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

by A. C. Fuller

  Shannon shifted her gaze from the phone back to Gunstott. "Why didn't you want him to become president?" she asked quietly. "I mean, other than the FCC?"

  Without opening his eyes, Gunstott smiled. My guess was he was impressed that Shannon knew about the FCC angle. "We believed Payton Rhodes was a reformer posing as a centrist in order to get elected. A JFK-type. Some of my friends in the corrections industry didn't want him elected. Some of my friends in the military didn't want him elected. I could bring him down. Simple."

  "And you used Burnside to get the story out?" I asked.

  "I did."

  "Did Burnside know why you were feeding him the story?"

  "He didn't care."

  "Why not?" Shannon asked.

  I already knew the answer. Breaking a major story is a like being on a drug. It makes you feel bigger, more important. Excited and afraid and powerful all at the same time. I was no Burnside, but I knew the feeling. I also knew that, when feeling it, most reporters care only about whether the story is true, not why they're getting it.

  "He confirmed the details independently," Gunstott said. "The story was true. It was fact."

  Shannon frowned. "And that was enough for him?"

  "That's always enough," Gunstott said.

  Thinking back over my career, I had to agree. Even when we know we're being used by a source, most journalists will break a story if it's both true and newsworthy. Looking at it from this perspective, much of political history can be understood as a contest between which camps were most effective at working the press. In the 1988 election, it was Dewey Gunstott's camp.

  Gunstott opened his mouth, but nothing came out. I leaned in, studying his quivering lips, but couldn't make out what he struggled to say. It was as though he'd run out of gas.

  Shannon sensed that our interview was almost over. "Mr. Gunstott, please. One last question. We know Burnside was working on a book about himself. A book that made a bold claim: that he was essentially an unwitting CIA asset for his entire career. The Payton Rhodes story was part of that. Also, Detroit Estates. Probably others. And we believe he was killed over the book. Do you believe that and, if so, do you have any idea who would have wanted him dead?"

  My first thought was: why the hell would she ask that? Sure, Gunstott was near death, but if she was right that people were dying over this conspiracy, why let Gunstott know we know that? If we were right, with one call he could make sure we were next.

  The question hung in the air. Gunstott was still.

  I stared hard at his chest to see if he was still breathing. He was.

  "He's asleep," I said to Shannon.

  "He wasn't going to answer that anyway," she said.

  "Probably not." I leaned in. "Why'd you ask?"

  "He's not gonna tell anyone, Alex. I know what a dying man looks like."

  We sat there for a minute that felt like twenty. We exchanged glances, but neither of us spoke. I couldn't believe what had just happened, and I don't think Shannon could either. The sound of the door creaking open behind us snapped the tension. Myron Gunstott's head emerged from behind it.

  "He just fell asleep," Shannon said, stowing the phone back in her bag.

  Myron eyed her, then turned to me as he stepped into the room. "How did it go?"

  "Fine." I tapped Shannon's forearm in a let's-get-out-of-here way.

  We thanked Myron and hurried down the stairs, leaving him in the room with his father. When you get quotes like the ones we just got, you don't wait around to ask the son if it's okay to run them. We got the quotes from the man himself, we confirmed he knew he was on record, and that's all we needed.

  Shannon and I huddled under a tree half a block from the house as I ordered a Lyft. "How 'bout we head back to my office and talk through what just happened?"

  "Right," Shannon said. "Unless I imagined what happened over the last twenty minutes, we just got Dewey Gunstott on record admitting he used Holden Burnside to determine the outcome of the 1988 election. He confirmed Burnside was a CIA asset without ever knowing it. Holy hell. I mean, oh my God." The words poured out, like she couldn't speak them quickly enough. "And we know Burnside was writing about it, which is enough of a motive to kill him. Now we just need to find out who pulled the trigger, so to speak."

  I glanced down at my phone to check on the car, but was greeted by text from Bird.

  Bird: Another journalist is dead. Get back to the office now! Be safe.

  Chapter 11

  Shannon and I sat side by side at my desk. We each had our phones propped up on our laptop screens, staring at a total of four screens between us. On the ride from the Gunstott residence, we'd learned all we could about the dead journalist by reading media reports and texting a cop Shannon knew.

  The dead journalist’s name was Micah Baumgartner, science editor at The Seattle Times. I didn't know him, but I knew of him.

  Baumgartner was found just after dawn on a bench at Green Lake in Seattle, a .22 on the ground by his feet. A single bullet had entered his right temple, passed through his frontal lobe, and exited his head around the left eye socket. A jogger found him only minutes after death, slipping on a trail of blood running across the jogging path. As in the case of Holden Burnside, it appeared to be suicide.

  At least at first.

  The night before, Baumgartner had told multiple people he was meeting a source early the next morning. He didn't tell anyone who the source was or what the meeting was about. On its own, this wasn't odd for a journalist at his level. A younger reporter might have shared the name of the source with an editor, but not someone at Baumgartner's level. He'd been at the paper for thirty years, won several awards, and had risen to prominence as one of the top environmental reporters in the country. What I did find odd was that Baumgartner was meeting a source in the first place. A senior editor, Baumgartner didn't break much news. He rarely wrote, and when he did, the pieces were long and thoughtful, usually taking months of quantitative research no one else was willing to do. A dawn meeting with a mysterious source in a park wasn't his style.

  The media was going crazy. All the local papers would run it on the front page tomorrow, and, after it leaked that it was a likely suicide, the local NBC affiliate announced that there was a "suicide contagion" among Seattle journalists.

  Shannon and I had our doubts. More and more, we came to the same conclusions at the same time and communicated them without words. She'd opened an app on her phone that she used to text with cops anonymously. I'd opened Twitter on my laptop and clicked to my list of Seattle breaking news reporters. Both of us looked for clues that Baumgartner's death wasn't, in fact, a suicide.

  Bird knocked on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. "We're reporting on the Baumgartner death but not really saying anything. I know it looks like a suicide but…is that what you're hearing?"

  I held Bird's gaze a moment. I knew what he was getting at. He could read me as well as Greta could. He said when I was concealing something about a story, my "energy got tight." I still don't know what that means, but he guessed right every time.

  "I don't want to say too much right now," I said. "But—and Shannon tell me if you disagree—I'd be surprised if this turns out to be a suicide."

  "You want David on it?"

  David was a former sports reporter we'd stolen from ESPN Seattle to cover the political and social aspects of sports. He'd become our go-to guy for breaking news in Seattle, a subject we rarely covered. "Yeah, send him out to Green Lake. Tell him to keep his phone handy."

  "I don't need to tell him that." Bird tapped the wall a few times—his sign he was on it—then left.

  As the door shut, Shannon said, "Look at this."

  Her laptop was open to her personal Facebook feed. She pointed to a post from a woman named Mary Brown. "I did a search for mutual friends between me and Baumgartner. Mary is our only mutual friend. She's a copy editor at The Seattle Times. I tried to cultivate her as a source after meeting her in an MMA clas
s a year ago. Never panned out—she wouldn't give me anything. But we stayed friends."

  "Wait, you took MMA classes, too?"

  "Two years, I could take you down in like ten seconds. Read the post."

  Mary's post was a long, rambling block of text posted forty-three minutes ago. It used little punctuation. "She's a copy editor?" I frowned.

  "I've noticed that people who spend all their time being sticklers for language and punctuation write like trash on their personal social media."

  I pointed to a couple sentences in the middle of the post. "That what you're getting at?"

  "Yup."

  The section read, "I'm completely torn up and confused about all of this--Micah was a strong supporter of gun control I don't think he ever owned a gun...he wouldn't even let his kids play violent video games."

  "Do you know how well she knew him?" I asked. "A lot of people are for gun control while also owning guns themselves. Would she have known if he owned a gun?"

  "They worked together more than ten years. I think they were actual friends."

  She scrolled to the comment section of the post. A woman named Zoya Adisa had posted a comment only seconds ago. "So sorry for your loss, for all our losses. For the world's loss. I met Micah only once, but it was at a vigil for the people killed in the shooting at the Tacoma mall last year. I simply will not believe he took his own life with a firearm. I pray for his children."

  "He didn't kill himself," Shannon declared. "I'll bet he was murdered and, I know I'm jumping the gun here, but I bet there's a connection to Burnside, to the CIA."

  "You're jumping a whole arsenal." I walked to the window. The street below was mostly deserted. Everyone was staying inside to avoid the rain. "Since when did two random commenters online become enough to prove someone didn't own a gun and was therefore murdered?"

  Shannon didn't reply, and I turned to see her on my laptop. "Do you have David's number in your messages app?"

  "Yes, but…"

  "Got it. I'm sending him screenshots of the Facebook posts. Is it okay if I text like it's from you?"

  "And say what?"

  "That this obviously wasn't a suicide and to question the police or any potential witnesses from that angle."

  "He's a good reporter. He'll go in with a clean slate. But sure, text him the screenshots. Don't say 'obviously,' though. Say 'possibly.'"

  She sighed and tapped my keyboard. "Sent."

  "Back to my question," I said. "When did Facebook comments become evidence?"

  "They're not enough evidence to publish anything, but if you think social media can't provide clues or a general direction, you've been asleep the last ten years."

  She scooched back to her chair and I sat at my laptop. "Have the police said anything official yet?"

  "No. My source said what I already told you. Found dead, single gunshot wound to the head. His fingerprints were on the gun. Likely suicide."

  "Who's your source?"

  "You’re not my editor, Alex."

  "I know. I'm not asking for their name. But I mean, is it a detective, someone high up?"

  "No, it's a newbie, which is another reason I'm convinced it was murder. Dude is an okay source, but not someone who would know the difference between suicide and a badly-staged suicide on first glance."

  "I don't feel great about this," I said, "but until we hear something from David, or from the police, I guess it can't hurt to look into the CIA angle."

  Chapter 12

  Over the next hour, Shannon and I went through every story we could find by Micah Baumgartner. Shannon was sure we'd find CIA connections all over his pieces, as we did with Burnside. I was sure that, if we looked hard enough at any prominent journalist's career, we could find a CIA connection. When you spend thirty years writing about the environment, you're bound to deal with a lot of government agencies, politicians, and businesses. And at least a handful of those are going to have former CIA agents working for them, or have people who left to become CIA agents. That alone isn't enough to prove anything.

  To my surprise, we didn't even find that.

  Most of Baumgartner's sources were on-the-record. The sort of reporting he did didn't need a lot of anonymous quotes. By lunchtime, we'd come up with nothing. Literally nothing.

  "It doesn't mean anything," Shannon said between bites of pizza. "So there are no clear connections. They're gonna be there. I bet that—"

  "Alex!" Bird was at the door, waving me out into the main office space. Much of our staff was facing the wall, heads tilted up, staring at a large flat-screen TV. "Police briefing on the Baumgartner case is about to start."

  We followed Bird out and watched along with the rest of the office. The scene was a typical police briefing, hastily organized in a little wood-paneled room with an old podium that displayed a banner printed with the Seattle PD logo. A woman stepped to the podium, where four or five microphones jutted toward her from all angles.

  "Thanks for coming. I'm Officer Miranda Washington. We've been inundated with requests for comments and information regarding the death of Micah Baumgartner. I will serve as media contact on this case." She looked down, studying her notes.

  "She's good," Bird said. "Poised."

  "You know they're flooded with calls when they trot someone out there less than half a day into the investigation."

  "We have an announcement regarding the case," she continued, her voice steady, "then I'll take your questions. Our initial findings indicate that Micah Baumgartner's death was likely not self-inflicted, contrary to the stories that circulated widely in the first few hours after the body was located. An initial investigation by Detectives Mark Graber and Maria DaVinci—yes, spelled like the painter—indicate that multiple parties were involved in this death. It is now being investigated as a homicide. In a moment, I will take your questions, but I will say that, at this time, I will not comment on any of the specific details that led detectives Graber and DaVinci to suspect homicide. And one more thing—at this time we also ask the media to respect Mr. Baumgartner's family—he is survived by a wife and two daughters who are grappling with this tremendous loss and we ask that you leave them alone until they speak out if they choose to do so. Now, questions."

  She called on a young reporter in the front row, who shouted a question I didn't hear.

  "The question was about the connection between Baumgartner's death and the death of Holden Burnside, who was found dead a few days ago. At this time, there is no connection."

  Another reporter jumped in, close enough to the mics that his question made it on air. "But if you are now investigating Baumgartner's death as a badly-staged suicide, is it any great leap to think that Holden Burnside's death—until now assumed to be a suicide—could also have been staged?"

  Washington looked exasperated. "Yes, it's too big a leap to make. Apparently, it's not too big a leap for you to make, since you made it within sixty seconds of my announcement. Good grief." With that, she left the podium in disgust as reporters shouted questions after her.

  Within minutes, the story had taken a ninety-degree turn online. Within hours, that turn was reflected on the local news. A few hours after that, it hit the cable networks. CNN's Anderson Cooper opened his show with the subject: Journalist Murders Staged as Suicides? The story had gone national.

  Shannon and I watched in my office, taking in Cooper's reassuring voice over dinner. "Shocking developments out of Seattle today, where a second legendary journalist has been found dead only four days after the death of Holden Burnside. Tonight, we'll be talking to friends of Micah Baumgartner, winner of two Pulitzer prizes and perhaps the most acclaimed environmental reporter in American history. Full disclosure, Mr. Baumgartner has appeared on this program three times as a commentator, and I considered him—while not a personal friend—certainly a friend of the show."

  Cooper went on to lay out the facts as we already knew them, and while he never said Holden Burnside's death was connected to Baumgartner's, he opened the
question in a way that would get the debate rolling nationally.

  We'd spent the afternoon following every lead we could think of, trying to connect Burnside and Baumgartner. Since we'd suspected Burnside was murdered days before everyone else did, we figured we were ahead of the game and would be able to suss out a connection fairly quickly.

  Boy, were we wrong.

  Not for lack of trying, we found nothing linking them that felt anything more than coincidental. Shannon's best efforts to link Baumgartner to the CIA came up empty. We'd watched Anderson Cooper in case one of his guests had any new information, but it became clear within the first few minutes of the show that it would raise more questions than it answered.

  My guess was that Anderson's team had spent the afternoon trying to find information and come up as empty as we had. Most likely, they'd been working sources within the Seattle PD to learn everything they could about the Burnside case. Playing catch-up like the rest of the journalists in the country. But they had nothing new. Just guest after guest either offering empty speculation or Baumgartner's family members rehashing statements they'd already made to the press about his disdain for guns and their belief that he would never have committed suicide. It was moving television, but none of it moved the story forward one iota.

  At the end of the show, I closed my laptop and stowed it in my bag. "I gotta get home. You're welcome to stay and use the office, use our Wifi or whatever."

  Shannon was on her fifth or sixth cup of coffee. When she'd learned we had unlimited cold brew on tap, she ditched her slow-sip method and chugged it like water. She was wired.

  "It's only nine o'clock, old man. You're crapping out on me?"

  "Don't you know that every year of a journalist's career counts as twenty months? That makes me like sixty-five instead of fifty. So yeah, I'm an old man in journalism years."