The Triple Threat Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  “There was something dark matted on its flank, but the dog was filthy—fur stuck together, burrs, cuts on its paws,” Nicole said. “Everyone got all excited. But it turned out to be canine blood, not human.”

  “I’ve been trying for an interview with the woman who found him, but Channel Eight’s got her all sewn up.” Cassidy took another sip of beer.

  “What would you guys have if you didn’t have nonstop coverage of this?” Nicole said. “Maybe some actual news?”

  Cassidy snorted. “We’ve talked about this before. Everyone sitting at this table depends upon crime for her livelihood. We don’t make the bad guys. We catch them!”

  Have joking, half not, Allison said, “But the media distort everything.”

  “Right. Just like all cops are trigger-happy and all lawyers are sharks.” Cassidy laughed. Nothing ever seemed to get to her. “The media are not creating the problem. We’re reporting it. There’s a difference.”

  As the counter guy set down Cassidy’s food, Nicole said, “In about fifteen minutes, could you bring us a black-and-tan brownie and three spoons?”

  After he nodded and left, she turned back to Cassidy. “Are you sure there really is a difference?”

  “Hey, her parents have begged for coverage. They want everyone to know what Katie looks like, what a good girl she is. They think it will help.”

  Allison pushed the remains of her salad away. “Sometimes I worry that this much coverage just gives people ideas. Now any sicko who wants his own little piece of the six o’clock news knows that all he needs to do is go out and get his own girl.”

  Instead of taking offense, Cassidy dropped her eyes and smiled a private smile. “That’s what Rick says, too. He says I’m just encouraging them.”

  Nicole pounced. “Rick! So you’ve got yourself a new man? You’ve been holding out on us, girl!”

  “This one’s a cop. So he understands the hours. He gets that when a story breaks I’ve got to go.”

  “Where’d you meet him?” Allison couldn’t imagine what it would be like to still be dating. She and Marshall had been together since they were sophomores in college.

  “I interviewed him when that 7-Eleven clerk got shot, and afterward we ended up going out for coffee.”

  Nicole arched an eyebrow. “So is he fine?”

  Cassidy licked her lips. “He is very fine. He reminds me of a fox, or maybe a wolf. He’s got these pale blue eyes and dark brown hair and a very muscular body.”

  Nicole made a show of fanning herself.

  Despite complaining that all the good men were taken or gay, Cassidy managed to find dates every place she went. Dates, yes. Long-term boy-friends, no.

  Cassidy was a contradiction. She was always sure of herself when it came to covering a story, but in her personal life she needed constant reassurance. Though she exercised obsessively, she complained about being fat, and worried aloud about growing old—and waited for some-one to contradict her. And she twisted herself into a pretzel to gain the approval of whatever guy she was dating.

  Three years earlier, she had been a windsurfer for about two weeks when she had a boyfriend who loved windsurfing. Then she had briefly become a vegetarian when she dated someone who abstained. And there was the time she was “seriously considering” converting to Catholicism until she realized the guy she had met on Match.com expected her to stay home and have babies. Lots of babies.

  Maybe this Rick guy would be different.

  But Cassidy was still the same. Even over dinner with friends, she couldn’t stop looking for a story. “Jerry wants a minute-forty-five package about Katie on the news every night. That’s an unbelievable amount of time. The world coming to an end would be lucky to get a minute and a half. Normally I would start with the latest update and reverse to the B-roll—but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything new. Right?” She eyed Nicole closely.

  Nicole shot Allison a look, which Allison answered with a little nod. None of this got past Cassidy, who grinned in anticipation.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” Nicole shook a cautionary finger. “But you can’t use this, Cassidy. Not yet.”

  “All right.” She nodded so hard that her artfully highlighted hair swung back and forth.

  “I mean it. You can’t. I’ll give you a heads-up when we’re ready to release this. But Katie had a MySpace account, and she kept a blog on it.”

  Cassidy’s eyebrows went up. “And her parents didn’t take it down?”

  “They didn’t know anything about it,” Nicole said, reaching out to grab some of Cassidy’s fries. “It’s anonymous, or at least as anonymous as a seventeen-year-old girl can think of how to be.”

  “In other words,” Allison said, “not very.” Reading the blog had left her with a residue of sadness. It brought Katie alive for her—and yet as she read her words, Allison grew even more afraid for the girl.

  “Right,” Nicole agreed. “Like it’s called The DC Page, and on the part where people can leave comments, they’re all addressed to Katie. There’s only one Katie in the Senate page program. What makes it even clearer is that now that she’s missing, there are people begging for her to come home, or saying how much they miss her.”

  “Are there any clues? Like ‘Dear Blog, today I intend to disappear . . .’ ?”

  The counter guy set down their dessert. Cassidy was the first to pick up one of the three spoons.

  Nicole shook her head. “No. I wish there were. It’s clear she had a boyfriend in the program, but it also sounds like they broke up. It was all very dramatic, very much love one minute and the worst thing that ever happened to her the next. The one thing that gave me pause is that she seemed to have a crush on one of the senators. She called him Senator X, but she also said it was her sponsor. Which would be Senator Fairview.”

  Allison hadn’t known what to make of the blog. Had Fairview returned the girl’s feelings? Or had he even been aware of them?

  “Fairview.” Cassidy rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard stories about him.”

  “What do you mean?” Allison asked. Her heart started beating faster. She set down her spoon.

  “I’ve interviewed him before,” Cassidy said, taking a bite of dessert that strategically encompassed the brownie, the ice cream, and the caramel sauce. “He’s a nonstop flirt who likes it when women are impressed by the fact that he’s a senator. His wife—I think her name’s Nancy—lives here with their two kids. She’s got an upscale children’s clothing business. So he spends his time back in DC in a bachelor pad, and maybe comes home once or twice a month. But when the cat’s away, he likes to play. . . .”

  “So he’s like Senator Packwood?” Allison asked.

  Bob Packwood, after decades as an Oregon senator, had been forced to resign after dozens of women came forward saying he forcibly kissed or groped them.

  “No. As far as I know, all his conquests are willing. But you hear stories about him.”

  “Like what?” Nicole leaned forward.

  “Like him having sex in the back alley with some college girl he met in a bar, while his driver waits in the car.”

  “That’s pretty sick,” Nicole said.

  “The sick thing is that I heard it from the driver.Our honorable sena-tor got a kick out of doing it right in front of him.”

  Nicole made a face. “A woman in a bar is one thing. A seventeen-year-old girl is another.”

  Allison was finding it hard to breathe. The food in her stomach had turned into a leaden ball. She remembered another man she had known. He had liked to take chances too. The more dangerous it was, the more he got off on it.

  It felt like a big piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place.

  Allison said, “I don’t think the two are that far apart. It sounds like Fairview likes to take risks. What could be riskier—or more tempting—than a seventeen-year-old?”

  Making an enemy of a powerful senator was never a good idea. Still, Allison knew it was the right thing to do. She took a deep br
eath.

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to open a grand jury. And I’m going to make sure that the first thing they do is take a good hard look at Senator Fairview.”

  MYSPACE.COM/THEDCPAGE

  Take a Picture

  September 17

  All the other pages complain about the schedule.

  They don’t know what they are talking about.

  At least here I can make most of my own decisions. If they give me an errand to run, nobody cares how long it takes. If I stop to talk to some-one, or to look at a painting, they don’t grill me about what I was doing.

  Besides, this place is so cool! Like on Sunday evening we all ended up playing Frisbee on the Capitol lawn. I mean, who else gets to do that? We even got one of the Capitol cops to toss it back & forth for a few minutes. And in January we’ll hear the State of the Union live. See the president up close & personal. Did you know the pages are the first people to shake the president’s hand when he walks in? Look for us on TV!

  I’ve finally made a friend here—this girl E—& sometimes we do crazy things. E & I went on a “guy hunt” the other day, where you take pictures of cute guys with your cell. But they can’t catch you doing it or the game is over. We got some pictures of the other pages, bike messengers & a cop. I even took one of Senator X, but I didn’t tell E about that one.

  When we went through the rotunda, people actually took pictures of us! It must have been because of our uniforms.

  Sometimes you do sort of feel important. Some of the senators take time out to talk with you & tell stories in the back lobby. It’s awesome when a senator calls you by name or remembers what state you’re from. We’re even allowed to get in an elevator with senators, as long as it isn’t the senator-only elevator & it isn’t crowded.

  It’s not a big deal to them, but being a page is pretty much scum compared to being a senator. Some senators just ignore pages all together, but a few of them are nice. The coolest is my senator, Senator X. He says he remembers what it was like from when he was a page.

  I was talking to him today & some newspaper guy started pointing a camera at us. I noticed how Senator X lifted his chin & started using his hands a lot. I took mental notes for when I’m a politician someday. He looked important. He looked powerful.

  And then Senator X caught my eye & winked. With the eye that the camera couldn’t see.

  UNITED STATES SENATE

  September 20

  We’re talking about destroying the youngest of human lives for research purposes,” Senator Fairview said.

  He had them all. He could feel it. The Senate galleries were packed. The cameras clicked and whirred. His veins were filled with quicksilver.

  He nodded, and Katie set up the metal easel and then put up the poster board. He was in the zone, as he liked to think of it, and even though Katie was very easy on the eyes, he barely saw her. The poster showed a series of photos, starting with a black-and-white collection of cells and ending with a color photo of a little girl.

  Stepping out from behind the polished podium, Fairview walked over to the easel. He adjusted a silver cuff link that had caught on the edge of his navy blue blazer, then pointed at the photograph of cells—they looked like a cluster of gray circles—on the left-hand side of the board.

  “Even the presiding officer, as handsome as he is”—Fairview paused for the laughter, and got it, feeling a Yes! in his gut—“he looked like this at one time, just a little clump of cells. If he had been destroyed at this point, he wouldn’t be here before you today. It’s important to remember that we all started like this.”

  He ran his hand from left to right over the series of photographs—a baby sucking its thumb in the womb, a swaddled newborn, a toddler with a teddy bear—that ended with a six-year-old with blonde pigtails and a gap-toothed grin. Could she be any more perfect?

  “This shows the development taking place that led to Ellie here.” He tapped her photograph, then trailed his fingers back to the clump of cells. “If you destroy her here, you don’t get Ellie here.” Fingers back to tap on the smiling girl. “That’s key. If they had destroyed Ellie and used her cells for research, then this little girl wouldn’t be alive today. And Ellie knows how important that is. That’s why she drew this.”

  Katie stepped up to take the first poster as he removed it, revealing the second poster, a series of a child’s drawings.

  Fairview knew that he could be pontificating about unsubstantiated claims of imminent scientific breakthroughs from embryonic stem cell research or rattling on about how adult stem cells or even skin cells had actually been shown to be useful in a variety of cases. But who would listen to that? he thought. Show them a kid. A real live kid. How could they vote to kill a little girl with pigtails and a Band-Aid on her knee?

  He pointed at the circle on the far left, filled with a scrawled happy smile. “Ellie drew this to show herself when she was adopted as a frozen embryo. She is what they call a snowflake. The couple that adopted Ellie had infertility problems. They could not conceive, so they adopted her as an embryo. She was implanted, and now we’ve got Ellie, and she’s already quite the artist.

  “She drew these three pictures for me. As the Bible says, out of the mouths of babes comes great wisdom. In this first picture, Ellie is smiling because she got adopted and she got a chance to continue living her life. In the middle is another frozen embryo.” He pointed at a circle that showed not a smile, but a straight line for the mouth. “He’s sad because he’s still sitting in a frozen state. And this one on the end?”

  This circle was frowning, with huge tears drawn running down the page.

  “As Ellie told me, this one is saying, ‘Are you really going to kill me?’

  “You see, Ellie knows that this is not just a clump of tissue. This is not just a random group of cells. This is not a hair follicle. This is Ellie. And if nurtured, she grows into this beautiful child who is in our gallery today with her mother and father.”

  People craned their necks to see. The cameras pivoted. Ellie waved, just as Fairview had asked her to.

  “These boys and girls are not spare parts. We absolutely can’t use federal money to kill children like Ellie.”

  As the gallery burst into applause, Fairview dipped his head in acknowledgment. Today Fox News, tomorrow YouTube. And in the future? Inside, he smiled.

  NORTHWEST PORTLAND

  December 22

  As she drove back to the office after having briefed the Converses on the total lack of progress in the hunt for their daughter, Nic’s cell phone started to buzz on her hip. She gritted her teeth. Her phone rang all the time now. It was starting to feel like a leash she could never be free of.

  She lifted it to eye level. The display read LEIF LARSON. Why would he be calling her? She thought of how they had bantered in between answering hotline calls. Something about Leif slipped past her guard.

  Flipping open her phone, she said, “Nicole Hedges,” sounding efficient and professional. Sounding like she hadn’t been wondering about Leif at all.

  With no preamble, Leif said, “It’s Leif. Meet me over at Twenty-seventh and Vaughn. We’ve got a twenty-two-year-old guy, Michael Cray, no priors, but his stepsister is saying that on the night Katie disappeared he came home with a swollen eye and what looked like scratch marks on his chest and hands. She also says there’s dirt on the floor of the family basement—like someone’s been digging. I’m bringing in some of the ERT until we know exactly what we’ve got.”

  Leif was the team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team.

  “I’m on my way,” Nic said.

  Taking the next exit, she went right back on the freeway, doubling back the way she had come. The address was only a few blocks from where the Converses lived—and where Katie had disappeared. Mentally, she began to rehearse how she might break the news to the Converses that their daughter had been found buried in a basement.

  There were a half dozen police cars parked in front of the old yellow Victo
rian house. On the lawn, a young woman with spiky yellow hair hugged herself, a cigarette in one hand. She wasn’t wearing a coat, despite the cold—just jeans, a T-shirt, and a brown cardigan sweater.

  As Nic got out of the car, she heard the girl say to a cop who was writing down her words, “After I heard about Katie disappearing, I thought back to how he looked that night. And that was the nail in the coffin for me. That’s all it took. I knew then and there what he’d done.” She took a deep breath. “Because that’s the kind of person he is, see? The kind of person who would do something like that.”

  Her bright blue eyes met Nic’s for an instant, but they were blank, unseeing, as if what they saw existed in some other time, some other place.

  Nic flashed her badge at the cop guarding the front door. Inside, another cop gestured toward the kitchen, where an open door led to the stairs to the basement. But even before she set foot on them, she could hear people cursing downstairs. When she rounded the corner of the banister, the first person she saw was Leif. His face was twisted with disgust.

  “Another waste of time. How could she think Katie was buried down here? You know what we’ve got? A concrete floor. Concrete! And as old as the house. Hundred-year-old concrete that hasn’t been touched.”

  “What about the dirt?” Nic asked. “Didn’t she say there was dirt, like someone had been digging?”

  “It’s potting soil! There’s even a stack of empty plastic pots in the corner. Man, I knew they would come out of the woodwork when the Converses upped the ante to a half million. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast.”

  “They’ve raised the reward?” This was the first Nic had heard of it.

  “Yeah, they told that blonde reporter on Channel Four about it this morning. Five hundred thousand dollars if she’s found alive. They got some of the dad’s business friends to kick in, and took out a second mortgage on their house. You can imagine what that’s going to do to the volume of tips. I just didn’t know some girl would rat out her own brother just for cash.”