by Lisa Black
Along one wall sat a row of paper rolls, still on their ends instead of their sides. They couldn’t have been moved without the aid of heavy equipment, so she ignored them and turned to the other wall. The tanks of ink—which must have held at least eight or nine hundred gallons each—stood with pipes and spigots coming out of them. A heavy adjustable wrench sat on an electrical box next to one of them.
She used the flashlight to take a closer look, saw a black hair caught in its teeth.
“I put that there,” Kevin Harding admitted, suddenly at her elbow.
“What? Why?”
“Because I thought the red tank was leaking. I thought I’d have to turn the valve off and it’s old. But by the time I reached the tank the lights had come on, I looked down, and realized there wasn’t any ink in front of the tank. I turned around and saw—him.” He didn’t reenact this part, keeping his back to his dead coworker.
“So you set the wrench here?” She gestured.
“Yes.”
“Where did it come from?”
He blinked. “From—here. The electrical box. That’s where it usually is.”
“So you picked it up from here and then put it back down?”
“Uh-huh, once I realized I wasn’t going to need it. Then I turned and—”
“Yeah, I got that.” She picked up the wrench with two fingers at its neck and dropped it into a bag. If the killer had used it to disable Tyler Truss, he had put it back in its proper place afterward. Why? To keep her from thinking it had anything to do with the death? Perhaps he didn’t wear gloves and worried about fingerprints, not realizing that she could get them much more easily from the paper around the roll than from a dirty, rough tool handle?
Or from force of habit, because he worked in this area often and needed tools to be put back where they belonged?
Kevin again retreated to the roller towers, and Maggie looked more closely at the electrical box and the ink tanks. One small screw in the side of the box held a clump of blue fibers. With a loupe and a flashlight she decided that they didn’t have the same layer of paper dust than every other surface in the area. Maybe they belonged to the killer’s pants. Of course, maybe they belonged to Kevin Harding’s pants. Hell, maybe they belonged to her pants—humans came into contact with so many more surfaces during the course of a day than they believed. Nevertheless, she collected them.
What did the killer do next? He had to get out of the building and she and Rebecca had disabled his escape route. The fire door would have sounded its alarm. Jack had said he would check all the other fire doors to make sure he hadn’t set up a new one for himself. If all the contacts remained intact, then the killer had to be on camera leaving the building. The print run began at about the same time every night. The time crunch would narrow their suspects a great deal.
Unless, of course, he was still in the building.
* * *
Maggie collected swabs from various areas, an exercise in futility because surely all the blood belonged to Truss. Body snatchers Deion and Tony arrived, again escorted by Kevin Harding. They had the same reaction as the investigator. A raised eyebrow from Tony and a “What the hell is with this place?” from Deion.
“Yeah, not what I wanted to be doing tonight, either,” the investigator grumbled.
Maggie said, “This is probably even worse for you.”
“Nah. My mother was right—the first three months are the worst. If this happened during my first trimester, I’d be puking right now. And for the next hour.”
“I’m okay with you not doing that.”
“So am I.”
Deion and Tony laid out a plastic body bag and clean white sheet on a steel gurney. With gloves on, they pushed the murder weapon off the victim’s left hand. The roll wasn’t that hard to push, Maggie saw.
Once the blond investigator zipped the remains of Tyler Truss into his clean white bag, Kevin Harding approached. He had stayed at a distance throughout the process and looked as if he didn’t need to be pregnant to start vomiting.
“I don’t even know how to ask this,” he said to Maggie. “But—what about the paper?”
“The paper?”
He gestured at the roller towers. “We . . . we have to get the paper out. But the paper rolls are all bloody and the day crew is gone, so . . . ”
Maggie surveyed the damage. “You’ll have to just sell what you’ve got. We can’t release this area yet, and even if we could, the whole place is one big biohazard.”
He exhaled through his teeth. “As if our circulation hasn’t fallen enough.”
Chapter 42
By the time Maggie had done all she could possibly do in the printing center, everyone had scattered and left her alone. Jack and Riley had gone to clear the building and eventually inform editor Roth that he had lost another employee, Printing Supervisor Harding disappeared, and the bustling loading dock workers and drivers had departed. That end of the area was dark and silent. The mini-forklifts were lined up against the wall, the large overhead doors were pulled down and locked, and the un-bloodied newspapers were on their morning trip across the city.
Quiet had descended, the calm after a tough job well done—at least for one more day. She could hear only a steady hum from the vending machines dispensing Fritos and Dr. Pepper, and the only light came from that source as well. She found herself standing in a forty-by-fifty-foot area, its edges lost in shadow, with a concrete floor, the stacking and binding machineries, and three Formica-topped tables littered by used coffee cups. She had only glanced at this area before; it made one bookend for two of her four crime scenes, but had been full of people during both murders. The room itself had an alibi.
It contained no lockers, but one wall had been completely given over to industrial shelving. Most of the items on these shelves related to vehicle maintenance—oil, washer fluid, parts from fan belts to headlights. Then there were supplies for the binding mechanism, the plastic straps fused by the binder to hold the stacks together until the drivers got them to where they were going. Each delivery person or carrier would have a box cutter to cut the straps off so the papers could be put in a vending box, or folded and tucked into someone’s mailbox or tossed in their driveway.
It was a long process, from writing words on a screen to deciding which words got used to putting them all on a page, to printing that page, to getting it to people’s homes in time for their six a.m. coffee. And they did exactly that every day. It was amazing now that, for the first time, she could see the process in her mind from start to finish. She could see why the people in that process didn’t want to see it lost.
Next to the crates sat another box, on the bottom shelf, a dusty, worn, misshapen cardboard structure with something white peeking out the top of it. She pulled on the white shape, glowing vaguely in the dimness. It spooled out of the battered cardboard like a string of handkerchiefs from a magician’s sleeve.
A white mesh strap, about an inch wide.
Her murder weapon.
“Huh,” she said to herself. Not exactly earth-shattering news. She had always believed the strap would prove too generic to positively identify the killer even if they found him with it, and its presence here simply pointed to someone inside the Herald, where the investigation had been pointing all along. As a clue, then, not particularly helpful. All their suspects—if they could even be sure of their list of suspects—had access to this room, and even if they didn’t it would be no trouble to enter through the open overhead doors during loading hours.
All the same, it could be one loose end—no pun intended—tied up, the goal in every investigation. You never knew what tiny detail could become a huge stumbling block during the trial phase. She should collect the end of this strap right now, to compare it to the cut ends found on Stephanie Davis.
She heard a sound behind her.
She straightened and turned. She saw no one, but somehow the shadows seemed deeper than they had before. The vending machines were to her left, ag
ainst the interior wall; now their illumination seemed to blind her, turning the north half of the space into a black hole.
She did not move.
She thought she could hear someone breathing, but surely that had to be her imagination. Whoever had murdered Truss could still be in the building, but he—or she—had no reason to attack her—she didn’t work for the Herald. While she might have discovered the source of their mesh straps, it brought her no closer to the killer’s identity.
The blackness beyond the vending machines’ illumination shifted and separated. Someone was there, a dark figure. She heard the faint whisper of cloth against moving skin and picked up the slightest waft of human sweat. It could be her own, since her heart had begun to pound against the inside of her rib cage.
The compressor in the Coke machine kicked on. The split-second glance she threw its way ruined her vision all over again and the figure disappeared. Still rooted in front of the shelves, she scanned the area and saw nothing—except shadows that moved and drifted—
And then he was there.
Strong fingers grabbed her elbow and she jerked away.
“Maggie!”
In the light from the Coke machine the dark figure became Kevin Harding, looking ordinary and professional and very tall. And she had nothing but a mesh strap.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. The friendly tour guide of her first visit had disappeared.
It took a moment for her to find her voice. “Just looking around.”
“You have to be careful in here. Our machinery can be dangerous.”
“So I’ve seen.”
“What do you have there?”
She still held the end of the white strap. “I think I found our murder weapon. From some of the deaths, anyway.”
He frowned. “That? We—I didn’t know we even had that.”
“Why do you? Have it?” she asked without moving. She would not back up, even as he leaned his large frame over her to examine the box.
“They tie it to the door handles. The overhead doors—here on the dock, and on the trucks. Gives them something to grab to pull them back down again. That’s all.”
“Your editor said the paper didn’t use straps like this.”
Harding snorted. “He’s never loaded a truck in his life.”
“You didn’t like Robert Davis.” She didn’t make it a question.
“No one did.”
“Or Tyler Truss?”
Now he seemed to catch the drift of her thoughts. “I’ve run into Tyler Truss maybe five times in as many years. I just feel . . . I mean, he worked here . . .”
He had been stooping to look at the box, and so they were eye to eye. “Do you have a dog?” she asked.
She heard a click. She looked down to see a box cutter in his hand, blade out.
“Dog? No.” He moved the blade toward her. “Allergies.”
“What are you—”
“I figured you’d want to cut a piece off.” He rotated the box cutter so that he could hand it to her handle-first. “Why are you asking about dogs?”
“No reason.” She took the cutter, turned her back on him, and cut off a length of the strap, tying a knot in the cut end so that she would know which end to compare with the pieces used in the murders. She snicked the blade back into its holder.
Kevin Harding held out his hand.
Don’t hand a weapon back to a suspect just because he asks for it. That should be a rule in the cop handbook somewhere. Or at least the common sense handbook.
But because she didn’t know what else to do, and because she knew if he really wanted to take it away from her, he could, she held out the cutter.
In one smooth move he took it and dropped it into the pocket of his khakis, then gave her a tired grin. “Want a Coke? I’ve got change.”
Just like that, her fear evanesced and left chagrin in its place. “No, thanks anyway.”
“Come on, I’ll escort you to your car.”
They walked away from the dim area, back into the well-lit place with the print rollers, taking a side hallway to avoid the paper roll warehouse. Only half its lights were on, but she no longer felt afraid. She asked where the cops were. Harding didn’t know.
“You think whoever hung Davis took the strap from the loading dock?”
“It would make sense.”
“Huh,” he said, pausing in the midst of the reporters’ bullpen. “You know what’s weird?”
“What?”
“Strapline is something a copy editor would write.”
“So I heard.”
He took another step, noticed that she did not. “You want me to walk you to your car?”
She noticed a light on upstairs. “No,” she told him. “I’m staying.”
Chapter 43
Maggie wandered onto the second floor, the ring of offices looking down on the reporters’ bullpen. From above, the desks looked as chaotic as always, especially Roger Correa’s. For an industry with a purely digital future, it didn’t seem ready to let go of the tactile feel of paper anytime soon. Blotters were scattered with notes and printouts, clippings, photos, as if a strong wind had whipped through the space. But the wind had stopped and the building sat silent and abandoned. It seemed that the churning stream of newsprint truly represented the lifeblood of the Herald, and without it, everything and everyone else had died.
She heard a sound, a soft clunk, from one of the offices up ahead.
The office at the very tip of the oval had a light on, and the door stood open. She moved toward it.
Franklin Roth sat behind his desk, staring at a bookshelf against one wall of his office. The other had been hung with framed photos of himself with local and national celebrities, various journalism awards, and a few front pages from the Herald’s history. Behind him windows spread wide so that he could watch the sun rise over the eastern half of the city every morning.
He’d been on the phone, finishing with: “Just tell Mrs. Russo to call me as soon as you hear from her. We do still have a paper to get out, even if it doesn’t feel that way.” He hung up the receiver, rubbed his forehead, and caught sight of Maggie standing in his doorway.
He gazed at her without recognition. He seemed to have aged at least twenty years since their first meeting, his skin pasty, thin hair flat on his scalp, too many lines in the flesh under his eyes.
“Mr. Roth?”
His absent stare cleared. “Miss Gardiner. Are you finished with the print room?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid it won’t be operable anytime soon. You’ll have to have it cleaned—”
“Yeah, I get it. It doesn’t matter. A day or two offline will hardly make a difference at this point.”
She moved inside. “Why is that?”
He blinked, as if surprised at her interest—or her naïveté. His mouth opened once or twice to formulate an answer, before he said, “Sit down.”
She did, taking one of the two armchairs across the desk from him. It was leather, soft and comfortable, and it felt good to sit. She’d been on her feet for hours.
He leaned over and opened a lower desk drawer, out of her sight, then produced a bottle. “You drink bourbon?”
She lied about her liquor preferences for the second time that week. “Sure.”
“I hardly ever drink this—I think this bottle has been down there for at least ten years—but felt I had to have it. You know, the booze in the desk drawer. It goes with being an editor. Some traditions have to be maintained. Guess I watched too many movies as a kid. We all watch too many movies as kids. They teach us what to want, drill it into our heads, and we won’t give it up, even when we know better. Could you get those two glasses there, on the shelf?”
Franklin Roth, Maggie decided, was in shock. She stood again, found two cut-glass tumblers on a matching tray in front of a matching series of textbooks on journalistic ethics. The tray sat next to a framed photo of a younger Franklin Roth and an attractive blond woman.
She held a wriggling black puppy.
“This your wife?” she asked, picking up the frame.
“Yes. She passed away—eleven years ago, now.”
“Do you still have the dog?”
“Louie? Fourteen now, still going strong. You like dogs?”
“Sure.” She set the glasses down gently on the blotter in front of him. “He’s a Rottweiler, right?”
“You know your breeds.” He spoke absently, his mind too full of what had happened to his paper to wonder at her curiosity about his pet. He plucked a tissue from a box on his windowsill and polished the glasses. Maggie retook her seat, staring at his tie and wondering if it were made of silk.
She took the glass he pushed at her and let him talk. She felt more than a little afraid to be alone with him, but even more afraid to leave. If she waited, Jack or Riley would find them there. Wouldn’t they?
Franklin looked spent. But then, someone had crushed Tyler Truss under a paper roll. Someone who could move through the Herald offices unnoticed. Someone he would turn his back on. Someone familiar.
But she could not quite believe it had been this man.
He sipped. “I say it doesn’t make a difference because we’re on death watch here. The paper. The industry. The business of news as a whole, and maybe with it, democracy itself, if I can be a little melodramatic. People have more information than ever, and it’s more useless than ever. Without information, relevant information, how can people know what the hell their leaders are doing?”
“That’s what Roger says.”
Roth gave a mirthless chuckle. “I’ll bet he does. The paper is supposed to be a watchdog. News, as an entity, used to be considered so vital to democracy that the FCC required television channels to have a certain amount of public service content . . . as if they recognized right away what a time suck television was going to be. That’s why TV news existed in the first place. When I was a kid you had three networks, they all had the news on at seven, and you had no choice but to watch it. But ratings weren’t great—let’s face it, no one in this country has ever been as big on staying informed as we would like to think. So in the late sixties broadcasters discovered market-driven journalism. Fluff, in other words. Feel-good stories, lost puppies, recipe ideas, and of course, the secret lives of celebrities. It raised ratings and still satisfied the FCC code. But then came cable, and people started watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show instead of Dan Rather. Now we have entire channels of news, quote unquote, that isn’t remotely news. Magazines are the same—they’re probably the only industry in America that’s even worse off than newspapers. Ever wonder why you can stop renewing a magazine and they keep sending it to you for another couple years? Because subscriptions don’t pay for it. Advertisers pay for it, and they want to see high circulation numbers. And corporations want to see profit. Lots and lots of profit. Sure you don’t want a refill?”
