by R. G. Belsky
Faron looked like he was about to have a heart attack next to me
“Pretty much,” Kaiser said softly.
“So why don’t we just get to the point you really want to find out from us? About the note at the crime scene which mysteriously includes your name for some reason. How do we keep a lid on this? How do we avoid you being drawn into a messy murder case in some way? How do we contain this?”
“Okay, so how do we contain it?” Kaiser asked me.
“We don’t,” I responded.
“Uh, what Clare means is …” Faron started to say.
Kaiser interrupted him.
“Let her say what she means,” he said.
“Mr. Kaiser, you must realize this is going to come out in the media,” I told him. “Sooner or later, probably sooner. I know about it. Faron knows. People in the police department know. They talk to other reporters too. Reporters from other stations, newspapers, and all the TMZ-like websites that have sprouted up out there too. Bottom line here is there are three possible reasons you’re on that list: 1) You’re a potential victim next; 2) you’re a possible murder suspect in this; or 3) it was completely random and has no direct connection with you. I’m assuming—I’m really, really hoping—that it’s reason No. 3. So our plan should be this: We don’t try to contain it. We break the story ourselves. Total transparency. We—or more specifically you—have nothing to hide. We’re the station that tells the news as it is, even if we have some kind of personal interest. Even if the story is about our own boss.”
There was a long silence after I was finished. Kaiser didn’t say anything. Faron didn’t say anything. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t said anything. But Kaiser finally nodded and smiled at me.
“Go ahead. I’m still listening.”
“We break it on the 11 o’clock news tonight. Everyone will pick it up. The other stations, the papers, all the websites—but it will be our story right from the beginning.”
“We could have Brett and Dani make the announcement at the top of the newscast,” Faron said, jumping on board with my idea now. “They’re very respected and trusted in the news business.”
Kaiser shook his head no.
“I want you to break the story,” he told me.
“On the air?”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“It was your idea, you should be the one to do it.”
“All right, I guess I can. But I still don’t understand why—”
“There’s more,” Kaiser said. “I have one more condition if I agree to go ahead with this. But it’s a big condition.”
I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I was about to find out.
“I want you to be the reporter on this. I want you to go on air and talk about any stories we do on this. I want you to handle all the reporting—or at least the bulk of it. I want you to be the face of Channel 10 on the screen breaking whatever news comes out of this in the coming days.”
I looked over at Faron. Now he was the quiet one in the room, and it was up to me to say something significant or meaningful or perceptive.
“Why me?” I said again.
It was the only thing I could think of.
“I read up on you. You won a Pulitzer Prize as a newspaper reporter. You did a great job reporting on a lot of other big stories. You’re the best reporter we have here. And I want the best. This is about me and I want answers. I want to know why I’ve been dragged into all this. I want to know who’s behind this. I need to use the best possible tools I have at my disposal to get those answers. That’s why I want you to cover the story first hand for us.”
I hesitated before answering. Normally, I would have jumped at the chance to get back out there reporting a big story myself again. Normally, reporting was the thing I loved to do best. But these weren’t normal times for me. I finally told Kaiser I’d do it, but he picked up on my reluctance.
“C’mon, Carlson.” He smiled. “Maybe you’ll win another Pulitzer. What have you got to lose? Do you have something more important to do right now than throw yourself into this story?”
Actually, I did.
But I couldn’t tell Brendan Kaiser what it was.
I couldn’t tell anyone.
CHAPTER 7
A LIFETIME AGO, when I was a nineteen-year-old college freshman, I had a baby girl after a one-night stand with a guy I never saw again. I gave the baby up for adoption. I didn’t think about it much for a long time after that.
Then, eleven years later, I met my daughter again. Briefly. Her name was Lucy, and she lived with a family named Devlin right here in New York City. Neither she nor the Devlins knew that I was really Lucy’s biological mother. Soon after that she was kidnapped and presumed murdered in a sensational New York City crime story. It rivaled the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz during the seventies as the most famous missing child case in the city’s history.
I covered the story as a newspaper reporter—still never telling anyone about my relationship with Lucy Devlin—and won a Pulitzer Prize and became a pretty big media star because of it. Did I feel any guilt over profiting on my dead daughter? Sure, but I sublimated that guilt to someplace deep down inside me just like I did when I gave her up for adoption.
Last year, I discovered the shocking news that my daughter might still be alive.
I then compromised my journalistic integrity to cover up a powerful politician’s role in Lucy’s disappearance—and other likely crimes—in order to get him to tell me how to find her.
He still has not done that.
So I had become increasingly consumed over the past few months over what to do next—and by the questions that haunted me along with this.
These questions were:
1) Was my daughter alive?
2) Where was she?
3) What would happen if I ever did meet her?
The consequences of this act of giving birth—which I’d barely thought about when I was nineteen—had become the most important thing in my life as a forty-five-year-old woman.
Even more important than a big story involving Grace Mancuso and Dora Gayle and Brendan Kaiser and all the rest.
But, like I said, I couldn’t tell anyone that.
Not even my best friend, Janet.
I had brought it up in a general way with Janet recently. I’d been struggling to find an intelligent, reasonable way to track down my daughter if she was still alive. I couldn’t think of any intelligent, reasonable way to do that. So I decided I’d try something stupid. I was that desperate.
“Whatever happened to that guy Todd Schacter you got acquitted?” I asked Janet.
“The computer hacker?”
“Right.”
Janet shrugged.
“He’s probably online right now stealing someone else’s private information, just like he did last time.”
Todd Schacter had been arrested after breaking into a Fortune 500 company’s computer files. He published on his website all the details of the company’s top officers—including salaries, expense accounts, cars and other perks, plus even their home addresses in case disgruntled stockholders wanted to show up at their door to complain.
“If you thought what he did was illegal, why did you represent him?” I asked.
“I’m a lawyer. I represent people who are guilty and innocent. That’s what a lawyer does.”
“How did you get him acquitted anyway?”
“Did you ever hear of the First Amendment?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, I just stretched the First Amendment a bit.”
I asked her a few more questions about Schacter and then I got to the point.
“Can you tell me how to contact him?”
“Why?”
“I want to hire him.”
“For what?”
“Do you remember Elliott Grayson? Our former federal prosecutor and now U.S. Senator?”
“Sure, I do. You had an affair with him last year
. Then you covered him in that missing girl case. Lucy Devlin.”
She knew nothing, of course, about Lucy Devlin being my biological daughter—the daughter I’d given up at birth years earlier.
Or that Elliott Grayson was the politician I’d made a secret deal with last November that helped him get elected to the Senate in return for information on my daughter.
I’d discovered that Grayson had been involved in Lucy’s long-ago kidnapping off a Manhattan street—ostensibly as a kind of vigilante justice act to save her from an abusive family situation—as well as several other missing child cases. But I had never told anyone about this or aired the story. In return, Grayson promised to tell me how to find Lucy after the election was over. Except he’d never done that. I’d tried everything to force him to tell me the truth about my daughter, but none of it had worked.
“I need someone to hack into Grayson’s computer files.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, I know. I figured that would be your reaction.’
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I’m your best friend.”
“That’s why I can’t tell you.”
Janet shook her head.
“He’s a U.S. Senator. You could get yourself in real legal trouble with this, Clare.”
“Then I’ll hire you to defend me.”
“How would I do that?”
“Ever hear of a little something called the First Amendment?” I smiled.
She sighed.
“Listen, this guy Schacter is really scary. I mean he spies on anyone’s records. I was concerned for a while that he was going through my files and my records and my bank accounts.”
“Sounds like the person I’m looking for.”
“What do you think is in Elliott Grayson’s computer files that’s so important? No, wait a minute … don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, Janet. Just put me in touch with Schacter. Or you don’t even have to do that. Just let me know some way to contact him. You don’t have to be involved at all.”
Janet took out her phone, looked up his information, and clicked on it. She held up the phone screen so I could see and copy it. I had to do it by hand. She refused to even send an email to me with it that might leave some kind of trail back to her if this all went bad.
“Be careful, Clare,” she said after she put the phone away. “I know what you’re doing must be important to you. But this is a slippery slope you’re going down here, my friend.”
She was right about that.
It sure was a slippery slope
Slipperier than she could imagine.
CHAPTER 8
THE FIRST THING I decided to do on the Grace Mancuso/Brendan Kaiser story was find out more about the people involved. All the people on the note found next to Mancuso’s body, plus Mancuso herself. Accumulate as much information as I could on them. Then see if there was a connection or link I could find between these six seemingly disparate lives that might somehow explain the note.
And so, on the morning after I broke the story on air for Channel 10 about the bizarre note at the crime scene, I started digging on this. I’d worked out an agreement with Faron that I’d still function as news editor for as long as the story took, but he would take over a lot of the day-to-day duties so I could focus on reporting. I also had free rein to use any of the station’s reporting staff to help me. Kaiser had balked at this initially, saying he only wanted me doing this story because of the sensitive nature of it for him. But I convinced him it was necessary that I use the station’s reporting resources. He finally agreed, as long as all the information came through me.
I have to admit there was a part of me that was grateful to be able to work on a big story like this.
Working on a big story has always been an escape for me from the problems in my life—bad romances, failed marriages, and even a missing daughter. I threw myself into my reporting to avoid having to deal with whatever was bothering me. A big story made my problems fade into the background, at least for a while. A big story kept my mind focused on other things. A big story always made everything better for me.
Maggie had already started a lot of the research. By the time I got to my office a little after eight a.m., she had compiled files of information on all six of the people:
*Bill Atwood, former U.S. Congressman who was now a college president
*Emily Lehrman, high-profile defense attorney
*Scott Manning, NYPD homicide detective
*Dora Gayle, homeless woman found murdered several days earlier
*Brendan Kaiser, media mogul who owned Channel 10
*Grace Mancuso, the murder victim
I took a sip of the coffee I’d bought on my way—at the same store where Dora Gayle used to panhandle at the door, which seemed a bit sad for me—and began going through the information with Maggie.
We started with Bill Atwood. Much of his life was already pretty well known from his years on the public scene. For a while, he’d been the golden boy of American politics. A Rhodes scholar. A successful businessman for several years. After that, he went into public service—getting elected first to statewide office, then to Congress by an overwhelming majority of the voters.
He’d led a charmed life. His father was a wealthy real estate developer and a real mover and shaker in New York politics. Young Atwood grew up in a Sutton Place penthouse apartment; summered on Nantucket and in Europe; and attended Princeton before going to England on the Rhodes scholarship. He then had become a successful real estate developer himself before going into politics.
On the home front, he was married with a daughter. His wife, Nancy, was a formidable presence in her own right, a major player in both the New York political and cultural scene. Their daughter, Miranda, had been on the dean’s list with academic honors at Yale, where she also was a star athlete.
“Then it all began to fall apart,” Maggie said. “An intern in his congressional office filed a complaint against him for sexual harassment. She claimed Atwood propositioned her numerous times, made lewd remarks to her, and tried to fondle and touch her inappropriately. When she rejected his advances, she claimed, he ended her internship and gave the job to another young girl. She also told salacious stories she’d found out about Atwood and other women in his office.
“The women began coming out of the woodwork after that. Another intern who said she’d slept with him a dozen times. A stewardess who said she’d had a two-year affair with him. A Washington lobbyist who claimed he’d come on to her after a late-night meeting, then paid her to keep quiet. The House Ethics Committee eventually announced that Atwood had ‘agreed to resign’ from Congress to avoid any further action.”
He left Washington, but he didn’t leave the public eye. Within a few months, he was back. He went on the lecture tour, commanding $100,000 per appearance. He helped raise funds for other candidates and the party too, with a seemingly endless succession of benefits and appearances around the country. Then, a year ago, he was named president of Benson College in New York City. There was some opposition from educators who felt he wasn’t a proper role model for students. But the board of the school and the alumni and most of the student body embraced him wholeheartedly. He was a popular guy, a charismatic figure who could put their school on the map.
And that’s just what he’d done. There were speeches, TV appearances, fund-raisers—he even wrote a best-selling book about U.S. politics. Bill Atwood was a happening guy again. People knew what he had done, but somehow it didn’t seem to bother them. A recent poll had showed that a majority of people would vote for him again if he ever ran for another public office.
Emily Lehrman was the kind of rich, super-successful lawyer who made people mad.
There was an interview with her in a legal magazine in which she almost seemed to flaunt her role as a poster girl for everything that people hated about the profession.
> “My job is to win cases and make money doing it,” she told the interviewer. “It’s that simple. I don’t care whether my client is guilty, innocent or somewhere in between. I represent anyone that wants to pay me for the best legal representation that money can buy. What I’m doing is what everyone else does in other professions. Making money. I just make more of it than most other people do.”
“Charming woman, huh?” Maggie said.
“I guess that’s why people love lawyers so much.”
It turned out that Lehrman wasn’t always that money-hungry though. At first, after graduating from law school, she went into public defender practice in New York. Her specialty had been representing tenants—most of them poor—against unscrupulous landlords. There were several small newspaper articles from that period of her cases. One involved representing a homeless man who’d been arrested for vagrancy. She also worked extensively with tenants who’d been evicted as well as squatters—people living illegally in condemned or otherwise uninhabitable buildings because they had no place else to go.
“After that there was nothing about her for a few years until she suddenly turned up representing a mobster with a long record on a gun possession charge,” Maggie said. “These days she’s in the media a lot in connection with a series of high profile cases. Underworld figures, drug czars, and big-money white collar crime. Weird, isn’t it? Almost as if there were two Emily Lehrmans. Except there wasn’t. I checked with the American Bar Association.”
So what happened? Why did it take Emily Lehrman so long to figure out where the money was?
More importantly, what did any of this have to do with the story?
I sure didn’t know.
Scott Manning was a decorated police officer who had been with the NYPD for more than twenty years.
He graduated from the police academy at the top of his class and started working as a uniformed patrolman. He did well on the street, moving up to detective and then sergeant and finally homicide lieutenant—with lots of commendations along the way. He lived with his wife and three children in Staten Island, where he was a volunteer fireman in the community and also helped to coach Little League on Saturdays. At first glance, Scott Manning seemed to be a good cop and a good father and an all-around good guy.
