“Jesus, Ben.” I checked my watch. “That’s in less than a half hour.”
I looked around for Nelson’s Tahoe, but he’d driven away. I jogged across the street to Ben’s truck.
“Plenty of time,” he said, following me. “Nelson’s en route to headquarters now. He’ll save us a seat.”
He opened the truck door and helped me in. It was no easy thing to climb into that truck in a skirt and heeled shoes. Before he closed the door, he said, “Did I mention? They’ve got a new commander up at Criminal Investigations.”
I didn’t like that particular gleam in his eye.
“Your old boyfriend. Commander Michael Ledger. That’s quite a few promotions since you two parted ways. I understand he’s running the news conference.”
Michael. I forced my lips into a firm line.
He leaned in closer. “Why’d you blanch? Not chicken, are you?”
“Try not to be ridiculous,” I said, to him or to me, I wasn’t sure. “If you’re done having fun at my expense, maybe we could go gather news?”
He laughed as he pointed to the seat belt. “Don’t forget to buckle up. Might be a bumpy ride.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE LOBBY OF DC Police headquarters was crowded with people waiting to pass through the magnetometers, which were a huge pain in the ass. I was cooling my heels at the back of the line, trying not to worry about seeing Michael again, but the memories came without warning—Michael as I’d first seen him in the bright floodlights behind the crime scene tape, walking like a priest, touching nothing and nothing touching him. Michael tossing his tie over his shoulder as he bent over a dead man, searching for that one elusive clue.
There were other, more dangerous memories. Michael in the morning light, his body against mine as he said, “See how we’re made from the same swath of cloth?” My skin scorched by his stubble, the lethargic tangle of limbs, how peaceful it felt. How it drugged me.
All of it was from a regrettable past I was beyond caring about. I would’ve told Ben, too, except he’d know I was lying.
I glanced up at him. “Could you please stop smirking at me?”
“Not smirking.” He was doing that tall-guy posturing, tucking his chin to his chest, looking down at me from beneath lowered eyebrows. His mouth formed what was clearly a smirk. “Just wondering how long it’d take to get your head back in the game. Aaaaand she’s back,” he drawled. “Good. What’s the plan?”
We decided Ben would question the chief, since like most women, Chief Hayden found Ben charming. Me, I’d work the room. The best information came off-podium, and those were the answers I wanted. I jotted questions for Ben to ask and ripped the paper from its spiral.
He shook me off. “Got it all right here,” he said, tapping his temple.
Soon an officer searched my satchel and waved us through the mags. We took the elevator to the fifth floor, where we were ushered into a storage room converted for news conferences. Our competitors were already here.
“We’re the last arrivals,” I complained. It was so typical of Ben. He was the slowest person I’d ever met, he really was, and now he was slowing me down, too. Forget the fact that he told me about the news conference. I didn’t have time to play fair.
“Why bust ass? My guy promised they’d wait for us to start and they have.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder and leaned down, whispering: “Looks like you’ve rattled the hornet’s nest, huh? If your missing girl wasn’t a story before, she sure as hell is now.”
His laughter boomed over the buzz of too many cops and reporters. He sauntered to the front of the room and shook hands with the captain in charge of the Information Office. They put their heads together, as if sharing gossip, which they probably were. Nelson had already set up in the line of cameras behind folding chairs. I kept my back to the wall nearest the door.
An officer shut the door beside me. Another door across the room opened, and Chief Joyce Hayden stepped through. She wore her dress blues, a navy jacket over a white shirt and black tie, four stars glittering on each shoulder, her hair bound as neatly as her body. She took her place behind the podium as a couple of plainclothes detectives filed in behind her.
There was no family joining them. In missing persons cases there was always family—parents or siblings, spouses or lovers—someone to ask for help, someone who cared.
Evelyn Carney had no one.
The last official came through the door. It was Michael. He assumed a detective stance, hands clasped behind back, weight on heels. His suit was straight from a Zegna ad, tightly fit to his runner’s body. He looked the same as the day he left me. A weird pounding in my ears made the chief’s words drop out like bad audio. I put my head down and, with a shaky hand, took notes on her opening statement.
The chief said that investigators were canvasing the area where Evelyn was last seen, with cadets expanding the search to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and adjacent woods, so far yielding no leads. Police had spoken with a witness who saw Mrs. Carney leave the restaurant and walk alone to the corner where she turned south on Wisconsin Avenue. She’d worn a long black coat and tall boots and carried a small black purse on a cross-body strap. The weather that night had been cold and messy, with patches of slush still on the ground from last week’s snowfall. Not a lot of foot traffic, but police hoped more witnesses would come forward.
During the question and answer, the chief said there’d been no recent cases of women assaulted or robbed in or around Georgetown. While there were other open cases of women missing from the District, none bore similarities to Mrs. Carney’s.
No calls had been made from her cell phone. Neither her credit card nor her bank card had been used.
More hands went up.
Come on, Ben. Ask our question.
A television reporter asked the chief to describe Sunday’s dinner at the restaurant. Chief Hayden stepped aside and introduced Michael, even though everyone in the room knew him. Since his early days as a young homicide detective with a gift for solving intractable cases, his superiors had assigned him to high-profile murders. He had forensic training at Quantico and a PhD in criminology. An actor in a crime drama once rode along with Michael for a month to get into character, and after that, so his fellow detectives nicknamed him “Hollywood.”
Now they called him sir.
I looked away, listening to his speech, the tough, clipped sound of New England, low pitched, well remembered. “Evelyn Carney had dinner with her husband, Peter Carney,” he was saying. “She left the restaurant alone, and he remained behind. We’ve talked extensively with Mr. Carney and found him helpful and forthcoming.”
Someone else asked if Peter Carney was a suspect. There was no indication a crime had been committed, Michael said, and therefore they could have no suspects. He stepped back from the podium.
Ask the damn questions, Ben.
As if he heard my thoughts, Ben turned in his chair and made a sweeping gesture in my direction, indicating my turn to speak. It was infuriating. Michael and the chief were heading to the door when I called out: “Wait, Commander. I have a question.”
Michael stopped, squinting past the camera lights, and then smiled. “Miss Knightly.”
“Who notified police of Evelyn Carney’s disappearance? When was the notification made?”
“I believe the call came in Monday, maybe late morning, early afternoon.”
“Who made the call?”
“I’d have to check the case file and get back to you.”
“If Evelyn Carney’s is a missing persons case, why is it being investigated by CID, rather than the district detectives who usually handle such cases?”
“We’re working with district detectives,” he said. “As you know, collaboration between the districts and headquarters is nothing new.”
“Not in criminal cases it isn’t, but you say there’s no indication of—”
“Excuse me,” he said, and whispered something to the chief. When she nodded, he
ended the news conference by escorting her to the door.
Instead of following the chief, he turned back into the throng of reporters that circled him, talking to him all at once. He pushed past them, heading my way. My stomach went cold. It was just nerves; the kind anybody would have seeing him again, especially here, where everyone knew Michael and me and our history, where everyone was watching, and if I showed that I still cared, they’d tell everyone, it’d be everywhere.
The room had become loud with the clacking and banging of equipment as the photographers broke down their gear, and now Michael was close enough that I could see the stubble along his jaw. My fingers itched to rub it or slap it, I couldn’t decide. My heart punched once, twice, and I bolted.
————
The ride back to the station was brutal. There was nothing worse than Ben’s giving me the silent treatment. I’d almost prefer his bucolic tales of family and farming out west or his ear-bleeding theories of human mating based on the biological imperative, or whatever he called it. Hell, I’d even let him yammer on about the pioneering use of sheep to rid cattle-grazing lands of noxious weeds, if only he’d say something.
“Why aren’t you talking?” I asked.
“Didn’t want to interrupt all that noise in your head. It’s pretty loud. Even from over here.”
After another long moment, I told him, “Just say it.”
He shrugged. “Got nothing.”
Ah, the dumb cowboy routine. I hated that routine. He reserved it for folks he disdained, and that had never before included me.
We were stuck in traffic on Massachusetts Avenue by the old convention center before he drawled out: “If you really want to know? It was bad, you making calf eyes—”
“Calf eyes?”
“Getting all moony over that cop who played you for ten kinds of fool.”
“That’s enough, Ben.”
“I’d have thought so, too. But there you were, running out.”
“I got what I needed and left.”
“You ran. Like some lovesick schoolgirl.” His face remained calm, but his voice gave him away. It’d gone low with the throaty R’s and the flat O’s of the high western prairie, an almost Canadian sound that returned when his temper was riding him. “In front of every damn reporter in town. Hope to hell nobody shot video.”
I hunkered down in the seat.
“If you hadn’t run,” he said, “you’d know I got the name of the hostess at the restaurant, the last known person to see Evelyn that night. A source told me off the record that Evelyn wasn’t having some disagreement with her husband. She left him for another guy, just like the husband told you. Police know who the guy is and want to talk to him.”
That got me sitting up straight. “Who?”
“They won’t give up his name, and isn’t that interesting? Who knows what else we could’ve gotten if you hadn’t run?”
“You’re right.”
He was downshifting, and his mood went with it. “You’ve had a tough day. I get that. But you can’t go batshit crazy on me. I need help with this script. I’m slow. I can’t make deadline without you.”
“We’ll make it.”
“People depend on you. If you fall apart, I don’t know what happens to the rest of us. I’m locked into a contract. I’ve finally got you broken in the way I like—”
“You what?”
“For the most part,” he said, laughing. “And I don’t want to work for anyone else.”
And there it was, how I could never remain annoyed at Ben—his oaths of loyalty hidden in humor.
It was slow going through Dupont Circle. I pulled out my notebook and cleared my mind to conjure the story, and there it was: Evelyn on the dark street, her black wool coat flapping in the wind, her hair as wild and tangled as her feelings. I jotted a lead and read it under my breath. Not bad. The rewrite rolled off the tongue better. The next graph was inevitable, so I wrote that, too. Insert chief’s sound bite here. Cover with video there. The rhythm of the story carried me along, drowning out everything else.
Done, I thought happily, dropping my pen in my lap and stretching my fingers. The spine of the live shot was written. I blinked Ben’s profile into focus—his hawk nose, his eyebrows drawn together, a shade against the late-afternoon sun. When I blinked again, we were pulling in front of our building.
I read him the script. “Pretty good, right?”
“Damn good.” His voice contained some emotion beyond respect, maybe even admiration, and I was glad. He’d forgiven me. It was the first rule, after all. If you got the story right and by deadline, how you got there was largely forgotten. The daily redemption.
CHAPTER SIX
THE BEST PART of the day is show time. I always watched the show from the control room with its wall of monitors and flashes of video feeding in and the boop-boop-boop of the countdown to each story. In the control room, the work came together, alive with sound and color and movement, and it gave a wondrous feeling I tried to hold on to, because also lurking was the ever-present fear that somehow we’d missed a story or that some news might break and bust the show’s rundown all to hell or that something would go wrong—because something always went wrong—and I would have to fix it fast. That was my job.
But today I skipped all that and went home. Not that I’d been told to stay away or anything. I just didn’t want to see Mellay doing my job. Problem was, sitting around the house made me fidgety, the silence sharpened by the bare white walls and hard surfaces of my few furnishings, when what I really wanted was the thrill of the control room or even the shouting and chaos of the newsroom—so much that it felt like withdrawal.
At six o’clock I ate supper in front of the television. Ben was the lead of the show. I’d written the script, but he brought it to life, talking to the camera like he was telling a friend a story about a lost woman. How Evelyn had been late meeting her husband at the restaurant, and when she arrived, told him she no longer wanted to be married. How she’d left her husband stunned with a table full of food. The hostess watched a distressed Evelyn stumble from the restaurant. Where did she go from there, investigators wanted to know. Had anyone seen her after she’d turned that corner?
My cell phone rang. It was Paige Linden, Evelyn’s friend who hadn’t wanted to talk. Now she was telling me about a vigil she was planning for Evelyn. She had printed out fliers and asked some coworkers to hand them out in Georgetown tonight. “Could your station do the story?” she asked.
Of course, I’d send a photographer to shoot pictures. “What I’d really like is to interview you on camera.”
She hesitated. “There’s so much to do,” she said. “I haven’t even contacted other news outlets yet.”
“Maybe I can help.” I flipped open my laptop. From an old press release in my email, I copied the email addresses of reporters at other stations and pasted the list into the body of an email, along with the draft of a typical press release for a missing person vigil. It was the work of a moment. It might seem a little out of the box, giving Paige a template to invite my competition, but she’d have gotten them anyway. In the time she saved, maybe she’d talk. Besides, it was important to establish reciprocity. A relationship with a potential source is like any other relationship. You couldn’t just take. You had to give a little, too.
“Use this if you like,” I said, typing her address into the line and clicking send. “Press releases follow this format. If you email them to a reporter’s phone, it’s more efficient than trying to chase them down by calling their newsrooms. Especially during happy hour,” I joked. “You receive the doc yet?”
She hummed. “This is exactly what I need. Thank you.”
Before we hung up, she agreed to meet after the vigil, no cameras. And yes, she said in her lovely melodious voice—yes, yes, yes—she’d speak only with me.
————
I took a cab to Georgetown, getting out at the corner where the hostess had last seen Evelyn, and followed the route
Evelyn must have taken. The brick walkway sloped toward the waterfront, past pretty shops and restaurants in historic buildings. This part of the city was usually busy, and tonight there was a mix of middle-aged professionals and couples on dates and some hard-faced teens in hoodies. A group of college guys who’d been drinking pretty heavily brushed past me. Among the crowd, a man’s voice cried out: “‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ ”
Goose bumps rose along my nape. Ahead of me, the college guys staggered around a homeless woman rocking herself on the sidewalk. She had a face the color and texture of a peach pit, and her eyes were so pale they appeared milky.
From a distance, the street preacher called out again: “ ‘Why do you endanger yourself every hour? I face death, even as I pray for you—’ ”
Someone started playing the plastic bucket drums. My feet picked up the rhythm. At the corner of Wisconsin and M streets, the Corinthian columns of the bank framed the vigil.
I found a spot in the shadow of the bank column, where I could study the group. There was a young guy darting out at the cars stopped at the busy intersection to hand out posters. The others were dressed in business attire and chatting as you might if you’d just left those same people in the office moments earlier. They held lit candles, and there were flashes from the print photographers and lights on top of television cameras, and the lights were all moving. At the center of it all was Paige Linden.
She was taller than I’d expected, standing chin to chin with the men. Her strong face was framed by ash blond hair tucked behind her ears, and she wore silver hoops that swung as she shook her head vigorously, arguing with a blond man whose back was to me.
Someone bumped me from my blind side, knocking the satchel from my shoulder. “Sorry,” I said, reflexively, to the pale, doughy-faced girl who’d come up from behind.
The Cutaway Page 4