Chapter Eight
Inferno
Knight didn’t look up when I came into his office on Monday morning.
Probably because he’d locked his door and refused to let anyone in other than Lavender and Knuckles.
And only when Knuckles threatened to break the door down.
He hadn’t wanted to talk to me, so I’d decided today I was going to knock until he either opened it or I had to break it down.
Turned out, the door was open this morning. Knight sat at his desk with several open documents on four different screens on the wall. A coffee mug sat at his elbow, cold by the looks of it.
“Close the door,” he said. I did, then moved to stand next to him at his desk. “These went up between Friday night and Sunday morning.” He tapped the screen. “Fourteen reviews. All one star. All on the same three platforms.”
I leaned forward. The first one complained about a hair in the pastry.
A vague implication that the kitchen was dirty.
The second said the owner was rude and unprofessional and that the business had changed since new management had taken over.
The third said the cakes were overpriced and the ingredients tasted off.
I read through four more before I sat back.
“Same three talking points,” I said.
“Rotated in different order. Different phrasing. Enough variation that a platform algorithm won’t flag them automatically.
” Knight pulled the legal pad toward him and read from it.
“One was created eight days ago, no profile photo, no other reviews. Another, nine days ago, reviewed a parking garage in Memphis two days prior. And the last reviewed a nail salon in Brentwood. The others are identical in pattern and all of them created inside a ten-day window.”
“Reviews for a parking garage?” I glanced at Knight before I kept reading.
“Gives the account a history. Makes it look like a real person,” he said. “None of the accounts link to each other and none of them link to Brett Calloway. Not a shared IP address I can find and no billing trail.”
“He used a service.”
“Or a library computer and a prepaid card, ten free email addresses, and had an afternoon to kill. He could set them to stagger so they didn’t all hit at once.” Knight spread his hands. “Either way, there’s nothing concrete there.”
I looked at the screen again. Fourteen reviews. A one-star average now if you isolated the weekend. “What else?”
“An anonymous health department complaint was filed Friday at nine a.m. Specific enough to sound credible, like inadequate refrigeration temperatures and improper handwashing station distance from prep surfaces. Those are the kind of details a person looks up.” He paused.
“An inspector came that afternoon but found nothing.”
I kept my expression even. I hadn’t known about the inspector until now, which meant she’d handled it alone and hadn’t called me.
“And?” I prompted.
“And someone called the county zoning commission on Friday afternoon. Identified themselves as a neighbor, expressing concern that the building might not be properly zoned for commercial food preparation. Very polite but left no name. The number came back to a convenience store in Antioch… and it just so happens that’s where the head of the department bought a condo recently. ”
“Brett the agent?”
“Can’t tell that, but it was the company he works for that closed the deal.
” Knight picked up his cold coffee, decided against it, set it back down.
“There’s also a rumor moving around her supplier network.
Nothing’s confirmed yet, but the word going around is that she’s having financial trouble.
Now her suppliers are demanding payments before they’ll order the quantity she needs, since it’s usually pretty large, which will delay her shipments by more than a week.
” He shrugged. “You can’t run a bakery without flour, and she can’t afford the price difference to switch suppliers. ”
“None of that’s illegal,” I said.
“Reviews are protected speech unless you can prove defamation and quantify damages in court. Which is damned near impossible to prove without substantial legal counsel. The health complaint is anonymous and came to nothing. The zoning call was a question, not a threat. The supplier rumor is word of mouth.” Knight looked at me directly for the first time since I’d sat down.
“None of it traces back to him, but all of it works collectively.”
I put my hands flat on the table, leaning in beside him to see the screens better. “Walk me through what happens if we do nothing,” I said. “If we just leave it.”
Knight didn’t hesitate, which meant he’d already worked through it.
“The review damage compounds. Every week those sit there, her search ranking drops. She probably loses ten, fifteen percent of new customer walk-in traffic inside two months, because people don’t look past the first page of results, and sometimes they don’t even read the text.
They see the star count. The county opening an inquiry into zoning laws is a matter of public record so, though not damaging to her personally, it still looks bad.
The supplier situation makes her cash flow tighter, which means she can’t take on larger orders, which means she can’t grow out of the hole.
And if another wave of reviews drops, or another complaint gets filed, or someone calls her wedding clients…
” He stopped. “She loses the shop inside a year.”
I sat with that for a moment. A year. Maybe less if the supplier thing moved fast. She’d taken that place over from her grandmother, I was fairly sure of it.
I’d watched her work in that kitchen for one early morning and I knew what it cost her.
She put her heart and soul into everything she created.
“I want something to hit,” I said. “Give me something to hit.”
Knight closed the laptop. “There’s nothing there, Inferno.
” He waved at the screens in front of him, the evidence of his statement right in front of me.
“That’s the whole problem. He didn’t touch anything.
A lawyer couldn’t find a thread. The club goes near him right now and we’re the story.
She’ll be the collateral and would never forgive you.
Or us.” He picked up his pen and tapped it against the desk. “He’s not stupid.”
“I know.” I straightened and walked out, leaving the door open behind me.
I left the compound, headed to Juniper. That itch between my shoulder blades built and built with each passing day. I’d reached a point I had trouble controlling my impulses to take over and protect her by any means necessary. And if I did, I’d lose her forever.
She had a piping bag in her hand when I came through the back, and she didn’t look up. The ovens were running. The whole kitchen smelled like butter and sugar and clean warmth. A full sheet pan of croissants cooled on the rack. Another batch was going in.
“Morning,” she said with a tight smile.
“Morning.” I found the stool in the corner I’d used before and sat on it and kept my hands off everything. I noticed she didn’t seem surprised to see me, nor did she seem angry.
She worked in silence for a while. Then she spoke, never taking her eyes from her work. “The health inspector came Friday afternoon,” she said. “He found nothing, though.”
“Yeah. I heard.”
“Then you know the complaint was fabricated.” She set the piping bag down and turned the board a quarter inch. “I know it, too. I can’t prove it, so…” A small shrug. She picked the bag back up.
A few minutes later she stripped a tier off a stand near the window and set it on the counter. It was half-decorated, pale pink buttercream interrupted at the midsection, and she started scraping it back with a bench scraper in long, efficient strokes.
“I made this for a wedding client,” she said.
“They canceled this morning. The excuse was that they’d decided to go smaller, keep it intimate.
” She didn’t change her tone. “They booked me four months ago for a hundred and twenty guests.” The scraper moved.
The buttercream came off in long curls, and she deposited them in a bowl beside her without breaking rhythm.
She’d reclaim it, I realized. Use it somewhere else. She wasn’t throwing anything away.
I watched her work down the tier and said, “I’m sorry, Juniper.”
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s a cake.”
But we both knew it wasn’t just a cake. Twenty minutes later she was tallying an invoice at the register and I refilled my water in the sink and kept out of her way. She marked something twice on the invoice, stared at it a second, then clipped it under the counter.
“You know,” she said. She didn’t look at me. “You can say ‘I told you so’ and I’m not going to get angry at you.”
“The very last thing I want to do is rub salt into a wound. I think you know that too.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.” She was silent for a long moment.
“You know, my grandmother left me the bakery when she died. I was the only one of her children or grandchildren to take an interest in the place, so she taught me to run it from the ground up. I can make this place work on my own and the only thing I really need is someone working the register. Not only do I know how to make the recipes and all the wonderful icing sculptures, I know the accounting too. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and my mother’s brother lives in California.
No one wanted to bother with all the taxes and stuff and urged me to just sell it.
But that’s not what my grandmother wanted.
” She looked up at me, a fierce determination shown through her expression even through her worry and melancholy.
“You’ve heard about everything, haven’t you? ” She looked away.
“Knight filled me in this morning. Before you get angry, all he did was watch your ratings and your website. Once things started popping up, he went looking for the rest.”