“Okay, wow, you have to calm down,” I said.
“Please don’t send me to jail.”
It was almost funny. This girl had caused me so much stress and pain, so much worry, and there she was crying her eyes out like a child, blubbering about jail. All I had needed to do was threaten her a little bit, bluff a little bit, and she totally broke.
Which was actually strange. If she were blackmailing me, you’d think she would have prepared herself for this. And yet there she was, sobbing into her hands.
“Okay,” I said, reaching into my bag. “Here, take these.” I handed her some tissues.
She took them and blew her nose. “Thanks.”
“You’re not going to jail. Please calm down.”
She took deep breaths, tears running down her face. “I’m not?”
“If you stop crying you won’t.”
She nodded, visibly trying to pull herself together. I stood there watching, totally baffled, as she slowly stopped sobbing.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “It really wasn’t.”
I sighed. “Okay, Madison. Who was it then?”
“My boyfriend, Trent Hanger.”
I recognized the name, but it took a second before it really sank in. When it did, though, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Trent was the name of Cole’s big nemesis, the same guy he was going to be fighting soon.
I gaped at her. “Did you say Trent?”
“Yes,” she sniffled.
“MMA fighter Trent?”
She nodded, dabbing at her eyes.
I shook my head, completely mystified. “Tell me everything. And start with how the fuck you know Trent.”
Slowly she began to talk, and she told me the most improbably story I had ever heard in my life.
Madison used to work for Ultimate Fighter Championship, or UFC, the most famous MMA league in the United States. She lived in Las Vegas back then and was working her way up in the company as a member of the public relations group.
As a PR person, she worked with the fighters constantly. That was how she met Trent. At first, she said, she hated Trent, but slowly she fell in love with him. Apparently he was persistent, and although I wasn’t interested in the details of their courtship, she decided to tell me way too many anyway.
Finally, though, she and Trent got together. Back then, she had no clue who I was or who Cole was, and she had no plans to ever bother us. But things had changed when she had applied for an internship at Cindy’s company a few months ago.
“I never thought I’d get it,” Madison said. “But I did, and Trent agreed to move to the Bay area with me. I guess Cindy liked me, because after a month of the internship, she fired her old personal assistant and hired me.”
I listened as she talked about the nightmares of that job and how stressful it had been when the companies had merged. She said she wasn’t really that ambitious, but Cindy was teaching her a lot.
The blackmail happened by accident. Madison had hired Marla to take some pictures of the event, mostly of Cindy’s family just in case any gossip magazines wanted a scoop about the scandalous company marriage. She said she was in the habit of doing that just to make some cash on the side, another one of Trent’s ideas. She said she never expected to find what she found.
“Actually,” she said, “it wasn’t me that figured it out. When Marla gave me the pictures, I didn’t think anything of them at first. Trent found them buried in a pile of a bunch of boring other shots.”
“And that was when it happened?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Trent knew what it was right away. He recognized Cole and he knew all about the drama, of course. He actually is a good listener.”
“Okay, Madison,” I said, annoyed. “I don’t care if Trent is a good listener.”
“Sorry. After that, he took the pictures and said he knew what to do with them. I thought he was going to sell them to some magazine, not blackmail you. Anyway, he made me go back to Marla and get more.”
“So you didn’t know we were being blackmailed.”
She shook her head. “No! No, I swear.”
I stared at her for a long time. The story seemed incredibly improbable, but it made a kind of sense. She was lying, of course, at least according to Marla’s story, but it was amazing that Trent and Cole would end up so closely linked. It was a near miracle, but it had happened.
“Madison,” I said, “I need you to get the pictures back for me.”
She looked at me for a second and then burst out crying again. “I can’t!” she wailed.
“Okay, okay,” I said, patting her back. “Why not?”