by Jan Burke
Over the next twenty minutes, I reached for the phone several times, thinking I should call Max and reschedule anyway, but ultimately I decided I’d take Frank at his word.
I began reading though a packet of materials that was part of the agenda for the city council meeting next week, circling points I needed to ask questions about, and making notes.
“Computer not working?” Mark Baker asked, seeing that I was doing all of this in longhand.
“No, it’s not.” I told him my password problem. “Someone is supposed to fix it with an override code or something, but there’s some bigger problem with the software that runs the presses, so you know how high I am on the priority list.”
“Just remember that it will never, ever be as bad as it was when we had those first computers.”
“No kidding.” We spent a few minutes recalling hardware and software disasters of the 1980s — whole pages that would have to be reentered, bizarre line justification that produced odd gaps in type, stories lost somewhere in the ether, and worse.
“And all the headaches for the designers — what a mess. I went to bed every night wondering if the paper would get out the next day.”
“Same here,” Mark said. “Say — if you have a few minutes, why don’t you walk with me down to the morgue?”
This is one of the things I like about Mark. He’s one of about a dozen people at the paper who still call the paper’s archives “the morgue,” rather than “the library.”
“You talked to Frank before he left?” I asked as we made our way downstairs.
“Yes. His lieutenant released the story to other media, too, of course, but we’ve got the inside track, anyway — we covered these murders. I’m going to see if I can find the stories the Express ran on the cases. Interesting stuff — the cases go back to 1941 and 1943. The bodies weren’t found until 1950.”
I stopped walking.
He looked at me and said, “You know.”
“O’Connor’s sister. But she disappeared near the end of the war — 1945, I think.”
Mark shook his head. “That’s the weird thing. Frank said Harmon didn’t mention her. He said two victims here, and their names are…” He looked at his notes. “Anna Mezire and Lois Arlington. Anna disappeared on April 30,1943. Lois on April 18, 1941.”
“Wait — he’s saying that God inspired him to admit to two murders but not a third? That doesn’t make sense.”
“None whatsoever. But it makes me wonder. If he had something to gain in this lifetime, I’d say he hasn’t told us everything. But no one asked or coerced him to talk about these two — he doesn’t get any better treatment or time off at this point. The only break it’s going to give him is on the other side — when he meets his Maker. So why not make a completely clean breast of it?”
“You’re looking up what we had on it then?”
“Yes. And any background I can find on Harmon.”
“I’ve got some of O’Connor’s old papers. I’ll look through them and see if I can find his notes about his sister’s disappearance. Knowing him, he must have had his own investigation going.”
“Thanks. Listen — I appreciate your help with the story, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“This computer business makes me wonder about something. This morning, I got here early and caught Ethan snooping around your desk. He claimed he was just looking for a pair of scissors. I told him off, but I wanted you to know about it.”
“Was he trying to log on to my computer?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually see that, but…”
“But I think I just figured out why I couldn’t log on this morning. If you log on with the wrong password three times, it shuts the computer down until a system administrator can log you back on, right?”
“Right.”
“Last night, I changed my password. This morning, out of habit, I entered the old password — but I only did that once before I was locked out of the system.”
“So someone else had tried it twice and failed?”
“Yes. I don’t think I need too many guesses about who it was. He failed twice and knew better than to enter it a third time. If I had entered the new one this morning, there never would have been a sign of anything wrong.”
“How’d he get the old one?”
“Sits right across from me. He could have easily watched me log on dozens of times without my noticing it.”
Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We stood there in silence. After a while, Mark said, “He could be fired.”
“Not any time soon. He’s such an ass-kisser, if Wrigley turns a corner, that kid’s nose will break.”
“You’ve got that right. He’s trying to suck up to me now, too. I think he realized yesterday that I didn’t buy his version of events. And getting caught at your desk this morning scared him.”
“Mark, you know I don’t like newsroom gossip, but — let’s just say I’ve heard some things that make me think we need to keep an eye on him.”
“I wouldn’t need to hear any gossip to know that.”
“Why?”
“Call it intuition. I think he’s a phony. He’s got some kind of problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s come to work hung over more than once. You haven’t noticed?”
“This is a horrible thing to admit, but I guess I expect young men his age to do that once in a while.”
Mark shook his head. “This isn’t once in a while, Irene.”
“I’ll pay more attention.”
He laughed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scold — or to make it sound as if you are supposed to be the kid’s mama while he’s here. You aren’t even his editor.”
I hesitated, then said, “I think the biggest problem is going to be Lydia.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “To be honest, I’m glad to hear you say that. I was worried I was going to have to be the one to mention it.”
Back at my desk, I got a call from the computer services department and learned that I could log on again with a password the technician gave me. “But change it again to one of your own right away,” he said.
I followed these instructions. Ethan was schmoozing with the executive news editor, John Walters, at that moment, so I wasn’t worried that he’d be spying on me. He hadn’t had as much success with John as he had had with Lydia and Wrigley. I was fairly sure that if Ethan did manage to ingratiate himself with John, it wouldn’t last long.
Lydia was another story.
By choice, our careers had taken separate paths. I chose to stay with reporting and writing, she moved into editorial work.
Not all reporters get a reputation for being writers. You can be invaluable to the paper because you have the persistence to ferret out the facts, the ability to get people to confide in you, and other news-gathering skills. There are reporters who can do all of that, but are then unable to express what they’ve learned in clear terms.
Conversely, there are those who can’t figure out what question to ask next, but can take the dullest, most completely jumbled story you’ve ever seen and rework it into something clear and exciting to read.
Lydia was both reporter and writer, but she excelled at writing. Before she had worked on the news side for very long, the paper put her to work in rewrite, then as a copy editor, and soon after that, an assistant city editor — the first woman to have that job on the Express.
She was now the city editor, and her skills in that job were unquestioned. All hell could break loose, she’d stay calm and divvy up the crises of the moment to those most capable of handling them. She was good at assigning stories, and although there would always be someone who thought he or she would have been the better reporter for this story or that, no one thought Lydia was arbitrary or showed favoritism. She not only knew which reporter would best handle a story, she knew how to get the best out of each reporter.
She was known for her loy
alty to the reporters, for sticking up for them with the bosses — she might tell someone off (in her quiet way) in private, but she’d take on John Walters or Wrigley III in defense of that same reporter. She had won both the trust of the veterans and the respect of the newer reporters.
The problem was, when it came to seeing a guy like Ethan for what he was, I wasn’t so sure of her abilities. If you’re working on the street as a reporter, you usually spend time around a wider variety of people than editors do. You start to learn what most liars look like when they’re lying to you — not all, by any means, but the garden variety becomes readily apparent, and eventually some of the most expert find it harder to get past you. You figure out who’s uncomfortable with attention just because they’re a little shy, and who is hoping you will not ask a dreaded question. You don’t always find what’s hidden, but you almost always sense when something important is being kept out of view.
I had no doubt that Lydia could tell if something in a story didn’t ring true. But I wondered now if she had lost some of that ability to read people as well as she read stories.
Then I remembered Mark’s comments about how often Ethan showed up hungover, and also that I had failed to notice that the little twerp had watched me enter my password. I decided I should worry about my own inability to keep my BS detector working.
Even if Ethan had managed to log on to my computer before now, I wasn’t too worried about him looking at my notes. I was, you might say, a third-generation cryptographer.
O’Connor had been trained in newspaper work by Jack Corrigan, who had worked for the paper at a time when the morning News was the rival of the evening Express. Reporters spied on one another all the time. Corrigan wrote his notes in an oddball code — a mixture of a kind of shorthand, initials, and ways of referring to things that might not be readily apparent. RCC, for example, was not the Roman Catholic Church, but “the rubber chicken circuit,” or political fund-raising banquets.
O’Connor learned it and added his own layer of code to it, and once he decided I was worth the trouble, taught it to me. Even though there was only one paper by then, the code helped. If you’re in a room full of professionally nosy, often competitive people, sooner or later a slow news day will lead them to be curious about one another. It’s frowned upon. It happens anyway.
So the code remained useful. Maybe one day I’d pass it along to a younger reporter — but Ethan was not going to be a candidate to inherit.
I had just thought this when Ethan came over to his desk, smiling. He logged off his computer and gathered his notebook and jacket. He looked over at me and his smile widened to a grin. “See you in a few days,” he said.
“A few days?”
“I’m flying out this afternoon. Mr. Wrigley wants me to go up to Folsom and interview Bennie Lee Harmon.”
55
“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT ABOUT O’CONNOR’S SISTER,” MAX SAID.
We were sitting together in the living room after dinner, during which we had heard about Max’s fiancée, courtship, and future plans. They hadn’t known each other long, about three months now, but he had apparently fallen for her almost on sight. Her family was wealthy, so she didn’t seem to be after his money. He had shown us a photo of a lovely, almost ethereal-looking blonde. If she had given him the smile she wore in the photo — no mystery in why he had pursued her.
Frank had made it back in plenty of time. Harmon was ill, he said, and not able to talk for long. Frank told Max about Harmon’s two-out-of-three confessions on the old cases.
“O’Connor rarely let anyone know about Maureen,” I said.
“It explains so much, though,” Max said. “I remember how he used to speak about the missing.” He turned to Frank. “Will you be able to use DNA to tell if Harmon killed O’Connor’s sister, too?”
“Possibly,” Frank said. “I have to take a closer look at the evidence we gathered at the time, and how it has been stored. We had a good lab man back then. I’m told our coroner — this was before Woolsey — was a big believer in freezing tissue samples and the like, so if no one has dumped them out of the freezer at some point along the way, we may be in luck. But I’m not getting my hopes up just yet.”
“Can Ben Sheridan help in a case like this?” I asked.
“He might. He’s been called in on the investigation into Municipal Cemetery — they’re digging up a lot of graves over there trying to straighten out who belongs where, so he’s been really busy with that. But we’re going to have him take a look at the photos, see if he thinks it’s worth exhuming the girls’ remains.” He turned to Max. “Have you met Ben?”
“Not yet. He’s your forensic anthropologist friend, right? The one who stayed here with his dog for a while?”
“Yes. A good friend, and good at his work, too. He’s agreed to come by tomorrow and take a look at the photos.”
“Any idea why Harmon is so adamant that he didn’t kill her?”
Frank hesitated. “I can’t back this up with proof yet, but I think he’s so adamant because he didn’t do it. I’m beginning to think he’s telling the truth.”
“What?”
“I’m not the first to see that there are differences in the way the bodies were left, or what had been done to them. Dan Norton, the detective who worked on the case in the 1950s, left a lot of notes on this one, and he had the same feeling I do — he thought it was possible that someone else had killed Maureen.”
“But the timing — in April, every two years,” I said. “And what you’re saying would mean that the person who killed Maureen knew those other girls were buried there and never told anyone.”
“Believe me, I see the problems.”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “The best place to hide a body must be a grave. Think of that story in this morning’s paper.”
Frank laughed. “Don’t mention that story to Irene.”
I told Max about Ethan.
Max shrugged. “He still had to do a lot of work in order to write the story, though, didn’t he?”
“Yes. But it isn’t cool to do what he did to Hailey.”
“I can see that,” he said. He looked at Frank. “Actually, I have an interest in the contents of a grave, too. I hope you might be able to help me.”
“One of these ones in Municipal Cemetery?”
“No, in All Souls. The Ducanes are buried there.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
He shifted a little, then said, “Gisella’s family has … expressed concern about my parentage.”
“What? In this day and age?” I said, outraged. “Are they ‘Granny came over on the Mayflower’ types?”
“No, no, I’m sure that’s not it,” he said, not sounding all that sure to me. “What they said to me was, well, if we want to have children … it’s a legitimate concern.”
“A legitimacy concern, maybe?”
“Maybe,” he admitted with a sigh. “They say they are worried that without knowing my parentage, there may be hereditary diseases I could pass on to our children.”
“And?” I asked, sensing that wasn’t all there was to it.
He spoke softly when he answered. “They also say that if our children are indeed the great-grandchildren of the Vanderveers and Linworths, they should know their heritage.”
After a moment, I said, “And take Grandmother Lillian Linworth’s inheritance?”
“I’ve told them there can be no need, given my own situation. I can already provide more than enough financial security for any children we may have.”
“And they said, ‘You can never be too rich or too thin.’”
He smiled. “Something like that. I pointed out that Lillian would not be obliged to leave a dime to me, even if we are related. She may decide to leave her money to her pet cat for all I know.”
“But Gisella’s parents don’t think the cat would be a contender if you could be proved to be the missing heir.”
“Look, it’s just what her par
ents hold dear. They can trace both sides of each family back to — I don’t know, Stonehenge, probably — and I don’t know what my own birth name is, let alone my parents’ names. Gisella tells me not to worry about it. But I don’t really have a family, and I guess I don’t want to start out by causing division within hers.”
I finally caught on. “This isn’t about the Ross family, is it? You can finally answer a question that you’ve had on your mind for the last twenty years.”
For a moment he looked stricken. Then he let out a long sigh.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s it.” He laughed. “I just needed to talk to a friend who would be brutally honest, who could make me own up to it.”
“Was I brutal? I’m sorry.”
“No. Not at all.”
“How do you think I can help you?” Frank asked.
“As I understand it, there are DNA tests now that could be done on remains as old as Katy and Todd Ducane’s.”
“As old as Egyptian mummies — and older. Remains from the 1950s won’t be a problem. But if you’re thinking that we need to exhume Katy Ducane to find out if she was your mother, we don’t. Lillian could give a private lab a small blood sample, and you could know the answer in a matter of weeks.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed. “The problem is, Lillian won’t do it.”
“Won’t do it! Why not?” I asked.
“She says that she loves me as I am, doesn’t care who I once was or where I came from, and that all this talk of biological ties is insulting nonsense. She’s furious with the Ross family for bringing the matter up. I won’t repeat what she has to say about them. She became very upset. I have to admit that I was surprised at the vehemence of her reaction.”
Frank and I exchanged a look.
“What?” Max asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just a feeling, I suppose. Her reaction makes me wonder what she’s afraid of. All these years, not knowing what became of her grandson…”
“If the DNA tests show that they aren’t related,” Frank said, “she may fear that Max will no longer care about her.”