by Lisa Black
The pimply Bennet had returned and surprised Jack by also closing in. “It was me. Who approved it.” He gulped as Martin’s irate gaze swung toward him and couldn’t stop himself from adding, “Technically.”
Martin leapt on the change in topics. “Fine, then I’ll sue you, too. There are laws to protect people like me from malicious slander!”
“Libel,” Janelle corrected. “And it isn’t either of those things if it’s true.”
“Don’t be so—”
Roger Correa appeared behind Janelle. “I heard we had a visitor.”
If County Property Manager Martin had been flushed before, now he turned a dangerous shade of eggplant. “You!” He tried to climb over Jack, Bennet, Janelle, and her ergonomic desk chair to get to the reporter.
Jack and Riley put a stop to his progression. Janelle stood in front of her flat-screen, high-definition monitor with her arms out as if more than willing to take a bullet for it, or perhaps for the news copy she had just spent two hours arranging. Bennet’s Adam’s apple bobbed as if in a rough ocean and he slumped to the abandoned chair, managing to maintain only partial consciousness. Roger Correa watched the commotion with folded arms and a satisfied expression that said, clearly, he must be doing something right.
* * *
“That sort of thing happen often around here?” Jack asked the managing editor, Franklin Roth, after Riley had led the irate Martin off in handcuffs. Janelle had gone back to arranging the next day’s layout, Bennet had hustled to the men’s room, and even Tyler Truss had come down from his office, instead of viewing the commotion from the walkway above, and gazed around as if deciding which angles would best fit viewing on an iPad. Correa stood at the head of half a dozen reporters—including Lori Russo—drawn to the drama like sharks to a few cells of fresh tissue in the waves. Some seemed admiring of Correa; others—including Lori Russo—seemed to suspect it had all been a carefully scripted performance.
Roth said, “It’s not the first time in our history. Certainly not the first time for him.”
“We’re here to be a watchdog press,” Correa said, with an air of superiority that made Jack want to knock a few teeth out.
Apparently Roth felt the same way. “Oh my yes, Roger—you’re the only one who cares about journalistic integrity anymore. You’re the only one with the courage to write it as you see it. You’re the only one who remembers what it means to be a reporter. Did I leave anything out?”
“Yeah,” Roger said, and straightened up, balancing his weight evenly. With other reporters at his back, perhaps he felt bold. Or perhaps he simply felt he had waited long enough. “I’m the only one who seems to have noticed you’re about to sell the paper to TransMedia.”
His words were a verbal grenade with the pin pulled. A dangerous stillness filled the air. Even Janelle’s hand stilled over her mouse and she turned to look at the managing editor as if he were one of her kids who had come home in the back of a cop car. Jack heard the hushed wind as the reporters, in unison, sucked in a shocked breath.
The grenade went off.
“You’re going to what?”
“How many of us lose our jobs, tell me that!”
“They’ll eliminate the State news, you know they will!” said a skinny man with a skinny tie. His entire body quavered from either fear of losing his job or the terror of confronting his legendary editor.
“When were you planning to tell us?”
“Is it a done deal?”
“The union will—”
“How can you do that?” Janelle asked, her stricken look more damning than the various obscenities that crept into the reporters’ words.
Roth held up a hand, his neck turning red with an unhealthy flush. “That’s not true.”
Correa had been ready for a denial. “You mean you had lunch last week with Jon Tamerlane and Doug Jackson and Karen Saunders because you enjoy their company?”
Before the cacophony could start up again, Roth spoke with a voice of iron. “They requested a meeting, we had lunch. They made an offer, we said no, end of story.”
Correa didn’t pause. “And the trip to Virginia last week? That was just to say no, too?”
The reporters, Jack, and Janelle swiveled their gaze back to the editor.
Who gave a small grin without the remotest suggestion of amusement and said, “Are you following me, Roger?”
“Apparently someone should.”
“Are you going through my garbage? Reviewing my expense accounts?”
Correa had shaded from triumphant into grim. “And what about the NAA conference last October? A buddy told me you spent most of the weekend closeted with Saunders and their lawyer.”
A female reporter said, with forced calm, “If you’re going to sell the paper, Frank, you need to tell us. A lot of the people in this room will lose their jobs. You at least owe them some warning.”
“There’s nothing to warn of.”
“Yet,” another reporter said, not even pretending to be calm. “Isn’t that what you mean? Not yet?”
Jack felt the mood tensing his muscles, readying him for another tackle. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Holding Martin back was one thing, but with only himself to protect Roth from fifteen newsroom staffers—the odds were not healthy.
He wasn’t sure he even wanted to try. This was not calling out one seamy public official. This meant the livelihoods of a few hundred people—and he had learned enough in the past few days to know that journalism wasn’t merely a job for more people than only Roger Correa. It was a calling. It was a way of life. Many of the employees would not only not work for the Herald in the future—they would not work at all.
It took obvious effort for Roth to keep his temper under control. “They keep making offers. We keep turning them down.”
“Better brush up our résumés,” one person said.
“Lotta good that will do you,” said another. “No one’s hiring.”
“We’ll become a McPaper!” a third wailed. Jack didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.
The different female reporter pointed out, “Tamerlane wouldn’t fly into town if he wasn’t interested in making a deal.”
“Of course he’s interested.” A withering tone crept into Roth’s voice. “He’s a businessman. He’ll always listen to an offer, just to show respect if nothing else. They move in a different stratosphere, those types. But he’s not about to give up on one hundred and fifty years of history, of this paper being part of the lifeblood of this city. He has to be practical, yes. It may behoove us to join them in an affiliate status—frankly, we could use their resources. But only if we remain completely autonomous, and retain one hundred percent of our staff.”
“That would last about five seconds after you sign!”
“So now we’ve moved from a flat ‘no’ to ‘affiliate’!”
“We’re going to be online only, aren’t we? Print will disappear,” a paunchy blond woman said.
“That was always going to happen,” a young man told her. “Eventually. Get used to it.”
Another man made the mistake of demanding of Roth, “Do you even care what happens to this paper anymore? Or do you have a buyout arranged for yourself already, like in—”
“Don’t you talk to me about caring about a paper!” Roth roared.
The reporters shut up.
“I wrote obits at the Press before most of you were born! I learned to write copy at the foot of Louie Seltzer! I got glass in my shoes walking the streets in Hough after the riots! I came to the Herald after Sam Hudson drowned off Johnson’s Island. I was the one standing here just a couple years ago when we put every corrupt county official on the front page during the cleanup. Don’t you forget for one damn minute who you’re talking to!”
It had become one of those “pin-drop” moments.
He took a breath, and in a calmer tone said, “No one’s going to let this paper go the way of the Rocky Mountain News. But we have to be pra
ctical. Multimedia is the future and if we don’t face that, we will die like the News, and we have to stay here. The people of this city need a voice, now more than ever. Newspapers have served in a stewardship role in this country for over two hundred years. I’m not about to let that go just so we can print nothing but propaganda and celebrity updates. Now get back to work.”
Roth waited and watched as one by one, the reporters did just that. He had rallied the troops. They weren’t reassured, the state of their industry remained too grim for that, but they were temporarily mollified. Correa stayed, fixing his boss with a hard glare, but even he saw that he had lost this round and slowly turned away.
Jack relaxed. He hadn’t needed to tackle anyone after all.
A voice at his elbow said, “Hi again.”
He turned. Lori Russo, looking even better in daylight with a silk blouse and snug pants, stood with a tiny notepad in one hand and a pen tucked behind her ear. She hummed with that restrained energy all reporters seemed to radiate. “Hello.”
“I wanted to ask you, who is in charge of the vigilante killer investigation?”
“I’m sorry, what?” Jack asked, although he’d understood her rapid speech.
She repeated herself while Jack thought. Might as well tell her, vacillating wouldn’t do any good in the long run, and he couldn’t see what it could hurt. He’d always been underwhelmed by Maggie’s ex’s detective abilities. Setting Lori Russo on him might slow them both down, which could only be good for Jack. “Detective Richard Gardiner. Homicide unit. Just call the main non-emergency number and ask for him.”
Lori Russo scribbled the name on her pad, gave him a brilliant smile. “Perfect.”
Jack thought so, too, as she turned away. She’d leave a message that Rick wouldn’t return, and they’d play phone tag for weeks.
He hoped.
If not . . .
Riley returned from escorting Martin to a waiting patrol car. “What’d I miss?”
“Not much. A near riot and a brief recap of Journalism in America.”
“If I hear one more word about Journalism in America,” his partner grumbled, “I’m going to puke.”
“You and me both,” Janelle said.
Jack’s phone rang.
Chapter 30
Maggie could see why no one had found the body before it had time to cool to an icehouse chill. The parking garage tucked under Tower City opened to the south, where the sun gleamed and bounced off the Cuyahoga. The interior remained all dim shadows while the openings to the exterior overwhelmed with light. Since shoppers were coming from the elevators and returning home from dinner, they walked in a half-blind daze right past the body of Stephanie Davis.
“I want some halogens,” Maggie said to no one in particular. Who knew what might have rolled under Stephanie’s weathered Taurus on the right or its neighbor, a bright yellow SUV, on the left? She might find a shoeprint as well in that narrow channel, preferably one that didn’t belong to the two patrol officers or the now-slightly-traumatized sales rep who had found the dead woman. Or the hundreds of consumers who moved in and out of this mall every day.
“I have one.” The young maintenance man who oversaw the tidiness and repair of the garage spoke up. “And an extension cord. The closest outlet is that pole.”
Maggie rewarded him with a smile and said that would be great. In the meantime she took out her flat light, a foot-long row of tiny LED lamps in a metal housing, designed to strike the floor at an oblique angle perfect for illuminating shoeprints. But she couldn’t find any sections clear enough to be usable, no doubt thanks to the roughness of the concrete and the hundreds of consumers.
She moved closer to the body.
Stephanie Davis lay facedown, head turned to one side. The cheeks were mottled and her tongue protruding from the force used to strangle her, but her eyes remained open, startled and staring. Her hands were free and seemed to be clawing at the concrete, a few of the nails broken. Maggie didn’t see any blood or other injuries. Her hands were clean and so were her clothes, a neat blouse and coordinating slacks. A rosy perfume wafted up from her, mingling with the smells of exhaust and oils, discarded food, and the watery breeze from the river outside. Cars zoomed by on the street, but the garage interior remained quiet. Maggie took some photographs, tried to peer under the vehicles on either side, but she had, at most, a two-and-a-half-foot gap to work in, and the body took up most of it.
The keys to the Taurus dangled from the key lock. The fob had a remote, but Stephanie hadn’t used it—perhaps the battery had died. She had been about to open her car door the old-fashioned way and once inside she could have shut the door, blown the horn, driven away. She had been that close to safety. But she hadn’t even had time to turn the key.
“I don’t see a purse,” she said.
“Neither did we,” one of the patrol officers said. “Figure a robbery?”
Maggie took a picture of the woman’s left hand. “A robber would have taken her diamond ring as well.”
“It’s not very big,” he persisted.
She gave him a look. “Who strangles someone just to steal a purse?”
“It’s quiet. And this is a busy area. If she had shouted, maybe some Good Samaritan would have come to her aid.”
“Maybe they thought they’d just knock her out, not kill her,” the other officer suggested.
“The strap is embedded in her throat,” Maggie pointed out. “Then they knotted it for good measure. He fully intended to kill this woman. Besides, it would be straining credibility to think this is about a robbery. This is all about the Herald.”
“The what?”
A blazing beam of pure white hit her face, temporarily paralyzing her.
“I got it!” the maintenance man announced. “Oh, sorry.”
She stood up, blinking. “No, that’s all right. Really.”
“You said you wanted—”
“It’s great. A big help.” When her vision cleared of white blobs, she straddled the body, staring down at something caught in Stephanie Davis’s hair. She lowered herself again, taking care to keep her face turned down instead of toward the halogen.
It was a piece of paper, just a tiny sliver of newsprint. She could make out only two letters, i and n. She gave the three men strict instructions not to move, and dashed back to her car for glassine paper and a small manila envelope, what her predecessors in the field had called a coin envelope.
She examined the hair and the knot in the strap but didn’t find any more. The strap had a number of hairs caught in it, most likely Stephanie’s, but it would remain on the body until the pathologist cut it off at the autopsy. There were slight smears on the ends, where the killer would have had his hands. Maggie could only hope that they would turn out to be the killer’s skin cells or even blood, but they looked too dark to be either. Maybe oil or just dirt.
The strap seemed to be the same color and construction as the ones used on Robert Davis and Jerry Wilton, but with much shorter ends. The killer hadn’t left a long tail, hadn’t intended to string up Stephanie to look like suicide or to prepare her for evisceration. He had come prepared for a quick, quiet murder in a semi-occupied place. How did he know she would be there?
She laid a gloved hand on the woman’s shoulder. It felt malleable, rigor mortis still a few hours off, but cool. The concrete had sapped the warmth of the woman’s body in record time.
She stood again, careful not to brush the sides of the vehicles. She would want to fingerprint both of them—with luck the owner of the banana-yellow car would stay in the mall for dinner and give her time to work . . . and maybe time to clear the scene before they got a look at the black powder covering half their finish. But she couldn’t do that until the body had been moved, and she didn’t want the body moved until she taped—
“What the hell?” said a voice behind her.
She looked up—mistake, the halogen on its stand blinded her again, and trying to turn around without touching ei
ther car or stepping on the body or being able to see made her stumble. She felt a hand grab hers and guide her out of the crevice in which she’d been working.
It was Jack. He looked murderous.
Maggie had seen that look before, and snatched her arm back. He didn’t seem to notice, didn’t take his eyes off Stephanie Davis’s still form. He turned to her.
“Those boys are orphans now,” was all he said. But the way he spoke terrified her.
Chapter 31
Several hours later, the body had been transported—carefully, without touching either vehicle—and the area thoroughly searched. The purse had not been located, certainly not the cell phone. They had gone through Stephanie’s car and found plenty of crumpled napkins, broken pieces of Transformers, potato chips and a few errant French fries, a permission slip for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History that never made it home for a signature, and a briefcase of paperwork relating to the running of a Kohl’s store, from floor space per brand to which items qualify for the 80% off clearance rack. But nothing that pointed to Stephanie Davis’s killer.
She had an old and dusty GPS crammed into the glove compartment, but when fired up it showed only her kids’ school and a trip to Westlake the previous December. Underneath the body lay the necklace with her sons’ birthstones in its charms, broken in the struggle. Crouching between the cars, Maggie gazed at it, thinking over what Jack had said. He had such sympathy for the Davis children. Perhaps he had had sympathy for Ronald Soltis, too, in the end.
He appeared beside her, as if he had noticed the necklace. But instead he asked, “You okay?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“You were just talking to her this morning.”
She dropped the necklace into an envelope. “I can’t say that’s something I’m used to.” They stood. “If this is all about the Herald, where does Stephanie Davis fit in?”
“Obviously she knew more about her husband’s work than she claimed.”
“Or she didn’t know she knew.”
“Then what was she doing here?”
