Chapter Thirteen

Courtney unlocked the door to her office the next morning, laptop bag in hand, and made her way across the room to her desk. The message button on the phone wasn’t flashing for once, which relieved her. Normally, whenever she arrived at the office, the button would be going like mad, telling her that she had at least a dozen messages waiting for her. But, I’ve only been here for a couple days so by next week, it’ll be swamped with messages. As usual.

Placing the bag on her desk chair, she moved to the window on the wall to her left, the one Jason had been looking out of during the meeting, and opened the shades, letting a lemony early morning sunshine brighten the room. The sky was brilliant, even for early morning, and a few stories down, she could see people walking along the sidewalks. The town was so small and everyone was so relaxed. Most citizens had a smile or slight grin permanently on their face, as if there wasn’t anything that could bother them.

Sadly, the nice weather wouldn’t last for more than a day and a half, according to the trusty weatherman, as there was supposed to be rain and a slight chance of thunderstorms in the late afternoon and early evening the next day. As if the forecasters are ever right, she thought to herself, skeptical of the competence of such people who thought they could predict something as predictable as nature.

A light knock on her door startled her from the beautiful outside view and brought her back into her office. “Yes?”

“Ms. Matthews, there’s a call for you on line two. It’s a Miss Amanda Light calling from San Francisco.

Courtney chuckled to herself, knowing that Mandy was most likely calling to relay the story of how she got the photos from Perry to her. She moved to the desk and picked up the receiver on the phone before pressing the button that would transfer the call from the secretary’s desk to her own.

~*~

He stood in Sonny’s office at the coffee warehouse, along with Benny, Meyer and his boss, with a copy of the dossier that’d been put together on Courtney Matthews in his hands.

If he allowed himself to feel, he knew he’d definitely have a problem with this and wouldn’t look at the file, but he couldn’t do that. Even so, there was a slight stirring in the back of his mind that told him that he didn’t want to find out about her this way, not through some file that Sonny had had put together. He wanted her to be the one to tell him about her past, about her childhood, about the experiences she’d had in life thus far. If it had been anyone else, there would have been no problem, but this was her.

Shoving it aside, he opened the folder as Benny and Meyer looked on, curious as to why Mr. Corinthos and Mr. Morgan would want the background information on this particular young female. Sonny didn’t give them the specific details about why they were told to get the dossier, as usual, so they knew nothing about the relevance the woman had to what was going on right now. They did the work and asked no questions. Of course, they had already went over the information themselves, or most of it, before giving the matching folders to the two men. Benny and Meyer had every base covered and, honestly, the woman’s past wasn’t interesting at all. She was normal and that just added to the curiosity of why the dossier needed to be made in the first place.

Sonny Corinthos sat at his desk, his copy of the dossier on Courtney Matthews open in front of him. So far, there was nothing unusual about her She was raised by both parents and had done very well in elementary, middle and high school and she had a brother, Perry Matthews, who was older than her by three years.

He noticed that Benny and Meyer were still in the office and dismissed them before moving on in his reading. Seconds later, he looked at Jason, who had since taken a seat in one of the leather chairs in front of his boss’ desk.

“Have you gotten to this yet, Jase?” he asked, showing him a paper that had her high school past on it.

Squinting at it, Jason saw that he hadn’t and shook his head at the question. “No, why? What does it say?”

“Well, it’s more of a question of what it doesn’t say. There’s nothing on her that says anything about her relationship history in high school. No boyfriends, no casual dates, nothing like that.”

A puzzled expression made its way onto the mob enforcer’s face as he quickly searched through the papers in his lap for the one that matched the one Sonny had shown him. Sure enough, there was no mention of anything romantic in Courtney Matthew’s life. That’s a little odd, he thought as he filed the fact away in his memory for future use.

In the margins of the paper, he saw that Meyer had written a note, referring them to another page. Quickly, Jason found the other page and read over it. Meyer and Benny had made sure to dig deeper into that fact, Jason could tell, and covered those bases. Apparently, the only time she’d ever been out to dinner in her life with someone else were times she’d gone with her parents, grandparents, her brother and his girlfriend or for business meetings. Even at the business meetings, Perry Matthews had always gone with her.

More reading told him that she’d been asked by many guys during high school but she’d always declined their officers. She’d never shown any interest in any of the people in her school in that way and showed no regret of it after her high school graduation. Even after high school. The dossier showed, she’d never had a date. Business men she came into contact with had asked her out but those invitations had also been declined and, even if they weren’t doing business with the San Francisco company, there had been instances where she’d gotten asked out by men who saw her out in the city. Some of the guys from when she was in school had even tried again after graduation, most likely hoping that the blond would change her mind and give them a chance. Clearly, that had not happened.

Jason looked up at Sonny, who had patiently waited for him to finish reading the information on Courtney Matthews lack of love life. “So, what do you think, Jase?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. She obviously didn’t want to date when she was in school and afterward, either. Maybe she took a vow of celibacy,” Jason suggested, while his heart hoped that wasn’t the case.

Sonny looked through the papers for a moment before looking back at the spiky haired man in front of him. “There is no record of that here.”

“Sonny, it doesn’t have to be public. She could have made it to herself, in her head, and not told anyone about it,” he replied, rolling his eyes slightly. Sometimes, Sonny forgot that people could keep things to themselves.

An hour passed and the two had read all of the material in the file Meyer and Benny had put together and come up with nothing suspicious in Courtney Matthews’ past.

“She’s clean, Sonny. There’s nothing in there.” Jason said, tired of going over the files that they’d finally finished.

“No, but we’ll wait to make our decision until after we’ve heard the recordings of her phone conversations.”

~*~

“Well, what the hell happened, Stan? Why don’t you have the tapes?” Sonny Corinthos yelled later that night. Now, it was Jason, Stan and Sonny in the office and Stan had just informed the mob boss that he didn’t have the tapes of the conversation that the taps on the phones should have picked up.

“Well, I was in the van and I knew the woman was in the office. A call came an she picked it up, all of the equipment was on and ready to record as soon as she started talking. But, just as she said her name, someone must have come up behind me and hit me in the head, knocking me out a little bit. I woke up a few minutes later and someone shoved some needle in my arm and I was out again before I could really react. Whatever it was must’ve been a powerful sedative because I just woke up in time to get here. But, when I came out of it the second time, all the equipment in the van was totaled. They destroyed it, probably with whatever they used to knock me out the first time.” Stan explained.

“Did you see the guy’s face? And how did he get in the van if the door was locked? It was locked, right?” Jason Morgan asked him, hoping that he had seen the person so they could figure out what exactly was going on.

“No, I didn’t see the person. The door on the van was locked but I have no idea how they could have gotten it open. I couldn’t hear it open because I had the headset on, ready for the call.”

Sonny was clearly angry and so Jason let Stan leave, sending him to the doctor they kept on hand to get checked out. After shutting the office door, he turned to his partner.

“What do you want to do?”

“The only thing we can do. We’ve looked at her past, it’s clean and I doubt those tapings would have shown anything else. I just wanted them just in case. So, we’ll have to sign the contracts and trust her.”

Jason nodded in agreement. He’d known he would sign the contract, but he just had to wait for Sonny to make his decision and get his proof that Courtney could be trusted. But, they had a new issue to deal with: Who had knocked Stan out and destroyed the equipment and what was the reason behind it.