It had been half an hour now, at least, that Jane had waited on this lumpy sofa for word on Robyn, distracted only by the local news broadcast on the TV monitor mounted high on the plaster wall. The sound was muted, but she recognized the story—the exterior of the University Inn, the blue lights of the ambulance that she knew carried Lewis Wilhoite, and silent talking heads identified only as “hotel guests.” The graphic, a target superimposed over the University Inn logo, was accompanied by the headline “Downtown Drama.”
What you see on TV is only part of the story, Jane thought. That had never been clearer, how little of reality could be revealed in the brief snippets of video and supposedly catchy headlines.
When the guard went back to her paperwork, Jane surreptitiously checked her cell. Melissa had texted that she and Daniel had taken Gracie for ice cream—and the girl seemed fine. She’d have a difficult road ahead. But lucky to have Melissa and Daniel.
“Miss Ryland?”
Jane looked up at her name. The desk clerk was now pointing to Detective Bartoneri, who’d just arrived and stood at the waiting room door, a cell phone to her ear.
Finally. Jane tried to read Bartoneri’s expression. Something must be going on in that phone call, it was obvious from the woman’s frown and her downcast eyes. Jane stood, worrying, yanked her tote bag to her shoulder. Took a step toward the door.
Bartoneri’s expression changed again. Surprise? Concern? Fear? The detective took the phone away from her ear, narrowing her eyes at the screen.
Then the detective’s face paled. She took a step back. And hung up.
“Something wrong?” Jane had to ask. Clearly there was. Maybe—Lewis? If Robyn had succeeded in killing him, they’d never know the real story. And poor Gracie …
Detective Bartoneri had slipped her cell phone into a pocket of her black blazer. Jane saw the gold badge clipped to her belt and the edge of a black leather holster.
“Not at all.” Bartoneri squared her shoulders, looked Jane up and down. “I’m here regarding Mrs. Wilhoite,” she said. “She’s asked for an attorney. We’ll be holding her until he arrives. As a result, there’s no reason for you to remain, since—”
Bartoneri’s phone rang. The three-tone trill came clearly though the detective’s jacket. The woman’s eyes widened. She yanked out the cell, looked at the screen. Seemed to make a decision.
“Hello?” she said.
65
“Off the record?” Jake leaned back against the pile of pillows on Jane’s leather couch, his shoes kicked off, his legs stretched the full length. Coda, as always, had curled herself on his lap, tail wrapped to her pink nose. Jake was not a cat person, but Jane’s calico aggressively refused to accept that. “Yeah. It was Angie.”
Jane plopped a wooden bowl of twisty pretzels on the coffee table, then handed him an IPA, the icy brown bottle wrapped in a napkin. She took her usual spot, leaning back at the opposite end of the couch. Her legs, in those somehow sexy black sweatpants, paralleled his, her toes against his thigh.
“Everything on the couch is off the record.” Jane kneaded her toes into his jeans. “Especially after midnight. But I can’t believe I was right there when you called Angela Bartoneri. Rats. Wish I had known what was going on.”
Jake tried to calculate how long he’d been awake. It was risky to collapse on Jane’s couch, but they were both flying on adrenaline right now. Jane already knew Robyn Wilhoite was under arrest for attempted murder. And Angie Bartoneri was in custody as a co-conspirator in the secret City Hall taping and extortion. “I’ll tell you the rest—if you keep it secret.”
“Who am I gonna tell?” Jane toasted him with her glass of red wine. “I’m unemployed, and probably without prospects, since I blew off Marsh Tyson to take care of the Gracie thing.”
He saw her face fall.
“I know, honey.” Jake shifted, pressing the weight of his leg against the length of hers. “We’ll all take care of Gracie, right? However it turns out? Lewis will be fine. We know Gracie loves him, and he loves her. She’s lucky, you know, to have Melissa and Daniel. And you.”
“And you.” Jane took a sip of her wine, closed her eyes briefly. “We can’t control the universe,” she said. “We can only do the best we can.”
They sat, silent, for a moment, Coda’s purr vibrating against Jake’s chest. As peaceful and domestic as a scene could be—for a cop and a reporter after forty straight hours of deception and murder. And two families struggling with a new reality.
“Curley Park,” Jane said.
“Just what I was thinking,” Jake admitted.
“You’re such a romantic.” Jane poked him with a toe. “But yeah, off the record. Tell me. You grabbed that Ward Dahlstrom’s phone and hit Redial—very cool. Legally iffy, right? But cool. And that’s when you reached Angela Bartoneri?”
“Former Detective Angie Bartoneri—who’s now in custody for extortion and conspiracy and a shitload of other stuff,” Jake said. “Along with her partner in crime, Ward Dahlstrom. Apparently he’s hated Catherine Siskel ever since she got named chief of staff instead of him. Decided to use her daughters to get revenge.”
Dahlstrom, the weak link, had ratted out Angie the second he’d had the option. Once Jake had heard Bartoneri answer Dahlstrom’s phone—he’d recognized her voice instantly this time—their scheme had begun to disintegrate. Angie in turn had ratted out Calvin Hewlitt, who she said used his security systems for an extortion scheme, threatening to leak embarrassing security videos unless victims paid them off. Apparently the University Inn was a prime source. Jake had already subpoenaed every bit of video from Hewlitt Security.
“They couldn’t sell the stuff to TMZ and places like that,” Jake said. “They’d be too easy to trace, you know? Instead, they demanded payoffs from rock stars and pols to keep that stuff under wraps. Private citizens, too. We found they’d taped a girlfriend of Lanna Siskel’s in a hotel room with her still-closeted lover. Seems like the University Inn’s surveillance system supported a cottage industry in undercover video.”
“Disgusting,” Jane said. She wondered if Tall and Beefy were involved. Be fun to cover their trial.
“Problem is,” Jake said, “Calvin Hewlitt—the guy you saw in the alley?—insists he had nothing to do with anything. No question his company installed the hotel surveillance systems, and his college buddy Dahlstrom hired Hewlitt Security to wire City Hall all on the up-and-up. But he says he had no idea anyone was using the videos. He insisted Dahlstrom, on his own, wired the greenroom to his personal computer. And that Dahlstrom also made the Lanna Siskel video and the phony one of Tenley on his own. Well, ‘on his own’ in cahoots with Angie. I knew she’d hooked up with some computer guy. Dahlstrom and Angie. Geez. Both bitter about their careers. Both out for revenge. I bet they were quite the happy couple.”
“Easy enough to find out about the hookup.” Jane crunched a pretzel, brushed the salty crumbs off her chest. “The computer hookup, I mean. Not Bartoneri and Dahlstrom.”
“Yeah.” Jake tipped his beer, finishing the last drop. Sleep was about to overtake him, but now his brain was revving. “Wish we could link Hewlitt to Curley Park, you know? He was in Franklin Alley, we know that. But he insists he wasn’t anywhere near the stabbing.”
“Want another?” Jane drained her wineglass. Uncurled herself from him. He could still feel the heat from her leg against his.
“Sure.” If they wound up here on the couch all night, what the hell. Even though tomorrow—it was already tomorrow—he and D still had a shitload to solve. “We can’t figure out who the dead guy with the tattoo was—but again, it’s not like we’re a TV show. It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours. We’ve got Dahlstrom and Bartoneri. We’ll crack this. I know Hewlitt’s the link. I just wish I could put him in Curley Park. He was probably all over those photos Bobby Land took. Obviously that’s why he smashed the damn camera. We just can’t prove it.”
* * *
“Poor Bobby Land,” Jan
e said. She saw three more IPAs in her fridge, but Jake was fading fast. She’d never seen him so tired. Scruffy face, eyes spiked red, his T-shirt sagging. He was still adorable, no question, but exhausted. She kept talking as she came back into the living room. Jake had draped one leg over the top of the couch. Coda hadn’t budged. “So Bobby Land—you think Bartoneri and Dahlstrom were in on that, too?”
“We’ll find out. Like I told each of them, first to talk is the first to walk,” he told her, taking the beer. He took a swig, then tucked the bottle between his arm and the back of the couch, settled into the pillows. Yawned. “Oh, sorry. Anyway. Yeah. They clearly thought Land had witnessed the stabbing. The kid made a big deal of it, remember? My bet’s on Angie. She knew the blind spots of the police HQ surveillance cameras. And Angie had left the hospital at the time of the attack. She’s got means, motive—and no alibi. And remember, she was alone in the ambulance with the tattoo guy. Who knows what she did to make his condition worse.”
Jane pictured it all again, Bobby Land, just a scrawny kid who longed to hit the big time with his photos. He’d clearly latched on to her because …
“Jake?” she began, then stopped. He was out cold, the mutterings of his snores competing with Coda’s purr. She smiled, not wanting to wake him. She eased herself up from the couch, pausing, one foot on and one foot off, as Jake shifted, cozying into the pillows. She leaned across him, smelled the beer and the Jake scent, pulled the half-full bottle from the crook of his arm. He shifted again, oblivious.
Coda jumped down and followed Jane into the dining room. With Coda curling around her legs, Jane zipped open her tote bag. Dug in. In seconds, she’d rewound the Quik-Shot video to the very first moment she’d arrived at Curley Park, her first shaky wide shots of the scene. Frame by frame, she inched the video forward. She knew just what—well, who—she was looking for. Red hair, blue oxford shirt, khaki pants. She’d seen Calvin Hewlitt in Franklin Alley, gotten video of him in handcuffs. Had her camera also seen him at Curley Park?
There were all the cops. The crowd. The flashing lights of the ambulance. That brown paper bag that had caught the breeze fluttered by her. And there. At the outside of the circle around the body and moving away fast. Calvin Hewlitt. Caught on Jane’s little camera. Exactly where he’d insisted he never was.
“Jake!” she called out, then remembered he was asleep. And then she remembered why she’d shot that video: as a reporter for Channel 2. Remembered who Jake was. A cop investigating a crime. And remembered, by all the rules of journalism, she could not show it to him.
Or could she? What was the goal, anyway—to break a big story, or to bring justice? Why couldn’t that be the same thing?
“What?” Jake’s eyes fluttered as he scooted himself upright. He yawned, dragged his hands across his face. “Yow. Sorry. I’m wiped.”
“I have Calvin Hewlitt,” Jane said. They’d figure out the ethics later. “At Curley Park. Right here on camera.”
“You do?” Jake tumbled from the couch, was at her side in two steps. “Let’s see.”
Jane rewound the Quik-Shot, held it out to him. “This is before the alley thing. It puts him right here. So funny, though. When I heard DeLuca yelling at you about him, I couldn’t figure out what D was saying. Hyoo-something. I didn’t know it was Hewlitt.”
Jake had a funny look on his face. “Hyoo?” he said.
66
Well, this was a first. Jane sat in the front row of Mayor Elihu Holbrooke’s news conference, middle seat in the line of dented metal folding chairs set up in the walnut-paneled conference room. She was here without portfolio, except as secret girlfriend of the cute cop now standing cross armed (and freshly shaved, she noted) on the raised carpeted dais and as the secret almost-relative of the woman now charged with the attempted murder of her husband.
Another first: Jane hoped to keep all that knowledge from the swarm of media types now filling the chairs around her. Though Robyn and Lewis Wilhoite’s names were irretrievably public, the cops were calling it “a domestic,” shorthand for “no one else is in danger so we’re done.” No reporters knew about the little girl in the middle of it all.
Lewis would recover, and if there were a trial, he’d certainly testify. Melissa and Daniel had whisked Gracie to Chicago, as already planned, and were working out what to tell her. Jane crossed her fingers, and, as almost Aunt Jane, asked the universe to take care of her new niece.
But City Hall was under siege. The secret taping of the chief of staff’s greenroom and the alleged extortion plot of Bartoneri, Dahlstrom, and Hewlitt had been revealed in a tersely worded press release. The media had been notified to attend a “brief” news conference.
Now the room buzzed with pinging texts and humming cell phones, still photographers checking light levels and elbowing for floor space, a crowded row of TV guys clicking video cameras onto spiky tripods. All the local TV stations sent their big gun reporters, even Channel 3’s Emmy-magnet Charlotte McNally. Jane’s colleagues. Ex-colleagues. She could have skipped this, she supposed. But she couldn’t resist seeing it firsthand.
“Hey, Jane.” Beverly Chorbajian, brandishing her reporters’ notebook, arrived in a waft of musky-rose. “What’re you doing here? Did Marsh Tyson finally get in touch with you? Are you—”
“Long story. Oh.” She pointed, relieved to change the subject from Channel 2. “Here comes Siskel. And Holbrooke.”
Catherine Siskel, black skirt, white shirt, hair pageboyed, and chunky gold earrings, strode to the podium. Jane knew her husband had been murdered just two days ago. How had she switched off her grief? Was it strength? Or denial? Or necessity?
“I’m Catherine Siskel, Mayor Elihu Holbrooke’s chief of staff,” she said. “The mayor will make a short statement. He will take no questions. Bottom line, everything is under investigation. Understood? You ask a question? We’re done. Got it?” She scanned the room over the top of Jane’s head, assessing. “You rolling?”
“Rolling,” a voice from the back.
The silver-haired Brahmin marched to the podium in gray worsted and burgundy tie. Still cameras flashed, their pops of light and clicking motor drives punctuated his movements as he adjusted the microphone, raised his chin, calculated the waiting audience.
He had everything money could buy, his opponents in the mayor’s race had sneered. But he couldn’t buy away the murder that had taken place right under his window. Or the involvement of his own employee. Or the discovery of a dirty cop.
“Almost exactly forty-eight hours ago…” Mayor Holbrooke looked at his watch as if he were actually calculating and not reading from the huge-fonted typed pages Jane could see in front of him. “Our city was hit with a series of terrible crimes. But through the brave and quick-thinking work of our city’s homicide division, we can confidently say the danger is over.”
“How could your own surveillance chief be involved in extortion and sales of sex tapes?” Charlotte McNally stood—how’d she always manage to get the first question?—pointed a thick ballpoint at the mayor. “Did you know of the greenroom camera?”
Siskel flew to the podium, frowning, edged in front of the mayor, both hands waving McNally off. “No questions! I specifically—”
But now more reporters clamored to their feet, one after the other, pelting Holbrooke with demands, their voices overlapping.
“So a police detective was in on it? What’s her status?”
“Can you confirm that your chief of staff’s husband was the Curley Park victim?”
“Who killed Greg Siskel?”
Jane couldn’t bear it. She stood, not exactly looking at Jake. He’d understand. She was doing it for the public’s right to know.
“Does City Hall have surveillance video of the Curley Park stabbing?” she asked.
67
“Who was that on the phone?” Tenley Siskel stood at the entrance to their kitchen, saw her mother standing at the sink, staring out the window, her cell phone on the counter. Tenley
knew Mom was looking across their backyard to the lush oaks and maples of Steading Woods. Where Lanna had gone, and never come back.
“Come here, honey.” Her mom turned to her, holding out one arm. She was still in her black funeral suit but had kicked off her black heels, like she always did, left them in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Come talk to me.”
Funny how, like, a week ago, Tenley would have been mad because her mom was thinking about Lanna. Funny how so much had changed.
“It was Detective Brogan, sweetheart,” her mom said. “And…”
And then, standing in their kitchen like it was any old day even though it wasn’t, Mom told her what the detective learned. They were still in the midst of an “interview” with Hewlitt, he’d said, but he wanted them to know that the cop who’d questioned Tenley about Lanna—that creepy Angela Bartoneri who Tenley had never liked—was part of the whole thing. Detective Brogan said that while investigating Lanna’s death, Bartoneri discovered Lanna’s connection with Ward Dahlstrom, as well as his secret taping with college crony Hewlitt. Dahlstrom admitted Angie’d convinced him to let her benefit from their scheme in return for covering it up.
“I always wondered why that Detective Bartoneri couldn’t find Lanna’s boyfriend. I guess, in fact, she did.” Her mom drew Tenley closer. “Now they’ve reopened the investigation, honey. It’s still possible her death really was an accident. But maybe now we’ll get some real answers.”
Tenley looked out the window, past the greening forsythia and the last of the tulips. Last year, they had put tulips from their garden on Lanna’s grave. And earlier this morning on her father’s.
Now it was just the two of them. She felt the weight of her mother’s arm around her waist, a weight that was good and strong and connecting.
What You See Page 34