Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told us where he buried Lucy Devlin’s body.”

  * * *

  The site was a wooded area in Dutchess County, some one hundred miles north of the city. There was a cabin and a lake on the property, and the Warlock Warriors had sometimes gone up there when things got too hot in the city. After he killed Lucy, Marston said in the note, he decided that was where he’d get rid of the body. He stole a car, took her up there late at night and dug a grave deep in the woods. He put Lucy’s body in it, filled it up again, and then went off to get drunk.

  The search in Dutchess County for the body quickly became a media event in itself. Outside contractors were brought in, and soon the area was filled with bulldozers, steam shovels, tractor trailers, and all sorts of other excavation equipment.

  The note from Marston hadn’t said exactly where he buried the body. So, there was a lot of area to cover. On top of that, the land had grown over extensively with trees and shrubs and weeds over the years since then. Any obvious signs of Lucy Devlin’s grave were long gone.

  They dug for days. It became a staple of every TV news show, including us at Channel 10. Video of the digging, the excavation equipment, the workers … and a solemn newscaster reporting that there was still no sign of poor little Lucy Devlin.

  Grayson was there every day, directing the whole operation. I thought about how he’d done the same thing in New Hampshire a few years earlier where they found the other six children. I wondered about the similarities and if maybe Sandy Marston could have had something to do with those deaths, too. Or maybe he wasn’t involved in any of it. I kept hoping against hope this was all a big ruse. That Sandy Marston made it all up about Lucy Devlin just to yank our chains one last time—even in death.

  Then, on the tenth day, they found her.

  There was no indication that she was even recognizable after all those years in the ground. But they found her skull had been crushed, just like Marston said. That appeared to be the cause of death. There were also injuries to other parts of her body, where someone apparently had beaten her before she was killed. I thought about the cute little girl—the one who loved school, who loved animals, who loved life—that I’d seen in all the pictures.

  I didn’t want the story to end this way.

  Even then, after Grayson and his agents found the body, I suppose I still harbored some kind of deep-down fantasy that this wasn’t Lucy.

  That it was all a mistake.

  That it was really some other child Marston had killed.

  But there was no mistake.

  The announcement came later that they had confirmed the identity of the little girl’s body found in the grave.

  It was Lucy Devlin.

  CHAPTER 34

  “SO, LUCY DEVLIN’S dead,” Janet said. “Sandy Marston confessed to the abduction and murder in the note, and we know he was telling the truth because he knew where the body was. Now he’s dead, too.”

  “End of story,” I said.

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

  “There’s no real evidence—at least that I can find—of any connection between them and Lucy Devlin.”

  “Marston never mentioned them in his confession note?”

  “Nope.”

  “So that’s it, right? It’s over.”

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “And you’re unhappy about that?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  We were sitting in the living room of my apartment. Janet had shown up at the door a little earlier carrying a six-pack of beer and a large pizza with extra cheese, mushrooms, onions, and sausage. She said she thought I might need some company and some cheering up. Sure sounded like a good plan to me.

  Janet picked up a knife and fork now and cut off a small piece of pizza. She put it delicately in her mouth. Not a speck of tomato sauce on her face or hands. I don’t understand people who eat pizza like that.

  “I think the reason you’re unhappy,” Janet said between chews of her pizza, “is that you always believed Lucy Devlin was still alive. And that one day you would find her. Now you know you were wrong. Hence, the feeling of disappointment and sadness and unhappiness even though you just helped break a very big story. Am I right or am I right?”

  “That’s a bit of an overstatement.”

  “You didn’t hold out hope she was alive until the very end?”

  “Of course, I had hope. But I knew the facts, too, Janet. I’ve covered missing person cases before. When a child is abducted, the chances of finding him or her is good in the first few hours, maybe even the first day or so. After that, the odds go down dramatically. I know it was a pleasant dream to think of Lucy alive, all grown up and living happily ever after somewhere. But that’s all it was: a dream. I knew she was probably—hell, almost certainly—dead.”

  “Did you know you have a tell?” Janet asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you lie, you run your fingers through your hair.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  I suddenly realized I was running my hand through my hair as I said it.

  “See, you did it again.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “I know you’re lying.”

  I looked down at the pizza. I’d eaten three pieces already. I had the fourth in my hand. Pizza always looks so good when you first get it. Then, after you’ve eaten a few pieces, it doesn’t look so good anymore. Right now it was making me nauseous. I put the pizza slice down.

  “I hoped she was alive,” I said. “I convinced myself she was. Part of this was for Anne Devlin, but part of it was for me.”

  “It’s just a story, Clare. There’ll be other stories.”

  “She was friggin’ eleven years old.”

  “There’s a lot of bad people out there like Sandy Marston.”

  “That’s the other thing that bothers me.”

  “What?”

  “I met him. I didn’t think he was that bad a guy. Okay, he killed or hurt a couple of people. But that was in fights, and they were no pillars of society either. I guess I just didn’t see him as being the kind of guy who could kill Lucy Devlin.”

  “Maybe the woman did it.”

  “Louise Carbone?”

  “Yes. You said she was insanely jealous of other women around Marston. If he was interested in a little girl like Lucy Devlin, it could have been enough to set her off. She might have killed Lucy, then he just helped get rid of the body.”

  “I thought of that, too,” I said.

  “It makes sense.”

  “Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I liked her.”

  I thought about Big Lou sitting in my office that day. Telling me about wanting to start a new life. About her daughter and her family and her ex-husband. I remembered, too, the way she was holding the picture of Maureen, her daughter, when she died.

  “There’s one other problem I have, too,” I told Janet. “If Louise did it—or even if Marston was the killer—why did she come to me and tell this whole story about Elliott Grayson? Why did she try this extortion ploy with Grayson? What was she trying to accomplish? I mean, wouldn’t she and Marston have wanted it to just all go away? Instead, they turned it into a big story again. A story that wound up getting them killed in the end.”

  “Who knows?” She shrugged. “Why does it matter?”

  “It’s a loose end.”

  “There’s always loose ends.”

  “They bother me.”

  We talked about the case for a while more, then drifted off into other topics. One of them, as I knew it would, turned out to be my personal life. I told her then about my date with Grayson and my abrupt exit from his bedroom. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone, even Janet, until that moment.

  “Do you think I overreacted?” I asked.

  “You might have been a l
ittle excessive.”

  “I just didn’t want to be there with him anymore.”

  “Then you were right to go.”

  “The minute he made the Lucy Devlin remark, I just lost it.”

  Janet looked at me with a worried look on her face now.

  “Like we said, Clare, the Lucy Devlin story is over. And that’s all it was, just a story. I know how badly you feel and how close you got to the family and all that, but it is still just another story. You accidentally stumbled into it a long time ago and you’ve never really let go. Now it’s time. You’re the one who always preached about how you can’t let any story become personal. Right?”

  I looked down at the pizza box. There was still one piece left. If I ate it, I was going to hate myself in the morning.

  “This is more than just another story,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never talked about it to anyone before. It happened a long time ago, and I was a different person then. I didn’t even know you. You’re my best friend, Janet, but I always resisted telling you this because I thought you might think less of me. But now, well … since Lucy’s dead, maybe this is the time. I just feel like I have to share it with someone. I guess you’re nominated.”

  Janet sat and waited.

  “I didn’t accidentally happen onto the Lucy Devlin story fifteen years ago,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I was sleeping with Patrick Devlin.”

  She stared at me. “You slept with the father of Lucy Devlin while the entire city was looking for her?”

  “No, before.”

  Janet looked confused.

  “I met Patrick Devlin on a story I was doing about new construction projects in the city. He took me out for a drink, one thing led to another, and we wound up in bed. After that, we started having regular trysts on our lunch hours—sometimes back at his Gramercy Park town house. His wife worked during the day, and his daughter, Lucy, was at school, he told me. We had the place to ourselves.

  “Except that last day, Lucy came home early. She walked in and saw us in bed together. She got very upset. She started to cry. Patrick calmed her down, and I thought the crisis was over. But soon after that she was gone.

  “I’ve often wondered if that was the reason she ran away or put herself into a situation where someone could harm her that day. It all came back to me when Anne Devlin said Lucy had told her something about her father and sex. Anne was afraid that meant with Lucy. But Lucy was talking about me, the woman she found in her father’s bed. I’ll never know if I was somehow the impetus for everything that happened to her.

  “The strange thing is that Anne Devlin and I got so close afterward. We both shared this devotion and this vow to never rest until we found out what happened to Lucy. She thought I was just being kind. But part of it was my guilt. My guilt for what I’d done to her and to her family.”

  “And that’s why you were hoping against hope that one day Lucy would be found?” Janet asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So you wouldn’t have to live with the guilt anymore?”

  “I forgot about it most of the time. Time is the great healer. As the years went by, other stuff happened and Lucy Devlin and her mother faded more and more into the background. Or at least I tried to compartmentalize it down deep inside of me. But this brought it all back. All the pain. All the sadness. All the guilt.”

  “Lucy’s dead and her mother’s dying, too,” Janet said softly. “There’s nothing more you can do about it now.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s what’s eating me up.”

  And then, for the first time in a long time, I began to cry.

  I cried for Lucy Devlin.

  And for Anne Devlin.

  And for those six children found in a lonely grave in New Hampshire.

  And, maybe most of all, I cried for myself, too.

  PART II

  SUMMERTIME NEWS

  CHAPTER 35

  IT WAS ONE of the hottest summers that anyone could remember in New York City.

  The temperature soared over one hundred for eight days in a row at one point. It was in the nineties for much of July and virtually all of August. The humidity was so oppressive that even a short time outside left your clothes wet. There was no blackout this summer, but a few power scares. Con Edison kept issuing appeals for people to turn their air-conditioning down to conserve electricity, which everyone ignored. Being without lights didn’t seem as bad as sweating under the blazing sun. Everywhere you went, the conversation was always about how hot it was.

  At Channel 10, we led the news most days with an in-depth weather update package—talking about all the records that we were breaking in this one-of-a-kind summer.

  There were tips about how to beat the heat.

  Advice on how to avoid heat stroke or dehydration.

  Cool places to go like the beach and air-conditioned museums and city parks.

  Features on the New Yorker who had the hottest job—it was a tie between a pizza parlor worker and a guy who poured asphalt on the highway—and the New Yorker who had the coolest one—a butcher who worked in a meat freezer.

  One day we even tried to prove the old adage that says: “It’s so hot you could fry an egg out there.” We dropped an egg on the sidewalk outside our Manhattan office to see if it would really fry. It didn’t.

  But you want to hear the truth?

  It really wasn’t any hotter than it always is at this time of year. It’s always hot and miserable during July and August in New York City. When I worked at the New York Tribune as a newspaper reporter, my editor there used to avoid doing weather stories like that. “We’re going to tell them on our front page that it’s hot out?” he used to say. “I think they already know that. Where’s the news?” In TV news, we had no such hesitation about telling people what they already know. Hence, it was all weather all the time.

  Even the stories that weren’t technically about the weather seemed to be mostly weather related.

  We had a shark scare at one of the beaches off the coast of New Jersey, which gave a few good weeks of scare coverage. Footage of killer sharks, clips from Jaws, interviews with shark experts about what to do if you see one—“get the hell out of the water” seemed to be the general consensus. The shark that had been spotted turned out to be one of the harmless sand shark variety, but by then TV news had moved on to other stuff anyway.

  There was also a big series about the water quality at area beaches. “ARE YOU MAKING YOURSELF SICK THIS SUMMER?” was the title. By the time we were finished with that and the shark series, people were afraid to go anywhere near the water.

  Then there was the story of the street vendor who got busted for selling ice cream cones to kids in Central Park on a hot summer afternoon. An overzealous police officer not only wrote him a ticket for operating without a valid license, but actually hauled him off to jail. You had outraged kids, outraged parents, and outraged civil liberties groups. By the time the fiasco was over, the vendor wound up on the Jimmy Fallon show and the cop who arrested him was walking a beat in the Bronx.

  The good thing for me was that all of this kept me from thinking too much about everything that had happened.

  I spent most of my summer consumed with covering warm fronts, humidity indexes, and temperature fluctuations.

  I hardly had any time for anything else.

  I almost never even thought about Lucy Devlin.

  Almost.

  * * *

  The Senate election was the other big story.

  Elliott Grayson had a comfortable lead over Teddy Weller in the race for the Democratic nomination even before Lucy Devlin.

  But, after the news about the killing of Marston and Big Lou and the discovery of Lucy Devlin’s body, he began to pull away even further from Weller in the polls. By June, he had opened up a double-digit lead. By July, it was even higher. By August, with the Democratic primary only a few weeks away, some political obser
vers were calling him unstoppable unless some scandal or mistake happened.

  Grayson was playing the Lucy Devlin card as hard as he could. He talked about it constantly during speeches and campaign appearances and interviews. Hey, I’m the guy who solved the case that had been unsolved for years, he told everyone. It was a powerful argument for what a great crime fighter he was, and it seemed to be working with the voters.

  Sometimes, when I saw him on TV, I thought about that night in his apartment. I wondered if I’d made the right decision by walking out on him. Not that it really mattered at this point. He never tried to call me or reach me anymore after that. At press conferences, he continued to avoid any contact with me. Whatever appeal I’d once held for him seemed to be gone now.

  I thought about what Cliff Whitten had said about how Grayson would do anything to win. What if he somehow set up the whole Lucy Devlin story to get an edge in the election? It was a nice conspiracy theory, but nothing more. After all, I was the one who set everything in motion. No, he just got lucky. That’s what happens to people like Elliott Grayson. They get lucky. They always wound up in the right place at the right time.

  * * *

  Anne Devlin was still alive, but just barely.

  She’d rallied for a while and been released from the hospital, but she suffered a relapse over the summer that required more treatment. It was just a matter of time, of course, and the doctors said that time was now measured in weeks instead of months.

  She’d been a poignant, heartbreaking figure at the memorial service that was held for Lucy, crying softly throughout the eulogies and collapsing to the ground in grief at one point before it was over. I thought that maybe she’d been holding on just for that, a last chance to say good-bye to her daughter, and that I’d hear about her death soon after that day. But she was still around, fighting an unbeatable battle against cancer until the very end.

  I visited her a few times over the summer, but the truth is we really didn’t have much to say to each other anymore, now that Lucy was truly gone.

  Patrick Devlin didn’t even bother to show up for Lucy’s funeral, which shocked a lot of people. I mean, I understand that the guy had a new life and a new family now. But I wondered how he could be so indifferent to his own daughter’s death. I wondered how he could completely turn his back on his former wife at such an emotional moment. I wondered how I could have ever been attracted to—and slept with—a man like that. I had made a lot of bad choices when it came to men in my life, but Patrick Devlin was right up there at the top of my list of regrets.