Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  There is a pace to being a good journalist. I learned that a long time ago. You had to play the game until the person you wanted to get something from was ready to talk. I didn’t plunge right into questions about her daughter. Instead, I just made this kind of small talk with the woman until I thought the time was right to ask about Lucy.

  “I understand you have some kind of new lead about what might have happened to your daughter,” I finally said.

  “Lucy is still alive,” Anne Devlin said.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you? No one believes me anymore. Not even you, Clare.”

  “I think at some point you have to accept the inevitability that Lucy is gone for good,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully.

  “Mountainboro, New Hampshire,” Devlin said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s where I think she is. Or was.”

  We’d gone through this same thing many times in the months after Lucy disappeared. Her coming to me all excited about some tip or lead. Of course, none of them panned out. Eventually, I imagined she would accept the fact there was nothing more she could do. But here she was, after all this time, still chasing the ghost of her lost daughter.

  She handed me a piece of paper. A printout of an e-mail. It was from someone named CONCERNED CITIZEN at a hotmail address. The e-mail said:

  Dear Mrs. Devlin:

  You don’t know me, but I saw a TV special not long ago about your daughter’s disappearance. I watched you being interviewed, and my heart went out to you. At the end of the show, they ran your e-mail address in case anyone had any information about Lucy.

  That’s why I’m writing to you now.

  A long time ago, right around the time your daughter disappeared, I belonged to a motorcycle gang. That spring we all met up with other gangs for a convention in a little town in New Hampshire called Mountainboro. Hells Angels were there, bikers from California—they came from all over the country. One of the guys was from a motorcycle gang in New York called the Warlock Warriors. He had a little girl with him.

  It’s been a long time, but when I saw the photo of your daughter, I remembered her again. I’m pretty sure it was your daughter. She looked like the pictures I’ve seen of her. I only talked to her once. She told me how much she loved Cheerios and Oreo cookies.

  I remember thinking how unusual it was for a little girl to be there in the midst of all those motorcycle people. I noticed that she had a birthmark on the back of her left shoulder. I don’t know if your daughter had a birthmark at all. But if she did, perhaps it was really her that I saw that day.

  The other thing you should know is the little girl didn’t leave with the same man she came with. On the last day, I saw her on the back of a motorcycle with a guy from a different gang. Someone said his name was Elliott. It was this Elliott that the little girl left with.

  I knew something was wrong, and I probably should tell the police. But you didn’t do that when you were in a gang like mine. If you cooperated with the authorities, you might wind up dead. So I did nothing. And I never saw that little girl again.

  I pray for you, Mrs. Devlin. I pray that my information isn’t too late.…

  I handed the e-mail back to her.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It seems kind of thin,”

  “Lucy loved Cheerios and Oreo cookies.”

  “So do a lot of kids.”

  “She had a birthmark on her left shoulder.”

  “The person who sent you this e-mail might have read that in the papers.”

  There was more. I could tell it from the expression on her face.

  “My husband,” she said slowly, “was a member of a motorcycle gang before I met him. Right here in New York City. The Warlock Warriors. The same group as the e-mail said she came with. Patrick and I used to laugh about him once belonging to a motorcycle gang when he was young. But now …”

  I stared at her. “You think your husband might have had something to do with your daughter’s disappearance?”

  “I’m not sure about anything anymore. Something happened the last day before she disappeared. I’ve never told anyone about it, not even the police. I guess I didn’t want to even admit it to myself for a long time. I pretended like it never happened. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Lucy was very strange that last night. Something was bothering her. I finally asked her what it was. ‘Dad wants to have sex,’ she said.”

  “Sex?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I’ve no idea …”

  “What if Patrick was trying to have … well, you know … sex with her?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to let the enormity of what the woman had just said sink in.

  “The note said the little girl at the rally came with one of the guys from the New York gang, the Warlock Warriors,” she said. “But she didn’t leave with him. She left with another biker gang. On the back of a motorcycle with someone from that gang named Elliott. If it was Lucy, then this Elliott is the last person we know that saw her. Elliott could be the key to all this. Elliott might have all the answers about Lucy that I’m looking for.”

  “Look,” I said, “this all happened a long time ago. The trail is cold—so cold you’d need a miracle to find anything now. I know how hard this is for you, but I think you just have to get on with your life and hope that somehow, before you die one day, you’ll get the answers you want.”

  Anne Devlin shook her head sadly.

  And that’s when she delivered her real bombshell news.

  Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen in an interview until you get to the very end.

  That’s what happened here with Anne Devlin.

  It turned out she had—as the old journalistic expression used to go when I worked in newspapers—buried the lede of her story.

  “I’m dying right now,” Anne Devlin said. “It’s cancer. I have an inoperable tumor in my lung. That’s why I look this way. The disease—not to mention the chemotherapy—really takes a toll on you. I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I figured you would notice. Thank you for not mentioning it. The doctors say I’ve got another few months, maybe three to six months at the most. So, as you can see, I’m not going to be able to ‘get on with my life,’ as you put it. This is my last hope, Clare. My last hope to find out what happened to my daughter before I die. You’ve got to help me.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I TOLD JACK Faron, the executive producer and my boss at Channel 10 News, about Anne Devlin’s health condition. How she was dying of cancer. How the doctor had told her she had several months to live. About the e-mail claiming a long-ago sighting of a little girl who looked like Lucy at the motorcycle convention in New Hampshire.

  “Anne Devlin is staring death in the face,” Faron said excitedly when I was done. “She desperately wants to find out what happened to her long-lost daughter before she dies. She has this one slim hope of a new lead about what happened to her daughter. And Channel 10 News is out there in front of the story trying to help her. Missing girl. Heartbroken mother. A race against time for her to find answers. And all this is happening on the fifteenth anniversary of the day the girl went missing. I like it, Clare. We can even make a poignant plea to the Channel 10 News viewers for anyone to come forward who might have some information about the case.”

  I nodded.

  “So, who will do the on-air interview with her? Cassie?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Janelle?”

  Cassie O’Neal and Janelle Wright were the hot female faces on Channel 10 News. Glamorous, glib, and a bunch of other G-stuff thrown in, too. Their most recent journalistic achievement had been going undercover to get jobs at an upscale strip club. By doing so, they discovered exclusively that A) many beautiful women worked there; B) the beautiful women da
nced and took their clothes off for a living; and C) men paid money to see these beautiful women do this. Somehow, we managed to stretch this into a ten-part series for the last sweeps period.

  “No, I don’t want the Barbie Twins involved in this story.”

  “Who, then?”

  I told him how Anne Devlin only wanted to do the interview with me.

  “You?”

  “Yeah, me.”

  “Are you talking about going on the air again?”

  “I’ve been on the air before.”

  “Yes, and we all remember how that worked out.”

  “I wasn’t that bad.”

  “Even if I wanted to let you do this, Clare—and I really don’t—it’s been a long time since you’ve been in front of a camera. Do you even still know how to do it?”

  “Let me see,” I said, pretending to think about the question. “I stand stiffly, hold a microphone in front of me, and say: ‘Hello, I’m Clare Carlson of Channel 10 News …’ Yes, I think I still know how to do it.”

  I pointed out to him my long relationship with Anne Devlin. My Pulitzer Prize fame for writing about it and breaking the case fifteen years ago. The publicity bonus we’d get at the station from my name being attached to this story again. He understood all that, but he still seemed dubious.

  “Look, Jack, it’s my story,” I told him. “This has always been my story. If we’re going to revisit the whole Lucy Devlin disappearance again, I want to be the one to do it. I need to do this one myself.”

  After Faron eventually agreed to the plan, I went next to tell Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine, the Channel 10 news anchors, what was going to happen. Brett and Dani weren’t the stereotypical “just a pretty TV face” type of anchors. They were good. Maybe too good. So good that I was constantly worried about losing them to a bigger station.

  Brett had come from a syndicated TV show called Inside Scoop. I’d competed against him on the street when I was a reporter. And I knew how aggressive and savvy he was. When Inside Scoop went off the air, I signed him to be the anchor for the six- and eleven-o’clock newscasts. He was attractive, had a real presence on camera, and knew what he was doing, too. I figured he couldn’t miss.

  Dani Blaine was another story. Her real name was Nancy Grabowski, and she started out as a reporter at the New York Post. Scored a lot of big scoops for them. I met her once at an award dinner and was impressed. She was blond, pretty, and came across as a bubblehead when she was really very smart. Perfect for TV. We changed her name to Dani Blaine—it just sounded better than Nancy Grabowski—and teamed her up as the co-anchor with Brett.

  The strange thing is it didn’t work at first. The ratings were not good. Faron told me he thought it was a mistake, and he’d have to let them go. It could have cost me my job, too.

  But then I came up with an idea for a new concept for the news show. I called it “Go News.” The gimmick was to keep Brett and Dani—along with everyone else on camera—moving all the time. Instead of sitting behind anchor desks, I had them walking all over the set. They’d stride over to one of the other reporters, go stand next to a graphic—sometimes even act out in front of the camera some of the physical aspects of a story. No sitting, always keep moving—that was the motto.

  It made the whole news show seem energetic and fresh and lively. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Dani Blaine was one hot babe. Our demo surveys showed that lots of guys tuned in just to see her legs in a miniskirt, something you couldn’t do when she was behind the anchor desk.

  The idea worked even better than I had hoped. Ratings soared. So did advertising revenues. One newspaper did a poll that named Brett and Dani as the hottest news team in town. I was hailed as a genius. Believe it or not, it’s ideas like this that can make or break a TV executive’s career.

  I told Brett and Dani now that I was going to be doing the Lucy Devlin report myself on the six-o’clock news show that night.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Brett asked.

  “Now why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

  “Something might go … well, wrong.”

  “What could go wrong?”

  “You haven’t been on the air for a long time, Clare,” Dani pointed out.

  “It’s not exactly brain surgery.”

  “I just don’t want to see you embarrass yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically. “Maybe I’ll have a mental meltdown right there on camera and reveal to the audience that my oh so attractive anchor had plastic surgery tucks done on their last vacation.”

  “I did no such thing,” Dani said.

  “Actually, I was talking about Brett.”

  I was walking a fine line here. I wanted to do the story myself. But I didn’t want their noses out of joint. I needed Brett and Dani. My career depended on their careers. That was a part of TV I didn’t like. Depending on other people. I hate to do that. People usually let me down.

  “How about this?” I suggested. “You guys introduce the segment. You give the background and do the intro. Then I’ll do the report with an interview with the mother of the little girl that didn’t come home. How she wants to find out the answers before she dies. Then you come back and do a wrap. That way it looks like you’re directing the whole thing. I think it’s good for the show to keep it like that. I mean no one knows who the hell I am. And you guys, I mean you’re New York idols.”

  Dani looked over at Brett. He nodded.

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  “Works for me,” Brett chimed in.

  “See?” I smiled. “I told you we could work this out.”

  * * *

  I spent the next hour making notes on the people who’d been involved with the Lucy Devlin story when I covered it as a newspaper reporter. Lou Borrelli, the cop who headed the task force looking into the disappearance, was dead—from a heart attack five years ago. So was the first officer on the scene, Bill Graham. Cancer, last year. I made a list of the other investigators and law enforcement officials and tried to call as many as I could. I thought about calling Sam again, but decided against it. Nothing to be gained for me—on any level—by going back there.

  A lot of the old law enforcement people I tried weren’t around anymore or their numbers were no longer any good. The ones I did reach didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. It was an old case. They’d thought about it, just like I had. But there’d been no clues or leads or developments in a long time.

  The last call I made was to Patrick Devlin, Lucy’s father. After we went through the initial pleasantries, I told him why I’d looked him up.

  “Your wife thinks she has a lead on what might have happened to Lucy. She got an e-mail saying Lucy had been seen at a motorcycle convention in New Hampshire right after she disappeared. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of Lucy’s disappearance coming up. I’m going to do a report on it all. I just wanted to get a response from you.”

  “Anne just can’t let it go, can she?” he said. “She keeps clinging to stories like this so she doesn’t have to deal with the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “That her daughter is gone and isn’t coming back, not now or ever.”

  “She’s your daughter, too.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “That’s right. And she’s never gotten over it. She wants to know what happened to her daughter. I would think you would, too.”

  “You and I both know that Lucy is dead,” he said.

  “I don’t know that.”

  “Sure you do. You just don’t want to admit it. Some pervert took her. That’s what happened. We can’t change that. I’ve accepted that. I’ve got a new life now. Anne, she’s still mired in the past. Going over and over things that she’s never going to be able to change. Lucy’s dead. Tell her that. Tell her it’s time to move on.”

  I hated to hear him talk like that.

  “Do you know that Anne has cancer?” I asked. “She’s only got a few mont
hs to live. That’s why she’s so desperate to find out what really happened that day. She doesn’t have much time left. Can’t you understand that? I would think that would be important to you, too.”

  “What’s important to me now is my life here in Boston and my wife and my son and daughter here with me. I know it may sound unfeeling to you, but Anne is not a part of my life anymore. Neither is Lucy. And so, no, I don’t have any response for your TV show.”

  I wondered why he was so upset. I thought about how Anne had said how he was a member of a motorcycle gang himself once—the same gang that the e-mail said had brought a little girl who looked like Lucy to New Hampshire. How Anne even suspected Patrick might have had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance. I didn’t believe it at the time. I mean, I’d known Patrick Devlin, and he’d loved Lucy with all of his heart. Or at least I thought he did.

  But now I wasn’t so sure.

  Sometimes we don’t really know people at all.

  That’s how I felt about Patrick Devlin at that moment.

  CHAPTER 6

  SIX O’CLOCK THAT night. Show time. I felt the same butterflies in my stomach that I always used to get before I went on the air. I took a deep breath and reminded myself I was a boss now as the opening credits for the newscast ran …

  ANNOUNCER: This is the Channel 10 News.

  With Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine at the anchor desk. Steve Stratton with sports and Wendy Jeffers at the Accu 10 weather central.

  If you want to stay up to date in this fast-paced city, you need to keep on the go with Channel 10 News.

  And now, here’s Brett and Dani …

  The camera cut to Brett and Dani.

  BRETT: Good evening. We start with an update on a sad story that has haunted New Yorkers for years. The disappearance of little Lucy Devlin.

  A picture of the little girl appeared on the screen behind him.

  DANI: She would be a grown woman today, if she’s alive. Maybe married, maybe with a career, maybe with children of her own. But instead she’s a statistic. One of the thousands of children who disappear in this country every year. This one, though, has left a special ache in our hearts. Even after all this time, New Yorkers remember Lucy Devlin.