Second Life (Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 4)

by D. F. Bailey

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Earlier this month I covered what was supposed to be a climate change debate between Martin Fast and Kali Rood.”

  “Oh my God, I heard. And then he was shot, right?”

  “Yeah. An hour later. On Market Street.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “That’s the thing. It is unbelievable. Anyway, just to get her perspective on the murder, I interviewed Kali Rood. And I know you did a huge feature on her last fall when you were still at The Voice—‘The Virgin Queen.’ ”

  “The one and only. She’s a grade-A pretender, believe me. And I know she’d say the same thing about me. About most journalists, probably. You don’t have to be special. She might even have words for you too, Will.”

  “Oh, she does.” He paused a moment. “Listen, this is going to sound kind of strange, but I want to ask about your sources for the story.”

  “My sources?” She laughed with a nervous chuckle and glanced around the room. How could he ask for her sources? “You know I can’t tell you that. Why are you even asking?”

  “Because I don’t have time to dig this up myself. Something’s come up and I need to know who you talked to and what files you found.”

  Jayne felt a sudden urge to hang up—and she would have until she reminded herself who she was talking to. “Look, you need to explain this to me.”

  “Okay. I was working on the story about Rood and Martin Fast’s debate. And few days later something came into my possession.” He hesitated. “A list.”

  “What kind of list?”

  “A list of names. Twenty-four names. My name is on it, and so is yours.”

  “Really?” She stood up and gazed at the bronze Caddy parked across the street. Was someone sitting behind the wheel? Hard to tell through the smoked glass windows of the car. “So, it’s what? A list of journalists covering climate change?”

  “Five of them are in the media. Three in politics. But most of the others are researchers and scientists.”

  “Some kind of honor roll thing?”

  “No. We think it’s a kill list.”

  “What?!” She sat in the chair again and propped her head against one hand. “What the fuck are you saying? And who’s we?”

  “My editorial team. Check the eXpress web site. We put the story up yesterday.”

  “Just a second.” Jayne put her phone down and brought up the web page on her laptop. She scanned the article and then read the headline again. Three Dead in Four Weeks.

  “So what does this mean?” she asked when she recovered her poise. “I’ve been threatened before, but I don’t like the look of this.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why I want you to share your sources with me.”

  She waited a moment to consider this. What exactly was his game?

  “Tell you what, you email me this list of twenty-four names. I’ll look at it and get back to you”

  “You’ll have it in a minute,” he said.

  “And if I open my sources to you—if, and that’s a huge if, so don’t count on it, okay—then we share the story credit for anything on this going forward. Agreed?” She heard a rustling on his end of the line. As she waited, she pressed the heel of her hand against her head until it hurt. “I said, do you agree?”

  “Sorry, I was just sending the list to you.”

  She checked her email service. Nothing. She clicked the refresh button. Nothing.

  “Look, this isn’t just about the story,” he said in a pleading tone. “This is more about survival, Jayne.”

  “Survival?” She let out a pish of air as his email appeared in her in-box. “Okay, I got your email. So if we’re doing this together, you have to know something about me. I have conditions.”

  “All right. Name them.”

  “One: don’t contact my sources without asking me first. Two: do not claim credit for the work that I’ve done. And three: do not fuck with me—and I mean that in every conceivable way. And that’s no pun, either, okay.” She raised her voice so that he’d make no mistake about her determination. She’d had enough of ballsy editors and so-called collaborators. “I mean it.”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  He sounded contrite. A good sign. But could she trust the tone of his voice? Was that enough?

  “All right, I’ll get back to you after I’ve gone over this list. But just so you know, I’m not sure about any of this. I mean this is a fucking shock.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  She clicked off the phone and printed a copy of the list. Then she stood at the edge of her window and examined the Cadillac parked in front of the Bohemian National Hall. She checked her watch. Time for a break. A little earlier than normal, but it seemed like a good idea to get out of her apartment and plant herself at a table in a cafe. Somewhere public, open, safe.

  To prepare herself, she decided to apply some internal fortification. A wee toot for the road. She took the collapsible two-step stool from behind her bedroom door and propped it open beneath the kitchen cupboard. Standing tippy-toed on the top step she reached to the back of the highest shelf and clasped the baggie between two fingers. She carried it over to the table, slid the tip of a fingernail inside the plastic seal and drew it along the width of the bag. Then she opened the narrow drawer in the desk and fumbled a moment for the antique silver salt spoon that she’d purchased in the West Village.

  “Ah, there you are, my friend,” she whispered to herself and dipped the spoon into the finely granulated cocaine. She pressed a finger against the left side of her nose and held the spoon under her right nostril. Then with a quick snort she loaded the coke along her sinus membranes. She applied the same remedy to her left nostril, sniffled loudly and rubbed her fingers over her flared nostrils. Then she sat back and rolled her head in several back-and-forth rotations over her shoulders.

  “Ohhhh,” she moaned in a long, ecstatic sigh. “My-my-my. Just what the good doctor ordered.”

  ※

  Rain, snow, sleet or hail—Jayne Waterston had become the US Postal Service of freelance writers. Despite the obstacles, she delivered. Every day she nailed down two or three interviews before nine AM when most of her sources could spare five minutes to cough up some usable quotes. Then she’d write until noon, take a half-hour break, and cap off the morning with a sequence of yoga asanas. Over the lunch hour she’d call her list of editors and see where she stood on the five or six story ideas she’d pitched the previous week. After the calls, if she felt the juice, she could write for another hour. If not, then she’d pack up her laptop and notes and trek over to Klutch where she’d research and write uninterrupted for another two hours. Late afternoons were reserved for networking. Fortunately, New York City offered a plethora of lunches, mingles, and shake-n-takes where freelancers of every stripe shook hands and took their rivals’ business cards. Evenings were reserved for her increasingly varied social life—which these days often included a freelance hook-up with benefits.

  Although it was almost twenty blocks up Second Avenue from her apartment, Klutch had become Jayne Waterston’s favorite working cafe. It offered a well-lit space, decent coffee and no distracting music. She fancied the rustic atmosphere, bare brick walls, the Queen Anne chairs. And after she left her job at The Village Voice, she realized she needed some form of exercise—a stress-buster—and the hike back and forth to the Yorkville area provided a daily regime that dragged her out of her apartment into the real world.

  Sometimes the stress and whirlwind nature of her life left her feeling a little dizzy. She could see the possibility ahead of her, a mental landmark of sorts, where she might spin out of control and lose her bearings. It seemed quite possible that she could live four or five different lives all at the same time. The writer, the activist, the rebel, the mythic hero, the sex bomb. To complicate things, she suspected that each of these personas could dwell in various zones of what she called the psychic bubble, a sort of shared head-space populated by millions of New Yorkers.
<
br />   So which part of the bubble do you inhabit today?

  That was the question in Jayne Waterston’s mind as she rattled down the three flights of stairs from her three-room walk-up and opened the front door onto Seventy-third Street. The paranoid part, the realistic part or the ostrich part? She liked to imagine that she resided in the left-of-center zone of realism, somewhere above the dumbed-down unionist block, and a little left of the LGBTQ partition (her favorite neighborhood by far). But she detested the ostriches of the world, though she admitted that she had spent a good deal of her early twenties with her head stuck in the desert of nineteenth century novels, devoutly ignoring the everyday trauma that surrounded her. And frankly, New York City had more than its fair share of public trauma.

  But the paranoid sector, the place that seemed to discretely encroach on her upper east side apartment—that zone was amorphous, a cloud that could sweep into your life without notice. There were no street signs and curb markers to let you know when you exited realist normal and entered the labyrinth of paranoia. However, she had her suspicions as she stepped onto the curb. And she knew from experience that the best way to hack out of the jungle of paranoia was to confront the most obvious, most pressing anxiety that hit you.

  And today the key source of anxiety was the bronze 2015 Cadillac SRX parked in front of the Bohemian National Hall. Still buzzing from the twin blasts of cocaine, she crossed the street and paused to study the license plate. Then she took a photo of it with her Samsung. Just in case.

  She rubbed the back of her hand over her nostrils as she recalled her twin brother’s admonition ten years ago when they walked hand-in-hand into the morgue in Buffalo. They’d just turned sixteen and as they rode the elevator down to the basement of the Mercy Hospital she felt her heart sink into her belly. She entered the windowless room where they had to identify the corpses of their parents. Then she felt her heart come to a stop when she saw their cool, still bodies lying side-by-side. They’d been killed that summer morning when a city bus blew out a tire, skidded across the median on South Park Avenue and crushed the Ford Taurus. Their parents were on the way to pick up Jayne and Simon following the junior mixed doubles tournament at the Amherst Audubon Golf Course. They’d shot two above par and moved into the final round.

  “Be brave. Take a deep breath and be brave,” Simon had said.

  Jayne took a deep breath as she stood on the sidewalk opposite her apartment and examined the Cadillac. Not a scratch on it. Still unable to make out the presence of anyone sitting behind the smoked glass, she tapped a knuckle on the front passenger window. Nothing. She tapped a second time, louder. “Hey, anyone in there?” Definitely nothing.

  She pressed a finger to the side of her right nostril and sniffed the air—then repeated the process with her left nostril—and waited a long moment to see if she’d stirred up any ghosts in the world of paranoia-ville. Convinced that she could now safely depart this micro-vector of her delusions, she crossed behind the car and stepped onto the street. Yeah, get back to reality, she whispered to herself. Stop pretending you’re so special that the world is conspiring against you. You’re not special and you should know it by now. She picked up her pace, rounded the corner onto Second Avenue and began the hike up to Klutch.

  But once she was out of sight of the Caddy, she couldn’t see the door open or the tall man in the iron-gray leather jacket ease out of the car. She couldn’t see his gaunt face, his weedy hair or his ice-blue eyes. Or the rough scar that zig-zagged from his right ear past his neck to his shoulder.

  ※

  During her walk up Second Avenue, the misting rain morphed into a steady drizzle. Before Jayne entered the cafe she took a moment to shake out her curls and primp her hair. After she had her cappuccino in hand, she settled in an upholstered chair next to the long brick wall in Klutch and took a moment to organize her laptop, phone and notebook in a tidy arrangement on the table.

  She spent five minutes examining the list of names that Finch had sent her. Because she’d been covering the environment in one way or another for the past ten years, she knew most of the people, if not personally, then by reputation alone. The common denominator was not their decisive research or publications (though they’d all won some acclaim) it was their outspoken behavior.

  Over the past decade they’d screamed their warnings to anyone who would listen. By 2100 the lights would go out. The waters would rise. The cities would be swamped. The bees would die and locusts would consume the surviving vegetation.

  But the omens seemed so improbable, so remote from the latte lifestyle embraced by urban bohemians. Perhaps that was why so many of the science oracles became so shrill and unrelenting. And why they were now targeted for destruction.

  However, of all the names on the list, Will Finch seemed out of place. He’d only taken up the cause in the past year. Granted, the feature story he’d written on Dr. Martin Fast was penetrating and incisive. Fast himself seemed unable to articulate the human consequences of permafrost melt in the common idiom. But Finch’s exposition had been brilliant. For once, the pending catastrophe in the lower Arctic circle could be understood by anyone in the tenth grade. Thanks to Finch.

  But … no thanks, Finch. She decided to decline his offer to collaborate. Why bother? She didn’t need him or his demands to see her sources. She had the hit list, she knew the science, and she could approach the listed names one-by-one and crank out a series of articles over the next week. The Times and Post would be outbidding one another to grab this. Maybe fifteen thousand dollars for an exclusive five-part series.

  The crowd in Klutch now filled all the tables and chairs and Jayne was surrounded by people talking in groups or by the soloists like herself who worked on their laptops or ticked away on their tablets and phones. She checked her watch and realized that before anything else she had to complete the article for Gawker. Halfway through her second cappuccino, she’d almost finished the piece on Trump and Clinton’s green policies. Or lack thereof. At first the story seemed impossible to write. But when she finished the first draft, she felt relieved that she’d devised a piece of snappy satire likely to get a nod from the editor. At the top of the page she typed in a headline, a brazen rip-off of Eddie Cantor’s 1922 hit tune: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IN HARMONY ON EMPTY CLIMATE POLICY: “Yes! We Have No Bananas.”

  After a quick read-through, she closed the lid on her laptop and glanced around. The man at the next table caught her eye. He wore a gray leather jacket and had a thatch of hair that had never seen a comb.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a low voice. “Can you watch my stuff while I take a break?” She tilted her chin toward her purse, computer and note pad.

  He studied her a moment before answering. His fingers traced a knotted scar that dropped from his ear to his shirt collar. Jayne thought he might decline her request and the delay made her hesitate.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said before he replied. “I’ll just take everything with me.”

  “No, it’s fine.” He forced a smile to his lips. “You can trust me.”

  Trust me. Amber alert. How often had she heard that? But now she felt a twinge of embarrassment. She’d asked him for help, he’d accepted, so now what? “You sure? I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “Look, I’m good. But I’ve got to run soon. How long?”

  She held up a hand, all digits pointing to the ceiling.

  “Five minutes. Call of nature.” She smiled to let him know she was capable of small intimacies with strangers.

  “Fine.” He nodded and turned his attention back to his newspaper.

  Ten minutes later Jayne returned to the table with her phone clutched in her hand. She hadn’t meant to take so long, but from the bathroom stall she’d ended up trading texts with Brittany. A moment of anxiety swept through her when she saw that the stranger she’d assigned to mind her laptop and purse had disappeared. She sat at the table and checked her bag, then opened the laptop. Nothing amiss. But no sign of the man or hi
s newspaper or jacket.

  She decided to proofread the green politics story once more before sending it to Maxwell at Gawker. She sipped at the half-cup of cappuccino, then drank it off in one shot when she realized it had turned borderline cold. She imagined that Maxwell would be impressed to see the story arrive in his in-box two hours before deadline. She had a hunch that he liked her and the prospect of more gigs with him seemed within reach. A monthly column with Gawker? Ka-ching.

  The first sign of trouble came with the taut pain in the pit of her stomach. She blinked. What’s that? She set her hands on the chair armrests and tried to think. Fuck, what is that? Then a bolt of pain shot from her stomach through the top of her head. She stood up as a wave of dizziness washed through her and she tried to cry out. A dash of vomit burst from her lips and in an instant of crystalline clarity Jayne Waterston realized that she would now die.

  She had no opportunity to beg for reprieve. No chance to say goodbye, to express forgiveness or love. When her legs buckled under her and she toppled to the floor between two tables, all that she could see was the fading light. And then, nothing.

  ※ — TWELVE — ※

  A FEW HOURS after Finch’s article appeared in the eXpress, the FBI demanded to know the names on the list. A few hours after that, they told him they needed to interview everyone involved with the story: researchers, writers, editors. Everyone including all the eXpress sources.

  FBI Agents Lorna Munn and John Elphick began their interrogation of Finch a little after three-thirty. Following Finch, they planned to talk to Eve, Fiona, Finkleman and Wally. Wally agreed to allow the cops to use the eXpress boardroom for their interviews in exchange for permitting Lou Levine, the company lawyer, to sit in on each conversation. The alternative was to require everyone to troop down to the interrogation rooms at the Bureau’s regional offices.

  As Will walked into the boardroom he felt more confident now that the FBI had been assigned to the investigation. It meant that someone at the top had pushed the SFPD off the case and demonstrated the seriousness of the situation. Finally.