Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  “Probably time to assign this to someone else.”

  “I said I’d do it myself.”

  “Clare—”

  “It’s my damn story!” I snapped at him. “And I’m not giving it up to anyone else here. I started this story, and I’m going to finish it.”

  Faron had a concerned look on his face.

  “Why does this story mean so much to you, Clare?” Faron asked me. “Oh, I know all about your Pulitzer Prize and everything, your special relationship with Anne Devlin and how your name has always been associated with the Lucy Devlin story. But it just seems like there’s more to it than that. I’ve never seen you react to a story like this, Clare. This one just seems so personal to you.”

  There were a lot of printouts and other material about the Lucy Devlin case spread out on my desk. One of them had a picture of Lucy.

  “Look, I know it’s a rule for a journalist never to get personally involved in a story,” I said to Faron. “I really understand that you always have to keep a wall up between you and the people that you cover. You need to get into their lives, but don’t ever let them get into yours. Otherwise, this job will eat you up alive. That’s a rule I learned a long time ago—and I’ve taught it to a lot of young reporters since I came here.”

  I looked down at the picture of Lucy Devlin on my desk now. The wholesome little eleven-year-old girl with the big smile on her face. Thinking she had her whole life in front of her and all the time in the world to enjoy it. Without a clue of whatever terrible things were going to happen to her.

  “But here’s the other thing about that rule: It’s all bullshit. Sooner or later, a story comes along that’s so big and so powerful for you that it sucks you in emotionally and it becomes personal.”

  “Is that what happened to you with Lucy Devlin?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “I got personally involved in this story a long time ago, Jack. And I guess I still am.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NAMES OF the six young bodies found near where the motorcycle convention had been held in Mountainboro were:

  Joseph Manielli

  Emily Neiman

  William O’Shaughnessy

  Tamara Greene

  Donald Chang

  Becky Gale

  Three girls, three boys. One of them was black, one Asian, one Jewish, one Irish, one Italian, and one a combination of several ethnic backgrounds. Whoever killed them was not motivated by race or religion, that was clear. This was an equal opportunity killer.

  I gathered background material on the cases from online and other places—and then spent a lot of time going through all of it. The pictures were the toughest to take. Headshots of all of them looking cute and adorable before something terrible happened and they disappeared into that lonely grave.

  Tamara Greene was the youngest at six, Donald Chang the oldest at thirteen. The rest were various ages falling in between the two. I’d always assumed that someone who preyed on young children had a fixation on a particular age. Or sex. A six-year-old girl was sure a lot different than a thirteen-year-old boy. This could mean there was more than one killer. Or that there was a series of killings, at different times and different places by different people, with the bodies all being dumped together for some reason. Or it was a single killer who played by his own rules.

  There was no geographic pattern that I could discern. Becky Gale was from New Jersey; Tamara Greene from Ohio; Joseph Manielli from Pennsylvania; William O’Shaughnessy from Florida; Emily Neiman from Texas; and Donald Chang from Southern California. I plotted them all on a map and then drew lines between each location, looking for some kind of clue. There was nothing. Whoever did this would have had to crisscross the country to find his victims.

  The children had all gone missing long before the bodies were found. All within a few years of the Lucy Devlin disappearance. Just like with Lucy, there had been reports of sightings after that, but never any confirmed accounts.

  The bodies were too far decomposed to determine an official cause of death. But the medical examiner determined that all of the children had been beaten—and some appeared to have been strangled or stabbed. In any case, the IDs were eventually established by investigators who painstakingly cross-checked against nationwide missing kids’ reports, and the parents received the sad news that the search for their children had ended.

  Over the years, a few suspects had been questioned about some of the individual cases, but no one was ever arrested. All of the cases were still open.

  One of the newspaper articles was about Elliott Grayson, the man who’d been in charge of the digging operation and subsequent investigation. It was a glowing profile, describing him as a hard-nosed but compassionate law enforcement official who agonized over the fate of the children he’d uncovered. There’s no question the case had been a career maker for him. Six months after that, he was promoted to a big job in the New York office. He later became Deputy US Attorney, then moved into the top spot a few years later. Since then, he’d gone after drug lords, mob figures, and corporate scammers with such success that it had elevated him to political stardom.

  Six bodies had been found at the site in New Hampshire. That didn’t mean there weren’t more. Authorities said they’d checked, but they couldn’t dig up the whole town. Even more distressing was the idea that there could be a series of these burial grounds across the country, which no one had ever found. What if there were tens or hundreds more bodies who’d been killed by the same person?

  * * *

  I knew a guy in the FBI. His name was Gary Belton.

  When I say I knew Belton, I mean in the biblical sense. We’d met on a story a few years ago when I was in between marriages—and I had slept with him a number of times. We had a great time together. Good sex and good conversation, too. We talked about a lot of things in bed and out of bed.

  Unfortunately, the one thing Belton didn’t talk about was the fact that he was married. When I found out, I told him I didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. He took this news very badly, which I assumed was a compliment to me—sexually speaking. Anyway, I hadn’t talked to him since then.

  “What do you want?” he asked when I got him on the phone.

  “I need some information.”

  “And why would I give you information?”

  “Because we’re old friends?”

  “Okay, how friendly do you want to be?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Maybe we could get together again one night.”

  “Like old times?”

  “Sure, what do you think, friend?”

  “Will you be bringing your wife this time?”

  “I’m not married anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, I’m a single man now.”

  “You wouldn’t be just saying that to get me into bed with you?”

  “Honest, Barbara and I got divorced right after I stopped seeing you.”

  “Maybe I should call her up and offer my condolences.”

  “Don’t do that!”

  “Why not?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Okay, I’m still married.” He sighed.

  “I knew that,” I said.

  I told him about the graves in New Hampshire and the six kids. I asked him if he could check to see if any similar clustering of bodies had been found anywhere in the country. He hemmed and hawed a bit, but eventually agreed. He also gave me some other facts and figures that startled me.

  “More than eight hundred thousand children go missing every year,” he said. “Most of them are found in a day or two, but some aren’t. A lot of them eventually turn up, of course. But the rest just disappear off the face of the earth. Maybe three hundred children a year fall into that category—they just walk out of the door one day and never return. You have to figure that many of them are dead. The parents keep on hoping for a miracle, of course. What else can they do? But they know, as well as we do, wh
at the odds are. Once a kid’s gone for any length of time, he’s as good as dead. Or worse. Even if you find that child, it won’t be the same child that you remember.”

  “Let’s say one person killed all six of the kids in New Hampshire,” I said. “What are the odds that he’s killed others, too?”

  “Well, six is a big number. I mean someone could kill once and never do it again. But if he killed six times … let’s just say I don’t think he would have stopped. No, there’s more bodies out there somewhere. Unless he’s dead or he’s in jail, that is. If he isn’t, the toll is higher than six. There’s one other thing, too …”

  “He’s still killing,” I said.

  “Absolutely.”

  After I hung up with Belton, I looked again at the pictures of the six dead children found in New Hampshire.

  Joey Manielli, Becky Gale, Donald Chang, Emily Neiman, William O’Shaughnessy, and Tamara Greene.

  All six of them were smiling in the photos.

  All six of them looked happy.

  None of them seemed to have any hint that they had so little time left in their short lives.

  Just like Lucy Devlin.

  CHAPTER 14

  THERE WAS A story meeting the next day in Jack Faron’s office. Me, Maggie, Brett, Dani.

  Cassie and Janelle were there. A handful of other editors and writers and on-air reporters, too. The goal was to come up with some enterprise ideas to cover in the upcoming weeks leading up to summer.

  “How about an end of school series?” Brett asked. “Prom fashions, tips on studying for finals, advice on getting summer jobs—that sort of thing.”

  “We could do a shape up for the beach special,” Dani said. “For all the viewers who promised to lose weight for the New Year, but never did. Now we tell them how to diet and exercise and get rid of some of those excess pounds before Memorial Day.”

  “Let’s do something on day trips people can take right now before their summer vacations,” Cassie suggested. “Amusement parks, local beaches, camping trips. Short jaunts when things aren’t that crowded yet.”

  This was all what I liked to call the “ratings bait” stuff we do in TV news. High interest, short attention span required, quick hits on things like weight loss, fashion advice, vacation tips. This was the bread and butter of TV news—especially during the big ratings sweeps periods.

  We weren’t breaking any major news here, exposing any kind of secret wrongdoing, making a contribution to fighting climate control, or battling air pollution or anything else to better the world and the human race. It was just entertainment, plain and simple.

  But, every once in a while, there is a chance to do a meaningful story on television amid all this fluff.

  That’s what I wanted to do now.

  “Let’s talk about Lucy Devlin,” I said.

  Brett shrugged. “We’ve already interviewed the mother,” he said. “You could try the father again, but he wouldn’t talk to you last time. Your Elliott Grayson tip didn’t go anywhere, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. I’m not sure where else there is to go with it, Clare.”

  “What about all the other missing kids out there?” I said. “Lucy’s just one of thousands of them who disappear every year. Let’s look at a few of them. Some of the others out there just like Lucy Devlin. Who are they, what happened to them, what was the effect on their families and friends and classmates? We could even do a series. It might be very powerful television.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That could work.”

  “I agree,” Maggie said. “We take a hard look at the six bodies that were found up in New Hampshire. The ones in that little town where someone thought they once saw Lucy Devlin and where Grayson supervised the digging up of the mass grave. That way we could still keep him as part of the story, too, since he is running for the Senate. Tell the viewers how he found out the tragic fate of these six other tragic Lucy Devlin–like children. All the emotion Anne Devlin and everyone felt over little Lucy … well, all six of these families must have undergone the same thing. All we have to do is tell their story. Plus, we can still keep Lucy as the peg for it all. That way we can include her, and keep that story going, too.”

  Faron nodded. “That’s not bad,” he said.

  “Not bad?” I asked.

  “Okay, it’s pretty damn good.”

  It was a victory for real journalism amid the clutter of the TV news landscape. But only a small victory. After that, we went back to discussing the normal business of what goes on behind the scenes of a TV news show. We had recently changed the set a bit—part of my “keep them moving” strategy that had worked so well for us in the ratings thus far. Instead of the traditional look of just two anchors sitting behind a desk to read the news, the plan now was to have them move over to a living room setting—complete with a big couch and some comfortable chairs—to interview people and discuss some of the events of the day. Also, a TV consulting firm we hired to make suggestions about the show thought it made the anchors seem more personal and more human and more likeable.

  The problem was we were now going to be seeing a lot more of Brett and Dani than ever before, and again, not just from the waist up like traditional TV anchor people.

  “We need to figure out the right length of skirt Dani should wear,” Faron said at one point. “The skirts need to be short enough to keep the viewers interested, but not too short to get the religious groups and parents organizations and God knows who else mad at us for X-rated TV.”

  “Are we really having a discussion here about the length of Dani’s skirt?” someone asked.

  “This could have a big effect on our ratings,” Faron pointed out.

  “How about we just put her in hot pants and blow the roof off the Nielson meters?” I said.

  “I’m looking for some serious suggestions here, Clare.”

  “Okay, how about we put Brett in hot pants then?”

  “Oh, God,” Dani said, “I can just hear the sound of TV sets being clicked off all over New York City.”

  “Laugh if you want,” Brett said, “but you’re just jealous because I’m going to be a bigger sex symbol than you.”

  It was finally decided that Dani’s skirt should be well above the knee without showing too much of her thigh. I just let the rest of them figure it all out. Sure, I was the news editor, but I wasn’t in the mood for this kind of discussion right now. I wanted to concentrate on the real news. The news about Lucy Devlin.

  * * *

  My phone was ringing when I got back to my own office. It was Gwen, Elliott Grayson’s assistant.

  “Mr. Grayson would like to have another meeting with you later this week,” she said.

  He’s having his assistant make the appointment for him? That sure didn’t sound like a personal date.

  “He suggests meeting you for a drink and/or possible dinner tomorrow night, if you’re free for that,” Gwen said.

  On the other hand, a drink and dinner did sound very personal.

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  “Let me check Mr. Grayson’s schedule, and I will get back to you or someone in your office with more specific information about the appointment,” she said. “Is that satisfactory, Ms. Carlson?”

  Damn. Could this woman be any more officious?

  “Sure,” I said. “Just have your people talk to my people—and we’ll make this sucker happen.”

  After I hung up, I clicked on my computer and Googled Elliott Grayson’s name. I read through some more material about him. I wanted to be prepared this time before I met him again. Most of the stuff was the same PR crap I’d read before. Elliott Grayson was a dogged crime fighter, a rising young star, he had a big political future … blah, blah, blah. The list of Elliott Grayson items was a long one. Just for the hell of it, I started cross-referencing it online in the search engine with some other names. I tried Lucy Devlin. Anne Devlin. The cops who handled the Devlin case. The Warlock Warriors. Finally, I tried Patrick Devlin. There was one l
isting for both men. It was from a political website called ElectGraysonforSenate.com. There was a picture of Elliott Grayson and Patrick Devlin shaking hands at a fund-raiser dinner. The caption said: “Elliott Grayson thanks Patrick Devlin, head of the Boston-based Devlin Construction Corp., for his generous contribution to the Senate campaign.”

  Elliott Grayson and Patrick Devlin knew each other.

  Another coincidence.

  Just like it had been a coincidence Grayson was the one who dug up the six kids’ bodies in Mountainboro.

  Sure were a lot of coincidences in this case.

  CHAPTER 15

  NOTHING IS EVER what it seems.

  When I’d looked at the picture of Joey Manielli—one of the six dead children found in the grave—I envisioned another Lucy Devlin. An adorable kid from an all-American family whose lives would never recover from the terrible tragedy of losing a child that way. But the reality turned out to be a lot different.

  The Manielli family lived in a trailer park outside Allentown, Pennsylvania. That was about a two-hour drive from New York City. I went the next morning in a Channel 10 van with a film crew.

  Janis Manielli, Joey’s mother, was sitting on a lawn chair in front of the trailer when we got there, drinking from a can of beer. She was wearing a loose-fitting housecoat that couldn’t hide the fact she was seriously overweight.

  It was barely eleven a.m., but the beer she was drinking was probably not her first can of the morning. I surmised that by the empty cans scattered around her chair. Also by the way she slurred her words as she spoke. Then there was the belching. The first one I thought was just an accident. I expected her to excuse herself, but she didn’t. After a while, I realized it was a pattern as natural to her as breathing. She’d take a big swig of beer, talk for a while, and then let another belch rip.