by Lis Wiehl
“And the station is letting me tell my story. I’m doing a special report on domestic violence just before Valentine’s Day. It’s a pretty big deal.” Cassidy suspected they had thrown her a bone after not living up to their promises, but it was still airtime that was hers and hers alone. “After what happened, I’ve decided to take a break from men.”
Jim never took anything seriously. “You know I’d be gentle,” he said, and gave her a wolfish grin. He had ordered his steak rare, and with every bite he sliced off, the pool of bloody juices on his white plate grew.
“Not interested,” Cassidy said, although she was. In a way.
“Even if you’re not, you and me, kid, we could go places together. Strictly on a professional level. We would make a great team. We could bill it as Beauty and the Beast.”
Cassidy was beginning to think Jim was serious. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Or should I say someone? What about Victoria Hanawa?”
He snorted. “That’s not working, and it never has. Not from day one.”
“What are you talking about?” Cassidy didn’t want Jim to see that there was something about the idea that intrigued her. “You guys have great chemistry.”
“Don’t give me that. It’s not great chemistry when someone’s main contribution is to laugh or say, ‘Oh, Jim!’”
She gave him a skeptical look. “Or do you mean it’s not great chemistry when someone doesn’t go along with what you’re saying? I heard about you cutting her mike when she disagrees with you too much.”
He lifted his open palms, as if to show he had nothing to hide. “Look, the problem is that Victoria and I are too much alike. We’re always fighting for the microphone. The result is barely listenable. What the show needs is two different kinds of people. One person like me: someone with a million ideas, even if, I admit, they might not all be good ones. And someone like you, who, once you give them an idea, always comes back and says something funny or thought-provoking or just generally wonderful. I’ve seen you do it time and again on Channel 4. You can think on your feet. You can put disparate facts together and tell a coherent story. Cassidy, together you and I could be magic. If not personally, then still professionally.”
She broke his gaze and looked down at her plate. Half of her steak was already gone. How had that happened? She would just have to leave her baked potato untouched. Everyone always said the camera added ten pounds. She couldn’t afford to look fat. Not now. Not when she had to sit next to Jenna in story meetings.
“Yeah, but it would still be The Hand of Fate show, right?”
He shrugged. “You can only have one top dog.”
Jim was like a force of nature. Cassidy didn’t relish getting caught up in the whirlwind. “No, thanks. I’m my own person. I’m not meant to be anyone’s order taker.”
“But what are you at Channel 4? You’re not coanchoring with Brad, even though they promised you. And I see they’re even giving airtime to that young thing they’ve got there—Juno or whatever her name is.”
“Jenna.” Cassidy said her name reluctantly. Jim had a knack for finding her painful places and then poking them.
“At KNWS I have an intern, but you won’t see me confusing her youth and beauty with talent. Channel 4 is getting desperate because they know their average viewer is eighty plus. I mean, look at the ads you guys run during the news. It’s all motorized scooters, Viagra, and ‘you can’t be turned down for our insurance.’ So in a desperate bid for attention, TV news is now all about eye candy. Radio still has some gravitas.” Jim slid a fork piled high with baked potato, sour cream, chives, and bacon bits into his mouth. He obviously had no qualms about his waistline.
“I’m surprised you can say that with a straight face. I’ve heard your program. It can be pretty one-sided. You work someone over until they’re the consistency of mush.”
“Okay—how about this aspect? You never have to worry about aging out of the radio market. Whereas on Channel 4, one day it might be Jenna sitting in the anchor chair, right next to Miss Connecticut. And you’ll be out on assignment. Someplace where it’s raining and it takes you three hours to drive there. One way.”
The sickening thought of Jenna in the anchor’s chair was not as far-fetched as it might have sounded even a month ago. “I don’t know,” Cassidy said slowly.
Working in TV was like a drug. You got addicted to the action and the recognition. But the business was so small that once you lost or left an important job, it was difficult—if not impossible—to go back. But did she want to jump into something new, or did she want to wait until she was pushed out?
“Tell you what. Why don’t you come by my condo after dinner?”
He certainly had a one-track mind. Oh, well, at least she still had it, as far as Jim Fate was concerned. Cassidy lifted one eyebrow. “What— and see your etchings? Haven’t you already shown me those?” She allowed herself one bite of baked potato. One bite had never killed anyone.
“No. A couple of months ago I put in a small studio setup. Just try practicing with me, and I’ll record it and give you a CD. Once you hear for yourself how great we can be together, you’ll know why I want this.”
“I don’t know, Jim.” The second forkful slid into her mouth before she could stop it.
“That’s not a no. Come on. Just give it a try. And if you don’t think it’s right for you, then no blood, no foul.”
“Mm, maybe.” She ate another bite of baked potato. Weren’t potatoes a vegetable? And didn’t she need to eat more vegetables?
Forty-five minutes later, she was sitting in Jim’s condo, wearing headphones and staring at a black mike. “How are we going to do this?”
“It’s easy.” Jim smiled at her. One earpiece of his headphones was pushed back, as was hers. “This is your microphone. Stay about six inches away, and speak directly into it. All you need to remember about radio is: no last names, no brand names, no phone numbers over the air. Other than that, speak normally.”
Cassidy’s palms were damp, and her stomach felt sour. She hadn’t felt this anxious in a long time. With Rick, sure. But not when it came to work. She was good at her job. And this was just like her job, only minus a camera.
“Just follow my lead. I’ll start talking about something, and you chime in.” Jim slid his headset back into place, flipped a switch, and then leaned toward his mike. “Now, I don’t know how many of you have read it, but there’s a B-list actress who has just come out with a book that says aliens are living among us. What do you think, Cassidy?”
There was no audience here but Jim and the microphone. Still, she heard the faint tremor in her first few words. “Well, I’m not sure I believe in aliens.” Her voice steadied. “But I will say her theory would go a long way toward explaining a few of our politicians.”
Jim laughed, a little theatrically, and shot Cassidy a thumbs-up.
They went on for about twenty minutes, Jim riffing on current topics, and Cassidy following his lead. Then Jim copied the file he had made and handed her a CD.
“Just listen to this in the car on the way home. And tell me you don’t think we could blow everyone else out of the water.”
She looked at her watch. It was nearly midnight. She had to get home. Get home to her Somulex. All of a sudden the water she had drunk in between sips of gin and tonic in a bid to stay sober caught up with her.
“Could I use your bathroom?”
“Of course.”
The nearest one was off Jim’s opulent and masculine bedroom. The bed was made with the same red and gold silk coverlet she remembered from last year. Nothing was out of place. Nothing had ever been out of place any of the times she had been here before. Jim must either be a neat freak or have a housekeeper. Cassidy’s guess was both.
When she came out of the bathroom, Jim was waiting for her. He put his arms around her. His mouth was covering hers, his body insistent, his hands on either side of her head.
For a moment, Cassidy’s body answered him.
For a moment, her body betrayed her, as it had so many times before. And then she twisted her head and pushed on his chest.
She stepped back. The sound of their breathing hung in the otherwise silent room. “No, Jim. I can’t do this again. Not now.” She had always been a sucker for blue eyes and black hair. She had always been a sucker for pretty much anything in trousers.
“Can’t you see? It’s like yin and yang. You and me, we would fit together like puzzle pieces.” For a second he pulled her to him, demonstrating, and then slowly released her.
“That might be true. Maybe. But I don’t think I want to go back there.”
“Let’s just leave that door open for a while, then, why don’t we? We can be whatever kind of partners you like.” He walked with her out into the foyer, helped her into her coat. It was funny to see him acting like such a gentleman now. Cassidy kind of liked that there were two sides to Jim, and he wasn’t ashamed of either one.
His face turned serious. “Look. There’s another reason I wanted to talk to you tonight.”
Cassidy wondered what it could be. He had already offered her a job and a place back in his bed—what else was there?
“If I remember correctly, you have friends in law enforcement.”
She kept her face smooth. “I went to high school with Allison Pierce and Nicole Hedges. Allison is a federal prosecutor now, and Nicole is a special agent with the FBI.”
“Can you give me their cell phone numbers? I’d like to get in touch with them.”
“Why?”
Jim shook his head. “I’d rather not say.”
“I’m not handing out their personal numbers if I don’t know what it’s for. They would kill me if they got a call from the show and ended up being broadcast.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the show. Well, it probably does, but not the way you’re thinking. I don’t want them as guests. I want their advice. I’ve been getting some threats.”
“Don’t you get a lot of threats? Whenever I turn on the program, you’re handing out that NOD award.”
“These are different,” Jim said, and wouldn’t elaborate much further.
Finally, Cassidy wrote down their numbers and gave him a kiss on the cheek before she left.
It was only later that she realized one of her earrings was missing.
CHAPTER 28
Portland Field Office, FBI
The cop sitting next to Allison in the FBI conference room had recently eaten onions. Raw ones, she guessed, as he exhaled again. Her stomach pressed up against the bottom of her throat. As if lost in thought, she cupped her hand over her mouth and tried to concentrate on the neutral smell of her own skin. In another ten days she would officially be in her second trimester, and Dr. Dubruski had said the bouts of nausea might fade away.
The task force had thinned considerably since sarin gas had been ruled out. Yesterday, the bigwigs had flown back to DC. Now it was down to local representatives.
“What have you learned about Jim McKissick?” Nicole asked Rod Emerick.
“Well, a lot more than about Jim Fate, that’s for sure.” Looking down, Rod began to read from his notes. “James Robert McKissick. Only child. Dad a drunk. Mom died in a car accident when he was nine. Dad was driving, but wasn’t charged. It’s not clear why. A few months after that, the state took custody after a teacher reported seeing welts on the kid’s back. Dad died of liver failure about two years later. Meanwhile, the kid was bouncing from foster home to foster home. Reading between the lines, there may have been some physical abuse.”
Allison imagined what it had been like. Jim must have envied his classmates their living mothers and sober fathers, their siblings, their certainty of their place in the world.
Rod continued, “Fate went to college on scholarship. He worked at three other radio stations, including one in college, before joining KNWS. He’s been there for about twelve years. He had an excellent credit rating, no outstanding bills, and a nice-sized 401(k). He owned a BMW and a condo in Willamette Villas. There’s been no unusual outgo of money in the last year, so it doesn’t look like he was paying blackmail. His medical history was unremarkable—some trouble sleeping, and his cholesterol was a little high.”
“How about his personal life?” Leif asked.
“Well, as you might have guessed from what we heard from his neighbor, it was, hmm . . . robust might be one word you could use to describe it. He dated a number of women. And he took photos, of some of them, at least, with a digital camera we found in his condo.”
“What were they wearing?” asked Officer Flannery.
“Or what weren’t they wearing?” Heath Robinson chimed in with a leer.
Allison shot Nicole a resigned look. She didn’t know how Nic could stand to work with Heath. Nicole’s face was impassive. Even though her expression hadn’t changed, Allison saw that her friend’s face had gone strangely flat, as if she had withdrawn deep into herself. Talking about photos must have dredged up memories of her work with Innocent Images. Online predators often used pornography to convince young girls that having sex with them would only be natural.
“The shots were actually kind of tasteful,” Rod said. “Nothing hardcore. Negligees or strategically placed sheets.” He looked over at Nicole. “Oh, and Nic—that receipt you found for Oh Baby in Fate’s desk? Turns out that’s an upscale lingerie shop, not a baby store. He bought someone a, a—” He stumbled over the word. “A bustier.” He pronounced it buhst-ee-air. No one corrected him.
“Speaking of kids, were the women in these photos all adults?” Allison asked. “Did anyone look underage?”
Rod shook his head. “All what I would call age-appropriate eye candy. Late twenties to early forties.”
“How many in total?”
“There’s some question as to whether a couple of shots are of the same woman or not. My best guess would be nine.”
“Any familiar faces?” Allison braced herself to hear Cassidy’s name.
“Negative. And we isolated just their heads and showed them to the neighbor who saw a woman leaving his apartment the morning Fate died, and she didn’t recognize any of them either. None of the photos were of Victoria Hanawa or any of Fate’s female coworkers.”
“Could you tell if the women knew they were being photographed?” Nicole’s voice had a raspy edge.
“It was all pretty much ‘smile for the camera.’”
“I can’t believe anyone was that stupid. Let alone nine of them.”
Special Agent Karl Zehner shook his head. “In five minutes, he could have sent those photos all over the Internet.”
Rod shrugged. “They must have trusted him.”
“How about that hotel card from the Hilton?” Allison asked.
“They say the cards are automatically reprogrammed for each visitor, and they can’t say when or who used it last,” Karl said. “I’m guessing it was just a memento.”
Nicole turned to Riley Lowell, who worked at the computer forensics laboratory. “What’d you find on Fate’s computer?”
“No big surprises. But what was really useful was the memory stick you found in his desk. He had saved copies of a lot of threats that he had gotten by e-mail. Some of them weren’t threats per se, just people who were angry at him.” He patted a stack of paper. “I’ve made printouts for you so you can prioritize which ones you want us to try to get IP addresses on.”
“And then there are the people Jim knew in real life,” Leif said. “Nic and Allison, you guys handled the bulk of the interviews this morning. What do you think?”
Allison looked at Nicole, but when she didn’t say anything, Allison went first. “I can see a number of angles. One is that if you read between the lines, ratings for his show have not been as strong as they wanted. They added Victoria Hanawa in the hopes that she would bring them more young female listeners, but it didn’t work.”
“So the solution was to rig up some kind of poisonous gas and kill Fate at work?” Karl’
s face wrinkled in disbelief. “Shoot, wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to fire him, or both of them, and bring in someone new?”
“You would think so, but I just got off the phone with the station’s insurer,” Allison said. “They carried keyman insurance on Fate. Now that he’s dead, they’ll be getting five million dollars.”
Karl whistled, but Leif said, “This still feels personal to me, not corporate. In every interview I conducted today, it seemed like Fate had managed to tick off that person at least once.”
There were nods around the table.
Nicole said, “Victoria disagreed with him about the direction of the show. And she said that Chris was bullied by Jim on an ongoing basis.”
Rod nodded. “A couple of people I interviewed mentioned Fate picking on Chris.”
“I think we need to look closely at Victoria,” Nic said. “To me, she seems a much more likely suspect than Chris. Victoria certainly had the motive. Fate didn’t listen to her ideas. He mocked her and cut off her mike. He didn’t appreciate her suggestions for changing the show. And there could have been some kind of relationship that soured.”
“There weren’t any photos of her on his camera,” Karl said.
“All that means is that she’s smart enough not to get talked into posing. And as for opportunity—we already have a witness saying that Victoria is the one who handed the package to Jim. She claims she found it in her box.”
“What about the person who normally sorts the mail?” Rod asked. “Do they remember seeing the package?”
Leif said, “The mail room guy doesn’t remember putting that package in Victoria’s box. The thing is, he handles at least a hundred packages a day. He says he doesn’t remember any of them, unless maybe they’re so big they don’t fit in the box at all.”
“Just because the guy had access to the package doesn’t mean he’d have the motive to kill Fate,” Rod said. “Do we know yet what kind of opiate was used? Would Victoria Hanawa be able to get any? Would she have the know-how to modify a smoke bomb?”
