Buried Leads (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery)

by Walker, LynDee

  “I thought media contact with agents working on an investigation was against policy,” I said, regurgitating the line Agent Starnes had burned into my brain.

  “It is. But I’m not working on an investigation, now, am I?” There was a hint of mischief in his tone. I laughed.

  “I guess you’re not.” I paused and decided to be candid. “There was a lawyer found in the woods near the city limits last night. I don’t think he was an ordinary lawyer.”

  Evans fell silent for a minute.

  “You think right,” he said. Something in his tone twisted my stomach into a knot. “You sure you haven’t ever thought about being a cop, Miss Clarke?”

  “Couldn’t handle the shoes.” I tried to keep my tone light. “Can you tell me anything about cause of death on that case?”

  I heard papers rustling. “Let me find it,” Evans said.

  “They said an animal got to him. They weren’t sure if it was before or after–” my words came slowly. I clenched the phone in my suddenly-sweaty palm.

  “It was after,” Evans interrupted. “The prelims I got this morning say the guy was hit over the head with something and shot. Not sure which came first, but someone really wanted him dead.”

  Indeed. I scribbled that down and thanked Evans for his time. Then I clicked back to the Google results. There was nothing that would mark him as a target, except the lobbying job. I clicked over to the Channel Four website.

  Charlotte Lewis at Channel Four was my biggest competition in Richmond, usually just a step ahead of or behind me on any given story.

  If Charlie knew this guy was a lobbyist, she hadn’t run it yet. Her story was a basic report that identified Amesworth as a lawyer. She might be onto it, but I had time to figure out what happened to the guy, at least. And if I could beat Charlie to the answer, it’d be worth big brownie points with the suits upstairs.

  I pulled a file folder out of my desk and flipped it inside-out, writing Amesworth’s name on the tab and printing off copies of his Facebook page, the firm’s homepage, and the list from the Post. I added my notes from Evans and tucked it into the back of my drawer before I turned to the day’s police reports. Amesworth’s murder wasn’t the only crime in Richmond that day, and as the lone cops reporter, I had other cases to check on.

  Only one needed my attention: another drive-by on Southside, which had recently become a mini drug war demilitarized zone. Every small-time dealer and wannabe badass was fighting to win control of the cash that changed hands on every other street corner.

  I also needed an update on a rash of break-ins in the Fan—the part of Richmond named for its geography, the way it splayed out from downtown like the hand-held works of art favored by ladies in the days before air-conditioning. It was also the part of town where I lived, not that I had anything worth stealing except footwear. The police attributed the outbreak to a talented cat burglar, but Aaron got less forthcoming with information every time the guy got away.

  I called Aaron back.

  “You’re not tired of being blown off yet?” he asked when he picked up.

  “I’ve moved on. I’m good at that,” I said. “I need to talk to you about this shooting on Southside.”

  “Another day, another shooting. I’m surprised it wasn’t a reporter who got shot, with every TV camera within fifty miles hanging out down there all day.” He sighed. “One of these folks is going to get themselves killed trying to get better footage or asking the wrong person for a comment. You people and your scoops.”

  “Hey, you haven’t seen me out there dodging bullets.” I twisted the phone cord around my index finger. “I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime. Let Charlie at it. She might win an Emmy for some of what she’s done lately. More power to her. I’ll stay here, far away from the crack-high teenagers with automatic weapons.”

  Banter with Aaron aside, I did hope Charlie was watching herself. Covering cops is not the safest gig in journalism.

  “You do that,” he said. “I’ll give you all the details you want. The victim is young, again, with a record, again. I’ll fax you everything.”

  “Thanks, Aaron. I need an update on the cat burglar, too. Any leads?”

  “Not a one.” Aaron was annoyed, though he tried to keep his voice neutral. In a month, someone had managed to get in and out of some of the biggest homes in town (with some of the most influential residents) without leaving a fingerprint. The detectives were stumped, and cranky. “The good news? It’s been nine days since the last report of anything stolen.”

  “So he found what he was looking for?”

  “Or he’s on his way to the islands with the money from fencing that stuff.”

  “Any indication this is a team effort?”

  “Who knows? This whole thing is bizarre. How the guy knows which houses have the fancy security and which don’t, and how he can find and crack any type of safe without making a sound is beyond me. Guys like this usually work alone if they can. The more people involved, the better chance we have of catching someone.”

  I scribbled that down and thanked him before I hung up, glancing at the clock. Lunchtime. I didn’t have anything on my calendar until the interview for my feature story at five, so I called my friend Jenna and asked if she wanted to grab a bite at the café across the street from the rare bookstore where she worked. I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week, and her birthday was coming up.

  Ten minutes later I settled into a little metal chair, struggling to keep my mind off the dead lobbyist and on Jenna’s crisis of the month, which involved her husband and a certain medical procedure.

  “He’s right. We always said thirty-five was the cut-off for kids for us,” she said, plucking the wedge of French bread that had come with her soup into a pile of snowflakes. “But staring down the barrel of it when Carson’s getting so big, so fast, is a lot different than talking about it ten years ago. What if I want another baby in a year?”

  I knew she wanted me to say something, but I wasn’t sure what “something” she wanted to hear. I shoveled salad into my mouth and studied her as I chewed. The bread was gone and she moved on to her napkin.

  “I’m sorry, Jen,” I said finally. “But, do you really think you might?”

  She sighed as she dropped the last piece of the shredded napkin. “No. I’m nearly thirty-five. I have a girl, I have a boy. I’m done with three a.m. feedings and my boobs are my own again.”

  “So why are you so upset?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly? Maybe I have PMS. But he didn’t even tell me first. He just comes home and says ‘I’m doing away with our ability to procreate as of nine o’clock Friday morning.’ No warning. No, ‘Honey, what do you think about this?’ Happy freaking birthday to me.”

  “You’re pissed because he didn’t talk to you about it before he made the appointment,” I said. “That’s when your tone went from ‘I married such a great guy’ to ‘My husband is the world’s biggest asshat and I may end up on that Oxygen show about women who go batshit and bludgeon their men to death with a garlic press.’”

  She peeked up at me and smiled. “A garlic press? Nah. I’m definitely a Wives With Knives sort of girl.”

  “Hey, that was a joke. A small one, but still. See? It’s not all doom and gloom.”

  “No, but it still sucks. Isn’t it fun to be my friend?”

  I laughed. “That it is. I certainly learn a lot about the mechanics of marriage, at any rate. Not that I’ll ever need to understand them. But knowledge is good, on the whole.”

  She grinned. “Nothing from your sexy Italian friend?”

  “I don’t know that he’s actually Italian. But in fact, he did stop by last night. I really wish I could stop wondering if he’s a murderer, though. There was a dead guy in the woods just before I saw him.” I clung to the hope that forensics would d
etermine Mr. Animal Food had been there for a while, but I didn’t know yet whether it had been days or hours.

  “More dead people?” She raised her eyebrows. “We’re going to have a population shortage around here before long.”

  “This was a gross one, too.” I paused and looked at her half-eaten lunch. I didn’t want to ruin the rest of her meal, but I had the borders of a new puzzle in my head, and Jenna was a good sounding board.

  “You don’t need details.” I smiled. “Suffice to say that the FBI said this morning that the guy was shot and hit over the head with something. The exact quote was ‘someone really wanted him dead.’” I paused, thinking about Jenna’s joke about Chad. Was the killer someone Amesworth knew?

  “What the hell are you getting yourself into now?” Jenna’s eyes widened and she shook her head. “You can’t go getting killed chasing a story, Nicey. Who else will listen to me bitch about my fantastic life with such convincing sympathy?”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said wryly. “I have no intention of getting myself killed. I just want to beat Charlie to this story, and I have a hunch I’d like to run down before my interview tonight. Thanks for listening to me.”

  “Back at you.”

  I stood up and leaned in to hug her. “It really will be all right, Jen,” I whispered into her reddish-brown curls. “These things work out the way they’re supposed to. Talk to him.”

  She nodded. “I know. I will.”

  I cranked the stereo on my way back to the office and let the Red Hot Chili Peppers lead my mind back to college political science class. Lobbyists in democracy gave me a place to start. My first order of business after filing my copy for the day would be to see if I could find where the money was going.

  Back at my desk, I pulled up my story on the body and rewrote the lead to include the victim’s name (Daniel Amesworth) and profession (attorney, as far as anyone else needed to know).

  I found Aaron’s fax and wrote up the shooting, too. The nineteen-year-old female victim had three prior arrests, and had been patched up at St. Vincent’s and sent home overnight. The cat burglar story was easy, essentially rehashing what I already had, plus Aaron’s comment about the nine-day lapse in the robberies, the longest since they started.

  Once I’d sent those to Bob, I was free to hunt for background information on Amesworth. Clubbed, shot, and left as dinner for the local wildlife. If he’d pissed someone off that badly, there had to be a record of it in cyberspace. I just had to find it. Preferably first.

  I typed a few words into the Google box, drumming my fingers on the desk as I scrolled through the results. He was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, and that was big business in Virginia, from farming, to manufacturing, to sale. And yet, Google had nothing for me in ten pages of results. If there was one thing I’d learned from six years at the crime desk, it was that the answer to almost anything could be found on the Internet. The trick was knowing where to look.

  I clicked over to the image results and scrolled through a surprising number of photos. Amesworth appeared to be a fixture in Richmond society. I ran my cursor over the thumbnails, finding loads of charity event shots from the Telegraph’s site. I jotted a list of places he’d been, wondering who else had been there, too. Lucky for me, I had the means to find out.

  I got up and hurried back to the photo cave. A darkroom in its former life, it now held high-resolution monitors for photo editing. The smell of stop bath and fixer still hung in the air ten years into the digital age. Larry Murphy, our senior photographer, was the only one not out on assignment that afternoon.

  “Hey Larry, how long do you keep images from big charity events and society stuff?” I leaned on the table next to the monitor he was studying.

  He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and peered up at me, his gray hair sticking out from under his faded Richmond Generals baseball cap in a dozen different directions.

  “Forever,” he said. “It’s a nice little side income for the paper, because those people order reprints all the time, so Les won’t let us trash them.” Les Simpson was our managing editor. He was also a pain in my ass, since the copy editor he was sleeping with wanted my job. I felt my nose wrinkle reflexively at the mention of his name. I’d had a pretty successful run of flying under his radar lately, and I hoped to keep it that way.

  “I’m not used to Les being helpful.” I handed Larry the list of events where I’d found Amesworth. “Do you have time to find and copy the shots from these events for me?”

  “Sure. And don’t worry, Les didn’t mean to be helpful. I heard him bitching last week because you’ve been writing about too many murders on Southside. His focus groups don’t like it.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be sure to let the trigger-happy dealers know they’re boring our subscribers.”

  Larry plugged a little USB drive into his computer, clicked his mouse, and handed me the drive. “Have fun. There are about twenty-three-hundred photos there. What are you looking for?”

  “Needle. Sounds like I have myself a haystack. I see another late night in my future. Thanks, Larry.”

  I tucked the drive in my pocket, went back to my desk, and unplugged my computer. Amesworth’s social life would have to wait. Eunice was counting on my feature for Sunday, and I had an interview appointment.

  3.

  Old story, new friends

  Graffiti-covered storefronts hawking liquor, cigarettes, and soul food lined one side of the street. On the other, narrow front porches cluttered with junk sagged from years of neglect. My little red SUV slowed to a crawl as I looked for address markers. Some houses had them, some didn’t.

  The row house where Joyce Wright raised both a drug dealer and an honor student had three out of five numbers over the front door.

  I made the block and parallel parked the car on my first try. Not bad for a girl who’d learned to drive amid the sprawl of Dallas’ plentiful parking lots.

  Joyce’s was the neatest of the block’s porches, occupied only by a battered ten-speed and a couple of metal yard chairs that looked like their best days had come and gone back when Lucy was trying to finagle a way into Ricky’s acts on Monday night TV.

  I smoothed my beige linen slacks, eyes on my sapphire Louboutins, and pushed the doorbell.

  It opened quickly, and I looked up to meet Troy Wright’s deep brown eyes.

  “Miss Clarke!” His face lit with an infectious smile.

  “It’s nice to see you, Troy.” I returned his grin. “How’s school?”

  “Good.” He stared at me for a long minute. “School is good. Life is getting better.” Troy dropped his eyes to his shoes and shuffled backward, holding the door. “I should thank you for that. I didn’t expect you to listen to me when I told you what I thought about my brother and why he died. So thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” I laid a hand on his arm and stepped into a cluttered living room. The furnishings matched the era and wear of the porch chairs. No air conditioning, but the warmth in the homey little room was more than temperature. Love oozed from every chip in the once-white paint on the walls.

  “Thank you, too. For trusting me.” I squeezed his outstretched hand and laughed when he pulled me into a hug.

  He shoved his hands into pockets of faded jeans that were at least two sizes too big. “So, what brings you to my neighborhood? Mama said you wanted to talk to us. Are you doing another story about Darryl?”

  “No. I want to write a story about you. What it was like to grow up in the city with a single mom. I’d also like to talk about your academic achievements. Have you started applying to colleges yet?” I looked around. “Is your mom here?”

  “She’s...sleeping.” He dropped his gaze to the worn red carpet. “She does a lot of that when she’s not at work since Darryl...well. She said to get her when you got here.
I’ll be right back.”

  He disappeared through a narrow door into a dim hallway. I studied the photos that covered the wall. Troy at different ages. And another boy, a happier one than the Darryl Wright I’d seen in mugshots. They posed next to a Christmas tree with vastly different-sized, new-to-them bikes. In another picture they sprayed each other with super soakers on the tiny lawn I’d crossed on my way to front door.

  I could tell Joyce Wright loved her sons. Both of them. My throat tightened at the thought of her holed up in her bedroom when she wasn’t at work. No parent should have to bury a child. A voice breached my reverie with a soft “hello,” and I spun around, arranging my features into a bright smile.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, ma’am,” I said, extending my hand to the robust woman who shuffled into the room. She was two heads shorter than me, with a full figure and close-cropped hair. Her handshake was firm, but the smile on her face didn’t reach her eyes. The same extraordinary espresso color as Troy’s, Joyce’s eyes betrayed anguish.

  “Likewise, Miss Clarke,” she said. “I want to thank you for what you did for my Darryl. Not many people would care about a black boy with a record who got shot with a house full of dope.”

  “They should,” I said. “And thanks to Troy, they do now. Thank you for taking time to see me today.”

  She gestured to the small sofa that ran the length of one wall, and I settled myself on the floral fabric and dug a pen and a notebook out of my bag. Joyce took the La-Z-Boy in the room’s opposite corner, and Troy dropped his long frame to the floor in front of her, pulling his knees to his chest.

  “You want to talk to us about Troy’s schooling?” Joyce asked.

  “Among other things.” I smiled. “But why don’t we start there? Troy, have you made any decisions about what you’re going to study in college?”

  “I want to be a sportscaster.” His eyes lit up, excitement creeping into his voice. “You know, like on ESPN. Sometimes when there’s a game on TV, I turn the sound off and call the plays myself.”