Kill The Story

by John Luciew

“That’s a different case,” the detective protested.

  “Perhaps it shouldn’t be.”

  Chapter 26

  Langhorne shook his head, waving off my theory. “Can’t be,” he said again.

  But Merrin leaned toward his desk, intrigued. “Let him finish,” he said. “Frank, tell us what you think.”

  I inhaled deeply, trying to order my thoughts. “Wayne Dykstra died on Saturday. At first, it looked like an assassination attempt. Everyone thought Hollister was the target. Dykstra was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” My eyes moved from face to face, each one staring back with deep interest. “But it turns out we were wrong. All the evidence suggests Dykstra was the real target.”

  “Yeah, but where’s the connection?” Langhorne pressed.

  “He was a journalist who worked in Harrisburg around the same time as Bressenhan,” I said.

  “He worked at the paper, too?” asked Langhorne. “Dykstra?”

  “No, not at the paper,” I answered. “He worked for a news service out of the state Capitol.”

  Langhorne shot me a skeptical wince. “That’s pretty thin.”

  “There’s more,” I said. “It’s also the way he died. Outside of a hotel. But not just any hotel, a Hilton. And he was shot in the midst of a political event. Hence the initial confusion about the assassination attempt on Hollister.”

  “Yeah, so?” Langhorne said. “It was an open-air event, and the guy was a target of opportunity for a very skillful shooter. The motive here could be anything. A hatred of the press. Anything.”

  “You might not be far off,” I said. “With that idea about hating the press. See, the circumstances of Dykstra’s death are important because of the story he covered. A most famous story.”

  Merrin pointed his now-empty glass at me. “The assassination attempt on Reagan,” he said.

  “That’s right.” The faintest of smiles crossed my lips for the first time that day. Someone else was seeing it, too. “Dykstra was a junior correspondent who just happened to be outside the Washington Hilton on March 20, 1981, when John Hinckley fired shots at Reagan. A political shooting outside a Hilton Hotel.”

  “Remind me not to stay at a Hilton if I ever run for office.” Langhorne deadpanned. “It’s an interesting theory. But where’s our man upstairs fit in?” Langhorne jerked his thumb toward the ceiling. “I thought you said Bressenhan covered politics, mostly. I don’t remember any politicians losing their heads. Least not in the literal sense.”

  “Not a politician,” I said. “A reporter. Bressenhan covered the Danny Pearl case. I didn’t realize how deeply Irv was involved in it until I checked it out on the Internet. He wrote extensively on the killing. It really affected him as a reporter -- and as a Jew. He wrote columns. Did the lecture circuit. Supposedly, he was working on a book.”

  Langhorne was already nodding. “And Pearl got beheaded by terrorists in Iraq.”

  “Pakistan,” Merrin corrected. “He was working on a story for the Wall Street Journal. He’d agreed to meet a source, despite the dangers. He put his life on the line for a story, and he was abducted because of it. The terrorists held him for a while. Later, they forced him to read a statement, then someone ran a blade under his neck. The bastards cut off his head and videotaped the whole thing. They sent the tape to the Pakistani government. Eventually, it wound up on Arab TV, then the Internet. That tape sent a chill through the world. No journalist was safe.”

  Langhorne was the picture of confusion. “And you’re saying that’s why this Bressenhan was killed? Because he was crusading on behalf of Pearl?” ‘Cause, if you’re saying that, then it means we’re looking at terrorists, or anti-Semites. Something like that.”

  I shook my head, frustrated that he still wasn’t getting it. “No, no, no. The significance of the beheading is that it was Bressenhan’s biggest story. Bressenhan was killed in the exact manner of a story he covered. Same with Dykstra.”

  “Great,” Langhorne said. “So you think there’s a killer out there targeting journalists. This may be the first serial to get a pass by the cops and cheered on by the public. I mean, you guys ain’t exactly liked.”

  The detective’s attempt at a joke fell flat among the journalists in the room. We sat in silence, surrounded by framed front pages and old metal press plates commemorating some of the most significant stories in the Herald’s 150-year history.

  All journalists held a special place for their biggest scoops, their best stories and the bloodiest bits of breaking news. These were stories to be told and retold over drinks for a lifetime. They were memorialized in bold headlines on yellowing newsprint. The old newspapers would sit in a drawer, only to be taken out for nostalgia’s sake in retirement, or whenever one was contemplating hanging up his pen.

  Only now, a killer had tapped into this strange fetish for tragedy, misery and malfeasance. This killer was turning it around on the reporters and murdering journalists in the very manner they had helped sensationalize.

  “It’s not just any journalists,” I corrected. “It’s journalists with ties to Harrisburg. And if I’m right, it’s not just the two.”

  The room was silent, except for the ticking of an antique clock.

  “I think Debbie Moore’s death is part of the series,” I said.

  “Who?” Langhorne said. “We don’t have any Debbie Moore on our homicide board. I know, because I check it every morning.”

  “She was the local girl who died in the fire in Baltimore,” I said.

  “The bar fire?” the detective repeated. “How does that connect?”

  “It was arson,” I corrected. “There was a device timed for when there would be lots of people in the club. A Saturday night, after midnight. And there was an obstruction placed in front of one of the emergency exits. A newspaper vending machine.”

  “I still don’t see it,” Sharps said.

  “With most arsons, the motive is to burn the building. Usually, for the insurance money, or to drive someone out of an old building on a prime piece of land, whatever. It’s typically not to kill people. In this fire, the motive seems to have been to kill as many people as possible. Not only that, but to mimic the deadly fire that happened up in Rhode Island a few years ago.”

  I turned to Langhorne. He looked pained.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “This Debbie Moore. She covered the bar fire up in New England.”

  I nodded slowly. “Not only covered it, interviewed victims for a year. Won awards.”

  “And her father worked for this newspaper,” Angus Merrin put in. “He worked in this town around the same time as Dykstra and Bressenhan.”

  “Shit.” Langhorne exhaled the word, then flipped open his cell phone and dialed numbers without looking. He raised the phone to his ear.

  “Chief,” he said. “We have a situation.”

  Chapter 27

  He stood in the December chill watching the commotion from across the street. One after the other, the cop cars rolled up on the newspaper building. The crime scene truck was there, even an ambulance, though he knew that was unnecessary.

  He watched, yet couldn’t enjoy the event he had created. His story.

  He had tried to be so artful. He had re-created the stories so lovingly and with such attention to detail. This had required years of research, months of planning and a lifetime of reading. But he had finally done it. He had put the reporters inside their own stories. Perhaps now they could see how it felt.

  He had accomplished all of this with such precision. Three of them and counting. All according to plan. Yet they still hadn’t seen it. He had to be graceless and obvious, and send them the fucking head. Even in this, there were nice parallels. In Pakistan, the terrorists had sent Danny Pearl’s decapitation death tape to the media. He went one better. He delivered the decaying, stinking head -- right to the newspaper.

  Maybe now they would wake up. Maybe now they would realize the story. Maybe now they would see what was coming. All that was
coming.

  No, not them. It was too much to expect. They were too busy watching others, observing the news and scribbling in their little notebooks. Or on TV, doing take after insipid take, staring into the mindless black eye of the camera. They didn’t notice when someone was watching them.

  How pathetic they were, too. Their lives were so little, so empty. Their only importance came from a press pass. Their power derived from a newspaper masthead --The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post. Their entire identities were wrapped up in bylines.

  Divorced from these things, their lives were meaningless. They had exchanged their youth, their marriages, their families, their whole lives -- for headlines. But their self-worth evaporated the moment they walked out of the newspaper each night. Their identities were erased along with a byline that was no longer printed.

  They had to be in a buzzing newsroom to feel like they mattered, that they were important. Or at a press conference shouting questions. Or at the scene of some tragedy, traipsing through evidence, getting in the way of the cops and the rescue workers, and asking stupid, insensitive questions of the sufferers. Or, best of all, they had to be bringing someone down, pecking apart careers and characters, until the victims were hollow, broken shells, just like them.

  How shocked they would be if someone turned the mirror on them. If only they could see themselves with the same keen powers of perception they used on everyone else.

  The one from Philly draped himself in tailored suits of the finest material. It was a desperate attempt to cloak himself in importance. Yet he ended up on the same barstool each night, medicating himself with cheap liquor. He couldn’t afford an expensive taste in booze. Not with how much he drank.

  At closing time, he stumbled home to a small apartment. There wasn’t much left for rent after the alimony and child support payments and all that he spent on his masquerade.

  The one in D.C. wasn’t much better. He wore his faith like a Star of David sewn onto the lapel of his coat. He made the grand, misguided assumption that he spoke for an entire people in the things that he wrote. His diatribes. It was another grasping attempt to be something more. Something better. Something that would last. But long ago, he had lost his own faith. And he never did have much faith in himself.

  The girl was a little different. She was still too young for her soul to show much decay. She had friends, but her relationships with men were shit. And she was already starting to ask hard questions as she looked long into the mirror each night after drinking too much wine. She wondered what would happen when her looks began to go. He had done her a favor, really.

  In truth, she had very little to do with any of it. She was payment for the father. The man who thought he could escape. The one who believed he could cover up what he had been and what he had done. In reality, the father had just passed the disease onto his daughter. She would pay. But he would suffer.

  There would be others, too. Their endings long-planned. Their stories specially prepared.

  Last would be Tellis. Of all of them, he was the most pathetic. Bounced from his beat at the Capitol. Suspended from the paper. Drunk most of the time. Never advancing. Staying at the same paper all these years. Rotting there.

  How was it that this pathetic, broken man had managed to write the ultimate story so many years ago? How had he engineered the grand spectacle? Created the gruesome show that replayed again and again on TV, and then resided in infamy on the Internet?

  Standing there in the December cold, across from the lousy, second-rate newspaper where it had all started, the man pondered this. These were questions he had turned over in his mind many times. He’d think on these matters as he sat in his study, reading over the old newspapers, yellowed and smelling of must.

  The feel of the newsprint, even in decay, was reassuring. The smell was an old and familiar friend. And the details they contained, along with the faded black and white photos, were reassuring. He looked at them everyday, committing it all to memory, as he had many things.

  He was a good student, a voracious reader. He had prepared well. And he’d been very, very patient. But the time had come to resurrect the story, long forgotten in the old newsprint. It was time for him to re-write the news.

  Tellis would be the subject. But by the time the hack realized it, it would be too late.

  Chapter 28

  I was unable to write a word of the sensational story I had pieced together. It was not because of my tremulous hands. Nor was it due to the fact that my desk and everything on it were still considered part of a crime scene, an off-limits area to be picked over by lab techs for hours. It was Det. Dave Langhorne who insisted upon the muzzle. And strangely, my editor and publisher agreed.

  Still sitting together in the publisher’s dimly-lit office, the four of us now believed a serial killer was targeting journalists with ties to Harrisburg, yet there wouldn’t be a word of it in tomorrow morning’s paper. I felt the decision was a mistake. But Langhorne argued successfully that a story linking the murders of Wayne Dykstra, Debbie Moore and Irv Bressenhan would damage the case and hand the advantage back to the killer.

  “Seems to me he already has the advantage,” I protested, as Merrin and Sharps remained mute. “He’s killed three people and we still don’t know why.”

  “At least we know what he’s up to,” Langhorne countered. “We’ve pieced it together. Well, you did, anyway. Now that we know that, maybe we can get ahead of him. One thing’s for sure, he’s not done. Not by a long shot. I’ve never seen anything like this. But I’ve seen enough to know it ain’t over.”

  Merrin leaned forward. “I agree, detective. We publish nothing linking the murders.” The publisher’s words effectively ended the debate. He had just relinquished the paper’s interests in breaking a national story.

  “However, this doesn’t mean we can’t investigate it ourselves.” Merrin continued, his sunken eyes focused on me. “Telly, I want you to handle this personally. You’ve done well so far. Maybe you’ll see something else, find another link. If all of this is tied to something that happened here, maybe you’ll find out what it was.”

  It was as if Merrin were trying to purchase my silence with stale compliments and hollow pledges. But I knew we already had enough to go Page One tomorrow. Media from around the world would be on the Bressenhan story. If I could put it together, somebody else out there could, too. By waiting, we risked getting beat.

  I looked to my city editor. Bill Sharps appeared boyish in the overstuffed chair, just as he was compliant in the face of the fatherly publisher. I needed to ignite his usual fire for breaking a story.

  “Bill, you always talk about taking care of our backyard. Local news is the franchise, you say. The paper must own what happens in Harrisburg. We gotta get it first, and we gotta get it right. Shouldn’t that apply here? The hell with our back yard. This maniac brought it inside the paper. That’s not a newsroom up there, it’s a crime scene. We should break this, Bill. You know we should.”

  Sharps seemed to resent being put on the spot. The color of his bald spot, the chief indicator of his mood, was reddening. He was about to lash out when Merrin interrupted.

  “Hold on a minute, fellas,” the publisher said in his most genial, grandfatherly manner. “Seems this meeting has become more of an editorial debate than a discussion about the case. I apologize, detective. I don’t want to take any more of your time.”

  Taking his cue, Langhorne grasped the armrests of his chair, preparing to hoist himself up. “Damn,” he said, “and it was just gettin’ interesting. Too bad I got a murder to solve.” The detective rose and leaned over the publisher’s mighty desk to shake hands. Merrin replied with another half-stand.

  “Gentlemen,” Langhorne said, dipping his head at me and Sharps. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

  As soon as the oak door swung shut in Langhorne’s wake, I was back on Sharps. “Well, Bill? Is this a backyard story or what? Do our readers want to know why we got a decapitated
head in our newsroom, or don’t they?”

  “Of course they do,” Sharps seethed. “And they will. Yes, the New York tabloids will have a field day with this. The clever headlines alone will be worth the price of a copy. But this is about more than news coverage now. It’s about lives. I’m not going to be party to a story that jeopardizes more lives.”

  “At least let me get going on the Bressenhan story for tomorrow?” I pressed. “At least throw me that bone.”

  Sharps shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

  “Not a good idea?” I echoed, throwing up my hands. “It’s the story of the year, and it was FedExed right to my desk.”

  “That’s the problem, Telly,” Merrin took over. “As soon as you opened that package, you became part of the story. What are you going to do? Interview yourself? Have your name show up in the byline and in the story?”

  I flung myself deep into the chair and folded my arms.

  “I’ll give the story to Macy,” Sharps conferred with Merrin. The old man nodded.

  “I’m not cutting you out, Telly.” The publisher extended his open hands. “Matter of fact, I’ve been very impressed with you. I admire the way you’ve resurrected your career. By the way, Senator Hollister sends his regards.”

  It hit me then. Hollister had warned me that he was good friends with Merrin. The senator had threatened to use that relationship against me. He must have called in a marker, and now I was getting pulled off the biggest story of my life.

  “So that’s what this is all about?” I said, leaning forward. “The Hollister story? The senator threatened me that he had an in at the paper, but I went ahead with the story anyway. It was a good piece, and I trusted that my editors and my publisher would see that. I trusted that the paper would back me, regardless of personal ties or political leanings. The next thing I know, I’m getting pulled off a story that should be mine.”

  Merrin steepled his bony fingers. “Yes, I did get a call from the senator. And he was quite upset with you. He asked me to hold your story, even to have you reassigned. Know what I told him?” The old man cast a cold eye on me, then cocked his head. The loose skin of his neck dangled over his shirt collar, as he waited for my reply.