by Sam Bourne
Will sat himself in Terry Walton's chair, ready to mount the search for the key. He was sure it would be here somewhere: no one kept the key to a desk-drawer on a ring, did they? Will ran his hand underneath the desk, hoping to find it taped in place. Nothing.
He sat back in the chair. Where could it be? The desk held only the yellow pad and a couple of lame mementos of Walton's glory days as a foreign correspondent: a bust of Lenin and, most bizarre, a snow-dome in which the winter scene was not children sledging or reindeer riding but a fatherly-looking Saddam Hussein, his arms outstretched, reaching out to a young boy and girl running towards him.
Ba'athist kitsch, doubtless picked up when Walton covered the first Gulf War. Without thinking, Will picked it up to give it a shake, to watch the blizzard fall on the great Iraqi tyrant.
As the first flakes fell, he saw it. Stuck to the underside of this plastic bauble — a thin, silver key.
'Good evening, William.'
Will could feel his muscles seize up. He had been caught.
He swivelled his chair around.
The man was barely visible, standing in the half-light. Still, Will recognized his profile before he could even make out the features. It was Townsend McDougal, Executive Editor of The New York Times.
'Oh, hello. Good evening.' Will could hear the nerves, the exhaustion and the panic in his own voice.
'I've heard of eagerness and dedication, William, but this is surely beyond the call of duty: spending Saturday night toiling not only at your own desk, but at that of a colleague.
Most industrious.'
'Ah, yes. Sorry. I was… I was looking for something. I think I might have left my notebook here. On Terry's desk, I mean.'
McDougal made a show of craning his neck and peering at the desk, as if searching it was a difficult task, when in fact it was uncluttered and visibly empty.
'Doesn't seem to be here, does it, William?'
'No, sir. It doesn't.' Will was embarrassed by that 'sir'. He was also aware of sitting so far back in his — Walton's — chair, he risked falling over. Like a man held at gunpoint.
'We didn't see you in the office yesterday, William. Harden wondered if you had been kidnapped.'
Will felt a feverish chill run along his neck, as if he was fighting a severe flu. He was so tired. 'No, I was… I've been working on something. On a story.'
'What kind of story, William? Do you have another unlikely hero for us? Another "diamond in the rough" like your saintly crack dealer? Another organ-giving gun nut?'
Will had a dread thought. The editor was either mocking him or, much worse, voicing scepticism. The paper had been burned before by young men in such a hurry to make their mark that they had written works of short fiction rather than journalism, which The New York Times had swallowed whole and published on page one. People still spoke of the Jayson Blair scandal, which had toppled one of Townsend's predecessors.
Will realized what he now looked like. Unshaven and twitchy — and, unaccountably, in the newsroom late on a Saturday night at someone else's desk. 'It's not what you think, sir.' Will could hear his own voice slurring with fatigue.
His mouth was dry. 'I just wanted to check something about the Brownsville story. I was looking for my notebook and I thought maybe Walton-'
'Why would Walton want your notebook, William? Be careful not to believe everything you hear in the newsroom.
Remember, journalists don't always tell the truth.'
There it was again, another coded dig at Will and his stories.
Was he accusing him of faking the Macrae and Baxter tales, albeit in the genteel language of a New England Brahmin?
He may have had the accent and erect posture of a Massachusetts aristocrat, but McDougal's unblinking expression was the poker face of a consummate office politician.
'No, I was not believing anything. I just want to go through my notes.'
'Is there something about the story you're not sure of, William?'
Damn. 'No, I've just been wondering if there's more there than I first realized.'
'Oh, I would certainly assume that.'
Another dig.
'You need to be very careful, William. Very careful.
Journalism can be a dangerous business. Nothing more important than the story, that's what we always say. And that's almost true. But not completely. There is always something far more important than the story, William. Do you know what that is?'
'No, sir.' He was back in the headmaster's study.
'It's your life, William. That's what you have to look out for. So, mark my words. Be very careful.' He left a long pause before speaking again. 'I'll tell Harden you're getting some rest.'
With that, the editor withdrew back into the semidarkness and began his stately glide towards the National desk. Will fell back into Walton's chair and let out what he knew was an audible sigh. The editor thought he was a junkie, about to go off the rails and ready to take The New York Times with him.
And now he was 'getting some rest'. It sounded like a management euphemism for suspension, while they investigated the veracity of the Macrae and Baxter stories. Was that why the notebook was missing? Had Townsend taken it as evidence?
His fingers were still balled around the Saddam snow-dome, now misted over with clammy hand-moisture. He had held it tight throughout the entire conversation with Townsend.
That would have looked great: not only wild-eyed, but his hand a permanent fist. As his fingers uncurled, he saw it again — the plain, thin key that would surely open Walton's desk drawer. He knew it was madness to try it, having received an all but formal warning from the most senior man in US journalism. But he had no choice. His wife was a hostage and that notebook surely held the clue to getting her back.
Will glanced left and right and back again to see if anyone was nearby. He turned a complete circle, mindful that Townsend had surprised him from behind. Then, in a single rapid movement he ripped the key from its sticky tape, ducked down and slid it inside the lock. One jiggle and it turned.
Inside were multiple neat, fawn-coloured files. Between them, hardly concealed, was the tell-tale white metal spiral of a reporters' pad. Will pulled it out and saw the scribble on the thick, front cover.
Brownsville.
Jesus. Woodstein was not kidding: Walton had stolen his notebook. God only knew why. The story had already been published. There was no scoop to be scooped. What possible use could it be to him? Will put it out of his mind: there were enough puzzles to be solved without adding Walton's bizarre strain of journalistic kleptomania to the pile.
Will wanted to start flicking through it right away, but he knew he had first to close the drawer, lock it, replace the key and return to his own desk — all without being spotted.
Exactly what possibility he was guarding against, he was not sure. He had already been caught by the editor; the damage was done.
Even so, Will made sure he was hunched over his own desk before he so much as opened the book. He devised a method. First, a rapid-fire search for something alien: a note stashed inside that he had failed to see, a scrawled message in a hand other than his own. Perhaps, through some sorcery that remained utterly opaque, Yosef Yitzhok had smuggled a message onto these pages. Look to your work.
Will moved through it fast, scanning the lines in search of the unfamiliar. There was nothing, just his own scrawl.
The newsroom was so quiet, CNN on Saturday evening mute, he could hear the pages turn. He could hear his own brain.
Briefly, he became excited by a couple of lines that leapt out, clearly written by someone else, but they turned out to be contact details for Rosa, the woman who had found Macrae's body, scrawled onto the page in her own hand. Will now remembered that he had promised to send her a copy of the piece once it was published.
There was no mystery phone number, no smuggled message — not that there could have been with this notebook stashed in Walton's filing cabinet since who knew when.
Inste
ad he would have to stare very hard at the one clue he knew this book did contain, the thing that had brought him here. There it was, on one of the last pages, boxed and ringed with asterisks: the quote that had made the piece, from Letitia, the devoted wife who had contemplated prostitution rather than let her husband rot in jail. The man they killed last night may have sinned every day of his God-given life but he was the most righteous man I have ever known.
In an instant, Will was back in Montana, talking to Beth on the cell phone. It was, he realized, the last conversation they had had before she was taken. He was telling her about his day spent reporting the life and death of Pat Baxter. He could hear his own voice, speaking animatedly, before realizing that Beth was miles away.
'You know what's weird. It hit me straight away because no one uses this word, or hardly ever: the surgeon who operated on Baxter used the same word as that Letitia woman.
Righteous. They even used it the same way: "the most righteous person," "the most righteous act." Isn't that strange?'
He had not pursued the point. He had rapidly realized Beth was elsewhere, preoccupied with the issue that should have been preoccupying him: their failure to have a baby. He felt his throat go dry: the thought that Beth might die never having known motherhood.
He pushed the notion away, staring down at his own handwriting on the page. The most righteous man I have ever known.
He had flirted with pointing out this uncanny echo when he wrote up the Baxter story but had ruled it out almost immediately. It would seem too self-regarding, noting a similarity between two stories whose only real common link was his own by-line. Baxter and Macrae lived at opposite ends of the country; their deaths were obviously unrelated. To notice a reverberation between one random murder and another only made journalistic sense if both cases were well-known, their details lodged in the public mind. That was emphatically not the case here, so Will had dropped it! He had not thought about it again until that evening, as he and TO stood either side of the homeless preacher in McDonalds. Every verse of Proverbs 10 he had incanted seemed to contain this same word, repeated too often to be a coincidence. Righteous.
But these murders could not possibly be connected. Black pimps in New York and white crazies in the Montana backwoods did not mix in the same circles or have the same enemies. They had lived and died worlds apart.
And yet, there was something oddly similar about these two eccentric tales. Both involved men who seemed suspect and yet had done a good deed. Or rather an extraordinarily good deed. Righteous. And both had been murdered, with no suspect yet arrested in either case.
Will swivelled round to face the computer screen. He logged on to the Times website and found his own story on Macrae.
He would read it forensically, looking to see if there was anything else to go on.
'… Police sources spoke of a brutal knife attack, with multiple stab wounds puncturing the victim's abdomen. Local residents say the style of the killing fits with the latest in gangland fashion, as in the words of one, "knives are the new guns".'
The method of killing was entirely different. Baxter had been shot; Macrae stabbed. Will opened another window on the screen, allowing him to call up his Baxter story. He scrolled down, looking for the paragraphs with the forensic detail, time and method of death. Finally he came to the line he was looking for.
Initially, Mr Baxter's militia comrades suspected a macabre act of organ theft lay behind the murder. Unaware of his earlier act of philanthropy, they assumed Mr Baxter lost his kidney on the night of his death. As if to add weight to that theory, there were signs of recent anaesthesia — a needle mark — on the corpse.
Will read on, looking for more, as if he had never read the story before. Now he wanted to curse whoever had written it: there was no more on the mystery injection. It had just been left hanging.
He dug into his bag to retrieve his current notebook, the one he had taken to Seattle. He riffled through the pages to find the interview with Genevieve Huntley, the surgeon who had removed Baxter's kidney. He remembered the conversation, sitting in the front seat of his rental car, cradling a cell phone to his ear. He had just let her talk, wary of interrupting the flow. According to the scrawl in front of him, he had not even asked about the recent needle mark. Looking back, he knew why. He had dismissed the whole business once the surgeon had told him about Baxter's kidney op. The story had changed, from organ-snatching gore to righteous man and that inconvenient detail had got forgotten. He had forgotten it. Besides, Huntley had said there had been no more surgery so the recent injection idea did not fit.
Yet, now he flicked a few pages back in the notebook to see his encounter with the medical examiner and Oxford man, Allan Russell. 'Contemporaneous' was his verdict on the needle mark. It was strange but inescapable: Baxter's killers had anaesthetized him first.
Will clicked back on to the Macrae story. No talk of injections there. Just a frenzied stabbing. He sat back in his chair.
Another hunch was evaporating. He had thought he was going to prove these two deaths were somehow connected.
Not just by the odd coincidence of the word 'righteous' but something physical. A real tie that might suggest a pattern.
But it was not there. What had he got? Two deaths which had good-guy victims in common. That was it so far. In one case, Baxter's, there had been a weird twist: he had been sedated before he was killed. That was not true of Macrae.
Or rather, Will had no idea if it was true or not. The police had never mentioned it — but he had never asked. He had not seen Macrae's body; he had not met the coroner. It had not been that kind of story. And if he had not asked, then no one had. After all, the Macrae death had hardly been a big deal. Apart from a few briefs written on the night, no paper had run much on it — until Will's story in The New York Times, of course.
Will reached instantly for his cell phone, punching at the internal phonebook. There was only one person who could help. He hit J for Jay Newell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Saturday, 10.26pm, Manhattan
'This is Jay.'
'Jay, thank God I got you.' Newell was the member of Will's Columbia set who had taken the least likely career route. He was a fast-tracker at the New York Police Department, leapfrogging over all the old doughnut-munchers on his way to becoming a big city commissioner before he was forty. Jay was as resented by the old guard cops as Will was by the aged newsmen.
'It's Will. Yeah, I'm fine. Well, I'm in a bit of a jam but I can't explain it now. I need you to do me a very large favour.'
'OK.' But the word was drawn out.
'Jay, I need you to check out something. I wrote a piece in the paper this week-'
'About that pimp guy? Saw it. Well done on making the front page, big fella.'
'Yeah, thanks. Look, I never checked autopsy reports or anything. Do you have access to those?'
'It's the weekend, Will. I'm kind of, you know.'
Will looked at his watch. It was late on a Saturday night;
Jay was a single guy with a lot of girlfriends. Will guessed he had called at a spectacularly inconvenient moment. 'I know.
But I bet you have the authority to see whatever you want, whenever you want.' The old flattery manoeuvre. Jay would not want to admit that, as it happened, he did not have that kind of access.
'What do you want to know?'
'I want you to see if there were any unusual marks on the victim's body.'
'I thought the guy was stabbed like a million times.'
'He was, but he was still in one piece. I want you to see if there was anything like a needle mark on him.'
'Some pimp scumball from Brownsville, you kidding? The amount of drugs these guys are whacking into their veins, he probably looked like a pincushion.'
'I don't think so. None of the people I spoke to said anything about injecting drugs. In fact, no one said he used drugs at all.'
'OK, my man. Whatever you say. I'll check it out. This the right cell for
you?'
'Yeah. And I need whatever you've got really fast. Thanks, Jay. I owe you.'
Suddenly he could hear voices, followed by a burst of laughter. It seemed to be a knot of men, walking in this direction.
And then, louder than the others, the unmistakable intonation of Townsend McDougal, talking newsroom talk.
'Can we hold it for twenty-four hours? Do we have this to ourselves?'
Will had no idea why they would be heading towards this barren part of the third-floor landscape: they had no shortage of meeting rooms at their end. Oh God. Maybe McDougal was looking for Will, coming with a posse of senior executives this time, to begin the inquisition right away.
He could not risk that, not now. At top speed, with too little time to check what he was doing, Will shoved the essentials — cell phone, notebooks, pen, BlackBerry — off his desk and into his bag, wheeled around and headed away from the McDougal ambush. The only perk of this faraway corner of the office, Will realized at that very moment, was its proximity to the back stairway. He had never used it before, but now was the time.
Once outside, Will gulped in the Saturday night air. He let his eyes close in relief, leaning backwards against the wall, the Times clock just above his head.
It was late, and quiet. In normal circumstances, Will liked this vibe. Working at a time when the rest of the city was not; leaving a half-empty office and walking into the Manhattan evening. It was such a contrast with the usual throng that bustled down this street. No one around, save a lonely tourist in sleeveless body-warmer and baseball hat peering into one of the Times display windows, doubtless looking at an antique printing press or a framed photograph of the late Mr Sulzberger shaking hands with Harry Truman or something. He must be cold, standing around outside. But Will was in a hurry to get away. He barely saw him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Saturday, 11.02pm, Manhattan
TO's room was just how he would have imagined it and, he realized now, he had indeed imagined it. Perhaps a dozen times since his marriage to Beth he had thought about TO not just for a second or two, but in long, extended sessions.