A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) by Darynda Jones

He nodded and left just as the mayor whirled on Sun. “You have to fill that position.”

She set the cage on the floor beside her desk. “You came here at midnight on a Saturday night to tell me that I need to fill the lieutenant’s position?” Her former lieutenant, Bo Britton, had passed away before she’d taken up her post, and she had yet to fill the revered man’s spot.

“No,” she said, gazing at Sun’s autographed poster of Sheriff Hopper. “That’s not the only reason I came.”

Sun fought a desire to rip the poster off the wall and cradle Hopper’s face to her breast. Hopper was hers.

“I just figured, while I’m here, we could examine the status quo.”

“I have to go to Arizona.”

“See, that’s what I mean.” She whirled back to her. “You aren’t taking care of business here.”

Sun bit down. She’d been meaning to talk to Quincy about the position, rifle through his thoughts on the subject, but it just hadn’t come up yet. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t throw the man under the bus. “I’m waiting for my chief deputy’s recommendation. He has yet to give me one.”

“Then insist on one,” the mayor said. “Give him a deadline, then move on. We need to fill the spot.”

Sun dragged in a lungful of air. “Anything else we need to discuss now that could easily wait until Monday?”

“The Ravinder case. You have yet to make an arrest.”

“I have yet to hear back from the lab.”

“Still? It’s been months.”

“It’s a cold case. I guess they aren’t in any rush.”

“Naturally. They hardly care about us out here in the boonies. Do I need to make some calls?”

“No,” Sun said, resigning herself to the fact that it would have to be done. “I’ll do it.”

“Fine. See that you do.”

Sun wanted more than anything to say, “You’re not the boss of me.” But she’d been actively trying to keep her inner six-year-old at bay. Instead, she said, “You got it.” Mostly because Mayor Lomas could make things difficult for her if she chose to.

The woman had threatened to look into Sun’s election campaign. The one Sun had known nothing about until she was actually elected. Her parents had somehow snared the position for her without her knowledge.

On the bright side, she now knew there was nothing her parents couldn’t do, nothing they weren’t capable of, so the next time they came to her for help with their computer, she would not fall for it. They were like the Illuminati. Or the KGB. Or Cirque du Soleil.

But election tampering, if getting her elected without her knowledge fell under that umbrella, was a serious offense. Her parents could be arrested. And not in a funny, let’s teach them a lesson way like when she and Quincy threatened to arrest them for harboring a fugitive that time they hid Auri from her after the kid scratched Sun’s cruiser with her bike. She’d even handcuffed her exasperated mother.

Good times.

“What about the other thing?”

“The other thing?” Sun asked, knowing exactly to what she referred.

The mayor put a hand on her hip, not falling for it. “The Dangerous Daughters?”

“Ah. Right. The mythical beings who secretly run the town behind everyone’s back, including the city council’s.”

Sun had heard rumors of the infamous group of women who’d come together to run the town at a time when only men were allowed to sit on the council. It all seemed pretty farfetched. Even if they had existed, surely they didn’t now. That was decades ago.

The mayor seemed obsessed with them, however, and part of the woman’s condition to stay out of the mountain of dirt that constituted Sun’s past was for Sun to uncover the members of the clandestine group. Their negotiations and dealings and general goings-on.

“Exactly,” she said. “I was afraid you’d forgotten about that part of the bargain.”

Ultimatum was more like it. “Like I told you, Mayor, the Dangerous Daughters are just rumor and innuendo. How would a group of women from the fifties secretly run the town? And where would they do it from? Their rest homes?”

The mayor pinned her with a rather evil—and sexy if Sun did say so herself—smirk. “That was the deal, Sheriff. You find out who they are. Or were. Either way, I want the lowdown on that group.”

Sun narrowed her lashes. “Why?”

She snorted. A very unladylike thing to do for such a prominent figure. “This town is considered freakish enough without stories of the Dangerous Daughters getting out.”

“Right. Because that would taint our eccentric reputation.”

The scowl the mayor leveled on her would have melted the face off a lesser sheriff. “You aren’t even pretending to take this seriously.”

“Of course, I am,” she lied. She was throwing all of her acting skills at this.

Though, admittedly, she’d asked around. She even asked her parents. Nada, and they knew everything about the town. No one could tell her anything other than the rumors she’d already heard. Short of scouring old newspaper clippings and police blotters—which she had zero time or inclination to do—she was out of luck.

The mayor lifted her chin a notch. “Maybe I should follow my own advice.”