by Lis Wiehl
“How can you say that?” Nicole asked. For once it sounded like a question, not an accusation. “You had this horrible, horrible thing happen to you. How can it have anything to do with God? If He really loved you, wouldn’t He have stopped this from happening?”
It was a question Allison had asked herself, and she tried to answer as honestly as possible. “You know what, Nic? I don’t really have an answer. But I’m coming to terms with that. Life is full of mystery. Not everything folds up neatly into boxes. But I believe that God sometimes allows something to happen that in His wisdom and power He could prevent. I will probably never know why. Maybe I’m not capable of knowing why. The peace I’m beginning to find isn’t something I can explain in words. It comes from knowing that God is good, and from looking for the good that can come from this.”
She watched Nicole as she spoke. Allison knew her friend wouldn’t argue with her, not when she was so raw, but she was unprepared for the tiny flicker of vulnerability in Nicole’s eyes. It was like she was really hearing Allison’s words.
Cassidy said simply, “I’m so glad to hear that.”
Allison added, “All I can do is get through each day the best I can. But I need something to focus on. That’s why I’m going back to the office tomorrow.”
Cassidy looked shocked. “You’re not going back to work?”
“What am I supposed to do? Sit around at home and think about what happened? I feel like God is telling me to move forward. I’m tired of talking about me and thinking about me. I’d much rather think about my cases. Especially Jim Fate.”
“You’re not the only one who can’t stop thinking about Jim Fate,” Nicole said. “And I’ve got news for you. Right before I came here tonight, I got the lab results on his blood.”
“And?”
“It was fentanyl after all.”
Allison’s mouth opened in surprise. “Fentanyl! Then Glover must have done it.” Despite his claims, Chris must not be as good at telling voices apart as he had thought.
Nicole’s nose wrinkled. “One odd thing was that the dosage was amazingly high. The lab people are still trying to figure out how Glover was able to concentrate it like he did.”
“So what does fentanyl do to you when you inhale it?” Cassidy asked.
“They say it would have caused an almost immediate opioid-induced apnea,” Nicole said. “Basically, he would have wanted to breathe, but his lungs wouldn’t have cooperated.”
Cassidy winced. “That sounds painful.”
“Everyone says it only took a couple of minutes for him to die,” Allison said. She didn’t point out how long a couple of minutes could be. She had once won a conviction on a murder case by simply asking the jury to think about the strangling victim while she timed two minutes on her watch.
Two minutes had proved to be an eternity.
CHAPTER 40
Channel 4 TV
Monday, February 20
Allison Pierce is here to see you,” the receptionist told Cassidy.
“Great. Could you send her down?” Cassidy wanted to get a little bit more work done before she took off. She didn’t have any stories on tonight’s news. Her entire day had been spent working on the half-hour special about Jim Fate—“Death of a Talk Show Host”—that was scheduled to air at the end of the month.
The special would have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But something about Jim Fate’s death still felt like unfinished business.
“Hey,” Allison said. “Are you ready to hit Nordstrom Rack?”
The plan was to do a little window-shopping and then grab a bite to eat, with Nicole joining them if she could. Cassidy guessed that Allison just wanted to check up on her and see if she was doing okay. But the joke was on Allison—Cassidy wanted to do the exact same thing to her.
“Give me a minute, would you?”
“What are you working on?” Allison leaned down to look over her shoulder. One side of Cassidy’s computer showed the transcript of an interview she had conducted with a nationally known talk show host right after Jim’s funeral. On the other was the script she was writing. As Allison watched, Cassidy copied two sentences of the interview and pasted them into the script.
“That special on Jim. It’s going to cover his life and times, as well as his death. I certainly have plenty of footage for the part of the story where Glover committed suicide rather than face the consequences of his crimes.” She swiveled in her chair to look up at Allison. “The thing is, the more I think about Glover killing himself, the less clear-cut it seems. What if—and I know they’ve already put this case to bed—but what if Glover killed himself just because he was worn down and desperate, knowing he was probably going to jail for taking kickbacks?”
Allison straightened up and bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking about it too, Cassidy. All the evidence we have is circumstantial. Glover hated Jim Fate, and he had access to both fentanyl and smoke grenades. But if hating Jim Fate was a crime . . .”
Cassidy finished the thought: “. . . then there are a lot of people out there who are guilty.”
“And the fentanyl and even the smoke grenades aren’t so unique that only Glover could have gotten his hands on them. And he never came out and admitted to killing Jim.”
“I guess there’s no way we’ll ever know for sure.” Cassidy sighed. “I’m almost done. Let me just check this B-roll footage of Jim at one of the governor’s press conferences. I’m thinking I could use it to illustrate how good he was at getting people’s goats.” In a new window on her computer, she clicked on the file that held five-year-old footage.
The clip began to play. Allison leaned over Cassidy’s shoulder again.
At the same instant, they both sucked in their breath. There it was. The missing piece. The thing that had been nagging at Cassidy for days.
Only it wasn’t a thing.
It was a person.
Allison tapped a short fingernail on the screen. “Isn’t that . . .?”
Cassidy turned the knob to shuttle back the footage. The cameraman had panned the audience of activists. And there in the middle was a familiar face. One she had seen recently in person. Only in this footage, the woman wore her hair in two swinging braids and was dressed in black Carhartt overalls. At Jim’s funeral, her hair had been in a sleek twist, and she had worn a tailored black suit.
Willow Klonsky. Jim Fate’s intern.
Somewhere in the intervening years, Willow had gone over to the other side, gone corporate, forgotten her roots as an activist.
“Wait,” Allison said. “What group is this again?”
“Some kind of environmental group. But narrow. I’m trying to remember. They focused on . . .” Cassidy thought a moment. “On food. Stuff like keeping antibiotics out of animal feed, more frequent factory inspections, banning that additive they give milk cows now.”
Allison peered at the frozen photo of Willow. “Looks like she parted company with the group. I can’t really see one of those activists going to work for someone like Jim Fate.”
“She couldn’t have been much out of high school in this photo. Maybe not even.” Cassidy felt the final puzzle piece fall into place. “So Willow grows up, forgets about her youthful ideals when she realizes that otherwise she’ll never be able to keep herself in iPods and Nikes, decides to go corporate, and starts working for a guy who opposes all kinds of governmental regulations. But what if one of these people”—she pointed at the blurry figures in the background— “saw what she did as a betrayal?”
“Jim Fate was a big name,” Allison said slowly. “The kind of guy who always had an army of people to do his grunt work for him— clean his house, pick up his dry cleaning, get him coffee. The kind of guy who would have someone else open his mail. But he always insisted on doing it, because he sometimes got personal items in the mail.”
Cassidy almost got sidetracked, wondering what those items had been. She dragged her tired mind back to the question at hand. “So maybe th
e package was never meant for Jim at all? What if they addressed it to him, knowing that it would throw the cops off the scent, but they expected all along that Willow would open it?” She started to pick up the phone. “We need to talk to her.”
Allison put one hand on top of the receiver. “No. Law enforcement needs to handle this. I’m going to go talk to Nicole, see what she knows about this group. Do you remember their name?”
“It was something like SAFE or SANE. Some four-letter acronym that started with S.”
“Okay. But I’m serious, Cass. Do not call Willow. If her group did target her, we don’t need her alerting them.”
“I promise. But you have to let me have first dibs on the story. If I didn’t have this footage, you would never have seen this.”
Allison nodded, already grabbing up her purse. As soon as Cassidy saw her turn the corner, she grabbed her keys and hurried the other way, toward the parking garage. She had promised not to call, but she hadn’t said a thing about not talking to Willow in person. This was her scoop. This was the story that might put her back on top.
And Cassidy ignored the little twinge she felt that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the right thing to do.
CHAPTER 41
KNWS Radio
It was five thirty by the time Cassidy got to KNWS, and the parking lot was beginning to empty out. The receptionist was putting on her coat as she told Cassidy where to find Willow’s space. The cubicles Cassidy passed along the way were mostly empty.
Willow’s cubicle looked like it had been assembled out of rejects. The once cream-colored head-high walls were stained, and the desk chair she sat in, typing away on her computer, was orange and lacked arms.
“Willow?” Cassidy said.
“Yes?” The girl turned around and stood up.
“Hi. Cassidy Shaw from Channel 4. I just need to ask you a few questions. I’m working on a memorial piece about Jim.”
“Now?” Willow’s brows pulled together. “It’s the end of the day.”
“Would you mind? It wouldn’t take long. And I’m on deadline.” She gave Willow her best smile, one that had disarmed an uncounted number of people.
“I really don’t know that I have that much to say about Jim. I mean, I was just his gofer.”
Cassidy lowered her voice. “Look, Willow, I found out about your past.”
The girl’s face froze. “What do you mean?”
“You were an environmental activist, but then you left that life behind and went to work for Jim. And your old comrades didn’t like that, did they? You betrayed their beliefs. They knew you were his gofer, so they figured you opened his mail too. They sent the package to Jim, but you were the target.”
Willow laughed, a single short burst of sound. She sounded both surprised and amused. She shook her head and said, “Really—that’s what you think happened?”
“If it’s not, then tell me what did happen. I was looking at some old footage, Willow. And there you were, at the governor’s press conference about food safety. You gave all that up, but they weren’t ready to give you up, were they?”
Willow stood totally still for a long moment. Cassidy could tell she was balanced on the edge, trying to decide whether to tell a truth or a lie. Cassidy had been in that same position so many times herself. Finally Willow got her purse from a drawer.
“Come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Cassidy followed Willow down a corridor. Fumbling in her purse with one hand, Willow opened a door with the other. Inside was a long room filled with banks of equipment, watched over by a silver-haired man wearing headphones. A glass window separated the control room from a radio studio, this one empty.
The man pulled back one of his headphones, looking confused. “Willow, what are you doing?”
“You need to leave, Greg. Now. Leave or die.”
Leave or die? What? And then Cassidy saw what Willow had just taken out of her purse—a small, black gun. She had seen far too many guns recently. Far too many guns, far too much blood, and far too many dead people.
Greg stared at Willow, uncomprehending. “But I can’t leave. I’m running the board.”
Cassidy felt like she was about to burst out of her skin. She had seen what guns could do, and she didn’t want to see it again. “I think she means it, Greg,” she said. At least that’s what Cassidy meant to say, but it came out as more of a shriek. “Get out now. Get out!”
Greg yanked the headphones off, set them down, and left in a hurry. Her eyes never leaving Cassidy, Willow went to the door and turned the lock. Then she opened a drawer, scrabbled through it with her free hand, and tossed Cassidy a roll of silver duct tape. “Sit down in that chair and tape your ankles together. And do a good job.”
Cassidy’s eyes darted around the room, looking for something she could use as a weapon. Nothing. Then she remembered her purse, which was still slung over her shoulder. She could stab Willow with a pen or a metal nail file, or squirt hair spray in her eyes.
But there were problems with these ideas. One was that a gun was a far more efficient and effective weapon. The second was the near impossibility of actually locating any given item in the bottomless depths of her tote. Her only hope was that Allison was sure to be right behind her.
“So you did it,” Cassidy said as she leaned over and taped her ankles together, trying not to do it too tightly. “Not your old friends.”
“What? No.” She shook her head. “SAFE is all about lobbying. Or, if they really feel like pushing the envelope, demonstrations. They’re not willing to put their lives on the line. When I saw that they were just going to stick to their petitions and their protests, I decided someone needed to really fight back. The big food companies have deep pockets. They can get stories swept under the rug, pay people to go away and forget about what happened. But I can never forget. Never. Which is why Jim Fate had to die.”
Whatever this was about, Cassidy realized, it was personal. “What is it you can’t forget?” she said softly.
“I had a little sister, Sunshine. We called her Sunny. She died when she was six.” Willow’s mouth trembled and then firmed into a thin line. But the gun never wavered. It was pointed right at Cassidy’s chest.
“What happened to her?”
“She ate peanut butter crackers. Something millions of little kids do every day. But the peanut butter was contaminated. She started throwing up. The next day she had bloody diarrhea, and my parents took her to the emergency room. She ended up in pediatric intensive care. In agony. They kept giving her painkillers, but they didn’t help at all. She just lay there and whimpered. My parents were talking to the doctors when Sunny started crying and saying she knew she was going to die. And I was saying of course she wasn’t going to, she was going to be okay, the doctors would help her.” Willow’s eyes shone with tears. “I was so scared, but of course I had to say those things. And at the time, I believed them. I still trusted the system to work.
“An hour later, she had a massive heart attack. All the doctors and nurses were there, trying to get her back, shocking her poor little body, but it was too late. They said there were no signs of brain activity. I was only sixteen years old, but I knew what that meant. They let us hold her, and then they unplugged the machines.”
“Oh no,” Cassidy breathed.
But Willow wasn’t done. “A year to the day after my sister died, my mom killed herself. She was the one who bought those crackers for Sunny.”
“I am so, so sorry,” Cassidy said, meaning it. If she could just get the gun out of Willow’s hand and some sense into her head, this would make great TV.
“Sorry doesn’t bring them back, does it?” Willow shook her head as if to clear the memory. “Now, tear off some more long pieces of duct tape so I can tape your wrists together.”
As Cassidy did so, she said, “But it was contaminated peanut butter that killed your sister, not Jim. Why go after him? He’s not a food manufacturer.”
> “Jim Fate had millions of listeners who hung on his every word. And he was always telling them that we didn’t need more regulations.” Behind Cassidy’s back, Willow wrapped the tape tightly around her wrists. “That we could count on the laws that were already on the books. What a joke! Every day, manufacturers decide to gamble. One positive salmonella test can mean dumping thousands of dollars’ worth of product. When the alternative is to ship it out, make money, and cross your fingers that with luck, A, no one will get sick, and B, if they do, they will blame something or someone else, not you.”
“But why didn’t you reason with him?” Cassidy thought of Jim. He had a soft side, even if many people didn’t get to see it. “He would have cared about your sister. He would have listened to you.”
Willow’s laugh was real. “How can you seriously ask me that? You knew him. You couldn’t reason with Jim. Jim Fate didn’t listen to anyone but himself. It would be like trying to argue with Hitler. Would you try to get Hitler to see that what he was doing was wrong? Or would you shoot him down like a dog?”
Hitler! Anger heightened Cassidy’s senses. She could hear the rasp of Willow’s breathing. The edges of everything she saw were sharper. So were her words, spilling out before she could think twice about their wisdom. “You’ve obviously got a gun—why didn’t you shoot him? But no, you didn’t even have the courage to look Jim in the eyes when you killed him.”
Willow waved the gun at her. “Don’t tempt me, okay? And I did see him that day. I was watching through the window when he opened the envelope. It only took a few minutes for him to die—it took three days for Sunny. Three days! I did him a favor, killing him the way I did.”
Cassidy felt her attention widen past the round eye of the gun, past Willow’s sad and crazy explanation. “So what’s going to happen now?” More important, what was going to happen to her?