Front Page Fatality

by Walker, LynDee

  I didn’t think I’d fucked up before, but since my opinion didn’t seem to be the popular one, I nodded and promised to toe the line in a timely manner.

  “I’m going to interview Chief Nash this morning, and then I’ll find the fishermen,” I said. “You do me a favor and get better. Les and his girlfriend are getting on my nerves.”

  He smiled. “I’m doing my best. And Parker brought me dinner last night. He asked about you. Apparently Shelby put on quite a show on her way out to the PD yesterday. I told him you were with the lawyer’s wife, and he said to tell you to ask if you need help with anything. Might be nice for you to have a friend in the newsroom.”

  If the friend wasn’t Dave Lowe’s college buddy, sure it would. I half-smiled and nodded, spinning back toward the front door.

  “Thanks, chief.”

  I left the copy of the lab report under my seat in the car when I went into police headquarters to interview Nash.

  His office was cavernous, the walls decorated with certificates and medals. A tall bookcase held copies of the criminal justice code, the Virginia Constitution, a smattering of legal thrillers, several coffee mugs emblazoned with logos from different police departments, and a Gators pennant.

  “Miss Clarke.” Nash stood when his assistant showed me in. He offered a Parker-worthy grin from behind a polished cherry desk, putting a hand out.

  He was bigger than I remembered, taller than me with broad shoulders and a thick, solid chest under his trademark charcoal jacket. While most of my non-uniform cops favored a more business casual dress code, I had never seen Nash in anything but a suit.

  Not that I saw much of him. The head of a big-city department rarely has reason to talk to the press unless they just like seeing their name in the news, and Nash wasn’t a limelight hound.

  “Forgive me, but I’m going to have to make this quick,” he said. “You’ve caught me on a very interesting day.”

  “I won’t take too much of your time, and I appreciate you seeing me.” I shook his hand. “We’ll just jump right in, if that’s okay with you.”

  He nodded and settled back into his tufted red leather chair. I took a black armchair across from him and pulled out my notes, firing questions and scribbling his answers.

  He seemed fond of Lowe. Nash said though it wasn’t part of Lowe’s responsibility to train officers for the river unit, he had an interest in the water patrols thanks to a Hampton Roads upbringing, and often went above and beyond.

  “He’s invaluable,” Nash said. “Spends hours outside his regular duties mentoring promising young officers.”

  How generous of him.

  “To come back from his youthful indiscretions and be the kind of officer he is shows extraordinary determination,” Nash continued.

  “Youthful indiscretions?” I echoed, furrowing my brow and looking up from my notes.

  Nash smiled. “I assumed you knew. Dave doesn’t make a big secret of the fact that he had a bit of a wild streak when he was young. A couple of brushes with the law: drugs, misdemeanor theft. When he was arrested, it served as a wakeup call. He’s really turned his life around.”

  Hot damn. I slowed my scribbling, mostly as an excuse to keep my face hidden behind my hair as I bent over my notebook. It took supreme control to refrain from jumping up, shouting “eureka,” and sprinting back to my office.

  I switched gears, moving the topic to the boat crash.

  Nash didn’t have much to say about the FBI investigation, which I expected, and his comments about the accident itself were restricted to things I already knew, but I needed the conversation to have more than one focus. The discovery of Neal’s body was the hot news of the day.

  “Chief Lowe mentioned yesterday that the department thinks the murder of Gavin Neal could be the work of organized crime,” I said, thinking of Joey’s smile and hoping it wasn’t in spite of myself. “Can you elaborate on why that is?”

  “I’ve taken a personal interest in that investigation.” Nash shook his head. “We’re working several leads, but given Mr. Neal’s instrumental role in the New York trucker trial last year, we’d be remiss to ignore the possibility that this was a Mafia payback.”

  I nodded. There should be a course on cop doubletalk in every college journalism department.

  On a whim, I asked him about Mike.

  He frowned. “That’s troubling, to say the least,” he said. “Sergeant Sorrel is one of our best officers. We hope to have an answer for his family very soon.”

  I nodded as I scribbled, wondering if Mike really could be in on whatever had gotten Gavin Neal killed—or if he was in the river somewhere, too. Either seemed possible, and I honestly wasn’t sure which I preferred.

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Clarke,” Nash said, standing when I closed my notebook and smiled at him. “I enjoy the work you do, even when it doesn’t make us look like the smartest cops around. The Telegraph is lucky to have you.”

  I smiled. If I was the type, I might’ve blushed.

  “Thank you for your time, chief,” I said. “I appreciate your fitting me in. This was very helpful.”

  Nash hit a button on his desk phone and the assistant came to show me out.

  I cranked up the stereo and ran through my suspects as I drove back to the office. Though I had more on Lowe, Nash hadn’t offered anything that substantially changed my list. Nor had he given me any real answers.

  I made my living asking other people questions, but I was so tired of them I didn’t care if I never thought of another one.

  A copy of the morning paper, Shelby’s story on Neal blocked off in pink highlighter, lay on my desk with a big red “thank you” scrawled across the top of it. Nice. Stuffing it in the recycle bin, I looked up a phone number for one of the fishermen who’d discovered Neal’s body and dialed.

  They were both there, already drunk at noon and way too excited about having their angling interrupted by a corpse. It was macabre. But also sort of funny, and I needed some levity in my day.

  Jake Holly and Tony Ross had decided to spend the day together after they’d been on the early show with Charlie, Jake’s wife said, “and they’ve been sitting on my deck drinking beer and reliving their adventure.”

  She put Jake on the phone and a nanosecond later, Tony picked up an extension.

  I asked them to get further away from each other to avoid feedback from the cordless handsets screaming in my ear. They reminded me of a couple of little boys who’d caught a big fish. Creepy, but in a “Scooby Doo Meets the Redneck Brigade” sort of way.

  “Which one of you jumped in the water to get the watch?” I asked, interrupting their race to tell me loudest and fastest what had happened.

  “I did,” Jake said. “Tony was afraid he’d get caught in the current. I’m a better swimmer.”

  “You wish,” Tony snorted.

  “Why didn’t you jump in there, then?” Jake hollered.

  I could hear the effects of the Budweiser and didn’t want the nice woman who’d answered my call to have to break up a brawl in her kitchen, so I moved to the next question.

  “Then what happened, Jake?” I asked. “Were you looking around for the watch, or did you see the body right away?”

  “My watch landed right next to it. Er, him,” Jake said. “I thought at first it was some sorta joke. Like, somebody had dropped a dummy down there, you know? But I got closer and I could see the man’s eyes, and I knew it was a real person.”

  “He came up outta the water screaming like a little girl,” Tony chortled. “I thought he was pulling my chain, but he kept screaming at me to call the cops and get him the hell outta the water.”

  “And then the police came?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they brought a boat and scuba gear and went down there and brought him up, and the coroner’s office took him away. There were chains with weights around his feet and his middle and his neck. It was pretty gross,” Jake sounded less than excited for the first time since h
e’d picked up the phone.

  Charlie hadn’t asked about the weights. True, Charlie wasn’t quite as invested in the details of this story as I was, best I could tell, but I’d take whatever advantage over her reporting I could claim.

  “Weights? What kind? Did you see?”

  “The kind you use to exercise,” Jake said. “They were pretty big ones, too. I didn’t know they made those things that big.”

  I pictured the shiny rows of dumbbells in the weight room at the police department and wondered if I’d just gotten a break. Surely they’d replaced them by now. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check. Everyone made a mistake somewhere.

  They asked me in stereo if their names were going to be on the next day’s front page. I assured them they would, then clicked the phone off while they were still hooting at each other about that.

  I thought about the lab report from Neal’s file, which I had read enough times to commit to memory, and dialed the state forensics office. When the tech who’d analyzed the pancake mix picked up, I introduced myself and asked if he remembered the case, crossing my fingers under the desk.

  He laughed. “Yeah, I do. We don’t get a lot of stuff through here that’s not what it looks like. I knew when I opened that bag that whatever was in it wasn’t heroin. The smell wasn’t right. I played around with it for a while, trying to see if maybe it was some kind of new street drug, but the compounds in it were all wrong. I was curious, and eventually, I started testing stuff out of my pantry against it. That’s how I figured out it was baking mix.”

  “But then the next sample wasn’t,” I said, still scrawling the last of his comment on my yellow legal pad.

  “I don’t want to speculate on that, if you don’t mind,” he said. I kept my hand moving, not missing a word. “I didn’t test the third sample, and I can’t speak to what happened with it. All I can tell you for sure is that my analysis was pretty thorough. More thorough than it had to be, because I was curious. There’s no way I was mistaken.”

  “Would that be easy? To fake the appearance of an illegal drug with something else?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard,” he said. “Clumps of baking soda tinted with a little food coloring come close enough to looking like crack cocaine, and any white or off-white powder could pass for cocaine HCL. As I said, pancake mix outwardly resembles heroin. Even the prescription stuff would be doable, if you were doing it right. Lots of stuff, from baby aspirin to mints, comes in little tablets, in just about any color you could want. A dealer could make a killing as long as he didn’t want repeat customers. People would be fooled pretty easily until they actually took the stuff.”

  Except I was pretty sure the fake stuff wasn’t being sold. I thanked him for his help, smiling as I cradled the phone.

  The smile faded when a voice from behind me interrupted my thoughts.

  “Bob is convinced that you’re going to redeem yourself today.” Les sounded less than convinced. “What do you have, since you skipped out on the meeting this morning?”

  I spun my chair around to face him. I’d been avoiding him all day, but Nash was an excellent excuse for missing the meeting.

  “I wasn’t in the meeting because I was interviewing the police chief. I told you about that yesterday, remember?” I flashed a Shelby-like fake smile.

  “Did you get anything good out of him?”

  I bit my tongue. I wanted to tell him I knew exactly why he was giving me such a hard time, and it was a shitty thing for him to do no matter how good Shelby was in bed. But I wanted to keep my job, so I swallowed the words.

  “I did,” I said instead. “Turns out Lowe has a record. I’m going to see what I can dig up on that, and I already talked to the fishermen, too.”

  “Woohoo. So has everyone else.” He leaned against the edge of the cube and folded his arms over his chest.

  He stared at me for a long minute. I didn’t look away.

  “I hope you got something new from someone,” he said finally. “You still have a regular job to do around here, and I bet you haven’t even looked through today’s police reports yet. This big investigative reporter act you’re pulling won’t play much longer if you don’t come up with something to show for it, just so you know.” He turned and stalked off.

  Dammit. I spun the chair back to the desk and cradled my head in my hands. Shelby made a newbie mistake at the press conference because she was nervous and desperate to ask a question, but her story was good, I had to admit. And with all the unanswered questions swirling around me, Les breathing down my neck waiting to hand her my beat if I missed an apostrophe was crazy-making.

  I called Jerry to ask if the PD had released any new information on Neal, the boating crash, or Aaron and Mike. Not surprisingly, he had nothing. And I had less than that in the way of excuses to ask for tour of the gym at police headquarters, so I hung up.

  I flipped my computer open and wrote up what I had on the fishermen, which wasn’t fantastic enough to impress anyone but should be sufficient to keep me at the crime desk for another day.

  Filing the story with Les, I paged through crime reports. Nothing interesting, and my thoughts kept straying to the weights Jake Holly described.

  Someone would have to be strong to heft a grown man chained to huge dumbbells into the river. Lowe was about as likely as Jenna to be able to pull that off. There wasn’t exactly a shortage of biceps at the PD, but Parker’s Polos—tailored to show off the hours he spent in the gym—blipped up in my thoughts, and I wondered if he was the muscle that sank Gavin Neal to the bottom of the James.

  “Bob said you had quite a day yesterday.” Parker’s voice came from behind me and I whacked my bruised knee on the underside of the desk again when I jumped. Did the mere thought of him conjure his presence out of the ether?

  Turning the chair toward him, I fixed a big grin on my face.

  “Just the man I wanted to talk to today,” I said, and his eyes widened.

  “Does this mean you read my column?”

  Aw, hell. I really would have to get to that at some point.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Quite a day, remember? But I do have a question, and you’re my best bet for a straight answer.”

  “Shoot.”

  I leveled my gaze at his face, watching for telltale signs that something was bothering him as I spoke. “Dumbbells.”

  He cocked his head slightly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Dumbbells,” I repeated, studying him carefully. “The kind someone like you lifts at the gym. How big do they make them?”

  Google could have told me that easily, but I wanted to see his reaction to the question.

  “There is an actual question.” He laughed. “I thought for a second I was being insulted. My gym has them up to 75 pounds.”

  “And would three of those hold a grown man under the water?”

  “Your lawyer that turned up in the river.” He narrowed his eyes and nodded. “I’m no physicist, but I would say yes.”

  I murmured a thank you, a sinking feeling in my gut. If anything else about him jumped out at me, I’d have to say something to someone. If for no other reason than so they’d know who to blame if I turned up chained to a fridge at the bottom of a lake.

  “Thanks. I think I have an idea.”

  “I’ll let you get after it, then.” He stepped backward and smiled. “Glad to help.”

  I went back to my computer and clicked into the browser, typing what I assumed was the web address for the area’s most popular sporting goods store. I got a popup, courtesy of the paper’s pornography filters (who decided to name a business after that particular unit of the male anatomy, anyway?), and hastily clicked back into the address bar, wondering if there was some sort of porn offender IT list I’d just ended up on.

  All I needed was for Les to get the idea that I was looking for penis photos online at one o’clock in the afternoon. I didn’t want to imagine the fun he’d have with that. Shaking my head, I added “sporting goods” to
the URL, landed in the right place, and scrolled through product categories.

  Dick’s carried large dumbbells. I had a sudden yen for a little shopping.

  14.

  Out of the frying pan, into the fire

  “Three seventy-five pound dumbbells? You sold them Monday?” It took work to keep my voice even, and I flashed the pimply kid behind the counter a grin. Though he didn’t look like he regularly lifted anything heavier than a video game controller, he did look like he was a fan of my smile. And my legs, from the way his eyes kept wandering to the lower half of the glass counter between us.

  The two locations nearest police headquarters were of no help. This one was farther out, but that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t what I was looking for. I asked who he sold them to.

  “We don’t have a record of that, but they paid with cash.”

  I shifted my stance, hiking my hemline up the tiniest bit, and smiled again.

  “I know it’s not the kind of question you get every day, but I really need to know.” I frowned slightly. “There’s no magic you can work on that computer that will help me?”

  “I don’t think so.” He pulled his eyes away from my quads and looked at his screen again. “Wait, maybe.” He touched a few keys.

  I held my breath.

  “Well, I don’t have a name, but I have an address. There were only two of those in stock. We shipped the other one.” He rolled out a blank strip of register tape and scribbled on it, then handed it to me.

  I glanced at the address. I didn’t know where it was, but it was not police headquarters. Damn.

  I smiled and tucked the slip of paper into my bag.

  “You have no idea how much better you just made my day.” I checked his name tag. “Jesse, I could just kiss you.”

  “I wouldn’t stop you.” He smiled and leaned across the counter. Gutsy, for a skinny kid with skin problems. I couldn’t help admiring his moxie.

  “Something tells me your mom might not approve,” I winked. “But thanks for your help.”