Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  Maybe Rodgers could tell us more.

  “Diane Rodgers is twenty-three years old, with curly dark hair and a body that makes men drool,” Maggie said to me after I asked her to find out whatever she could about the Rodgers woman.

  “She flunked out of Benson College the semester before this one, but then suddenly reemerged as an employee in Atwood’s office. He gave her the job as his executive assistant over several more qualified applicants, from what I’m told. But I guess she had the type of qualifications he was looking for.

  “The people we talked to say she’s not very good at typing or taking dictation or even answering the phone or any other of the usual executive assistant duties. But, like I said, she’s definitely supposed to be very good to look at in an office—or anywhere else, I guess, for that matter.”

  “That all makes sense,” I said when she was finished. “I sensed a lot of sexual tension between the two of them that day in the office I was there.”

  “If she’s really involved with Atwood, she can’t be happy about that Sandy Underhill interview that just aired.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. She’s mad, she’s jealous—a woman scorned and all.”

  “So we think that Atwood was sleeping with Diane Rodgers. Also, with Sandy Underhill, the coed on campus. Maybe even having sex with Grace Mancuso too. And, at the same time all this torrid sex and passion is going on, Atwood’s got his wife waiting at home for him.”

  “Bill Atwood was a very busy guy,” I said.

  I staked out the building that evening on the Benson College campus where Atwood had his office. I saw him leaving at one point carrying a briefcase and hurriedly getting into a cab. I wondered if he was rushing off to a meeting or some other sexual tryst somewhere. A few others went in and out of the building afterward until I finally saw Diane Rodgers emerge.

  I waited until she was walking across campus and then caught up with her.

  “Hi, I met you in Bill Atwood’s office the other day,” I said when I got her attention.

  “You’re the TV reporter,” she said.

  She didn’t say it like it was a good thing.

  “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” I said.

  “I have nothing to say.”

  She turned and began walking away.

  “Did you watch the Sandy Underhill interview on TV?” I yelled out. “I imagine that was quite a shock to you. I’ll bet Atwood didn’t tell you anything about her, huh? Or any of his other women. Don’t you figure there’s got to be other women out there? I’d bet on it.”

  She stopped walking, then stood frozen there for a few seconds. When she finally turned around and looked back at me, I could see she was crying.

  “Don’t let Atwood play you for a fool, Diane,” I said. “You need to do the right thing here. The right thing for you.”

  “He told me he was going to marry me,” she said afterward when I took her back to the station. “He said that he had to pretend to be a happily married man for the time being because of his political future. But then he said he would leave his wife and he would be with me all the time.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I wanted to,” she said with a shrug. “But I’ve been around men enough to know they always say things like that.”

  She talked about how she had met him at a seminar on Political Influences for the 21st Century at the college. She didn’t really care much about political influences. But she was intrigued by Atwood. He looked so handsome, so distinguished during all that sex scandal stuff on TV—she felt sorry those politicians in Washington were being so mean to him by making him resign. Now she wanted to see him in person.

  After the seminar, she stayed around and introduced herself and told him about how much she’d enjoyed his talk. Then they went out for coffee together. They didn’t sleep together that night. But they did the next time. That’s how she got the job as his assistant. Of course, she wasn’t exactly thrilled by all the aspects of their relationship. He said they had to keep it a secret. Not just from his wife, but from everyone else too—the university administrators, his political enemies, the media.

  They’d been sleeping together several nights a week for a while now. She hated it when he had to go home to his wife. She wondered what he told his wife about what he was doing and how he explained it. She asked him about it a few times, but he never wanted to talk about his wife. We have an arrangement, he would tell her.

  “I asked about his daughter once too. He got all emotional that time,” Rodgers said. “I could tell he really loved his daughter. I think that’s why he and his wife stayed together, for the sake of the daughter. But I kept hoping that one day his wife would be gone and I would be the only woman in his life.”

  She talked about how devastated she had been when she saw the Sandy Underhill interview about being in the hotel with Atwood. She’d suspected he might be seeing someone besides herself, but now she knew the truth. He was cheating on her as well as his wife. And that hotel—the one where Sandy Underhill said Atwood had taken her for sex—was the same one where Atwood had taken Diane Rodgers many times too. Probably they even had sex in the same room as her and Atwood. That was all really hard for her to take, she said.

  “I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping,” she told me at one point.

  “It’s never easy when you find out a man has lied to you,” I said sympathetically.

  “That’s not the reason I’m having trouble sleeping.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s something else. Something about the murder of that woman Grace Mancuso. Something I know about Bill and her. I was going to keep it a secret, but not now. I mean, it would be one thing if I thought I was going to become the next Mrs. Atwood. That might make him worth trying to protect. But seeing that woman on TV talking about the two of them, I see everything clearly now. I’m tired of being played for a fool by Bill Atwood.”

  I waited expectantly, hoping against hope she wouldn’t change her mind about telling me what she knew about Atwood that was bothering her. She didn’t. A few seconds later, the whole story came pouring out of Diane Rodgers.

  “I walked into Bill’s office while he was being interviewed by police about his name being found at the apartment of that murdered woman, Grace Mancuso. They asked him if he knew Grace Mancuso. He said no, that he had never met or heard of Grace Mancuso in his life until then.

  “It wasn’t until later that I remembered. He had gotten a call from a woman a few days earlier. She identified herself and asked to speak to Bill. He wasn’t there. I told the woman that and asked her if she wanted to leave a message. The woman said no. She said he was expecting her call and she’d call back later. She never did, at least while I was there. But I left soon afterward, and Bill could have answered his own phone when he came back. Or his voice mail could have picked it up.

  “That’s what’s been keeping me up nights, Ms. Carlson. Thinking about that call. I could be wrong, of course. I didn’t write the woman’s name down. And it all happened very fast. It’s possible that I just confused the name afterward with the one I’d heard on the TV newscasts. But I don’t think that’s what happened. No, now that I’ve thought about it a lot more, I’m sure I heard the name right.

  “The woman who called looking for Bill that day said her name was Grace Mancuso.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I WAS SITTING in a Starbucks the next morning reading a bunch of texts and online posts about our show the night before—and feeling pretty good about things—when a man I’d never seen before sat down next to me.

  “Hello, Clare,” he said.

  “Do we know each other?”

  “Aren’t you Clare Carlson?”

  “Yes.”

  “The woman from Channel 10 News?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then we know each other.”

  He was tall, skinny, and had long, unruly hair. It was hard to tell how old he was. He was on
e of those people who looked like he could be anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. The most noticeable thing about him was how nervous he seemed. He kept moving and twitching as he talked, blinking his eyes rapidly and looking around anxiously every few seconds at other people in the place. This guy was really wired. He wasn’t drinking any coffee or anything else, which was probably a good thing. Caffeine was the last thing he needed.

  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then why did you reach out to me?”

  “Uh, tell me exactly how I reached out to you.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  There was more twitching and blinking and looking around the room. Something was making him nervous.

  “Goddamit!” I said. “Will you stop answering my questions with more questions? Just sit still for a second and answer me one simple question: Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Todd Schacter,” he said.

  I stared at him in amazement. I’d been trying to reach this guy for weeks without success. And now he just sits down next to me in a coffee shop.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  “Your phone,” he said.

  I looked down at the phone in my hand.

  “You sent me a bunch of messages from it.”

  “But how …”

  “It’s like a beacon leading me right to you.”

  I quickly shut off the phone, which was sort of the classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse was gone.

  “Janet said you were very good at this sort of stuff.”

  “I am.”

  “How good?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know more about me than just being able to track my phone?”

  He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. All sorts of information about me was printed on it. My full name, Clare Ellen Carlson. My address. Birth date. Social security number. Mother’s maiden name. My job history. Even the account numbers and balances of my bank account and 401(k) account at the station.

  “What are you going to do with this?” I asked anxiously.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you search for it all?”

  “I figured you’d want proof.”

  “Proof?”

  “To show you how good I am.”

  “Okay, I’m convinced—you’re good.”

  “So what is it you want me to do?”

  I told him. Not all of it, just the part I needed his help on. Which was more than I’d ever told anyone. I didn’t like doing that, but I didn’t have a lot of other options at this point. I said I was looking for a daughter I’d given up at birth. How she’d grown up as Lucy Devlin for the first eleven years of her life, then disappeared. How I believed she was still alive somewhere. And that one man had the information that might help me find her. That was the information I needed him to get for me.

  “Who’s the man?” Schacter asked me when I was finished.

  “His name is Elliott Grayson.”

  “The Senator?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to hack into a U.S. Senator’s computer files?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way!”

  “You can’t do that?”

  “Oh, I can.”

  “But you won’t?”

  He shook his head no. The twitching was even worse now. He seemed more stressed out than ever by what I had just asked him to do.

  “I barely beat the computer hacking rap that your lawyer friend defended me on,” he said. “She was good, and I was lucky. I don’t want to press my luck. They’re watching me. They’ve been watching me ever since I walked out of that courtroom a free man. They’re probably watching us right now.”

  “Who’s watching?”

  “Everyone—the government, prosecutors, all the people out to get me. I’m trying to keep a low profile these days. You’re talking about a U.S. Senator here. Hacking into his files? They’d send me to prison for life if they caught me. No thanks.”

  “I’ll pay you whatever you want,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What can I do to get you to change your mind …” I started to say.

  But it was too late.

  Schacter had already stood up from the table we were at and was walking away.

  A few seconds later, he was walking out the door.

  And then he was gone.

  Just like my last chance to find Lucy.

  CHAPTER 28

  BILL ATWOOD CALLED a press conference for the next day after we aired the Diane Rodgers interview. He didn’t really have much of a choice. He needed to do something to answer all the questions being asked about him and the Grace Mancuso/Dora Gayle murders now.

  A statement from his office said his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Miranda, would appear with him. That was no surprise either. Having the wife and family at your side for an embarrassing moment like this was right out of the disgraced politician’s handbook. Elliott Spitzer did it when he was ousted as governor of New York in a call girl scandal—and that even became the premise of the hit TV show The Good Wife. Anthony Weiner did it with his wife, Huma, when he admitted to sending X-rated texts to young women as a congressman and afterward. Even Bill Clinton did it with Hillary dutifully supporting him.

  I figured it would be the same with Atwood this time.

  Except I was wrong.

  It started out traditionally enough as Atwood read a prepared statement to the press while his wife and daughter looked on.

  “First off, I want to apologize to all of you—but especially to my wife, Nancy, and daughter, Miranda. Two women have come forward in recent days to make sexual allegations against me.Although many of the details they stated are untrue, I clearly have exhibited unacceptable sexual behavior, which shows I have a continuing problem. And so, I plan to begin receiving treatment for sexual addiction as soon as possible.

  “Second, I now acknowledge that I did have a sexual relationship in college with Dora Gayle, one of the names on the list found at the Grace Mancuso crime scene and who is now also dead. I went to college in England after my relationship with Dora Gayle and never saw or talked to her again. I simply did not recognize her name on the list after all this time—or her, given the changes in her appearance and circumstances—until a TV report raised the issue about that long-ago relationship I had with the Gayle woman.

  “Finally, and most importantly, I had absolutely nothing to do with the murders of Grace Mancuso or Dora Gayle. To the best of my knowledge, I did not know Grace Mancuso and, as I said, I barely remembered Dora Gayle. I will cooperate with law enforcement authorities in any way I can to aid in the investigation of these cases and capture the perpetrator or perpetrators of these tragic murders.

  “Because this is an ongoing police investigation, I can’t really elaborate any more about this or answer any questions.”

  Watching it all unfold, I decided that Bill Atwood had handled the meeting with the media as deftly as he could.

  It had all gone according to plan for Atwood.

  But then suddenly—and shockingly unexpectedly—everything went off the rails for him.

  “Liar!” Nancy Atwood screamed at him as he started to leave the podium where he’d been speaking.

  He whirled around in surprise, walked back to the podium, and tried to take her offstage along with him.

  But it was now apparent that his wife had an agenda of her own for this public event.

  “I want to make my own statement,” she said to the stunned reporters. “I want to tell you the truth. Something my husband does not do very often.”

  The place was in an uproar, the media there putting all of this out live on the air. Atwood tried again to get her to leave the stage with him. But Nancy Atwood just stood there at the microphone with a grim look of determination on her face.

  “I thought I had come to terms with my hu
sband’s philandering a long time ago. On our honeymoon in Mexico, we made love on our wedding night like any other couple. The next morning, I went into town to do some shopping. When I got back to our room, I found him in bed with the chambermaid. I pretty much knew right then that we were not going to have a traditional marriage.

  “But I hung in there and stayed with Bill, through all the embarrassments and affairs over the years. I kept myself busy with charity causes, seminars, speeches, and an endless round of parties and tennis—and pretended not to notice about Bill and all his women. You make your choices in life, and I made mine a long time ago. There were pros and cons in every relationship, whether it came to business or marriage. In the final tally, the pros in our marriage have always outweighed the cons. At least that’s what I always thought until now.”

  She said that on the night Grace Mancuso was murdered her husband came home very late to their home in Tarrytown—a posh suburb north of New York City—and crawled into bed. But she said he slept fitfully, turning and tossing like he was having a nightmare. He began talking in his sleep too.

  But it was only one word.

  A name.

  The name she said her husband was crying out in his nightmare was “Grace.”

  Later, she told everyone, she heard him get out of bed, leave the house, and get in his car. She followed him in her own car, she said, because she knew something was terribly wrong. So she watched as he drove to the shore of the Hudson River a few miles away, got out of the car, and threw something into the water.

  “There’s something out there he wanted to hide,” she said, looking straight into all the cameras now focused on her. “Something about Grace Mancuso, I just know it. I’ve put up with so much from this man over the years. But not this. That’s why I want everyone to know the truth about my husband.”

  Atwood had kept trying to get her to leave the stage, but she ignored him and kept talking. There wasn’t much he could do. He stood there for a few more moments listening, then walked off the stage while she continued to deliver all the pent-up feelings about him she’d held inside so long.