Time to work. McCarthy grabbed his tape recorder and notebook. He jogged to the end of the yellow tape line, then angled off through the brush.
Within fifty yards he gasped for air. He felt like hell and knew he appeared worse. He was barely thirty-five, but gray had vanquished brown in the battle for his hair color. Cocoons of pasty skin hung under his eyes, which were receding, liquid and ruddy. He told himself his physical ailments stemmed from the car crash two years ago. On the back wall, however, was the knowledge that mental scars often reveal themselves on the flesh.
Ten minutes later, after nearly breaking his ankle twice on exposed roots, he crawled up the embankment of a dry riverbed to encounter the singularly diminutive figure of Lt. Geribome Fisk.
“They’re coming out of the frigging sand now!” the homicide detective screeched. Up the hill through the little detective’s legs, McCarthy could make out the lower half of her body and the cords which linked her to the live oaks.
“I thought I told you to keep the media back on the road!” Fisk squealed at the cops who stood by as the evidence technicians photographed and combed the area.
One of the patrol officers, a beefy kid with an acne-scarred face, mumbled, “I sealed it off back there by the road, Lieutenant.”
“Didn’t work, did it, Officer?” Fisk demanded. He stood on his tiptoes, scowling up at the patrol cop. “As if it wasn’t bad enough that flaky kid tried to scrawl a pentangle in the sand around the body, now we got two reporters on the crime scene.”
“You want I should take them out of here, Lieutenant?”
“And hear them shriek about their rights? I can’t take that tonight. Get him over there with The Beacon woman.”
“C’mon, Fisko,” McCarthy pleaded. “I’m on deadline here. What do we got? Is she part of the series?”
Fisk smiled sourly at the reporter. “What do you need to talk to me for, McCarthy? Why don’t you just wait to see The Beacon’s early edition, copy down what she writes, and put your byline over it? That’s your scam these days, isn’t it?”
McCarthy took the taunt in stride. “That’s what I’ve always admired about you, Fisko. You’d kick a man when he was down.”
“Payback’s a bitch,” Fisk said.
“Look, when did I write that story? Eight years ago?”
“I got the memory of an elephant.”
And the stature of a rat, McCarthy thought. But there was no use antagonizing a source he needed. “Fine, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ll wait for your words of wisdom.”
The acne-scarred patrol officer pointed a thick finger toward the portable lights. McCarthy shuffled off, scribbling a description of the scene in his notebook.
Fisk. The shortest cop he’d ever met. The most egotistical cop he’d ever met. The smartest cop he’d ever met. Over the years McCarthy had written a dozen or more articles about the detective’s unconventional prowess. Fisk’s first big case occurred when he worked vice. He’d gone undercover as a telephone repairman to break up a huge gambling operation in a condo overlooking the Sea View Race Track. Then he’d moved to narcotics and ran a famous investigation into a cocaine-trafficking ring run by a brilliant fifteen-year-old kid nicknamed Short Stuff Swain.
Fisk appeared destined for the top rungs of the force, maybe even Chief T. Lawrence Leslie’s job one day. That was before the detective transferred into special investigations and was given his own car. The word McCarthy got back then was that Fisk worked less for the department than the chief. His job: to gather dirt for Leslie.
One day McCarthy found a big envelope in his mailbox. It was filled with photographs and detailed logs of Fisk’s personal comings and goings in a city-owned Pontiac Grand Am. The detective claimed he never used the car off duty. McCarthy knew better. Among other things, Fisk had driven it all the way to Las Vegas with two of his civilian pals for a weekend of gambling, golf, and hookers over five-foot-ten.
A good story for McCarthy. A bad story for Fisk. Police Chief Leslie knew the effect of bad publicity. Leslie busted Fisk back to sergeant and transferred him to burglary. Fisk wallowed there for several years. Then he broke a massive ring that brought stolen cars into Mexico, a coup which prompted his transfer to homicide. When was that? Four years ago? At least that. And now Fisk was the supervising homicide investigator.
McCarthy’s nuts were in a vise. No Fisk. No story.
McCarthy glanced up from his notebook to see a very good-looking woman in her late twenties scribbling in her own white notebook. She wore a white cotton blouse, khaki pants, and purple hiking boots. Braided dark hair hung over her left shoulder.
“You Karen Rivers?” he asked.
“Who’s asking?” she replied, still writing.
“Gideon McCarthy. I work for The Post.”
She paused to consider him. “Thought you’d look different.”
“How’s that?”
Rivers stood. “Seedier perhaps.”
McCarthy rubbed his jaw. So this is how it was now. “Well,” he said. “At least you look like I’d imagined you would.”
“How’s that?”
“Like most Beacon reporters. Studious wannabes.”
She sneered. “I’m no want to be, Mr. Has-Been. I already am. And I’m not long for this job.”
“How unusual these days,” he replied. “A young reporter who thinks she’s ready to be a national correspondent after four months on the night cops beat.”
“I’ve got a master’s degree and did internships at the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, and The Oregonian,” she said, her arms crossed now.
“A master’s degree in journalism!” McCarthy exclaimed. “Don’t tell me now. I’ll guess. Studied arrogance, a patina of cynicism, and the certainty that grunt journalism jobs are beneath you. Northwestern? No, Columbia, am I right?”
The Beacon reporter furiously twisted her braid between her fingers. “All they told me was you were a plagiarist. They forgot to mention A-l asshole.”
“It only comes out in the presence of special people.”
“If you’d been at The Beacon and pulled that stunt, Harry Plake would have fired you on the spot.”
McCarthy didn’t answer. She was right. If it hadn’t been for Connor Lawlor’s kindness and the fact that The Post and The Beacon were embroiled in a vicious circulation war, he’d be flipping burgers in some hamburger stand right now. Or worse, sporting that gold coat for Century 21 Real Estate, practicing his double-pump handshake for newlywed couples trying to take that first step up the ladder of the American Dream.
From behind them Fisk said “You guys got two minutes. One ground rule. There are details about the killing I won’t get into.”
“So you think she is a serial victim?” McCarthy asked.
Fisk stuffed his hands in his pants pockets. “You can never be sure in these situations, but we’re leaning in that direction.”
“You have an ID?” Rivers asked.
“We can’t make a positive until we check dental records.”
“How was she killed?” McCarthy asked. “I mean, I could see she was tied up.”
Fisk nodded. “Like the others: bound and strangled.”
“Sexually abused?” Rivers asked.
“Doesn’t appear so,” the homicide detective said. “But that will have to wait for the medical examiner.”
“So the other women have been sexually abused?” Rivers pressed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Were they?” McCarthy demanded.
“I’m not saying one way or the other.”
“What about the hikers who found her?” McCarthy asked.
“Shook up by the whole thing. Father and son. The dad wants their names kept out of it. I don’t blame him.”
Rivers said, “This is the sixth or seventh body you’ve found out here in the last year. Some people might think you’re not doing enough to solve these murders.”
“NHI,” McCarthy said.
“No humans i
nvolved,” Rivers said, nodding.
Even in the shadows thrown by the spotlights, they could see Fisk’s face redden. “There’s no NHI when I’m around! The victims have been transients, whores, addicts. They put themselves in jeopardy every day. But if you’re saying we’re ignoring these slayings because the victims are somehow unsavory, you’re both out of line. We’ve got four detectives, including me, working this full-time.”
That was news. McCarthy pounced on it. “A task force?”
“Formed last week,” Fisk said. “Chief Lawrence is very concerned about the safety of women on the streets, any woman on the streets.”
The two reporters peppered the detective for several more minutes about the task force and the direction it would take. Then another homicide detective came up and whispered in Fisk’s ear. Fisk made a windshield wiper motion with his hands. “That’s it. Any other questions you can get me tomorrow or later at the office. Much later, I think.”
Rivers turned and rushed off through the brush toward her car. McCarthy glanced down at his watch. Two hours until The Post’s final deadline. He had to move.
The little Dodge Omni emblazoned with The Beacon’s logo squealed a U-turn just as McCarthy reached the pavement. He watched Rivers go, annoyed that she’d been able to get to him like that. My own fault, McCarthy thought as he got in his car. I created this hell, now I’ve got to figure out a way out of it.
Two miles down the highway he noticed her car parked in front of an all-night convenience store. She stood at a pay phone. He watched her dial as he drove by. She shifted from one leg to the other, revealing the presence of a very fit fanny. For some reason that aggravated McCarthy even more.
The Dirty Derails Count …
MEANWHILE PRENTICE LAFONTAINE DROVE north on the freeway toward Sloan Burkhardt’s office. He preferred stories about people, not buildings. But a dull chat with a real estate developer was as good as it got these days. Despite his disinterest, he intended to do his job well. He prided himself on being prepared. He always did his homework.
He knew, for example, that Burkhardt kept an office in a complex north of downtown, but that the developer did most of his work from a mansion in posh Mesquite Hills, about four miles up the road from The Ranch. He’d seen pictures of the estate in the local city magazine: whitewashed adobe with trellised verandas, a black-bottomed pool, a helicopter pad, and a tennis court.
Not a bad spread for someone who went through a divorce five years ago, LaFontaine thought. Last week, when News got wind that Burkhardt might win the right to develop the waterfront, he had tried to read the details of the developer’s divorce proceedings. The records were sealed. Not unusual. Rich people did it all the time. And by any estimation, Burkhardt was rich, perhaps not filthy wealthy, but $35 million will get you a sealed divorce record in any court in the land.
Still it was a shame. LaFontaine liked understanding the dirty details of people before dealing with them. It gave him leverage, insight into who they were, what they did, and why.
Hadn’t he learned the value of such knowledge the hard way? The Post had hired LaFontaine off a Louisiana weekly, where he’d been allowed to review movies in addition to his routine hard news assignments. Movie critic was the job he’d coveted at The Post. Ed Tower, then an assistant managing editor, had told him he’d have to earn the movie critic slot. So LaFontaine spent ten years toiling for the city desk on beats he hated, but from which he learned much about urban mechanics and the human condition.
It was in the mid seventies, while covering superior court, that he found an obscure appendix to the divorce proceedings between Tower and his ex-wife, Patricia. There, in the back of a dusty volume, he discovered that Tower had once burned the back of his wife’s leg with the tip of a cigar. LaFontaine kept a copy of the appendix in his private files. His mother had taught him long ago to protect himself by guarding his own skeletons and hoarding the mysterious bones of others. She’d employed the strategy to endure a rotten marriage to a grain dealer by clandestinely loving an attorney in Pontchatoula, Louisiana.
News had followed his mother’s example to save himself from the beatings he’d received ever since his father saw he liked to look at the sweaty muscular backs of farm boys who unloaded rice at the family grain-trading business. One hot August Saturday afternoon when LaFontaine was seventeen, he’d wandered into the back of the grain warehouse. There on a pile of burlap rice sacks he’d seen his father’s rump pumping between the legs of one of the young black women who helped run the office.
The boy instinctively understood that the bold declaration of discovery gelds the power of knowledge. Damaging gossip achieves potency through oblique suggestion; the idea being that the hint of the curtain about to be drawn back stirs more fear and passion than the secret squirming plainly in the light.
The next time his father raised his fist to him, LaFontaine sweetly asked whether his father thought young black girls considered the smell of burlap rice sacks an aphrodisiac? The hatred and trepidation that swept over his father was pure and plain. The paternal fist opened and fell limp to the waist. They rarely spoke again.
Since then LaFontaine had made it a habit to gather ammunition. Time and again, the dirty details had proved protective. Five years after discovering that Ed Tower had a thing for searing flesh, News was arrested for trying to pick up a vice cop posing as a marine in an area of the Alta Bay Park known as Vicious Queen’s Circle.
Tower called LaFontaine into his office to fire him. News played his trump card. He talked about the evils a burning cigar can wreak on the delicate skin at the back of a female thigh.
LaFontaine kept his job. But Tower made sure he never became movie critic. News was kept on a short leash, at the beck and call of the city desk, no chance of becoming more than what he was, a reporter blackballed by an event that no one at the paper, with the probable exception of Lawlor and certainly McCarthy, ever knew occurred. And yet, the experience of reducing Tower to a mass of fear had created in LaFontaine an insatiable hunger for newsroom filth. He loved gossip more than his own sweet mother.
LaFontaine parked his car beside the glass building and thought of McCarthy. Unless his friend hustled a good story soon, he risked being canned even if The Post was shorthanded in the final battles of a news war. LaFontaine forced himself to squelch these emotions. Nothing dulled a reporter’s edge like pity.
Inside, the receptionist told LaFontaine he’d have to wait five minutes. He killed the time going over the details of the Cote D’Azure development. Prime downtown waterfront property. Two high-rise hotels, an office tower, a marina; a festival market and an arts center designed in a series of grand aquamarine glass tubes. Estimated cost: $225 million.
He opened the proposal’s four-color map. A decent layout. Adequate pedestrian access. Sweeping waterfront views. The arts center aside, however, no better than what the other seven development teams proposed. Indeed, to LaFontaine’s way of thinking, several of their designs had been much better than Burkhardt’s.
“Mr. Burkhardt will see you now,” the receptionist said, opening the door to the office beyond.
Sloan Burkhardt stood from behind his desk as the reporter entered. He was a pale, fit man in his late thirties. His hair was light brown, slicked back into a ponytail. He wore an expensively cut poplin suit, white shirt, and a tie of a blue circular pattern. Not the sort of man or dress LaFontaine found attractive. The developer crossed the carpet, touching his fingers to a large mole on his right upper lip before offering his hand. The developer’s grip was limp, almost cold. He said: “I seldom grant interviews.”
“You don’t usually win the rights to develop one of the choicest waterfront properties in America.”
Burkhardt’s thin eyebrows arched. “Yes, well … Coffee?”
“Cream, no sugar,” News drawled. “Unless you have some molasses? I adore café Creole.”
Burkhardt winced. “I suspect that variation is not available, Mr. LaFountain.”
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“LaFontaine. There’s an ‘e’ at the end.”
Burkhardt seemed not to hear. He pressed an intercom button and asked for coffee, cream, no sugar. He looked at his hands. “Excuse me a moment, will you?”
The developer crossed to the far side of the room to a sink. It was the kind doctors have in their offices, with exaggerated faucet handles so users can turn the water on and off with their elbows. Burkhardt took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, then washed his hands thoroughly. When he realized the reporter watched, he said: “I seem to have soiled my hands somewhere.”
You fibbing ass, LaFontaine thought, you’re washing your hands because you find me dirty. He decided to get the interview over as quickly as possible; he wanted to head out on the town and forget this insipid fool.
While the developer dried himself, LaFontaine glanced about the office. The furniture was contemporary white oak, the paintings on the walls modern and nondescript, the desk devoid of personal items. The only thing in the entire room that spoke to Burkhardt’s personal life was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of the developer’s late father, Coughlin, putting a shovel into some marshy ground. A sign behind the old man said “Alta Bay Development.” The picture loomed on the wall over a white plastic model of the Cote D’Azure project.
LaFontaine pointed at the photograph. “I bet your father would be proud of you landing this deal.”
The developer tossed a linen towel into a hamper. “Perhaps.”
“No?”
“Father didn’t like to be one-upped.”
A tidy angle! News pulled out a notebook and wrote the quote down. “So you think your development will be more important than Alta Bay Park was to the city?”
“Infinitely.”
“Many argue that if it wasn’t for Alta Bay, the city wouldn’t have its identity.”
Burkhardt leaned forward with his hands on his desk. “You’re the public Boswell. Define that identity.”
“A mix of urbanity and beach, perhaps. A place where lawyers and bankers can surf before office hours.”
Hard News Page 2
