Double Cross by James David Jordan Page B

busy.”
    The man in the blazer came back to his table sipping a cup of coffee. Right behind him was a slender blonde, maybe half his age, who sat at the table with him. He touched her hand and began talking, an earnest look on his face.
    Katie leaned toward me. “These extortionists are well organized. Whether they are part of a larger criminal organization, I’m not quite sure yet. They must at least have some contact with a larger organization. They’ve become too big not to. They prey on prominent members of the community.”
    “How?”
    “Vice. That’s their hook. They run prostitution rings, gambling, and drugs. When they find out that a prominent person is, so to speak, patronizing one of their operations, they tighten the screws on him—or her. They threaten to expose the person publicly if they don’t get their money. You can imagine that certain high-profile people are willing to pay quite a bit to keep their names off the front page, especially in connection with drugs and prostitutes. And who knows what sort of influence they’re coughing up besides just money? Anyway, the people are too terrified to tell anyone, so it doesn’t adversely affect business for the bad guys. My story last week was about the football coach of a suburban high school. One of the best football programs in the state. He’d been betting significant money on his own team’s games—sometimes he even bet they would lose. These guys hit him up for ten thousand dollars. He was hocking school equipment to pay them off, then buying the equipment back out of hock with money he borrowed from family members.”
    “Poor jerk. He paid them the money and got outed anyway.”
    “Yeah. Unfortunately he couldn’t give the police a single name of anyone involved. Or he was too afraid to.”
    “Well, I can’t imagine Elise was into any serious vices. She was a straight arrow. In case you’re wondering, I can tell you Simon wasn’t involved, either. You might not think highly of televangelists as a group, but he was the real deal. As I said earlier, he was a good man.”
    “What did the auditors find?”
    I leaned back in my chair. “I wouldn’t stay in business long if I went around blabbing about my clients’ affairs.”
    She put her notepad on the table and pointed to it. “You don’t have to talk for attribution. You can be an anonymous source.”
    I studied her face and tried to think of any way Kacey and I could benefit from my telling this woman more than she already knew.
    “Look,” she said, “let’s get it all out on the table. I know about Simon Mason’s son, too. I know his name and I know where he lives. I’ve known about it for several weeks. I haven’t written about it, because it’s not news, it’s personal. If I were just trying to dig up a scandal, don’t you think that story would have run by now?”
    I put my hands on the table. “Who told you that?”
    “I wouldn’t stay in the reporting business long if I went around disclosing my sources.”
    I smiled. “Touché. However, you’re the one who needs information from me. I don’t need anything from you. And if you don’t tell me who your source is, you’re not going to get your information.”
    She turned her head and looked out the window. “Let me make a call.” She got up, weaved her way through the tables, and walked out the front door.
    Through the window I could see her talking on her cell phone and pacing the sidewalk. While she was outside I tried to figure her angle. So she knew about Simon’s son, and she must have been suspicious that somehow the blackmailers had gotten to Simon. Was it really possible, though, that both Simon and Elise were being blackmailed at the same time? That seemed to defy the law of averages.
    As I watched her pace the sidewalk, a black Honda Accord with tinted windows slid up beside her and eased to a stop. The back window rolled down just as Parst hit the button on her phone and reached for the door to come