As with everything in Washington news circles, the tables were assembled according to pecking order: the networks and big magazines at the tables in the front row closest to the dais, and in the back, the struggling local television stations and the small papers, radio news, and bloggers. My table was somewhere in the middle.
We stopped at a cash bar. Michael handed me a flute of champagne, and with his glass, he pointed to a city council member under criminal investigation—but don’t tell anybody yet, he warned—and over there, an aging columnist sent to therapy last year for anger management or sex addiction, he couldn’t remember. He wagged his finger at me. “You ever get jammed up, that’s what you say. ‘I had to have it, couldn’t help myself.’ Popular ailment right now.”
I laughed. “How do you know all this?”
“Keep my ear to the ground. Never know what you might need.”
“Really,” I said, cutting him a sideways look. “And what do you need here?”
“Ah-ah-ah,” he chided. “We agreed. No talking about work tonight.”
It was true Michael knew more people than I did: legislators and business leaders, activists and television celebs, law-enforcement officials from distant jurisdictions. He was constantly scanning the room, lifting his hand to someone he knew, then pulling me along to introduce me. He was charming, telling his outrageous tales out of school, and everyone we met seemed to like him.
He wanted me to introduce him to a particular news director from a competing station. Leila Gupta was a couple of tables over, a small woman in a coral-colored gown, speaking to a circle of admirers. I knew her only by reputation, which was for no-bullshit news, and admired her work tremendously.
We crossed to Leila’s table. She told Michael in a breathless way that she was pleased to meet him. Someday he’d grace her newscast, she hoped.
“But not too soon,” he said. “When I’m on TV, someone’s had a bad day. Much as I enjoy attention, I prefer safe streets more.”
She invited him for a tour of her station and to wine and dine him after. It was so outrageous I laughed. “That’s outright poaching of my guest.”
“And what about you?” she said, winking at me. “My station is on our way up. We only have to bump yours off, which would be easier if you were on my team. Consider it: the rise is more fun than the fall. And it’d be a coup to steal you from Nick.”
It was a no-brainer to dump Mellay, but my staff I could never leave. To be polite, I took her card.
Michael’s hand was on his hip, and he turned at the waist, surveying the room. “Where’s your guest?” he asked Leila. “I was hoping to catch up tonight. We’re old friends.”
“I was stood up,” she said, flatly amused. “Can you believe it? I haven’t been stood up since college. I wonder if some big case kept him?” She raised her eyebrow at Michael. “Something I should know about?”
The lights flickered and then dimmed, signaling the dinner was soon to start, and we headed back to our assigned table. Michael pulled out my chair for me. Before he took his seat, he leaned down and whispered, “I’m gonna ghost. It’s been a long day.”
“Really? You haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Motorcade’s on the move by now. I better leave before Secret Service locks us in.”
With that, he walked away. I stared at his back, confused by his abrupt departure, as he weaved past the tables and climbed the rise and went through a set of doors. My attention turned to Leila Gupta and the empty chair next to her.
Where’s your guest? he’d said. I was hoping to catch up.
Damn.
I moved as fast as my four-inch heels allowed. A server with a tray of breadbaskets came through the door as I reached for the handle, and we nearly collided. “Pardon me,” I said, holding out my arms to steady the tray before moving on.
The lobby was empty except for two federal agents. They were checking me out—not in a good way—and it occurred to me it might not be the greatest idea to appear to be fleeing a room in which the president was momentarily expected. I slowed down, tossing them a jaunty wave and a “good evening, guys,” and went through the door. When I hit the dark street, I started running. At the end of the block, Michael was sliding into his cruiser.
I shouted his name.
He climbed out and stood in the open door until I reached him, panting. I held up one finger. “I—hang on—”
He stared at me, bemused. “Need a ride or something?”
“I need . . . to know . . . it was Ian. Right?”
“What did I say?” he said. “No work talk. This is my well-deserved respite. A nice dinner with a charming companion.”
“But you didn’t come for the dinner. All night long you were scouting the room. For Ian Chase, right? He was Leila’s guest who stood her up, wasn’t he?”
His fingers drummed impatiently against his trouser leg.
“It was clever of you,” I said. “How did you know Ian was supposed to be here?”
He exhaled with impatience. “I told you. Keep my ear to the ground. Never know—”
“What you might need,” I finished for him. “Right. But what were you hoping to accomplish if he showed? It’s a party. What’s he going to do? Stand on his chair and shout he had an affair with Evelyn Carney?”
He stepped around the door. When he closed it, metal creaked loudly. The edge of the front quarter panel was bashed in where it met the door. It was a huge dent on a new-model Crown Vic.
“Of course not,” he said. “Ian Chase doesn’t talk.”
His profile turned toward the streetlight, which illuminated his lips pressed together and his jaw gone taut, a cunning look I remembered well. It was the look of the hunter and meant Ian had become the focus of Michael’s investigation and that Michael would show him no mercy.
“So you wanted him to feel you stalking him,” I reasoned aloud. “Why go to the trouble? He knows he’s a suspect. On your short list, as you say.”
He shifted his weight to his heels and rocked a little, feigning nonchalance. All the while he was studying me beneath lowered lids. I could feel the weight of his thoughts and also his reluctance to voice them. Softly, I prodded: “Or do you have new evidence you wanted to present to him?”
After a long moment, he said in a low voice: “She was pregnant.”
I blinked. A disoriented feeling came over me again, something akin to what I felt by the river when the heron launched itself from the tree and disappeared beyond the river’s end—although the revelation shouldn’t have caught me off guard. From the beginning, I had wondered if she was pregnant. It’s one of those things you always have to ask when a woman goes missing, especially when you learn she had a complicated relationship with a man. But hearing it now after the way I’d seen her in the river, the way Michael announced it, abruptly, in such a harsh way, the hopelessness of it all—
I gave him a vague sort of nod, like go on.
“Peter Carney thought the ME’s prelim had to be wrong. When we assured him it was not, he explained he and his wife had not been intimate since his return to the States.” He paused, shaking his head solemnly. “Anyway, you can understand the husband’s confusion, since the ME says she was seven or eight weeks along.”
“Conceived when Peter was out of the country?”
“Yep.”
“Did you ask Ian about it?”
“Another question on the list that Mr. Chase’s attorney has refused to let us ask. But I’ll get to him. Don’t worry.” He looked off into the dark street and sighed, and in a voice suddenly weary, he said: “Since you’re going to ask, yes, you can report it, but not tonight. I need one night’s rest. It’s been a shit day—the river, the visit to the ME, all that pretense at the dinner—and I can’t deal with reporters calling all hours or the chief asking why I don’t already have an arrest warrant. Bright and early tomorrow I have to figure out whether a guy I work with offed his lover while she carried a baby likely his and dumped her in the river l
ike yesterday’s garbage, and if he and his celebrity attorney thinks—”
He turned into the light again. His profile was grim and pale against the night sky. The line of his arrogant jaw had gone flabby, and the streetlights picked out the gray in his hair, but he was still one of the most handsome, tough, and determined men I’d ever met. I understood then why I’d once been so hung up on him, and also the distance of the feeling, which told me I wasn’t anymore and probably hadn’t been for quite some time.
“Okay, so the information is embargoed until the morning news,” I said. “What can we report?”
“The medical examiner found water in her lungs,” he explained. “That means death from drowning, but how did she get in the river? There’s also evidence of perimortem trauma—a head wound with no time to heal—meaning she’d been struck near the time of her death. Was she knocked out and thrown into the water? That’s supposition on my part, but you can report this as fact: however Evelyn Carney got into the river, whether she was tossed, fell, jumped, or chased into it, we’ll find out. We’ll close the case and charge the suspect, no matter who he is.”
He’d practically written tomorrow’s script for me.
My thoughts slowed and focused. “I want the exclusive for as long as it will hold.”
“Fine by me, but our person of interest is a federal prosecutor, and a politically connected one at that. How long do you think it’s going to hold?”
He was right. Naming Ian Chase took the story into an entirely new territory. “I’m going to need to name you as my source.”
He laughed unpleasantly. “Not happening.”
“Then I need another source, and that source needs to be high ranking. Who else is in the loop who will talk to me?”
“You still don’t trust me?” he said.
“Not a matter of trust. With something like this, I need at least two sources with direct knowledge.”
He opened the driver’s-side door. The metal groaned again. “Get in,” he said, before crossing in front of the hood of the car and coming around to the passenger’s side door. He unbuttoned his jacket and pulled his phone from his waistband before climbing into the seat. After he hit speed dial, a voice came over the speakerphone: “Mike.”
“Hey, Doc.” Dr. Robert Weller, chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia, precisely the source I needed. In his decades of work in the city, through the worst years of the drug epidemic and crew wars, he’d probably seen more bodies than soldiers on battlefields, and in the hot summer months when tempers frayed and shootings occurred with sickening frequency, his office got overwhelmed. Yet he was always cheery and competent.
“You’re on speaker,” Michael said, telling him who I was and that I was in the car with him. “Ms. Knightly has come to me with rumors in the Carney case. I’d like to set her straight on the prelim, at least. For one thing, she’s good people, and we can trust her. For another, I don’t need misinformation making this investigation harder than it has to be. That jackass lawyer will certainly use it as another excuse to keep his client from talking.”
The jackass lawyer I understood to be Ian’s.
“As long as she understands not to use my name,” Weller said. “It’s the policy of our office that we don’t make statements until the report has been finalized. But if she wants to overhear us talk about some aspects of the prelim, meh, I don’t mind.”
They chatted about closed head injuries and temporal bone fractures and intracranial bleeding and striking objects, forensic information that was its own language. After asking them to dumb it down, what I got was this: the medical examiner believed Evelyn had been struck on the side of her head with some sort of blunt object—like a stick or bat, that sort of thing, nothing that pierced her skull.
“A weapon like a blackjack?” I said, interrupting.
Michael turned quickly to face me, his expression keen, but said nothing.
“There are many objects that could create that kind of trauma,” the medical examiner said. “Yes, a weapon shaped like that certainly would.”
He went on to describe the blow was to a space between her temple and ear and involved enough force to cause bleeding within her skull. Yet the head trauma hadn’t killed her. The Doc surmised it was possible to have survived the injury, if she’d received medical attention.
It had been the river that killed her, after she’d fallen unconscious into it, or had been thrown in. In any case, the manner of her death would be ruled a homicide.
“One more thing, Doc,” Michael said. “Given the state of decomposition, is it possible to extract DNA from the fetus? To test paternity?”
“We believe so, yes,” the chief medical examiner said.
Michael was looking at me with eyes that caught the streetlamp and gave an odd glow. “Thanks, Doc. See what you can do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LAST NIGHT I dreamed I was swimming in the river. In the distance, a woman was drifting facedown. I wanted to help her, but the tide was working against me, and with each stroke, she seemed farther from my reach. It was hopeless, there wasn’t enough time, and suddenly I was there, as happens only in dreams. My hands were on her shoulders, turning her, the long and tangled hair covering her face. I brushed her hair away to find her eyes were alive and open, a summer-sky blue, and she gasped a deep gulp of air.
It was my mother.
I jolted awake. It had all been so clear. The briny river smell. The push of the tide. The blue of my mother’s eyes. It’s just a dream, breathe through it, it’s not real—and then my alarm went off.
Four o’clock had come early this morning.
After showering, I slipped on jeans and a faded American University sweatshirt and pulled my mop of hair back into a tight ponytail that I covered with a red Nationals ball cap and went out the door. My dashboard clock read 4:30 when I parked in the garage at the station.
Ronnie Morton was our morning editor. She was also the grande dame of the early news desk. She knew everyone in the business, having been in it since the days of shooting on film. But over the years her nerves had become a little unreliable, and breaking news fairly unhinged her, which was why—despite her talent and oversized contact list—we kept her on the zero-dark-thirty shift. It was simply quieter. These days, quiet made Ronnie happy.
Which was also why I approached Ronnie with caution, even though she’d obviously caught sight of me and was becoming noticeably disturbed, tugging nervously at the ends of her hair.
“Why are you here?” she called out in a falsely chipper voice. “Let me start over. Hello, Virginia, I’m pleased to see you. Now, how are you going to ruin my morning?”
“We’re going to break some news, Ronnie.” When she started to fidget anxiously, I held up my hand. “But no worries, I’ve already written the script and isolated the video, and it’s being edited as we speak. Now I have to get back down to the edit suites to oversee it, so I need you to get ahold of Ben. Tell him there’s a new development in the Evelyn Carney story, and the show needs him live on the set. He’s the lead.”
“Ben’s not a morning person.”
“So don’t call him before five,” I told her in a firm voice. “Make sure he knows the script’s already approved; he doesn’t have to write a word. I left his copy on the set for review. If he could call the police chief as a courtesy heads-up for the story we’re going to break, that’d be great. If the chief will give him a statement, that’s even better. Tell him I’ve already put in calls to a man named Ian Chase, but if he could get a response from Ian’s attorney, that’d be super. If not, I can do that, too.” I handed her a sheet of paper with the attorney’s contact info, wondering what else. “Oh, and tell Ben there’s a fresh pot of coffee waiting for him. That’ll get him here faster. Your assistant can fetch cream from my office fridge. He drinks it light but hates the artificial crap in the break room. I think that about covers it, but if Ben gives you any trouble, transfer him to me in edit suite two. Not to
my cell phone. I seem to have misplaced it.”
She nodded, smiling warily.
I was halfway across the newsroom before I stopped and turned back. “And, Ronnie? Do yourself a favor. Call in extra help to answer phones.”
Her smile disappeared. “All hell’s going to break loose, isn’t it?”
“It might feel that way for a short time. But don’t worry. After the story’s edited, I’ll be beside you the whole time.”
————
As I entered the suite, the editor, Doug, spun in his chair. “This video you’ve called for,” he said, talking about the cutaway shot of Evelyn Carney in the meeting with Ian. “I can’t find it on the server.”
“The raw video is MIA. The on-air version is here.” I pulled the thumb drive from the lanyard around my neck and handed it to him.
“You removed it from the server?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He paused, thoughtful. “Highly irregular.”
“Sure is.”
He inserted the drive. When he brought up the video of Evelyn, he whistled. “But wow, great shot,” he said. “And here’s the dude who killed her?”
“Person of interest, right.”
He glanced furtively my way. “I can see why someone might want to keep it to herself.”
“Yeah,” I said, and left it at that.
Soon we were in the zone. It was no longer about Ian Chase or Peter Carney or Michael Ledger. In a certain way, it wasn’t even about Evelyn anymore. It was about the process of making the story come alive with movement and sound: Ian Chase talking behind a podium, the police searching his condo, the blue light blazing across his walls—
“Stop,” I said, leaning over and tapping a fingernail on the monitor. “Over this video of Ian we lay his statement. I don’t have that yet. I’ll go upstairs and put in the calls and get something. Leave enough room.”
The Cutaway Page 15
