Within Striking Distance by Ingrid Weaver

the truth. He had a simplified concept of right and wrong, a holdover from his blue-collar roots. He wouldn’t care what a scandal would do to the company the way she did. Sometimes she suspected he didn’t care about their marriage as much as she did, either.
    No! She wouldn’t go there. The counseling had done wonders. She and Hank were happy. She would ease his workload, perhaps arrange a vacation for the two of them once this was over. Then everything would be fine, just the way it had been before.
    Squaring her shoulders, she pushed away from the door, took out her cell phone and called Ralph Bocci.
    He answered after seven rings. His voice was thick, as if he’d just awoken.
    Cynthia glanced at her watch and scowled. “What have you learned?”
    “What? Oh, yeah. Hang on.” He cleared his throat, then started to cough.
    It was a phlegmy, disgusting sound. She held the phone away from her ear until he finished. “You should use a nicotine patch, Mr. Bocci.”
    “Sure. I’ll get right on that.” There was the click of a lighter, followed by a soft squeak as he drew on his cigarette. “The girl’s in Italy for a week.”
    “Why?”
    “Some modeling contract. You want her agent’s number?”
    What use would that be? Bocci was an idiot, Cynthia thought. She hadn’t had much choice, though. She couldn’t very well have interviewed candidates for the job she’d given him. She strove to retain her patience. “That won’t be necessary. What did you learn about the investigation?”
    “There was nothing new in the files. Seems to me the investigation is stalled. With the girl out of town, looks like McMasters is taking a break.”
    “That’s no excuse for you to do the same, Mr. Bocci.”
    “I never said I was.”
    Cynthia wanted to believe him, just as she wanted to believe that the detective was slowing down. With stakes this high, though, she couldn’t afford to do either. “Spare me the protestations of innocence,” she snapped. “Both I and your parole officer know exactly what kind of character you possess, so unless you want me to enlighten him about the material you tried to steal from my company, you’ll go and do what I tell you.”
     
    J AKE PULLED into the lot at the Halesboro track and shut off the ignition. The smell of rubber and exhaust, along with the whining buzz of racing engines, came through the openwindow. Since it wasn’t a NASCAR-sanctioned track, the Cargill-Grosso team was testing here today, so it was a good opportunity to catch up with the person he needed to see. Casually, though. He wanted to keep this low-key, for everyone’s sake. That should be easy to do, since he was family and he followed the team closely enough that no one would think his presence at the track was unusual. All he had to do was get a handle on the anticipation that was curling through his gut.
    He took a deep breath, then reached into his shirt pocket for the snapshot that had brought him here. The baby in it appeared too young to lift her head, so she would have been only a few weeks old. She was strapped into a plastic infant seat that had been set on the middle of a round, wooden table. The picture had been taken in the Peters’s kitchen—the yellow cabinets and the seventies-style flowered wallpaper in the background looked the same as they did in pictures where Becky was older. There was a white rectangle on the wall in the upper right corner that was probably a calendar, but it was too blurry to show any details.
    It didn’t need to. The date was obvious. The baby was dressed in a red, white and blue sleeper that was adorned with tiny stars. Floyd Peters was leaning across the table, a sappy grin on his face while he waved a miniature flag on a stick to amuse his new daughter.
    There had been almost two dozen other pictures in the envelope where he’d found this particular shot. They presented a record of what must have been one of Becky’s first outings. Becky had cried. She’d had a