by Beck Jones
The local nodded.
“A body?” he asked before he could stop himself.
The local looked from him toward Yablonski, who said, “A body?”
“Not that we’ve found yet.”
Now was the time for action, for drama anyway.
He stood up. “I’ve answered all your questions. I’ve got to get out there.” He added, darkly, “If you’re not going to arrest me, you can’t keep holding me here. Russ is out there. God knows what his condition is.”
Yablonski shrugged. “You can go. For now.”
“Where is Liz’s rental car? I’ve got my bag in it with a change of clothes.”
“We’re keeping your bag as evidence for now.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “You can keep everything you’ve got of mine forever for all the good it will do you. In fact, I’d say that was perfect. Just your style as detectives, to focus on unimportant minutia.” And it was true. They were fools. He would have cracked this case.
When he stood up fast enough to jostle his chair backward, Murphy gave him a bitchy smile. “By the way,” she said, “We’ve been trying to get in touch with Eleanor King since yesterday. I don’t suppose you have heard from her at all? Did you call her from the plant? I mean, after you called the police.”
Fuck. Surely that wasn’t Eleanor last night. It couldn’t be, because if it were Eleanor she would have gotten Russ to a hospital. Still, she was certainly on the way down here now that the news had hit. And she was in for a nasty surprise about Scarlett Sharpe. He didn’t know where the body had been stashed, but when it was found, there would remain the fact that Scarlett had been Eleanor’s guest. In fact, once Eleanor realized the Scarlett was missing, she’d feel compelled to report the fact to the cops. That would tie her in nicely. How would the hit man know where to find Scarlett Sharpe except through Eleanor? The cops wouldn’t bother to look for surveillance of her phone.
And even though they probably couldn’t pin anything on her, it would surely look suspicious enough. Keep her busy.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t call Eleanor. You know very well my relationship with her. But no matter how much I dislike her, I didn’t really want to call her in the middle of the night to tell her Russ was dead.”
“Didn’t want to share the story, either, I suppose,” Murphy said.
He shrugged. That they thought him ambitious and jealous of Eleanor was all to the good. “Okay,” he said, “so if I called her she would immediately think she could start bossing me around.”
He could tell the answer satisfied them.
He relished the thought of Eleanor trying to explain away her involvement in Scarlett’s death.
“I don’t care about the clothes right now,” he said. He softened his tone. “I’m sorry I’m being testy. I’m tired. I’d really appreciate your giving me a ride out to the river. I assume you’re going there now, and it would be easier for me than calling another Uber.”
It was risky going to the site with the cops. Even with the vehicle in the river, it wasn’t impossible that Russ somehow emerged alive.
But then it was just as risky not going with the cops. What if they found Russ wandering on the river bank? He needed to be there.
Maybe Russ was in shock. That made sense. He tried to drive away, got disoriented and ended up in the river. From the back of the cop car, he floated the theory. The cops didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter. If they did find Russ wandering on the riverbank, he would rush toward Russ and embrace him, proclaim how sorry he was he hadn’t rescued him from the lagoon. Russ’s story would be suspect at this point anyway, since he hadn’t gone to the police right away. He would be hospitalized, for sure. There would be opportunities there.
He calmed down considerably as the cop car eased to the side of the road, and he could see the boats and the divers below on the river. Nobody expected anything but a corpse to float up. He needed to stop panicking.
Now he could see that he had wasted valuable time coming out here without a camera crew and some clean clothes. He got out of the car, wondering how long he would need to stay for respectability’s sake. Jerry had promised the Take Stock production crew would be here today. A promise he made after asking testily where the hell was Eleanor King when everybody in the whole goddam building knew there had been an APB out on Russ the whole fucking day.
As to Jerry’s question—where the hell was Eleanor King?—he now knew the answer. She was charging up the river bank straight toward him as fast as her short little legs could go. Glaring at him. Fuck, steam was practically come out her ears.
He steeled himself. What did she know? What could she know?
And then somehow, there was a blow to his chest and he was on his back and Eleanor was standing over him. “You miserable little shit,” she shouted. “You don’t even bother to try to pull him out of that toxic soup? And then you’re such a damned incompetent that he stumbles out the back way while you’re out front playing pretend hero.” She screwed up her face like she was eating lemon. He realized she was crying. “Do you I think I would have left him like that?” she said. Crying did not make Eleanor look any younger.
He got to his feet wary of Eleanor but otherwise feeling pretty damn good. “Yeah, I fucked up,” he said, turning his head down in mock shame but really resisting the urge to smile. Eleanor knew nothing. Nothing about how Russ died, and nothing yet of Scarlett Sharpe.
“Hello, Ms. King,” Yablonski said. “We’ve been trying to contact you. You didn’t return our messages.”
Eleanor turned her contempt like some kind of beacon on Yablonski. “I didn’t have anything to tell you,” she snapped.
“You seem to know quite a bit about last night,” Yablonski said.
Eleanor narrowed her eyes at Yablonski like he was an irritating gnat. “This is a huge story. The minute you left that station back there, lips started flapping.” She nodded at the river. “The vehicle was purchased four weeks ago at a dealer in the next town. It was a phony name but the physical description matches Paul.”
Yablonski raised his eyebrows. “Well, you’ve been very busy.”
At that she refocused her fire to the one person she hated more than anybody else, and who she was going to hate even more by the time he assumed his rightful place at Take Stock. “And why the hell didn’t you call me last night?” she practically shouted.
“Why should I call you?” he shot back. “For help? The all-knowing Eleanor didn’t see anything suspicious in the way Paul disappeared. I was the one who followed the story. Not you.” He couldn’t help himself, and didn’t see the downside of not stopping himself. “Why should I have called you last night? What the hell were you going to do about it? You’re not my boss. Russ is.” He let the is hang in the air. Nobody here thought of Russ in the present tense.
“And I know what Russ would want me to do,” he added. “I’ve got to get a report filed to the network.”
“You stupid little shit,” Eleanor snapped. “Do you think they’re going to let you run with this story? The big boys are already on their way I’m sure.”
“Jerry told me it was mine.” That fucker better not have lied. He had spent the last year cultivating Jerry, albeit in ways that Russ never discovered.
Eleanor snorted. “Dream on.” She looked him up and down. “Might want to get out of your onesie first, though.”
Later, when he returned to the river bank ready to do the standup, Eleanor was still hovering at the edge of the bank, her arms crossed against her chest. She looked so small. And old. He could almost feel sorry for her, but honestly the bitch had gotten what she deserved. She could have been a little nicer to him, and he might have kept her around once he took charge of the show. Okay, he wouldn’t have, but why should he?
It infuriated him that she was right. Bob from the nightly news—Russ always mocked him as Mister Star—showed up an hour after that, and his own piece was shelved.
But more hordes came, the other networks, and they were
all clamoring to talk to him. And Bob treated him with respect in their one-on-one interview, and afterwards told him that Jerry had very impressed with his early morning segment, and that he would get a shot at reporting the whole story on Take Stock. The crew would finish more B-roll tomorrow for a bigger package. He and Bob talked about the different story angles, about Argofel. God, what a relief it was to be taken seriously as a colleague, not some errand boy.
The fact that Bob made a point of huddling with Eleanor didn’t mean anything. With Russell gone, Russell’s terrier would need a new home. She couldn’t be on air, and if they even considered putting her in charge of the show—well, she could always be dispatched. Suicide was a reasonable conclusion for someone inconsolable over Russ’s death. Ah, what a good word.
All in all, he was feeling pretty good about things when he checked into the quaint little downtown hotel. Surely the body would turn up soon. It didn’t matter anyway, because he and Bob were going back to the studio tomorrow so he could start putting together the story. And it would be epic: The arc of Paul’s rage and jealousy that would also seg seamlessly into the big story of Argofel.
Now that I’ve seen the bodies, Bob had said, I realize how right Russ was about Argofel. I expect once the autopsies are completed, you’ll be back down here to put the company management on the hot seat. This is going to be big. I don’t think any of us realized your all-around potential. Russ was such a star, you were in his shadow.
At the knock on his hotel room door the thought came automatically that it might be Bob wanting to have a drink. Or maybe one of the guys from another network. He didn’t even bother looking through the peephole.
And there she was.
Alive.
He took a breath.
Stay calm.
It was a fuckup, but there was no need to panic. There was no way she could know what he’d done. Besides, if she did know something the police would be standing here in front of him.
“Scarlett. What are you doing here? Good God, what happened to your eye?”
She looked the way she always did, gorgeous and snotty, except for a big shiner on her right eye. She was dressed in jeans and a low-cut shirt that practically served up her big tits on a plate. Naturally. She had a jacket slung over her arm. Something else, too: she’d been drinking. Through the perfume, he could smell it. God, she was like a distillery.
“I heard about Russ,” she said, batting her eyes at him. Like she gave a shit about Russ.
He clenched the door handle. “Yeah, it’s awful.”
“Could I come in? Just for a minute?”
He realized he couldn’t unclench the door handle. Why not let her in? It didn’t matter that she wasn’t dead. Two dead interns was enough to make the story stick.
He looked at her face again. The shiner suited her. And the way she looked at him. The way she should have always looked at him. Like he was somebody important. He was somebody she needed.
Finally. This was better than her dying, really.
“Please,” she said softly. “I’ve had a really shitty few days. I just want to see a familiar face and be with somebody I know. Somebody I trust. Someone who knew Russ. I don’t have to come in. Why don’t we go for a drive?”
The black eye. Somehow it made her even sexier. Why was he being such a pussy? “Okay,” he said, and opened the door all the way.
She smiled at him gratefully. Sure, she didn’t know what he’d done, and maybe before today she would never even believe it if she were told. She’d never realized he had the guts to pull off something like this.
How stupid she was. Her only power was her body. Which was awesome. He had to give her that.
This was the beginning of his whole new life. He was going to fuck her. Show her exactly who was in whose league.
On the street, she handed him her car keys. “I’ve been drinking all day. You know, I never knew how much I cared about Russ.”
She slipped into the passenger side of the car, and pulled her jacket around the front of her chest like it was a blanket.
“Is that why you came all the way down here?” he asked as he got behind the wheel.
“I was already here,” she said. “I was trying to write, at Eleanor’s house.”
“She never said.”
“That’s because she was trying to have me bumped off.”
He smiled because he couldn’t help himself, but it didn’t matter because it worked. “What the hell? Why do you say that? How did you get the black eye?”
“Let’s go out to the state park. It’s just off the interstate.”
“It’s already dark. The place is probably closed.”
“I know. I went there with the guy. The hit man. Good name. He didn’t kill me but he hit me all right.” She fingered the bruise around her eye. “He would have killed me, but I fought him and managed to get away. I’ve been hiding out since. And then I saw you on television. I knew you would help me. Please take me out there to the park. I want to go back over it. To retrace my steps. But I’m afraid to go alone.”
He nodded, like he was being understanding. But what he really wanted to understand is what the fuck happened to the half-assed hit man? Dammit, if Scarlett did know something, and she was trying to lure him out to the woods, there was only one reason. She planned to take him out herself.
But Jesus, she wasn’t even a journalist. She was a romance novelist, for fuck’s sake. And if he sent her away, and she sobered up, she might decide to go to the police. Scarlett Sharpe was a loose end. Better to string her along than to cut her loose. He pulled the car into the street.
“Why do you think Eleanor would want to have you killed?”
By this time she had the jacket pulled up around her chin and her eyes closed. She opened one eye to look at him. “Because I’m one of the interns that Russ screwed. Surely you knew that.”
He tried to sound all oh-gosh-golly-gee. “Well, I kinda suspected. Russ would never talk about stuff like that. At least not with me. But listen, you’re wrong. It was Paul. I followed the whole story. I cracked this case. I know for a fact that he had Vanessa and Phoebe killed. He was trying to get Russell framed for their murders. He was so jealous of Russ. I’m flying back to New York tomorrow to put together the story.”
“How would Paul know I was at Eleanor’s?”
That thread again. He only wanted to tangle Eleanor in it. He didn’t want anybody to actually pull it.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Frame Russ for murder? You don’t seriously think that Eleanor would do that? I don’t like the woman, but she would never harm a hair on Russ’s head. Trust me, this was all Paul.” He couldn’t believe he was actually arguing this. But then again, it was fun to think about Eleanor having to answer these kinds of questions from the cops. Eleanor occupied? Oh, yeah, she was going to be way too busy to cause trouble.
He parked the car in front of the gate as Scarlett instructed. She put on her jacket as she climbed out of the car. Then she leaned against the gate and smiled at him.
“Thanks for doing this, Gabe.” He liked the way she said his name. She’d never actually addressed him personally the whole freaking time she was an intern. She always so focused on Russ, or chit-chatting with Eleanor.
“You’re going to have to help me over this gate,” she murmured.
She put her arm around his shoulder and he pressed her upward, but then she seemed to be stuck, and somehow the palm of his hand landed on her ass.
He felt a jolt down to his toes. God, what an ass.
He spread his fingers as he pressed his palm against her, but she didn’t complain.
And somehow he wasn’t surprised. Because once he was the star of the Take Stock show, he would have just as many interns to pick from as Russ did. Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t do the interns; those bitches were Russ’s downfall. But he’d have all the pussy he wanted.
When they were over the gate she leaned against it again. Smiling.
“Don�
�t you think life is funny, Gabe?”
He didn’t know what she meant, but he thought he knew what to say. “If you mean funny-ha-ha, right now I would say no. Not with what all has happened.”
“No, silly. Of course I don’t mean funny-ha-ha. I mean, it’s funny where people end up. I thought I wanted to be a crusading journo. Oh, hey, I can tell from your expression you’re sure I was out of my mind to think so.”
“No, not at all,” he said. But of course it was ridiculous. All she did was moon around Russ.
She shrugged. “Well, anyway, here I am, writing novels, and here you are about to step into the spotlight at Take Charge. You’re going to be a star, Gabe. I could tell just from seeing you on tv this morning. And you know, I have to be honest, I never really thought you could do it.” She smiled even bigger. “You proved me wrong. And I bet Eleanor is really pissed. You know, she used to call you Russ’ Mini Me. You really showed her with this story.”
He flinched at the Mini Me, but the rest of what she said felt damned good. And damned true.
She pulled out a flashlight from her jacket pocket and placed it in his left hand. Then she took his right arm. “Come on,” she said. “Keep me steady.”
They followed a path into the park that eventually moved upward. She walked on the right, and the higher the path, the more she leaned against him. Her hand that had been holding his arm eased down and grasped his hand.
Finally she said, “Wait a minute. I’ve got to rest.” She leaned her cheek against his shoulder.
He was winded, too, and having her so close to him kicked up his pulse. She was nearly his height, so it was easy enough for their faces to align even as they continued to stand side by side. When he began to kiss her and she kissed him back, he wasn’t even surprised. He wanted to pull her into him, but she was still holding his right hand like she was afraid to let him go. Which was pretty sexy.
He could actually imagine Russ approving, because this was the way of things. That the younger stronger man took over from the older weaker one.
She broke away from the kiss and smiled. “Pretty soon, you’re going to have so many women chasing you. Will you still make time for me?”
