Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 59146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
“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.”