Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  Del Rio went through her rap sheet in detail for me. The worst offense was when she spent some time in prison for aggravated assault. She’d cut up a woman in a bar with an open beer bottle because she thought the woman was flirting with her boyfriend. The boyfriend wasn’t identified, but I figured it probably was Marston.

  I thought about my own encounter with her that first day at the place in Hell’s Kitchen. I didn’t take her seriously at the time. Maybe I should have.

  Is that what happened with Lucy Devlin? Marston picks her up off the street because he’s attracted to little girls. Big Lou finds out, loses it in a fit of jealousy, and attacks the girl. Maybe even kills her.

  It was possible, I suppose, but I couldn’t really see it. For one thing, she’d told me she wasn’t even with Marston back then when Lucy disappeared. Besides, I’d liked her that day she came to talk to me in my office. I didn’t want to believe that she might be capable of something like that.

  On the other hand, I remembered her fury when she thought I was interested in Sandy Marston.

  Which one was the real Big Lou?

  Or maybe both of them were.

  CHAPTER 22

  CASSIE O’NEAL AND Janelle Wright had both taped their respective pieces on Elliott Grayson and Teddy Weller for a segment I called: “Campaign Confidential: The Inside Scoop on the Senate Race.”

  I watched both now.

  Janelle’s piece portrayed a consummate and veteran politician, Teddy Weller, who was somehow convinced he’d whip this upstart newcomer when all was said and done. She talked about the old-school Democrats backing him, the large amount of fund-raising he had done, and the political chits he was calling in from all the favors he’d done for people over the years. He’d waited a long time for his shot at this, paid his dues in the political area, and he truly believed he was the man who should—and ultimately would—be elected to the Senate.

  Cassie, on the other hand, reported on the dedication and energy and almost cultlike adoration Grayson got from his followers, many of them young and active in a political campaign for the first time. “Elliott Grayson is a fresh face, a fresh name, and a fresh point of view to many people tired of politics as usual,” she said. “The question is whether or not there are enough of them to get Grayson elected. Elliott Grayson is betting there are, and a lot of political experts agree with him. This is Cassie O’Neal reporting from inside the Grayson campaign.”

  Of course, it was what they didn’t say on the air that I was most interested in. I went back to both Cassie and Janelle after the broadcast and tried to find out anything that might give me a clue or a lead.

  “The word in the Weller camp is that some big scandal is about to blow up on Grayson,” Janelle told me. “No one’s sure exactly what it is or how it’s going to come out, but they’re all buzzing about it over there. The feeling is there’s something out there that’s going to hurt Grayson bad enough to cost him the election.”

  If Weller was saying that, that could mean he was the one who started it by sending the original Lucy Devlin e-mail. On the other hand, maybe they just heard rumors about it and didn’t have any involvement beyond that.

  The main thing going on behind the scenes of the Grayson campaign seemed to be sex.

  “The word is that our boy Elliott is an even more ambitious swordsman with the ladies than he is a politician,” Cassie said. “He supposedly has cut quite a swath through many of the pretty young things working for him. He might even be sleeping with a few Weller staffers, too. This guy is the new Bill Clinton, all right, in more ways than one.”

  The way she said it made me wonder if she had slept with him, too.

  “And no, I’m not on that list,” she said, as if she were reading my mind. “I did flirt with him a bit. Just to see if he responded the way everyone said he did to good-looking women. I figured it would be good for the story if I could get him to come on to me and maybe even try to get me into bed.”

  “And?”

  “He wasn’t interested.”

  “That’s surprising.”

  “Yeah, I could hardly believe it. But he didn’t want to talk about me at all. There was only one thing he wanted to ask me about.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, all Grayson wanted from me was to find out more about you.”

  Maybe it was time to go talk to him again.

  * * *

  I stuck my head into Faron’s office afterward.

  “Can I ask your opinion on something, Jack?” I said to him.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I plopped down in front of his desk.

  “It’s a hypothetical situation,” I told him. “Hypothetically speaking, let’s say there’s this woman journalist covering a story, and the guy she’s reporting on starts flirting with her and seems interested in her. Can you think of a situation in which it might be journalistically justifiable, in terms of journalism ethics, for this woman to pursue such a relationship?”

  “Hypothetically speaking, who is the guy?”

  “Elliott Grayson.”

  “And the journalist …”

  “Hypothetically, that would be me.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, why so surprised?”

  “Why would Grayson be interested in you?”

  “I really don’t think that’s the point of this discussion …”

  “I mean the guy’s got everything. Good looks, charm, power, and a big political profile. He’s going to the Senate, for chrissakes. He could have any woman in the city that he wanted.”

  “Okay, he’s a terrific guy.”

  “And he’s really interested in you?”

  “Again, I think we’re getting away from the subject at hand …”

  “Wow! You and Elliott Grayson. Who would have figured that?”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “How far has this relationship between the two of you actually gone?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you slept with Grayson?”

  “No.”

  “Do you plan to sleep with him?”

  “I don’t really feel comfortable answering these kinds of personal questions with my boss.”

  “Hey, you brought the topic up.”

  I sighed.

  “I have no immediate plans to sleep with Elliott Grayson.”

  “So, exactly how intimate have the two of you gotten then?”

  “Intimate?”

  “Has he gotten to second base? Third base?”

  “Jeez, Jack, all I want to know is whether or not I’m violating any of the station’s ethics standards for journalists by going out with the guy.”

  Faron thought about that for a second. I was hoping he’d say I was. Say that I shouldn’t have any kind of personal relationship with Grayson. Say that my job might be in jeopardy if I did. It would make things so much easier that way.

  “If you were still in newspapers, this would be a big deal,” he said. “There’s a very specific standard there between what you do professionally and your personal life. At a newspaper, the answer would be: No, you can’t do that. If you did, and anyone found out about your personal relationship with someone you’re covering, it would jeopardize your credentials as a journalist. Newspapers take this kind of thing very seriously.”

  “So, I should break it off with Grayson right now?”

  He shook his head no.

  “This isn’t newspapers, Clare. This is television. Different rules. To be honest, no one really cares about that sort of stuff here. Whatever you want to do in your personal life, go ahead and do. Just don’t tell me any more about it. I don’t want to know who you are—or aren’t—sleeping with.”

  Damn.

  I was kinda hoping Jack Faron might make this easy for me.

  But it looked like whether or not to get personal with Elliott Grayson was a decision I was going to have to make myself.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 23

  “WHY ARE YOU looking for Louise Carbone and Sandy Marston?” I asked Elliott Grayson.

  “Who are they?”

  “Two bikers from the Warlock Warriors motorcycle gang.”

  “And I’m supposed to be looking for them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Louise Carbone’s mother. She said two feds showed up at her door asking about her daughter and Marston. They worked for the Justice Department. You work for the Justice Department. So how about you drop the ‘Golly, gee—I have no idea what you’re talking about’ approach and tell me what’s going on here.”

  I was sitting in Grayson’s office. The scene of my previous interview with him. There were no TV cameras in the room this time. Just the two of us.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything, you know,” he said.

  “I understand that.”

  “So, why should I?”

  “Because I have relevant information I will share with you.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Louise Carbone was my source who claimed she’d seen you and Lucy Devlin together after Lucy disappeared.”

  He nodded slightly. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or not.

  “I read the e-mail sent to Anne Devlin about Lucy being with some motorcycle guy named Elliott in Mountainboro, New Hampshire, and then Louise Carbone said that Elliott was actually you,” I told him. “After that, I found out about how you used to ride with a motorcycle gang and how you’d also been in charge of digging up all of the bodies in Mountainboro years later. I put two and two together, and it didn’t come out to four. I rushed to a judgment that wasn’t supported by the facts. I jumped to some conclusions I shouldn’t have about you. I’ve subsequently found out some new information that makes me believe Sandy Marston—and possibly Louise Carbone, too—could have been the ones responsible for Lucy Devlin’s disappearance.”

  I told him about Marston’s arrest record for trying to grab a little girl off the street just days before Lucy Devlin disappeared. About how Marston lied to me about his whereabouts during the time Lucy went missing.

  “Sandy Marston wasn’t arrested for the attempted abduction of the first girl until months later. I think it’s very possible he tried again, this time with Lucy Devlin. At the very least he seems like a damn good suspect. If someone had known about the first attempt that failed, they might have solved the Devlin case right then. But, by the time the charges were filed, no one ever put the pieces together.

  “Anyway, Marston, I think, got Louise Carbone to feed me the claims of your involvement to set you up for some reason. Maybe to throw suspicion off them once I started asking questions about the case again. Whatever they were trying to pull off, it seems to have gone bad. They’re gone. They’re on the run somewhere.”

  Grayson didn’t say anything when I was finished. Instead, he just reached over to his computer and clicked on an audio recording.

  “I want you to hear this,” he said. “It’s a voice mail of a phone call I received here recently.”

  A woman’s voice said: “Elliott Grayson, I know what you did. I know about Lucy Devlin. I know about the other children. I will go public with this information and make it available to your political opponents unless you pay me $250,000. I think $250,000 is a cheap price to pay to avoid seeing your chance to be Senator go up in flames, don’t you? I’ll be in contact with you in the next twenty-four hours to work out the details. Just make sure the money’s ready then, or I’ll tell everybody what I know. Have a nice day.”

  I recognized the woman’s voice.

  It was Louise Carbone.

  “She was pretty stupid about it,” Grayson said after the voice mail ended. “She made the call from her own phone and the number popped up on our call identification system here. It was easy to identify it as her number at the Warlock Warriors place. We went over there to talk to her, but she and Marston must have slipped away before we got there. Later, we found the mother’s address in New Jersey, but we missed them there, too. Marston obviously put the Carbone woman up to it. Maybe they sent that original e-mail to the Devlin woman or maybe they just came up with this wacky idea to take advantage of it once you went to them. In any case, we have nationwide arrest warrants out for them on charges of extortion. From what you’ve just told me, it sounds like that when we do find Marston and the Carbone woman, we should take a hard look at them in the Lucy Devlin case, too. It definitely sounds like Marston could have had something to do with the Devlin girl’s disappearance.”

  “What about the other six bodies you found in New Hampshire?”

  “What about them?”

  “How do they fit in?”

  “They don’t.”

  “But Louise Carbone talked about the ‘other children’ besides Lucy in that message. What did she mean?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she found out about the New Hampshire bodies just like you did because I got so much publicity for that case. Maybe she was talking about some other children altogether. Or maybe she was just out of her mind on crack or speed or whatever else she’s using these days. Louise Carbone has a long history of drug abuse, you realize. She and Marston are not exactly sane, rational people.”

  “You definitely don’t think there’s any connection between the six dead kids in New Hampshire and Lucy Devlin?”

  “We haven’t been able to find one single piece of evidence to support that theory.”

  “Me neither,” I admitted.

  “Those six murders are not part of our Lucy Devlin investigation,” Grayson said.

  It all made sense, but there was one thing that was still bothering me.

  “How come no one ever talked to Marston about Lucy Devlin before this?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it wasn’t that hard for me to find out the information about him being suspected of child molestation in the past and how he’d tried to pick up that other little girl just a few days before Lucy. How come none of the investigators at the time ever checked him out or looked at him hard as a suspect? They must have been going through the files looking for people with records like that.”

  Grayson shrugged. “Law enforcement isn’t perfect. Sometimes we just miss things. The important thing is that we get the bad guy in the end. Sooner or later, we usually do that.”

  “In this case, much later,” I said.

  There was something more pressing on my mind right now, though.

  “I’ve got one favor to ask in return for telling you all this,” I told him.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Don’t tell any of the rest of the press about this yet. Let me break it on the Channel 10 news tonight. You can call a press conference tomorrow. Tell everyone then that I got a leak somehow, you’re furious about it—whatever you want to say to cover your ass. But it has to be my story.”

  “Done,” he said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Sure. All you have to do is one favor for me in return. Have dinner with me some night.”

  “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “You and me having any kind of personal relationship, which I think is what we’re talking about here, it just seems … well, unethical.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “A yes, then?”

  “Maybe,” I told Grayson.

  “Well, then, Clare.” He laughed. “We’re making progress.”

  * * *

  I went back to the Channel 10 offices and started to put together a piece for the 6 p.m. newscast.

  I wrote my own copy, got some of the production people to pull up file footage from the Lucy Devlin case and put in calls to a lot of people, including Lucy’s mother, for comment. Then I briefed Brett and Dani on what was going to happen. After all this was done, I taped a fifteen-second promo. That’s the blurb you see while
you’re watching Ellen or Dr. Phil that tells you what’s coming up on the news.

  The one I did said:

  STARTLING NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN A SENSATIONAL NEW YORK CITY MISSING PERSONS CASE: Two suspects are now being hunted for questioning in connection with the long-ago disappearance of Lucy Devlin. Exclusive details at six. Stay right here for Channel 10 News.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the story. I tried to concentrate on Lucy Devlin and Anne Devlin and Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone and make some sense out of it all. Finally, at 6 p.m. the red light went on and the intro for the evening newscast began to roll. Brett and Dani went right to my story from the top. They set me up and then cut to me in the studio.

  I looked into the camera and began to talk:

  ME: In a stunning development, Channel 10 News has learned that arrest warrants were issued today for two suspects in connection with the fifteen-year-old disappearance of Lucy Devlin. Federal authorities are searching nationwide for Sandy Marston, fifty-one, and Louise Carbone, forty-six, both members of the Warlock Warriors motorcycle gang. The two are accused of attempted extortion. But authorities believe they may also have information about the Devlin disappearance and may actually have been involved in it. US Attorney Elliott Grayson revealed few details publicly. Nevertheless, Channel 10 News has learned law enforcement officials are confident that a break in the case, one of New York City’s most baffling crimes, is near …

  I loved the feeling of breaking a big exclusive like this. It was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time. It was never the same as an editor. I never felt as close to the news as I did as a reporter.

  Lucy Devlin had been the biggest story I ever covered in my career.

  Now it was a big story for me all over again.

  I knew that it was a sad story and that it had caused so much anguish for Anne Devlin and her husband and lots of other people.

  But, for me, at that moment in time …

  Well, it felt good.

  God help me, it felt good.

  CHAPTER 24

  “YOU WANT TO go where?” Jack Faron asked me.