The doorknob rattled before I could think too hard about that. I spun, slapping the binder in front of me shut as the door swung open to reveal a broad-shouldered, business-suited wall of pecs wearing Ray-Ban aviators. Inside the library. In October.
If he was surprised to see me, I couldn’t read it on the parts of his face I could see around the sunglasses.
“How’s it going?” I flashed a smile.
“I—” Pause. His lips disappeared between his teeth. “There’s not usually anyone in here.”
Um. He didn’t exactly look like the type to frequent this place.
“I’m almost done.” I picked up my binder and returned it to the shelf, pressing the “Escape” key on the catalog computer as I walked past.
Turning to another shelf, I reached for a random volume like I knew exactly what I was doing and returned to my chair with it, smiling at Captain Sunglasses, who stuck out in this building way more than I did. Even his movements were jerky and uncomfortable.
My heart pounded twice too fast for the activity at hand, my fingers flipping pages, my eyes and ears tuned to the large man stepping into the room and shutting the door.
Shit.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
He fumbled with the mouse on the catalog computer. I risked a look up.
He tapped at the keyboard, his shoulders rigid. Feet shoulder width apart. Spine so straight you could level a wall off it.
That was military training.
Clearing his throat, he clicked the computer screen dark and turned to the shelves. I angled my face back down at the page in front of me—a political journal I understood, though I wasn’t really reading it. Flipped more pages.
He moved into the far edge of my peripheral, murmuring under his breath as he read binding labels.
Flip.
I lost him when he moved to the shelf behind me.
Flip.
My heart hammered triple-time.
Flip.
A binder slid across the shelf, the leather-on-wood hiss familiar and somehow comforting. He was just getting a book. Chill, Nichelle.
He laid it on the table. I turned another page.
He pulled out a chair catty-cornered from mine, his big frame not really fitting in it when he moved to sit. Opened the binder.
My eyes slid to the cover of the journal and I sucked spit into my windpipe when my breath hitched in, dissolving into a full-on, teary-eyed choking fit.
He didn’t move, didn’t speak. Just watched. Flexed his fingers.
I swiped at the corners of my eyes and sat up straight as the bronchial spasms subsided. “Sorry.”
“I think you’ll live.” He turned back to his binder. I feigned interest in mine. “For now.” I couldn’t swear on a Bible I heard the last two words with my ears or just inside my head, but either was enough to shoot me to my feet. I slapped the binder shut.
“Good luck with your research,” I said, forcing myself to walk to the door. Thugs are like rabid dogs or hungry bears. Showing fear can get you killed.
He didn’t reply, his log-thick neck bent over the pages in front of him.
I shut the door behind me and walked to the stairs, getting three down before I broke into a run.
It should take him a few minutes to find the article—about halfway through the fifth journal back, in the same binder I’d looked through an hour ago, because it was the first search result under Lakshmi’s name.
By the time I slid into my car, I was downright annoyed with myself. Of course there were large men in suits hunting information on Lakshmi—she’d been murdered in the governor’s office, for Christ’s sake. If there was a state or federal agent in a hundred miles not working this case, I’d eat my shoes.
Not that a Louboutin sandwich sounded terrible right then, anyway—almost seven hours of nonstop murder and lies, and I was running on a slice of breakfast bread and a package of questionable peanut butter crackers. My head and stomach were starting to let me know it, too. Clock check: twenty minutes to five. Swinging through the Starbucks drive-thru for a latte and a protein box on my way back to the newsroom, I opened my Channel Four app while I waited. Charlie’s story from this morning still led, with lame video of Aaron mostly shaking his head at that lousy excuse for a press conference. She hadn’t updated her piece since noon. I checked her Twitter. No teaser for more information coming at six, just a mention of the trial.
So I had at least tonight to keep digging, and three hours until Joey would be free.
Shaking off worry over his weird tone on that call, I held my phone out for the barista to scan, checking my rearview and asking her to tack on the order for the blue Mazda behind me, too.
I didn’t wait to get back to my desk to start shoving turkey and apples into my face, the whole box gone and my head a touch clearer when I stepped out of my car in the Telegraph’s garage. Good. I had three stories to write, and an hour to deadline.
I started with the simplest first: the robbery. After clicking through the RPD site to the incident report, I scanned it for specifics and opened a blank file.
Richmond Police are still searching for a masked offender after a third convenience store in two weeks was robbed overnight in Church Hill. Witnesses said the suspect was armed with a handgun and wearing a rubber Halloween mask.
“The voice was low, but like someone was talking in a lower voice on purpose,” the store manager told officers on the scene, according to the police report.
I added details from my stories about the first two robberies and a note for the graphics editor to make a map to run with the piece, then tacked Detective Chris Landers’s phone number on the end for residents to call with information and reread it before I sent it to Bob.
Snatching up my desk phone, I dialed Landers’s cell.
Voicemail.
I didn’t leave a message because I knew he wouldn’t listen to it anyway, clicking over to the text screen and thumb-typing instead. Need to ask you about the nightclub shooting. Please call me when you get a minute. Thanks! Send.
I wasn’t his favorite person, but Landers was nothing if not meticulous about his job. He’d call.
And in the meantime, I could go find someone who understood numbers better than I did.
“Feel like helping me with something I’m not supposed to tell anyone about?” I plopped into a threadbare gray chair in Grant Parker’s office and smiled when he swiveled his chair and stretched. He didn’t even wince anymore as he put his long arms all the way out over his head.
Thank God. Almost losing him last spring had hit me harder than anything short of when my mom was sick. Some days, I popped my head into his office just to make sure he was still breathing.
“I think I’m obliged to help you with just about anything you want, short of, like, taking our firstborn or something.” Parker’s lazy Virginia drawl was half-playful, his emerald eyes smiling right along with the rest of his face.
My eyebrows floated up. “Is there news about a firstborn?”
He laughed. “Not as far as I know. She might tell you first, you know—saving the love of her life has earned you Mel’s unending gratitude.”
I shook my head. “Just being a good friend.”
“Which I will happily do in return. What d’you need?”
I nodded to his screen, cursor still flashing in the middle of a sentence. “You need to finish your column before I start bugging you?”
Parker was a local legend. Our resident charisma machine’s former UVA baseball god status and smelling-salts-required good looks beaming off our sports page twice a week sold enough papers to keep the place afloat. Bob wouldn’t look kindly on me messing with his mojo, no matter how good a cause I had as an excuse.
“Tomorrow’s copy is already in. This is a feature for Wednesday. It’ll wait.”
I pulled out my laptop, opened my Photos app, and brought up the ones I’d taken of the journal articles. I flipped the screen around so he could see them.
; “I need to know what all this means,” I said.
He squinted, pulling my computer closer and moving his fingers over the trackpad to make the text larger. “It’s a journal article about math.”
“I managed to get that much, thanks.”
He read for a minute before he raised his eyes to mine over the top of the screen. “Do I want to know why you care about this? My sense of honor says I’m supposed to protect you, though my sense of logic says you do a decent job protecting yourself, and I tend to get myself shot when I try to help.”
“I can’t say right now,” I said.
He sat back in his chair. “That means it’s something to do with what happened at the capitol this morning.”
My head tipped to one side at the drop in his tone. Parker knew everyone. Had I missed a connection to this story right inside my own inner circle?
“Do you know something about that I should know?” I let the words drop carefully—not demanding, just curious.
He shook his head. Maybe a little too quickly. “I just know you. And I know enough about how politics works in this town to know a body inside the capitol is roughly a Titanic-level clusterfuck, with possible Hiroshima implications depending on where exactly it was found. I worry. That’s all.”
Not like I hadn’t given people reason to. I smiled. “I’m like a cat. I always land on my feet.”
“Probably something to do with the shoes.” He winked. “So, this looks like a study of varying statistical models on the same control groups, changing variables to see how it changed the results.”
I pulled out a pad and grabbed a pen out of the Richmond Generals cup on his desk. “Slower for those of us who don’t math well, please.” It made sense that he’d minored in statistics in college, since baseball is obsessed with numbers.
He grinned. “I like knowing something you don’t. Is this how you feel, like, all the time?”
“I think your intrinsic self-confidence plays a role in how it affects you.” I raised an eyebrow. “Some of us minored in psych. Politics, and all.”
He rolled his eyes. “I might be insulted if anyone else called me full of myself, but I know you love me. Anyway. This is basically a study on how pliable people’s opinions are. These folks took two groups of average adults and gave each a list of facts designed to help them form an opinion. The facts they gave group A were in direct contradiction to the facts they gave group B. You with me?”
I nodded, jotting that down.
“Then they took a poll of both groups and recorded the opinion results. Three weeks later, they went back to the same people and switched out half of the facts for each group. They took another poll and recorded both raw results and how the results shifted within each demographic subgroup.”
“Okay.” I kept writing, something tickling the back of my brain.
“Then another three weeks after that, they brought them back, gave group A the fact list group B started with and vice versa, and redid the poll again. Same data sets recorded.”
Fascinating. I stood and walked around to look at the screen.
“It’s pretty interesting to see the shifts.” Parker scrolled down, pointing to the screen. “Caucasian men between twenty-five and forty were the most susceptible to persuasion. A full thirty percent of that group completely about-faced their stance from the beginning of the study to the end. African American women were the least pliable, with only two percent shifting their opinion at all, and even then, it wasn’t dramatic.”
“Does it say what the facts were about? I mean, she didn’t convince these guys the sky was green or the grass was blue, right? And were there black women in both groups? Because you said the facts were contradictory.”
I laid my pad on the desk next to the computer. Parker scrolled.
“It’s probably in an abstract somewhere. Is this all you have?”
I nodded. “I took photos. There are more articles, but not more pages of this one.”
“I’m sure you could go back and look it up. It’s fascinating research.” He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “Why do you care?”
I clicked to the next photo. “I can’t say. Is this one similar?”
He leaned back into the screen. “Not particularly. It’s a model on how pre-perception influences taste in food.”
I raised the eyebrow again. He laughed.
“If I tell you escargot is gross and then serve you some, are you really less likely to enjoy it than if I tell you escargot is great, or that what I’m serving you is something else entirely?”
I scrolled down.
“But it’s still kind of the same thing. How to influence people.” I was mostly talking to myself, but Parker nodded.
“I suppose you could consider it that way. You’re really not going to tell me why?”
“Come on, you know how this works.” I resumed my seat, jiggling one foot when I crossed my legs.
“And you know journalists are inherently nosy. You have the battle scars to prove it, even.”
I nodded, not really listening as I twirled my pen through my fingers.
I was missing something.
I got it just as Parker noticed the byline on the study.
“I’m going to be the next Nate Silver.” Lakshmi’s voice floated through my thoughts tinged with that bell-like laugh, her confidence that she could rival the undisputed king of modern political statistics heavy in the words.
Learning how easy certain swaths of people were to influence and what pushed buttons went past political polling analysis and into voter manipulation, though.
“Lakshmi Drake? The call girl from the RAU scandal you helped disappear?” That was Parker, slapping my computer shut. “What is going on here, Clarke? Is she . . . Was some politician . . . Oh, holy shit.” He slumped back in his chair. “Bob said you told him the body was in the governor’s office. The governor and the hooker?”
I sprinted for the door and slammed it a little too hard, leaning against it when I turned back to face him. “No. Not the governor. I don’t think, anyway. And you cannot say anything to anyone about any of this. Not even Mel.”
He clenched his eyes shut. “So it is her?”
“Parker, please. You have to promise me you’ll keep this totally to yourself.” I should’ve taken the time to black-bar her name before I opened the pictures. Hindsight, something something.
No time for regrets now, though. I had to stop Parker from costing me Kyle’s trust and blowing my exclusive. Keeping big things quiet in a newsroom is hard. Journalists are nosy by nature—at least, the good ones are. But we’re also busybodies at the core, taking the things we find out and retelling the story in a manner interesting enough to get readers a little nosy, too. Like Bob spilling the location of the remains to Parker, probably without a second thought.
He nodded. “Of course. Whatever you need. But you have to promise me something, too.”
I waved a circular Come on out with it.
“I’m used to watching you run off after the truth without a thought to what’s going to happen to you when whoever doesn’t want people knowing what they’ve done finds you. But people who play politics at this level play for keeps. Be extra careful, and don’t be too stubborn to ask for help. From me, or from the big dude who was glued to you at our reception that we all just pretend we didn’t see because you won’t talk about him.”
I was kind of hoping Parker had been too hopped up on pain meds and romance that night to notice Joey. But I could deal with that later. The dead woman, the governor’s political life, and my looming deadline were enough trouble for now. Subject change.
My phone buzzed in my pocket like it heard that last thought.
What now? A Happy Halloween from Michael Myers himself wouldn’t have shocked me the way my day was going.
Landers: No time to talk. Nightclub suspect in custody. Tyler Gaines, 21, RAU student. History with the victim, not random, no other injuries.
Good. That wo
uld be an easy write-up. Easy, I could take, with this thing around Lakshmi Drake shaping up to be anything but. I tucked the phone away, turning back to Parker. As long as he knew what was going on, he might as well be a sounding board.
“The first time I met Lakshmi, she told me she was going to be the next Nate Silver.” I crossed back to his desk and opened my laptop, reading the top of the food test results. “This study was done that summer, right before I met her.”
I clicked back to the first page. Title, byline . . . date.
My eyebrows scrunched together.
“What’s up?” Parker asked.
“This one, with the opinion-changing thing, was just published this spring. More than a year after she left her program at RAU.”
“Maybe it took a while to find a journal to publish it,” Parker said.
I nodded. Maybe. But Lakshmi had published several articles with this same academic journal, so not likely.
I reached for the pad and pen again and copied the other three names on the byline.
Could one of these folks shed some light on what Lakshmi had been up to?
6
Journalism in the Age of the Internet 102: social media will tell you a lot more about young people than they should ever want you to know.
One of the students who worked on the study with Lakshmi was in Africa, teaching in a school on the savanna. One was pursuing a PhD at Duke.
And the third was a friend—a close friend, from the number of Instagram photos—of Hamilton Baine.
Jackpot.
I put a star by his name and opened two blank files, pulling out my notes from the trial and Landers’s text about the shooting. Thirty-six minutes to deadline. I work best under pressure.
The nightclub story was as straightforward as a crime story gets. Five paragraphs of nothing but facts with one quote from Landers (such that it was), it would fit nicely in the sidebar of our Metro front. I sent it to Bob and clicked the other blank window, shuffling facts in my memory and forgetting the rest of my harried day in the harmony of the story and the keystrokes.
Deadly Politics Page 5
