The Tin Man

by Nina Mason

  “Did you happen to read any of them?” She was sure he would remember. She had a way with words. Everybody said so. “As a rule, I’m not all that impressed by fame, you know, but there’s just something about your music that touches me. Touches lots of people, actually. Touches—how do they put it?—‘the soul.’”

  She didn’t know if it was her soul, exactly, but his music definitely touched something deep—in that way that made her throat tight and her eyes all misty.

  “To be able to do that is a gift.” Gazing into his vacant blue eyes, she put a hand on the sleeve of his ratty cardigan. “And, well, if nothing else, isn’t that worth living for?”

  The dream was a recurring one. She’d had it off and on since Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound back in 1994—only a week after her older brother, a grunge guitarist who, like Cobain, struggled with heroin addiction, died from an overdose. It was ruled an accident, but she’d always suspected it was deliberate. Robby had never been a happy person, even before the drugs. She’d done everything she could think of to be there for him, but nothing helped.

  Sometimes, in the dream, it was Robby instead of Cobain or it would start out being Cobain and somewhere along the way, he would morph into Robby or vice versa. Either way, she only had the dream on the nights she volunteered for the suicide prevention hotline, which were few and far between, given the demands of being an investigative reporter for New York City’s leading daily.

  Blinking hard, Thea rolled toward the end table and flicked on the lamp. Still disoriented, she took a quick inventory of her furnishings: red micro-suede club chair in the corner, the foldout futon she slept on, retro coffee table, jam-packed bookshelves, dusty mini-blinds, and stacks of newspapers, magazines, and books filling every spare inch.

  Home sweet home.

  Yeah, right.

  She squinted toward the kitchen, straining to make out the microwave’s red digital display. It took a minute before she figured out it was eleven thirty. Wow, had she really slept that late? Then again, she’d been on the phone with that suicidal girl in Queens until nearly two in the morning.

  Oddly, Come as You Are was still playing, though it sounded tinny and far away. It hit her then like a slap to the forehead: it was the ring-tone on her iPhone. Snatching it off the table, she pressed the device to her ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thea?”

  The woman’s voice did not immediately register. “Yeah?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  Embarrassed about still being in bed, she plucked a lie out of the air. “Of course not. I was up.”

  The woman chuckled. “Doing what? Sleepwalking?”

  Thea coughed. She’d always been a terrible liar and now she knew the voice. It belonged to Glenda Northam, her editor on the investigative desk. A picture popped into her head of a sharp, no-nonsense Helen Mirren type with wise blue eyes and a blunt silver pageboy.

  “What can I say? I was up late…” Thea’s voice trailed off as umbrage hijacked her excuse. “And so what if I wasn’t? It’s my day off—in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Glenda assured her, “and I’m sorry to bug you, but I thought that, under the circumstances, you’d want to know.”

  Thea’s journalistic instincts surfaced like a piranha scenting blood. “Know what?”

  “There’s been another media-related shooting.”

  Thea sat bolt upright and pinched the ridge between her eyes to clear the residual fog. That made two media-related murders in the past three weeks. The first was Malcolm Connolly, the CEO of Atlas, Inc., a medium-sized British corporation whose flagship was Newswire, an international news agency. Someone gunned him down in a car rental parking lot at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Oddly, nobody could say what he was doing there.

  The killer left a calling card: a Z carved into Connolly’s forehead. In the wake of the murder, Atlas stock plummeted, leaving the company vulnerable to takeover.

  “Who was it this time?”

  “That liberal news site,” Glenda told her. “The Progressive Voice.”

  Thea’s heart skipped a beat before lodging in her throat. Was he dead? She swallowed hard, steeling herself. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to hear the answer, but she had to know.

  “Was the owner the target? Please tell me he isn’t…?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, couldn’t bear the thought that Alex Buchanan might be—gulp—gone. Buchanan was a rare breed of journalist (and man)—intelligent, principled, passionate about doing what he believed was right. Back when he worked for World View, a top news magazine, he won a well-deserved Pulitzer for a hard-hitting series on the government encroachments on individual freedoms after 9/11. She deeply admired him for doing that particular series. It was a subject that, for lots of reasons, mattered deeply to her.

  “Apparently,” Glenda was saying, “he’s the one who found the bodies.”

  Relief washed over Thea, but the bath was short-lived. “Did you say bodies? Plural?”

  “Eight in all. Shot at their desks. Execution style.”

  “What about the M.O.? Were any of the victims marked like Connolly?”

  “That’s something you’re going to need to find out.” While Glenda talked, Thea padded into the kitchen and started making coffee. “Apparently, after calling the cops, Buchanan had a run-in with the gunman himself.”

  “Oh my God.” Thea damn near dropped the glass carafe she’d been filling in the sink, but recovered it in time. “What happened? Is he okay?”

  “As far as I know,” Glenda said. “The police are questioning him now. At the scene. Which is where you should be—if you want the story.”

  “Oh, I do,” Thea assured her. “Definitely.”

  “Good. Then get going. I need something on the website by two o’clock.”

  They talked a little more about brass tacks—which photographer to assign and the kinds of shots they might want—before they hung up. As Thea set the phone down, she took a breath. Gone were the days of late-afternoon deadlines and morning deliveries, and with them, sadly, the days of thoughtful, in-depth reporting. Except, thankfully, on the investigative desk.

  As Thea poured a cup of coffee, relishing the rich aroma, she glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was noon. A two-hour window didn’t give her much time to do the legwork and write the story, while somehow allowing enough time for the online editors to fact check, copyedit, and post the text. And she still needed to get showered and dressed.

  Eager to get to the scene to talk to the cops and Buchanan, she hurried into the bathroom, stripping off her lace camisole and satin pajama bottoms as she went. When the shower was ready, she stepped in and stood there letting the hot water pelt her skin as she considered possible motives for the killings.

  Had each victim coincidentally run something that offended the same crackpot? That struck her as implausible. Why not just write a letter to the editor—or sue for libel if it was something really defamatory? There were redresses available short of murder. Was it so somebody could take over their enterprises? That made more sense, but she just couldn’t see a connection. Atlas was about to go on the auction block while the Voice, with all its employees dead, was essentially out of business.

  Poor Buchanan. What the poor man must be going through.

  But, suppose the murders weren’t related. Suppose the hit on the Voice was one of those copycat crimes, a smokescreen created to divert the cops. Maybe the motive had nothing to do with business. Maybe it was personal, somebody out to ruin him, financially and reputationally. Maybe he had bad debts, gambled, or took drugs. Like Robby, she thought with a qualm. Not that Buchanan struck her as the self-destructive type. Then again, how well did she really know him?

  Not well at all, actually.

  She’d met Alex Buchanan back in 2008 while both were covering the Elliot Spitzer call-girl scandal—he for World View and she for the News. She
found him ruggedly handsome in that way that always made her heart beat just a little faster. He had a limp, but so what? In her book, that made him better. Without it, he would be too perfect. Who wanted to date Mr. Perfect except Ms. Perfect? And that sure as hell wasn’t her.

  After a quick shampoo, she stepped out and grabbed a towel off the rack. The mirror was too foggy to see in, so she swiped her hand across it before grabbing the comb and pulling it through her shoulder-length mostly black hair. She’d thought a few times about taking out the gray, but what the hell? She’d earned every one of those gray hairs just like she hoped to earn a Pulitzer one day for her hard-hitting investigative reporting.

  Letting out a sigh, she looked hard at her reflection. She was thirty-eight, still single, and hadn’t had a date in months—partly because of her busy professional life, but also because she’d become invisible.

  Not literally, of course, but in the way women over thirty-five did in America’s youth-obsessed culture. Sadly, she’d reached that depressing age when strangers now addressed her as “Ma’am” instead of “Miss” and she no longer looked “good,” she looked “good for her age.” The kitten had matured into a cougar—a predatory older woman. She swiped a “paw” at her reflection and hissed before laughing it off.

  She twisted her wet hair up the back of her head and secured it with a clip. Grabbing her coffee, she hurried to the closet. She had lots of questions for the cops and Buchanan and was eager to get to the crime scene before it was flooded with reporters. She pulled out a cream-colored charmeuse blouse, a pair of charcoal gabardine slacks, and her favorite low-heeled pumps.

  After dressing, she returned to the bathroom. Standing before the mirror, she gazed into her own almond-shaped brown eyes, wondering if she shouldn’t maybe put on a little lipstick and mascara. Normally, she wouldn’t bother. But then, normally, she didn’t get a chance to repair a bad first impression on the man she believed, deep down in her heart of hearts, might very well be “the one who got away.”

  * * * *

  Buchanan—wet, wounded, and shaken to the core—sat alone in the lobby Starbucks, head rocking in his hands. He felt numb, desolate, defeated, lost, and angry. Grief tore at his heart. In one fell swoop, he’d lost everything he had left in the world—his staff, his business, his livelihood. In short, his reason for getting out of bed every morning.

  The killer was still out there, waiting to get another shot at him. Witnesses had seen the gunman getting into a black sedan waiting at the curb. Because he and the driver wore masks, there were no descriptions. The getaway vehicle, the police informed him, was a Lincoln Town Car stolen the night before from a Philadelphia car service.

  Buchanan combed his fingers through his close-cropped hair before picking up the briefcase at his feet. Setting it on the empty chair beside him, he opened it, staring down at his Glock as he removed the other items he’d rescued from his office before the police cordoned off the entire sixth floor: his laptop, his flask, and his cigarettes. He took a long pull of whisky, savoring the burn as it swam toward his belly. Swiping his hand across his mouth, he laughed, but bitterly. Here, he’d left Scotland hoping to find a better life, afraid that, if he stayed, he would end up like his miserable excuse for a father—a broken man who drowned his despair in whisky.

  O, irony, thou art a cruel mistress. Why dost thou taunt me so?

  Unanswerable questions also taunted, starting with: Why? Why would anybody do something like this? What possible motive could there be? His editors were good people, hard-working people with friends and families, people who cared about the terrible shite that was happening in the world.

  Shite like this, for example.

  He searched his mind for any possible explanation. All he really had to go on was that the gunman had called him a “filthy dissident”—words etched on his brain. Along with the look of utter disdain in the assassin’s eyes. Baghdad, revisited. Wasn’t that what his torturers had called him as they used him as a human punching bag? A filthy dissident? But what did that have to do with this? Surely, none of them would come after him now. What possible reason could there be?

  His encyclopedic memory offered him Salman Rushdie and how, after he’d published The Satanic Verses, his controversial novel inspired by the life of the prophet Mohammed, the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the author on sight. Could this be something like that? Was he the object of a fatwa? Or was it the act of a rogue cell of terrorists? Skeptical, he shook his head. What reason could terrorists have to target The Voice? And what had he written that Muslims might construe as blasphemous? He could think of nothing. If anything, he had been a staunch defender of their rights, railing against the government-endorsed racism Muslims had been subjected to since the Twin Towers attacks.

  Could it be something else he’d written? Something that had nothing to do with Islam? One of his in-your-face editorials, perhaps, that struck a raw nerve? Something that had enraged someone enough to kill? That hardly seemed likely. Slaughtering his entire staff was hardly a proportional response to a bit of bad press. No. There had to be more to it than that. Clearly, somebody wanted him out of business. And there was only one man he could think of with a motive for that: Milo Osbourne.

  Only a week ago, Osbourne had tried to buy him out. The offer was for $3 million in cash and to stay on as editor-in-chief or sign a non-compete agreement promising not to start another similar news site for five years—obvious ploys on Osbourne’s part to eliminate “the boil on his neck” he and The Voice had become.

  The meeting—in Golden Age’s Taj Mahal of a conference room—came back in snatches: Osbourne sitting there with his battalion of barristers looking so high and mighty in his bespoke suit and tie. Who did he think he was, king of the fucking universe? Five minutes into the meeting, Buchanan wanted to smash his fist through that Crypt-keeper face of his. All of their faces, actually.

  Sitting there stewing, getting hotter under the collar by the second, Buchanan had started to feel like he was in a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life—the one where Mr. Potter, having failed to get the upper hand on George Bailey, tried offering him a job. George almost went for it too, until he realized what Potter was trying to pull and called him a scurvy little spider.

  A smile twitched on Buchanan’s compressed lips. Oh, aye. A scurvy little spider described Osbourne to a tee.

  He’d turned the old prick down flat, of course. He wasn’t interested in selling, hadn’t started this enterprise as a dalliance or a way to make a fast buck. Rather, he had started The Voice because he felt that, now more than ever, the world (Britain and America especially) needed an alternative source of news, needed somewhere thoughtful, truth-seeking people could turn for a different perspective. And that was precisely why he planned to do everything in his power to block the merger, including filing an antitrust lawsuit.

  He’d announced his intention to do so in last week’s commentary, which appeared the day before Osbourne extended his generous purchase offer. Coincidence? Buchanan thought not, but also wondered: had Osbourne hired someone to kill him because he couldn’t be bought?

  It was a possibility, however improbable, that he had already mentioned to the police. He had spent two grueling hours being grilled by the homicide detectives, answering the same questions repeatedly until he wanted to scream. The CSI crew was still upstairs combing the scene for evidence.

  They were finished with him, for now at least, but the detective in charge—some clown named Bradshaw—had asked him to stick around until further notice. Just in case. Therefore, essentially, he was stuck here, which was just as well. Where else was he supposed to go with the assassin still at large?

  * * * *

  Thea disconnected the unanswered call to her grandfather without leaving a message. What was the point? There was no Internet access where he was. There also was no electricity and no telephone. And the cellular signal, she’d discovered over the past several weeks, was hit and miss
at best.

  She put the phone away, returning to the business at hand—namely, the shootings and Alex Buchanan. She still cringed inside whenever she thought back on their date—an “epic fail” as kids today would say.

  They had agreed to meet for a drink at the Four Seasons and, hoping to knock his socks off (among other garments), she had slipped into her sexiest Little Black Dress. He was waiting when she got there, though she wasn’t late. And God, but he looked good. He’d worn an impeccably tailored black suit. Hugo Boss, if she had to guess. She had seen him around a few times, at press conferences and the like, always in a tweed jacket and jeans. Not that it was a bad look for him. On the contrary, he always looked good enough to eat. But that night, he was a big old slab of prime Angus filet mignon.

  They sat, ordered drinks, made small talk, told each other stories and jokes, and laughed easily. The undeniable spark between them flared hotter with every lingering glance or chance brush of knees under the table. She was sure he felt it, too. All the signs were there. And then, he took out his cigarettes…and everything went to hell.

  Normally, she wasn’t an anti-smoking zealot, but she had recently lost her mother to lung cancer and, when she saw that he smoked the same brand, something inside her snapped. She launched into an anti-smoking tirade that would have made Bob Schieffer blush.

  She couldn’t remember all of it, but she remembered enough, especially the part where he limped off like a wounded animal. She just sat there, watching him go, burning with shame, lost as to what to say or do to bring him back. She couldn’t understand what had gotten into her. She liked him, really liked him, and yet she had driven him away. It was only eight o’clock. They hadn’t even had dinner.

  In hindsight, she considered herself lucky that he hadn’t come right out and told her to go fuck herself. She certainly would have if their situations were reversed. The next day, she’d phoned to apologize, but he never returned the call. And now, maybe she’d finally be able to tell him how sorry she was. Not that it would probably make any difference, but she liked and respected him—a whole lot, actually—and at least wanted a chance to clear the air. And her conscience.