Above the Law by Carsen Taite Read Free Book Online Page A

reached for a napkin and when she looked back up, Elaina was standing beside her, wearing a sweet smile.
    “I figured you’d be hungry,” Elaina said. “I don’t know how you manage to eat the way you do and keep looking this good.”
    Lindsey cleared her throat, hoping she wouldn’t choke on a breadcrumb, but didn’t ask for clarification about what “this” was. She wasn’t interested in flirting with her ex or reminiscing about how she’d always worked through meals and then come home starving. Elaina might know all her little quirks, but those were all surface level, not the stuff that really mattered. She diverted. “Hey, Jed, you better get over here before I eat all this food. Consider this your only warning.” She heaped a plate high with sandwiches, pasta salad, and fruit and took it to the desk where Elaina’s stuff was spread out. “How about we make this a working dinner? What’s first on the agenda?”
    Elaina scrambled to shove the papers into a folder and then opened a fancy leather planner the size of a Volkswagen. “I’ve arranged with the local affiliate to provide us with a room for filming some of the non DEA interviews, but I’d like to do all the agency clips either at the DEA division office or in the field, same with the other local agencies. Jed, can you work with that?”
    He gulped a bite of sandwich and nodded. “Sure. We took a good look around while we were at the DEA office. It’s not ideal, but I can make it work. What kind of in the field filming do you have in mind?”
    Elaina leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know. Maybe Lindsey could tag along with one of the agents.” She looked down at her planner. “Since our focus is the Take-Back Initiative, Lindsey, you could get them to show you where they plan to hold the main event along with some of the local outlets, stuff like that.” She pointed at her computer. “The guy in charge, Agent Diego, sent over a bio for the liaison you asked for, Special Agent Dale Nelson. He’s a decorated Marine who served in Afghanistan, and I think he could be the perfect hook for the story. Might be good to follow him around and work the human interest angle. From the war on terror to the war on drugs. Different battles, same skills. Something like that.”
    As Elaina droned on, Lindsey tried to hide a grin. Jed was kicking her under the table, and his own grin was infectious. Alice was the first to catch on. “What’s so funny?”
    “Nothing,” Lindsey said as she delivered a return kick to Jed’s shin. But Jed was not to be deterred.
    “She’s going to figure it out sooner or later,” he said.
    She sighed. He was right. She turned to Elaina. “Dale Nelson is a she, not a he.”
    It took a few seconds for Elaina to register her words, but when she did, her eyes narrowed. “Hmmm, that might change things. I’ll have to think about it.”
    “Why?” Lindsey suspected she knew the answer, but she wondered if Elaina would be so crass as to admit her reasoning for rethinking Dale as the focus of the human interest angle. Please let her not be that callous.
    “It’s just different is all. Doesn’t have the same broad-based appeal.”
    “Broad-based appeal? Care to explain what that’s code for?” Damn. No matter how much she’d hoped Elaina would change, her hoping couldn’t make it so. Lindsey’s appetite vanished, and a clawing sense of claustrophobia drove her to stand and pace. “A woman serves her country overseas and comes home to do more of the same and that’s less compelling than a man who does the same thing? Like death and destruction can only be appreciated if we placate the majority by showing them only a pure reflection of themselves?”
    Elaina glanced at Jed and Alice, probably looking for moral support, but they both shook their heads as if to say “not my battle.” When Elaina finally addressed her, she sidestepped the question. “It’s not a matter of what you or I think. Our job is to reach