The clerk led Heat and Rook toward a glass-walled office on the far side of the room. Seated at the desk, behind mounds of old newspapers, was a rumpled, balding, and bespectacled middle-aged man with bad posture and a generally beaten-down-by-life air.
The clerk tapped on the door. Liebman didn’t bother to look away from his screen when he said, “Hello, detectives, what can I—”
Then he looked up. “Jameson?” he said, almost like he was seeing a ghost. “Thank God you’re okay, but…What are you doing here?”
Rook, following orders to let Heat go first, said nothing.
“Mr. Liebman, I’m Captain Nikki Heat with the Twentieth Precinct.”
“I know who you are,” Liebman said. “I read my own paper, you know. Are you here to give me a story?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll have a good chat with our lawyer. Have a very nice day,” he said, smiling for the first time.
“Mr. Liebman, it’s about Tam Svejda.”
The moment Heat said the name, Liebman’s smile evaporated.
“Oh, no,” was all he said, his shoulders slumping even farther than usual. “Oh, no…please…It was her in the video, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Liebman.”
The man’s face went immediately into his hands. He didn’t make a sound, but his body started shaking. When he lifted his head back up and took his hands away, there were tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to compose himself. “I think…I think I knew…Tam didn’t exactly take a lot of days off. When I didn’t hear from her on Sunday, I thought, ‘Well, atta girl, finally giving yourself a little breather.’ Then on Monday, no calls, no e-mails, which was…I mean, I don’t think I’ve gone two days without hearing from Tam the whole time we’ve worked together. She always had some kind of story percolating. Then this morning, I saw the video and…Well, like I said, I think I knew. I mean, everything about the victim was…But I was still hoping it wasn’t her. Oh, Tam.”
He stood and turned away, walking toward the window behind his desk, not wanting to let Heat and Rook see him emotionally overcome.
“She was a helluva reporter,” Rook said.
“She was more than just that,” Liebman said to the window, his voice sounding hollow. “I know she had this image that she cultivated. She was this journalistic rock star. Sexy as hell. Relentless in her pursuit of a story. Every scoop she went after was a piece of raw meat, and she was a tiger. But that was more of a persona than anything. Underneath she was a total sweetheart. I had exactly one reporter who always remembered my birthday and my wedding anniversary, and it was Tam. When my mom died, she came to the funeral and cried right along with me. She was…”
Liebman was faltering, so Rook finished the thought: “One of a kind.”
“Yeah. She was,” Liebman said, now turning back toward them and offering Rook a sad smile. “But what am I telling you for? You know what I’m talking about. Back when you two were together, I always said if you had kids, they’d be the greatest reporters who ever lived. They would have had to make a permanent table for them at the Pulitzers, because one of them would have been winning every year.”
He waved at the air, as if vanquishing the silly thought.
“Anyway, what’s going on with the investigation?” Liebman said. “Have you caught the bastards yet?”
Rook was about to say something, but Heat grabbed his wrist.
“This is going to have to be off the record,” she said.
Heat and Liebman eyed each other warily. The touchy-feely stuff now over, they had resumed their usual adversarial roles.
“So I’m supposed to help your investigation but then wait for the press conference to be able to report anything?” Liebman said. “You’re joking. Tam was our reporter. She was also the public face of our metro staff. It’s completely unacceptable for us not to be out in front of the competition on this. At the very, very least, you have to let us break the story that she was the American ISIS victim. It would be ridiculous for anyone else to have that first.”
Heat took in a large breath, which she planned to use to give force to her argument until she caught Rook giving her a small nod.
She let the breath out. “Hang on,” she said, taking out her phone and tapping at it a few times.
A voice came over the line: “Raley.”
“Hey, Rales,” Heat said. “Real quick: Have you done next-of-kin yet?”
“The Svejdas live in Media, PA,” he said. “The Media Police told me they’ll be sending a captain over to their house in the next fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks,” she said, then ended the call. She looked back at Liebman.
“Will you hold off for half an hour so Tam’s parents don’t have to learn about this from a reporter?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Then you got your scoop. You can source it from me. And I promise I’ll keep you out ahead of the competition on the rest of the investigation when I can,” she said. “But I need your cooperation. And I need your promise that if I tell you to hold something back, you’ll hold it back.”
“I won’t do anything to jeopardize your investigation, Captain,” he said. “I guarantee you I want to nail those scumbags just as badly as you do.”
“Thank you,” Heat said. “So had Tam been working on anything involving ISIS?”
“Well, sure, she did the Joanna Masters story for us.”
“Tam did that?” Rook said. “Geez. I didn’t even look at the byline.”
“Sorry,” Heat said. “The Joanna Masters story?”
“Joanna Masters is an aid worker who was shot by ISIS,” Rook said. “She was Red Cross, right?”
Liebman nodded, then continued the story: “She was over in Syria, helping to distribute food and medicine to the crush of refugees there, when her convoy was set upon by a group of ISIS fighters. She was shot as they fled. Tam knew Joanna was from the city and was determined to get the first interview with her. Tam started working a source she had cultivated at the Red Cross to give her a heads up as soon as Joanna flew home. I think Tam was waiting outside Joanna’s apartment in Greenwich Village when the cab pulled up from the airport. Everyone had already reported on what happened to Joanna Masters, but Tam was the first one to get the whole story.”
Liebman chuckled. “The Times sent a reporter over the next day and Joanna Masters told them to beat it. As far as she was concerned, she had said all she had to say to the Ledger, and she was done. The Times ended up having to quote Tam’s story, with credit, as opposed to what they usually do, which is pretend like they didn’t get scooped by the down-and-dirty tabloid.
“Oh, Tam,” he said again, shaking his head and sighing, his eyes getting misty.
“Okay, but that sounds like it was basically a human interest story,” Heat said. “Why would ISIS care about something like that? It’s not like they’re worried about getting bad press. Heck, they seem to want bad press. Why would they be threatened by the Joanna Masters story?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Liebman said. “I guess it’s possible Joanna gave her some kind of lead. But that’s just conjecture on my part. Tam certainly didn’t say anything. You’d have to ask Joanna.”
Heat made a mental note to pay a visit to Joanna Masters and do just that.
“Okay, so other than Joanna Masters, was Tam working on anything else that might have had an ISIS angle?” Heat asked.
Liebman cast his glance to the left. “Maybe,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘maybe’?”
“Tam and I had worked together for a lot of years,” Liebman said. “I keep my younger reporters on a pretty tight leash. And you may have noticed I have a lot of them. But Tam was…Well, she was in a different category. She knew as soon as she told me about a story, I’d have to put it down on the story budget, and then everyone from the executive editor on down would start clamoring for it, whether it was ready to go or not. So
there were a lot of times when she’d be working on something and tell me it wasn’t fully baked yet. Frankly, I think she learned that approach from your husband.”
“Editors have to be managed properly,” Rook confirmed.
“I had learned to trust her to tell me when the time was right,” Liebman said.
“So had she been working on something new that she hadn’t told you anything about?” Heat asked.
“Yeah. She said it was big.”
“How big?”
“Like supernova big. But she said she had to get it nailed down a little better before she let slip a single peep about it. She left town on Thursday to chase it down, but I honestly couldn’t even tell you where she went. I usually only know where Tam has been after she submits her expense report.”
“Do you think you could piece together what she was working on?” Heat said. “Does she have files we could look at?”
Liebman puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled. “Oh, geez. I have no idea. Her desk wasn’t much cleaner than mine.”
“Can we go have a look?”
“Sure,” Liebman said. “Come on.”
Liebman stood and walked out into the newsroom. Heat and Rook followed.
As she walked, Heat became aware she was being tracked by multiple sets of young, openly curious eyes. Then she realized the eyes weren’t on her.
“Rook, why is everyone staring at you?” she asked.
Liebman answered: “You think you can take a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and parade him around the city room of a major metro paper and people won’t notice? Rook is like some combination of the pope and Elvis to these kids. Half of them probably have posters of him back home in their bedrooms.”
“With all due respect to His Holiness,” Rook said, “I have much better hair.”
“Anyhow, here we are,” Liebman said, stopping at a desk that occupied the corner closest to the vending machines, prime real estate befitting Senior Metro Reporter Tam Svejda.
Heat stared down at the surface of it, which was covered in old newspapers, takeout menus, reporters’ steno pads, printouts of competitors’ stories, and ketchup packets. The main organizing principle seemed to be entropy.
“Uhh, wow,” Heat said. “Not sure where to start here.”
“How about there,” Rook said, pointing.
Heat followed his finger to the top of the computer. The Ledger’s parent company hadn’t sprung for new equipment since the Bush presidency—the first one, probably—so Tam’s desktop computer was a big block of a thing that had plenty of room for knickknacks on top. Heat saw a preserved alligator head, a pair of miniature handcuffs, some fuzzy dice, a Rubik’s Cube whose squares were pictures of male models, a tarantula under glass…
And a misshapen bullet slug.
“Don’t touch it,” Heat snapped as Rook reached toward it. She looked at Liebman. “Do you know anything about that?”
“Not much,” Liebman said, adjusting his glasses, which had slid down his nose, so he could get a better look at it. “It showed up, I don’t know, a week or two ago? I asked Tam about it and all she said was it was a souvenir.”
“Strange souvenir,” Heat said.
“Reporters are strange people, Captain Heat,” Liebman said.
Heat was now looking at Rook, who, having been deprived of tactile feedback, was studying the slug from multiple angles. It had clearly struck something fairly hard, hence its crumpled form.
“Do you think maybe someone was trying to send a message?” Rook said. “If I was trying to scare a reporter off a story, sending them a bullet would be a nice old-school way of going about it, wouldn’t it?”
“Tam didn’t exactly scare easily,” Liebman said.
“Yeah, but someone who was trying to threaten her wouldn’t know that,” Rook said. “And of course Tam took this quote-unquote ‘threat’ and stuck it on top of her computer like a trophy.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t you send someone a new bullet?” Heat said. “One that’s shiny and brassy and still in the jacket? That’s more symbolic, isn’t it? Why send an old busted-up slug?”
“Maybe that’s part of the message: Not only do we have bullets, we know how to use them,” Rook said.
The three of them stood around what had, in life, been Tam Svejda’s desk. It was as if they were waiting for her ghost to visit them and whisper an alternative theory in their ears.
But wherever Tam’s restless spirit had landed, it wasn’t the Ledger newsroom. After thirty seconds of listening to would-be-Jimmy Breslins type, overwriting their six-paragraph briefs, Heat snapped back to action.
“Can I bag that bullet for evidence?” she asked.
“Be my guest,” Liebman said.
Heat produced a pair of blue nitrile gloves and an evidence bag and carefully dropped the bullet inside.
“What about these notebooks?” Heat asked.
Liebman looked at their front covers. “She usually kept the current stuff with her. These look like they’re all for stories she’s already put in the paper, so they’re all old news. But our lawyer would probably have a fit if I turned them over without checking first. How about I go through them and see if there’s anything that might be relevant, and I’ll let you know if something stands out?”
Rook read Heat’s indecision and spoke up: “That bullet was probably sent to her because of something not yet in the paper. There’s no point in threatening someone once the story has already run.”
“Okay,” she said.
Heat then nodded toward the phone on Svejda’s desk. “Did Tam use that or did she stick to her mobile?”
“No, she used both,” Liebman said, then added a wry smile. “Sometimes simultaneously.”
“Was her cell phone provided to her by the paper?”
“It was.”
“So anything she would have been working on would have been reflected in phone records,” Heat said.
“Probably,” Liebman said. “Unless she was doing a lot of in-person interviewing.”
“Who can I talk to about looking through your phone records?” Heat asked. “Ordinarily I’d just get a search warrant but I don’t think any judge is going to let me paw through a newspaper’s phone records when all I have is an investigational hunch that I’m looking to confirm.”
“Well, if you’re looking for phone records, you’re out of my league, that’s for sure. While it’s our job to upend other people’s privacy, we take our own pretty seriously. Since this is a criminal matter, you’ll have to go through our outside counsel.”
“Sure. Who do you guys use?”
“Helen Miksit,” Liebman said.
Heat did not reply. She was too busy exerting the Herculean effort needed to block the sneer that was coming to her lips.
Which she did.
Barely.
Another twenty minutes of poking around the New York Ledger newsroom accomplished little beyond making Heat even more uncomfortable about being there.
Tam Svejda had clearly been up to something: perhaps something unrelated to her death, perhaps something that put her on a collision course with a terrorist’s machete. Wherever the answers were, they weren’t in Tam’s desk. Or in the vending machines behind it. Or anywhere else in that newsroom filled with barely adult reporters.
Heat could also sense Liebman was getting eager to be rid of them so he could begin marshalling his resources to cover a big story. The reporters of the New York Ledger had a scoop to get online. They also had a colleague to mourn, which they would do concurrently with their work.
It was one of the small ways in which cops and newspapers actually did have a lot in common: neither was given much time to stop and grieve.
Heat and Rook were back out on 6th Avenue and had just hailed a cab when Rook’s phone rang.
“Hello, this is Jameson Rook,” he said, smoothly.
His face brightened. “Oh, hi, Lana!” he said, then cupped the phone. “It’s Lana Kline. Legs’s daughter?”
“Oh, I remember. Little Miss Sunshine herself,” Heat said through a saccharine smile.
But Rook missed her passive-aggressiveness. He was already back to his call.
They had slid inside a cab. Heat told the driver to take them to the Church Street address downtown where she hoped to find Helen Miksit both in her office and in a good mood.
“Yes. Yes, that’d be great. How soon?” Rook was saying, then waited a moment.
“No, no problem whatsoever,” he said.
Another pause.
“I keep a bag packed for just such emergencies,” he said.
Then he laughed. “Yes, of course there’s a bathing suit in there.”
His face went mock-serious. “Rum? Miss Kline, that’s rather naughty of you.”
He waited for her reply, then responded with: “Oh, behave…But if you’re looking for suggestions, I’d go with Pyrat Cask. They have an aged—”
Wait.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “Okay. Sounds good. Yep, see you soon…Okay. Ta-ta!”
He ended the call. The smile had morphed into more of a goofy grin.
Heat could feel her ears reddening. She wondered if there was actual steam coming out of them or if that was just her imagination.
“What?” he said innocently.
“Nothing.”
“You look…angry all of sudden.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, giving the not-fine smile.
“Oh, good,” Rook said. “Anyhow, that was Lana Kline. Legs’s daughter.”
“You said that part already.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. And?”
“Well, it seems Legs has an opening in his schedule for a one-on-one interview this afternoon, which is something I’m going to have to do before I write the profile. Because, you know, talking to a source is…Well, it’s part of what you want to do when you’re trying to capture someone in a…in a profile…Why are you looking at me like that?”
High Heat Page 13
