The Last Journalist (An Alex Vane Media Thriller Book 5)

by A. C. Fuller

  "Suspect?" She cleared her throat and ashed her cigarette. "We sent some cops there for questioning, others are still working the scene, Alex, but he...he jumped. I'm sorry. This was a suicide."

  My legs buckled and I leaned on the door. "That's not possible. I mean I just…"

  The truth was, I didn't know if it was possible. It didn't feel right, but I doubt it ever feels right when someone you know commits suicide. The act is so final, so antithetical to life itself, my guess is that it always feels impossible to those left behind.

  I drove home in a stupor, mind racing between a hundred different scenarios, eyes laser-focused on the shifting patch of road five feet in front of me. I kept picturing Burnside jumping from a balcony. Or a window. My imaginings mingled with memories of our dinner. It didn't sit right.

  When I came to the two-story Victorian Greta and I bought while she was still pregnant, my mind told me to turn into the driveway, park the car, crawl into bed, and tell my wife what happened. My gut urged me to drive to the scene, to the apartment building in South Lake Union where they'd found the body. I'd been trying to listen to my mind more, to pause and take the cautious approach in situations like this. Greta and I had agreed upon this course of action in couples counseling. The cautious approach was to sleep on the news and see how it felt in the morning.

  But I couldn't do it. I passed our driveway and made a u-turn. The site of Burnside's death was only a few minutes away.

  Chapter 2

  Holden Burnside was famously understated. Every couple years he released a book. Every book became an instant bestseller, and every one broke all kinds of political news. And every year Burnside did the rounds on cable news and the Sunday morning political shows, presenting the damaging details and juicy gossip in his usual monotone, matter-of-fact manner. Yes, Chet, my reporting indicates that the President did in fact snort cocaine off a stripper's ass in college. And how does this affect his current budget negotiations with Congress? Glad you asked...

  I'd barely registered it when he'd said, "Turns out, my career may be the biggest political scandal in American history." The way he'd said it, he might as well have told me he was strongly considering switching laundry detergents.

  I'd sipped my Sambuca, trying in vain to read his blank expression. Of course, when the weight of what he'd said hit me, a hundred questions emerged. I'd known from the look on his face that he was serious, but what could he possibly mean? And how much would I be able to get out of him?

  The answer, it turned out, was not much. I tried a dozen angles, questioning him on his major stories, prodding his connections to current politicians, even asking about his wife, who was involved in various charities back in New York City. Ever the professor, he complimented the tenacity of my questions, but gave me nothing.

  Finally I gave up and, over cappuccinos, turned to my memories of Columbia. "Remember the saying you taught me on the first day of class?"

  Burnside scratched the stubble on his chin. "It's the same one I teach every class on the first day. I'm glad you remember it."

  Always carry a notebook, never give up a source, and, if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. It's a well-worn saying in journalism, somewhere between a maxim and a cliché. When Professor Burnside scrawled it on the whiteboard back at Columbia in the late nineties, I'd already heard it a hundred times, but he used it as a jumping-off point to explain his view of journalism.

  "That's easy to understand," I said, "but difficult to execute in real life."

  "I notice you don't have a notebook on you, unless it's buried in that trendy blazer."

  I laughed at the idea of being trendy. Compared to Burnside, sure, but that wasn't saying much. "I use an app on my phone."

  "That's not the same." He sighed, pulled out a pen, and tapped the notebook he had out on the table. "Ink, Mr. Vane. Paper and ink."

  Burnside came from the old school, before computers and cell phones, before they banned smoking in newsrooms. He didn't donate to political parties, didn't once express an opinion about politics in public. Rumor was he didn't even vote. In his mind—and this is what he taught his students—journalists could and should separate all personal feelings from their stories and doggedly pursue the truth wherever it may lead. Facts were all that mattered. God didn't live in the spin, in the pizazz, in the opinion. God was in the details. God was in the facts.

  Burnside tried to shove the pen back in his jacket pocket but missed and dropped it on the floor. The coffee hadn't sobered him much.

  The drinking, along with the hit of caffeine, had me feeling philosophical. "It's not the pen and notebook part that was hard to follow in my career. And not the giving up of sources. It's the last part. 'If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.' I'm fine with truth, accuracy, making absolutely certain I double-check everything, nail down every detail, but…I don't know. You ever feel like the facts aren't enough? That accuracy isn't enough? That you can report all the facts in the world but the Truth—with a capital T—still eludes you? I just feel like…"

  I trailed off. He locked his eyes on mine, and in an instant I was back in his classroom at Columbia, stammering a weak answer to a pointed question. Was he judging me?

  Burnside smiled sadly. "It's strange," he said, his tone wistful, almost resigned. "For the first time in my life, I know exactly how you feel."

  During dinner, Burnside hadn't written much in the notebook. A few words and phrases maybe, but it was an informal chat and he knew he could follow up by phone if he wanted to quote me.

  But the notebook had been on the table all throughout dinner, and though I didn't know it when I decided not to go home, it's why I drove to the apartment building. It's why I now studied the scene from a parking spot across the street.

  It was past midnight and nearly silent. Yellow police tape stretched across the sidewalk from the side of the apartment building to a car, wrapped around a parking meter, and returned to the building, forming an enclosed rectangle of about twelve by eight feet. Two uniformed officers stood by the entryway of the building, chatting casually. A young woman stood a few yards away, puffing clouds of steam from a vape pen.

  The streets were mostly deserted, but an occasional passerby wandered near the police tape to stare into the rectangle formed by the tape. Were they staring at Burnside's blood and wondering where the body was, and to whom it belonged?

  I rolled down the window, poked my head out, and gazed up at the building. The rain had slowed to a typical Seattle drizzle, almost a mist. The apartment building was high-end—about twenty stories of glass and steel with a small balcony jutting from each apartment. It was the kind of apartment building that had popped up all over Seattle lately, a kind that doesn't allow you to rent your place as an Airbnb. People do it anyway.

  What the hell was I doing there? Something in me wanted to see his notebook, but what had I expected—that I'd find it sitting on the sidewalk? Of course not. And it wasn't even worth looking for. Burnside had died a few hours ago. Any evidence on the street or in his room had been bagged.

  I was about to head home when I noticed the woman with the vape pen crossing the street. "Hey," she called. "You Alex Vane from The Barker?"

  She blew a massive cloud of steam in front of her, then stepped through it wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket, like a lone survivor emerging from a smoky plane crash in a movie. Of average height—about the same as Greta—she had a square, stocky build that reminded me of one of the Lego police officers Greta's niece used to leave on our carpet. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail that flapped from side to side as she approached the car.

  My first instinct was to roll up the window and get the hell out of there. Not just because I have a lingering fear of redheads from that time one tortured me for a day and a half. When you run one of the most highly-trafficked independent sites in the country, you're bound to publish a lot of stuff that pisses people off. That's always been the case.

  Ov
er the last few years, though, as the country has become more deeply polarized, readers have become more threatening. It's as though no one can read a story—whether about politics, sports, or even cooking—without being deeply offended by something. And they're no longer shy about telling you how much they disapprove. Time was, The Barker might get a few nasty or threatening letters a month. Now it averages at least ten per day. Nutjobs hound and bully our reporters on Twitter, and I've had a dozen nasty encounters in public over the last year.

  Before I could move, she stood at the window, leaning in too close. "You're Alex Vane, right?"

  "I am."

  "You knew Holden Burnside?"

  Until this moment, I'd assumed she lived in the building and had come outside to vape. "He was a professor of mine, a long time ago. I came here because…I don't know why. I had dinner with him yesterday. Was supposed to have dinner with him again tomorrow. Or, today, I guess it is now. His poor family. Are you—"

  She leaned back and extended her hand through the window. "Shannon Brass."

  Shaking her hand awkwardly, I tried to place the name. "So you're…I know that name."

  She handed me a business card. "Public Occurrences."

  I nodded. "You guys did the thing on the stadium, right?" It was too dark to read her card, so I tossed it on the passenger seat.

  "We did. And it's not 'guys.'"

  "I meant, 'people.'"

  She smiled and shook her head. "I don't mind being called 'guy,' what I'm saying is it shouldn't be plural. Public Occurrences is just me. I am the staff."

  "Oh, sorry."

  She shrugged. "How would you have known?"

  "You put up a good front. Seems like a professional operation."

  Public Occurrences was a small independent site dedicated to investigative journalism. I didn't read it regularly, but a story about a shady stadium land use deal got picked up by the major local papers a few months ago. The name of the outfit had stuck in my head because of its place in journalism history. "You named the site?"

  "I get asked about the name a lot." Her voice changed into a more perfunctory tone. "The first multi-page newspaper ever published in the United States was called Publick—with a 'k'—Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic. First published—"

  "In 1690 in Boston." She looked relieved to not have to say the whole thing, but I felt I needed to explain the interruption. "Still remember that from Professor Burnside's history of journalism class. We had to memorize maybe fifty important newspapers from American history for the final."

  Shannon looked back at the front of the building, where the two officers were taking down the police tape.

  "Were you here tonight because of Burnside?" I asked.

  She nodded toward the scene. "C'mon."

  The clunk of my car door was too loud in the quiet night as I followed her across the street. She stopped between two cars parked a couple yards from the blood-splattered sidewalk, then pointed up. "He was staying on the seventeenth floor. Renting an Airbnb for two-twenty a night. Gorgeous apartment." She held up her phone, which was open to a series of photos of the rental on the Airbnb app.

  "Okay," I said tentatively. How did she already know so much?

  "I also spoke with the doorman, a maintenance guy who arrived for his shift about an hour before the time of death, and staff from the coffeeshop across the street and the deli on the corner."

  She said it like she was leading up to some grand conclusion. "And?"

  "And nothing."

  "They didn't tell you anything interesting?"

  "Not yet. I've been talking to everyone I can for the last two hours. Nothing interesting yet, but it's early."

  "It's like one in the morning."

  "Early in the investigation, I mean."

  She spoke like I was a demanding editor and she was trying to convince me she was working hard on the story even though she hadn't yet uncovered anything worth printing. I'd had that conversation with my editors many times back in the day. I guess, not unlike myself, she had set aside her grief by diving into her work. "Investigation?"

  "How did you hear about Burnside's death?"

  "The cops had me ID his body. I should have gone straight home but I was too shook up."

  Shannon pulled a notebook from the inside pocket of her jacket and scribbled something.

  "What are you writing?" I asked.

  "That you had dinner with him last night and were planning to have dinner with him tonight."

  I offered up a blank stare.

  "That's an angle I'm going to want to follow up on."

  "What? What are you talking about? Police say this was a suicide."

  "I know. Two different officers told me the same thing. And maybe it was."

  "Then why are you treating this like you're Robert Redford in All the President's Men?"

  Shannon stepped back and sat on the trunk of a car. "Look, I know you've made choices in your journalism career. You stopped being a shoe-leather reporter years ago in favor of being"—she shrugged and shook her head—"a media mogul. But the most famous journalist in America—probably in the world—just splattered on the sidewalk ten feet from here. The blood hasn't fully dried. And there are a lot of people who would have wanted him dead. Now, I didn't know the man. Maybe this was a suicide." She leveled her gaze at me. "It's also possible it wasn't. The cops told you it was a suicide, but you don't know either. What the hell happened to reporters talking to people and gathering information, before forming a judgment? Or, worse yet, before blindly accepting the version of events provided to them by the cops?"

  It's the kind of speech Holden Burnside himself could have given, would have given. The way she'd said you've made choices in your journalism career reminded me of Burnside calling me his best and worst student. It carried an edge, like she was calling me a sellout. But I was about twenty years older and, despite my choices, I'd done a hell of a lot more real journalism than she had. "How's your site work?" I tried to hide my smirk. "How do you make money, if you don't mind me asking."

  "Online." Her tone suggested I hadn't successfully hidden my smirk. She cleared her throat like she was about to give a speech she'd given before. "For decades, newspapers were a decent business. Not a great business—never a great business—but they could return profits of eight to twelve percent annually. Then investment bankers got involved, and they demanded twenty-five percent profits. Quickest way to cut costs was to fire reporters, especially experienced reporters. Then the internet happened. People think subscriptions is how newspapers made money, but most of their revenue came from classified ads. When all those moved online—Craigslist and similar sites—a good chunk of revenue dried up. Add to that all the mistakes newspapers made, like giving away their content free in the early days of the internet and tainting their reputations by cozying up to bigwigs, and you're left with what we have today: a world where it's almost impossible for real investigative journalism to be profitable."

  "You still haven't told me how you make money? Trust fund?"

  Her look told me I'd offended her. "I come from next to nothing. I use Patreon. My readers contribute monthly to fund the site."

  I knew the model, but I was skeptical it could work over the long term. "You must be doing something right."

  She peered at the balcony again. "Have you watched Burnside's YouTube video about the three rules of journalism?"

  I laughed quietly.

  "What?" she demanded.

  "I was just thinking about that speech. He gave it to our class at Columbia."

  "You're so lucky to have been his student. Anyway, you know the three rules."

  "I know them, but he may have been the last journalist to actually follow them."

  Shannon whacked me on the shoulder with her notebook. "There are more of us than you think."

  "That's the real reason I'm here," I said. "Police said he didn't have a notebook on him, which I thought was weird. I thought maybe I'd see it, maybe it would
be...I don't know what I thought."

  Shannon shrugged. "There could be a lot of reasons he didn't have it on him when he died."

  "True, but he always had it on him. Ugh, I don't know. I should be getting home. My wife is probably wondering where I am." I turned and walked toward my car, but stopped in the middle of the deserted street. "What's your plan with this? The Burnside story, I mean."

  "No plan, I guess. I don't run breaking news unless I have something the local papers don't. They'll run with Burnside's death. CNN will do a cheesy obit. I won't run anything on my site unless I find something worth running. I don't feel right charging people for recycled news."

  "Makes sense. Nice meeting you." I resumed the march to my car before adding, "Good luck with the site."

  Chapter 3

  New York City, Wednesday, 4 PM

  The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity sits on the north side of West 65th Street in New York City, just a block from Central Park. When the taxi stopped out front, I recognized it immediately as the church the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man steps on and crushes in the first Ghostbusters film.

  I hadn't been to the city in years and rarely missed it, but Greta had been talking about visiting ever since Cleo was born. So when my old friend Lance Brickman called to tell me Mrs. Burnside wanted me at the funeral, we made arrangements to fly out.

  The service would be a long, traditional Lutheran affair—not a great place for Cleo—so Greta opted to skip it. She'd never met Burnside anyway and space would be at a premium. We parted ways before the church, Greta taking advantage of the unseasonably warm day to take Cleo to Central Park.

  I took a seat in the back of the church a couple rows from Lance, who caught my eye as I came in. The pastor opened the ceremony with a hymn and I listened with half an ear, looking around the room as he gave readings from both the Old and New Testaments. I settled into my seat surrounded by a who's who of American journalism and media figures. The managing editor of The New York Times was there. To his right sat the politics editor of NBC news. In front of her, a producer and anchor team from CNN and the host of Fox News Sunday. Burnside's funeral was as close to a state funeral as possible in the journalism world, and I doubted a more distinguished group of men and women from the news business had gathered in the same room this decade. There was also a section of politicians near the front—the mayor of New York, a governor or two, even a senator from Burnside's home state of Connecticut. Next to the politicians I could make out the back of Sheila Burnside's head next to a younger woman I assumed was their daughter.