Thank you.”
