Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Through neighbors they located her mother’s home and went there. But Shania Paulson’s mother, two sisters, and a cousin didn’t need to be informed of Jerry Wilton’s death. They already knew. The weeping lady who answered the door made that clear. Shania wasn’t there, and they shouldn’t disturb her mother, whose name was Mirabell and who had just learned that her handsome, successful nephew had been murdered. He had been more like a son to her, since Wilton’s parents had passed some time before.

  They asked to speak to Mirabell. The weeping lady wasn’t going to allow it until, after further questioning, Riley let it slip that they had been the detectives at the scene of Wilton’s murder. Then she ushered them right into a living room crowded with heavy furniture, Mirabell herself, and four sympathetic church ladies, all of whom peppered the detectives until Jack felt like bolting for the door. They wanted to know everything, how and when and why and by whom Jerry had been found, who had done it, and did they think he had suffered? The men stuck to the “that’s still under investigation” dodge, but Riley did assure Wilton’s aunt Mirabell that he believed the death had been quick and that Jerry had probably been gone before he even knew it. Jack guessed that when Aunt Mirabell learned the truth about the strangling, hanging, and disembowelment, she would be looking to shatter Riley’s kneecaps for glossing over those details, but his partner would have to cross that bridge on his own when he stumbled onto it.

  Jack didn’t ask about the ne’er-do-well grandson and his educational progress.

  “So Shania is Jerry’s cousin?” Riley asked.

  Mirabell, a short but wiry woman, confirmed this. “Why are you asking about Shania?”

  “We’d like to talk to her.”

  The mother of the woman in question stiffened in concern. “Why? Shania’s all right, I called her this morning to tell her about Jerry.”

  “Have you spoken to her since?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she is right now?”

  “No . . . you don’t think whoever killed him might be after—”

  “No, no,” Riley said, though Jack wasn’t so sure. Cousin Shania might be in very great danger indeed. “We just want to ask her about some e-mails she and Jerry had sent back and forth.”

  “Oh. Yes, they spoke all the time. Those two always got along, since they were tiny. My son, not as much. He and Jerry—what about the e-mails? What’s Shania got to do with Jerry getting killed?”

  “Probably nothing, but we have to check out every lead. Can you put us in touch with her?”

  Mirabell didn’t like the situation and really didn’t like Riley’s smooth evasions, but a mother’s concern trumped all and she gave them Shania Paulson’s phone number, boss’s name, likely hangouts, and closest friends. She’d have given this information to the FBI and the 101st Airborne as well if she could have, but settled for dispatching the church ladies to their respective phone trees with the express purpose of tracking down her youngest daughter before she got herself murdered, too.

  Riley and Jack left before Mirabell could demand to accompany them on a tour of Shania’s favorite haunts. They went to Shania Paulson’s workplace, spoke with her boss, contacted her friends, put a BOLO out on her car. They even got the super to open up her apartment, hoping not to find her disemboweled body on its floor, and didn’t. All to no avail. Shania Paulson was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  “Do you know whom you’re looking for?” Rebecca asked Maggie. They sat in Rebecca’s surveillance room, gazing at the rapidly changing television screens as each one fast-forwarded through the previous day’s comings and goings. Staff moved in and out of the building, carried briefcases and tote bags and backpacks, smoked cigarettes, and argued with people on cell phones. No one seemed suspicious or even in much of a hurry.

  “No,” Maggie told her.

  Rebecca rubbed her eyes, no doubt mentally groaning.

  “Someone killed Jerry Wilton and then came here and ransacked his office, and it had to be between the time Wilton went home from work and when we got here and found the office. There shouldn’t be that much activity in the second half of the day, right?”

  “It’s a newspaper. There’s always activity, but yeah, the bulk of the employees would have gone home by then. But reporters come and go anytime, and the whole printing and shipping crew would just be getting here. They can only get into the east side of the building.”

  “Except this person now had Jerry Wilton’s key card. So they could go anywhere.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  They watched people come and go.

  “There’s Roger,” Rebecca said.

  Maggie had asked about him earlier, having heard a description of the man’s personality from Riley. Rebecca pointed at a good-looking guy briskly approaching camera 2 with a girl who seemed to be dressed entirely in black. “Who’s that with him?”

  “Probably a groupie. They think Roger is Bob Woodward and Charles Dickens rolled into one.”

  “You know Roger Correa?”

  “Everyone knows Roger,” Rebecca said.

  The editor, Franklin Roth, had left about six, came back about eight, and left again shortly after. But he would not have needed Wilton’s keys; as she had seen, his own gave him access to Wilton’s office.

  A dark and slender girl came rushing up to camera 5 about eight-thirty. Maggie squinted at the grainy image. “Do you know who that is?”

  Rebecca peered. “No.”

  “I think that might be Jerry Wilton’s cousin Shania.”

  Rebecca didn’t evidence much curiosity in Wilton’s cousin. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that girl works in advertising.”

  “So she’s an employee of the Herald?”

  “I think so. I can’t be sure, but there’s a girl who looks just like that in advertising. I don’t know what her name is.”

  Maggie made a note of the times and had Rebecca print a still of the young woman.

  When the time stamp closed on 9:05 p.m., things got a little more interesting. Someone bolted out of the door under camera 6 and ran into the dark parking lot. A few seconds later, a light-colored sedan peeled out of a space and exited onto the street.

  “Who was that?” Maggie asked.

  “No idea.”

  They worked for another hour, painstakingly noting the pale raincoat of the fleeing figure and trying to match it to the outerwear of employees coming in. The figure seemed to have long hair, or at least some sort of ponytail at the nape of their neck, unless it was some appendage on the coat and not hair at all. They wore long pants and light-colored shoes, probably athletic shoes, and carried something tucked under one arm—a purse, a folder, a portfolio, a book? It wasn’t much to go on, but they eventually narrowed the possible incoming to three: a man in a trench coat who worked in accounting, a woman Rebecca knew, who worked there somewhere but did not know which department, and a young man who wore sneakers but had entered with a coat over his arm, so they could not be sure it fit their running person. Rebecca and Maggie had cursed out loud at the poor resolution of the average video surveillance system approximately sixty-seven times between the two of them, but this remained the best that they could do. Maggie collected printed stills and they sat down to go through the employee ID photos to try to find a match. Maggie’s butt hurt and her stomach rumbled.

  They found the guy in accounting easily enough. The woman turned out to be a secretary for the assistant director of marketing. The young man remained unidentified as there were at least three employees who looked too similar to the grainy image to distinguish. Rebecca also found and printed the ID photo of the young black woman from the advertising department, but Maggie still could not feel certain that it had been her entering the building and not Shania Paulson.

  “And there are no doors without cameras, right?” she asked.

  “Just fire doors. But they’ll set off the alarms if they’re opened.”

  Maggie considered this. “A
re you sure?”

  * * *

  The fourth of the five fire exits they visited seemed all right until Maggie followed the wiring from the push bar to a power supply box to the fire alarm—and there the conduit had a slight gap before it entered the red box. Without a flashlight and a step stool she couldn’t be sure the wires remained intact, but it made her suspicious. The door advertised the fact that it served as a fire escape only and an alarm would sound if opened, and dust sat on the top of the push bar. But the spiders that live at the lake’s shore didn’t occupy the top corners as they had in the first three fire doors, and the floor had some faint marks like dirty footprints. The spring rains would have caused anyone using it to track in mud. One such print was cut in half right at the threshold, which could only happen if the door had been open at the time. On top of that the bolt seemed to be permanently retracted. There was nothing latching the door closed.

  Maggie asked when they had last had a fire drill, and Rebecca thought it had been several years.

  Maggie grasped either side of the ALARM WILL SOUND plate on the push bar, so as not to disturb any fingerprints, and pushed.

  Rebecca said, “Hey!”

  Her voice echoed in the concrete walkway, but only her voice. No alarm sounded.

  Maggie held the door open. Rebecca gazed at it. “Crap.”

  “Crap,” Maggie echoed, but for different reasons.

  * * *

  Maggie got her fingerprint kit from the car and dusted the door from top to bottom, including the area where the wires had been cut, but industrial, painted steel doors that aren’t cleaned regularly are not good surfaces, and all she found were smudges on the inside and water spots and general grime on the outside. She seemed to have gotten more powder on herself than the door since the wind off the lake hadn’t helped matters. Rebecca watched in silence, waiting (upwind) for the electricians to come and fix the wiring.

  That particular door opened into a small nook of the employee parking lot, nestled in between the range of both the employee lot and the visitor lot cameras and easily accessible by both employees and visitors. No one had assigned parking spaces except the publisher and lead editors, so there was no way to tell who would be likely to be parking nearby, and Maggie had already spent enough hours staring at less-than-clear Herald surveillance video to relish the idea of more.

  Two men had been leaving through one of the employee entrances, then caught sight of their activity and detoured over to ask what was going on. Maggie said nothing. This was Rebecca’s territory; she could tell them as much or as little as she saw fit.

  One, lanky and morose, thought the recent murders were the work of terrorists bent on jihad, but the other—who turned out to be Roger Correa—said it would more likely be the work of ex-city council members rather than Middle Easterners. The former had received much more bad press from the Herald in recent years than the latter.

  “So now Jerry,” he said, watching Maggie pack up her fingerprinting equipment, which consisted of a jar of powder, a brush, a roll of tape, and some white fingerprint cards carried in a plastic fishing tackle box. “What’s up with that? What did he look like?”

  She stood, looked at him, and ignored the question.

  “Cops got any suspects?”

  She refrained from saying, “A building full of them.”

  He figured out that direct questions weren’t direct enough. “Who’re you?”

  Maggie identified herself.

  “Forensic tech, huh? You know what? I could use your help with something. Want to do a . . . what d’ya call ’em, ride-along? See a real-life investigative journalist in action?”

  The lanky guy scoffed aloud and walked away. Rebecca hid a subtle eye-roll.

  “Come on,” Correa continued. “I’ll spring for food.”

  Maggie’s stomach growled, loudly and insistently. She hadn’t eaten in, oh, about eighteen hours.

  Roger Correa grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Chapter 20

  “I’m sorry about this,” he told her two hours later.

  Maggie was halfway through a bacon cheeseburger and wishing she’d grabbed more ketchup for the fries. “Why?”

  “This is not exactly the exciting chase sequence I had in mind.” They’d been parked in front of a closed barber shop on East Twenty-second watching a five-story building across the street that had less than inspiring architecture and standard glass entrance doors. Correa told her they were waiting for the CEO of the recently formed New Horizons to either leave his office or receive visitors there. “This is the more tedious side of investigative journalism.”

  “You want to talk tedious? Yesterday I spent four hours watching black-and-white motion control-activated video surveillance.”

  When he smiled, which he did often, the corners of his eyes crinkled and his cheeks hinted at dimples beneath the facial hair. “Discover anything?”

  “Nope.” She had not lost sight of the fact that Roger Correa worked in that building full of suspects. “Did you say you needed my help with something here?”

  “Yeah, if we get the opportunity.” He leaned toward her and she tensed, but then he reached over the seat back to retrieve a good-size camera with a long lens from the rear floor. He set it on her lap.

  “I’m going to be your cameraman?”

  “My long-distance night stuff always comes out fuzzy, and I’ve been watching you walk around the building with that big Nikon. The paper can’t afford to send anyone with me. Hell, they can’t afford to pay me to be here. They’re not going to spring for a photographer. I do all my own these days.”

  “So you’re doing pro bono overtime?”

  “That’s it exactly. Investigative journalism was the first thing to be cut when the corporations took over.”

  “So you said.” Correa had spent the better part of the previous two hours bringing Maggie up to speed on The State of Journalism in America Today, giving her ears a break only long enough to walk to Michael Symon’s burger shop. Maggie had watched the double glass doors in his absence and wondered why she had come along on what might be a snipe hunt. But she had the evening free, and someone who might be a suspect but definitely was a window into the victims’ world wanted to talk to her. It seemed like a good idea on all fronts. Plus it kept her from thinking about Ronald Soltis.

  “Newspapers, as we know them, really haven’t been around that long, mostly just since the end of the Civil War when printers discovered the cash cow known as advertising.”

  Maggie slurped Diet Coke.

  He paused in his lecture to tell her: “Artificial sweetener will kill you, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that, too.”

  “But reporters more or less simply repeated what they were told—which is the way it has to be, most of the time, because no one has the time or the resources to double-check everything —and especially with the world wars, it was in a way a matter of patriotism. When we have a common enemy you’re not going to make a big deal about a county commissioner taking a bribe because it’s important that we all stick together. And that attitude has its place. But in 1971 that attitude changed forever. You know why?”

  “Nixon reestablished diplomatic ties with China?”

  “No! No—that was important, yes, but—the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. You know what those were?”

  Maggie scoffed, audibly. “Of course. Daniel Ellsberg’s copies of the Vietnam Task Force Study.”

  “Yes, everyone remembers that as a scandal and a turning point in public perceptions about Vietnam and the beginning of Nixon’s end via Watergate; it was something that nowadays would be taken for granted. Nowadays any paper that’s not crazy about the current administration wouldn’t hesitate to publish them, of course they would, but at the time it was a sea change in how the press related to the government. For the first time the media said, we’re not trying to be sensationalistic and this isn’t all about selling papers, but this is important, and th
e people need to know it. Period. They had stopped accepting White House press releases as fact, and that cat never really went back into that bag. They weren’t trumpeting it like the propaganda that passes for broadcast news today. But they steadily published. The government went to the Supreme Court to get the Times to stop, the Supreme Court said stop, and the Times stopped. But then the Washington Post started publishing them, until the Supreme Court said they had to stop. The Post stopped. Fifteen other papers began to publish them. Walter Cronkite interviewed Ellsberg on CBS News. No matter what the administration did, it couldn’t be stopped.”

  He paused, the wonder of that glorious and gloriously responsible behavior still causing him awe, even so many years later. “We covered that in history class and I got off the bus that day and told my mother I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I went to the principal and talked him into starting a school newsletter. The cafeteria and the bus loading zone safety rules were my first beat.” He shot her an embarrassed smile, as if he shouldn’t take as much pleasure in those memories as he did. “Enough about me. What about you? What made you decide to work with dead bodies?”

  “They’re much more cooperative than live ones.”

  He laughed. “That, I believe.”

  She wiped her fingers on a napkin and consolidated her trash into the takeout bag, wondering how much of herself she could share with this man. Ancient history, fine. More recent stuff, not so much. “My dad and I used to watch every cop show we could find. Alex would be out playing ball or in the garage starting a band and I’d be in the living room watching Starsky & Hutch, reruns of Dragnet, the old Ellery Queen show. I loved the idea of solving mysteries, of finding out the answer to the puzzle.”

  “But you didn’t become a cop?”

  “Live people—not cooperative. I guess I prefer my mysteries in the abstract sense.” That had been true of most areas of her life, perhaps—all her experiences were once-removed, other people’s actions, other people’s tragedies. Until Jack Renner had come along and sucked her away from the abstract into the very, very concrete.