“Hey?” Grady stood, crossing his arms over his gray T-shirt. Looked at the wall. Ignored the coffee.
Grady and DeLuca had a push-pull relationship. If DeLuca didn’t push him, Grady wouldn’t pull out of the deal. But Paul DeLuca, Jake’s longtime partner and at age forty-seven moving ever closer to his dream of early retirement, had no patience with snitches. “Rats,” he called them. Even in the situationally moral world of cops and robbers, DeLuca’d explained to Jake, you had to pick a side.
“What if I ratted you out, Harvard?” D put the question to him one late night last year, after a case closed, over a third Guinness at the Sevens. “Say, about Jane? It’d be the ‘right’ thing to do, I guess, but hell. Even though you went to that phony-ass school, we’re partners. Partners don’t rat.”
DeLuca, though aware of law enforcement’s need for the type of intel only an insider could provide, barely managed to hide his disdain for Jake’s young informant. This afternoon’s coffee had been Jake’s idea.
“Hey, D.” Jake removed his steaming extra-large from the carrier. The flimsy Styro cup, squeaking against the cardboard, seemed about to implode. “What up?”
“The nine-one-one came to a Brookline tower.” D extracted a spiral notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and flipped through the pages. “From a cell. But turns out the vic—”
“Jake?” Grady scratched a cheek, making a red line on his pale skin. “You were saying?”
DeLuca took a step back. Dramatically gestured, yielding Grady the floor. “The vic can wait,” D said.
“Look. Grady. Can you just lie low?” Jake paused. Started again. “Look, I understand. I’ll put in your witness protection paperwork. But there’s a waiting list, and the red tape’s gonna screw us. There’s no budget for it, Grady, that’s the hard reality. I’ll expedite. Best I can. But until then…”
“Dude. They’ll body me before that.” Grady muttered the words to the murky gray carpet.
“Kill you?” Jake narrowed his eyes. Options clicked though his mind, none of them workable.
“Whatever,” Grady said.
“Jake?” DeLuca flapped his notebook against his palm. “We gotta go.”
“Brookline?”
“Nah. Call actually came from Boston. The Reserve, doncha know. She’s ours.”
“Who?” Jake asked, collecting his phone and notebook. Grady would hear the answer, but no matter. It was nothing he wouldn’t see on TV. TV. Jake’s body registered Jane, even before his brain did. But she wouldn’t be involved, not with her new assignment at Channel 2. “Who’s the victim?”
“That’s what we have to find out.” DeLuca checked the cream-sugar markings on the side of one cup, then the other, selected the second one. “Dead woman, in a bathing suit. In a pool. No longer swimming.”
“Drowned?” Jake asked.
“Like I said, Harvard.” D toasted with his cup. “Let’s go find out.”
3
JANE RYLAND
“Where’d you get these crime scene pictures?” Jane Ryland whispered her question, hushed by what she saw. They’d shut the door to their shared office in Special Projects to keep out the inevitable snoops and gawkers.
Fiola used her mouse to click through a slide show of … well, some of it was hard to look at. “Rated V for violence,” Jane had said when she saw the first picture. It had been fifteen minutes now. Nonstop. Relentless. Gruesome. But powerful.
“And Fiola.” Jane turned to her producer, peering through the semidarkness, pointing. “We can’t possibly put that one in a TV documentary. I mean—the position alone. We’d have to blur it.” She paused, assessing. “Blur it a lot.”
“Yeah. Obviously. I’m just showing you what we’re up against.” Fiola clicked to the next photo. The hum of the computer, the flickering light, the glare of the shadows as the shots changed, it all separated them from the late afternoon newsroom hubbub. Their intentional sequestration somehow made seeing the heartbreaking pictures feel more personal. And even more disturbing.
“Like this one, big-time blur.” Fiola changed the shot. “I got them from sources. Most of them. Not in Boston. Look at her. This is why we do what we do, sister.”
In this one, the young woman’s face had been cropped from the photo. After seven years or so in news, often on the crime beat, Jane had seen her share of escalatingly tragic and mind-bogglingly repugnant crimes. It never got easier. She’d never let it.
“And this one.” Fiola clicked again. “Real people. Preventable. Every one of them.”
A woman, again, this time showing a muscular bare leg, a chaotically rumpled skirt ripped along one seam, and her blouse, what was left of it, with a slash of blood across the recognizable Burberry plaid trim. The woman’s arm dangled over the edge of the bed, fingernails painted pale pink, wrist graceful as a dancer’s.
“Sexually assaulted. And survived,” Fiola said. “Still unsolved. No surprise. We don’t need to see her face, and that’s a good thing. She’ll be our—touchstone. The object lesson for our documentary. She’s who every woman does not want to be, but who every woman might be. If this young student, only a sophomore in college, had reported her fears? Had gone to her school’s dean, even. Or her campus police?” Fiola paused, letting Jane mentally fill in the rest. She clicked again. “Even when they do—well, here’s one from Adams Bay College. Our only local victim, so far. The incident the dean of students was telling us about in the interview today. I kept wishing he’d go on camera.”
“Poor girl.”
“Yeah,” Fiola said. “She was drugged, and traumatized. She quit school soon after. They often do.”
Somewhere down the hall, trilling phones and raised voices heralded the countdown to the six o’clock newscast. But Jane’s deadline was still a month away. The news director had allotted her—and new producer Fiola—thirty days to put together their hour-long documentary. “Get it on the air in time for back to school,” Marsh Tyson had told them. “It’s our gift to the students arriving this September.”
Jane felt her third finger, left hand. Bare today, but where she sometimes wore Jake’s grandmother’s diamond. The two of them had decided, over July 4th champagne and carry-out egg rolls and gloriously appropriate fireworks, that they should work on going public as a couple. Take their first steps. And that she’d be the one to—kind of—compromise. So she’d negotiated this new deal with Channel 2. She’d still do investigative journalism, still be on the air and get to participate in what could be an important documentary. But she made her position clear to news director Tyson—she was out of the breaking-news department.
“I’m going to have to keep some secrets,” she’d told her boss. Jake’s secrets. “If you can live with that? I can, too. If you can’t? Tell me now. Because I can’t feel responsible, or guilty, or like I’m letting you down.”
“You’re going to want to tell us when you hear a good story, I predict,” Marsh had said, wagging a forefinger at her. “You’re such a pit bull.”
“Oh, trust me, I know.” She shook her head, accepting it wouldn’t be easy. “I’m an old dog—”
“Not that old,” Marsh interrupted.
“Whatever,” she said. Approaching thirty-four was approaching too-old in TV years, an industry that measured value on a sliding scale of youthful beauty. She’d be happy enough, she realized, to ease out of that losing battle.
“I know there’ll be times when I’ll be dying to call you with the scoop. But.” She had held up her hand, shown off the engaged-to-be-engaged ring, just that once. Felt the weight of it, and all it meant. “For the sake of my future? I’ll have to say no more.”
Fiola interrupted Jane’s thoughts. “What we need now are victims who’ll go on camera. Can you hit the lights?”
Jane flipped the light switch as Fiola’s slide show powered down. Blinking in the harsh fluorescent glare, Jane struggled to regain her emotional bearings, trying to shake off the disturbing aftereffects of her producer’
s photo collection.
Another relationship still in the experimental stage: hers with Fiola. Fiola, according to her impressive-looking resume, had started as main anchor at her hometown station, then moved through the ranks to become an experienced documentary producer in Washington, D.C. Though Jane was confident of her own journalism expertise, she’d never done a story longer than seven minutes. Seven-oh-five—she knew its length to the second—when two months ago she’d revealed the biggest banking fraud in the history of Boston.
But now, instead of continuing to work solo tackling TV’s relentless challenge of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately while juggling the boundaries of her relationship with Jake, Jane was assigned to Fiola’s documentary team. Adding another unknown to the mix. One day at a time, though, and this was day one.
“Victims, yeah,” Jane said, settling back into the swivel chair at her desk. “Who’ll talk about their experiences, and what they learned.”
That was nothing new, at least. Whether documentary, investigative story, or breaking news, TV was about getting real people to talk, to tell all to the camera.
Outsiders sometimes branded it a second victimization. A person’s tragedy was bad enough, they argued, but then a reporter pesters them to talk about it? It’s learning from history, Jane had debated with many a critic. How change was made. How justice was done. How more tragedies were prevented. It didn’t make it fun. It did make it necessary.
“We can troll the listservs, Facebook, Twitter.” Jane opened her computer screen, typed in “campus sexual assault victim” as she talked. “Say we’re researching a documentary on—”
“I’ve already done that. See?” Fiola pointed to her computer screen, now a mosaic of multicolored shortcuts. “I set up this dedicated website with links to Facebook and Instagram, said we were looking for young women who’d talk about their experiences. I put in an e-mail and phone number. It’s a special tip line that only rings on our desks. Let’s see if we have any e-nibbles yet.”
Drop-down menus flashed as Fiola moused through, checking for responses. “Nothing yet. But it’s early.”
“Only women?” Jane scooted closer to Fiola’s monitor, read the website page again. “How about guys? How sometimes they’re unfairly targeted? Unfairly accused?”
Fiola’s scrolling stopped, fingers hovering above her white plastic computer mouse. After a beat, she started scrolling again. Didn’t answer.
“I know it wouldn’t be the main element of our story,” Jane persisted. She was just as concerned and angry about campus sexual assault as anyone, but as a reporter, the best story was the whole story. They had to explore it. “And clearly it’s usually the woman who’s the victim. But it’s a campus-wide problem. That’s why ‘he said, she said’ campus assault stories are instantly suspect now.”
Fiola opened her top desk drawer, the room so still Jane could hear the little wheels along the drawer’s runners. Fiola took out a bag of pretzels, and, with a rattle of shiny foil, unzipped a pull tab. She waved the bag toward the closed office door.
“Can you open that door, Jane?” Fiola asked. “It’s getting stuffy in here.”
Fiola began scrolling her mouse with her right hand, popping little pretzels, one after the other, with her left. Fiola seemed able to eat anything, and did, incessantly, without it making a difference in her weight. Last week, the day they met, Jane had watched her eat a cheeseburger, then six pieces of sushi. For lunch.
The sounds of the newsroom floated back in as Jane opened the door. Reality returned. Crisscrossing theme music from the national newscast, audio from viewing stations, phones ringing, someone laughing.
Well, okay, Jane thought. Day one. Every big story had a ramp-up, of course, when every idea was on the table and every concept a possibility. You could always decide to cut an element, but the key was to consider everything. Discuss every angle, every point of view. Keep it fair and objective. The truth was the goal, silence the enemy.
“I’m just saying,” Jane picked up as if there hadn’t been a weird moment. “In light of everything that’s already happened, I think we need to—”
The trill of Jane’s desk phone interrupted her attempt at discussion.
“We’ll do it properly, Jane. No worries. Your phone,” Fiola said, unnecessarily. “Maybe it’s a call from a victim. Better answer.”
“This is Jane Ryland.” Seemed like she’d hit a nerve with Fiola. Huh. If this new producer had some kind of agenda … Jane stopped her spiraling paranoia. It was early days. This was a solid story. Important. They’d make sure it was fair. Silence on the phone line. “Hello?”
“Jane Ryland?” A male voice, unfamiliar. Had a man responded to their sexual assault inquiry?
“This is Jane,” she repeated. The man had asked for her, specifically, and her name wasn’t on Fiola’s website. So it couldn’t be about that. “Who’s this, please?”
“Assistant District Attorney Frank McCusker. From DA Santora’s office.”
Jane pictured the veteran legal insider, with his trademark suspenders and shaved head and imperious attitude. Dealmaker. Tough guy. She frowned, trying to parse out why he’d called her. He wasn’t one of her sources. Usually an ADA would never talk directly to a reporter, let alone call one.
“Hi, Frank. What can I do for—”
“That hit-and-run this morning.” He didn’t wait for her to finish. “Thanks for the plate number. It’ll help. Cops told us you’d seen the incident? The whole thing? You get a good look at the driver?”
Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak, gray hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips, clean-shaven. “What’s the DA’s office interest in a little fender bender?” she asked. She turned to Fiola, making sure she was listening. Fiola nodded, eyebrows raised.
“Can you come over, maybe now?” McCusker wasn’t answering her question. “We’d like to chat with you about it, Jane.”
Chat? She’d already given them the plate number. What nagged at her—she’d been on the job when she saw the accident. What if it somehow turned into a story?
Whatever ran on Channel 2’s newscasts was public, and the DA could see that, like everyone else. But what wasn’t on the air? Outtakes, raw video, what stayed in a reporter’s notebook or in her head? That was never shared. So the highly unusual request for her to give additional information to the DA meant Jane would have to ask permission of news director Marsh Tyson, who’d have to get authorization from the station’s owner, who’d have to get clearance from the station’s lawyer. No matter how she personally felt about it—and she wasn’t exactly sure how that was—no way could Jane unilaterally say yes.
There was no “chat.” She was already second-guessing herself about having given them the license number.
“I’ll have to get permission from upstairs,” Jane said. She still wondered what could possibly be so pressing about the accident. What she’d witnessed hardly reached district-attorney level. It was barely beat-cop level. Which meant maybe there was more to it. Which meant it was her turn to ask some questions.
“Might help, you know, give me some ammunition, if you tell me what DA Santora finds so compelling about this. I mean—the Gormay driver must have described the whole thing. What’d he say?”
“We’re getting a translator,” McCusker said.
“Oh,” Jane said, remembering. “Right.”
Fiola leaned forward in her chair, elbows on knees, so intent she’d even abandoned her bag of pretzels. A scatter of crumbs and salt littered her desk.
“So. Tomorrow,” McCusker was saying. “Call me before noon. We can subpoena you, you know, Jane.”
Subpoena her? For a fender bender? “Yeah, you can try that, Frank.” Jane kept her voice light so he’d understand she wasn’t yanking his chain. They could be adversaries without being adversarial, and each of them was only doing what they were told. “But let’s see what the command ladder says. Go from there before you drag me away in cuffs.”
“Before noo
n.” McCusker didn’t sound amused. And hung up.
“Geez. Nice guy,” Jane said, putting down the phone. “They threatened to subpoena—”
“I got it,” Fiola said. “Did they want to talk to me, too? Since I was in the car with you?”
“They didn’t say so.” Jane shrugged. “Maybe they’ll call you separately. Anyway, they wanted me to ‘come over,’ can you believe it? Can you see me deciding to sashay into Krista Santora’s office and tell all? You’d be looking for a new reporter pretty fast.”
“Well, I barely saw him anyway.” Fiola swiveled back to her monitor. “I was driving.”
“White, middle-aged, widow’s peak, gray hair, pointy cheekbones, thin lips,” Jane recited. “I looked right at him.”
“Yeah, I know.” Fiola clicked her mouse, and the slide show of victims paraded across her screen again, the light from the flickering colors playing across her face. “Thing is, that means he saw you, too.”
4
JAKE BROGAN
“Is it murder if you kill a dog?” DeLuca complained as Jake knocked on the front door of 3140 Alcott Road.
Pronounced “Al-kitt,” Jake knew. Their possible crime scene was an august brownstone town house in a quietly manicured cul-de-sac of The Reserve. Quiet except for the dog.
“Some lungs on that thing,” Jake said. The dog’s yappy barking came from the backyard. That’s where the body was, dispatch had informed them. Seemed like no way to get there except via the front door, and now they were waiting for the beat cop to let them inside. “Not very ‘Reserve.’”
No street signs proclaimed The Reserve, but ever since Jake was a kid, he’d been aware of the societal boundaries of this off-the-official-map enclave of blue-blooded affluence. His parents, most often his mother with her Dellacort heritage, had dragged him to “important” post-symphony-matinee or pre-library-lecture gatherings at the homes here of their “important” friends. Preteen Jake had played Ninja Turtles with the other children of industry and finance while the parents did whatever they did.
Say No More Page 2
