by Jon Talton
Melinda releases the page. The clock is straight up eleven.
She comes out of her chair and hugs me deeply. I wrap my arms around her and say “thank you,” stroke her short, soft hair, and run my fingers down to her neck, where they find a cool, slender chain. Years ago, I gave her a piece of jewelry: a chain with a silver hound dog on it. A news hound. She gave me a stuffed animal ferret—I was so good at ferreting out the truth. And she gave me the tie I wear tonight. It is all part of our history, and she wore the news hound for tonight. My fingers playfully sneak under the chain and move toward the front of her throat, then lift it out from her sweater.
But it’s not the news hound. It’s a white gold key. I drop it and push back.
“It’s Tiffany,” she says. “You’ve seen it before.” She’s smiling and her eyes are lying.
I’ve never seen it before. I’m about to answer when the elevator bell sounds and Amber steps out, followed by two men in suits and another pair in Seattle Police blue. One of the detectives is my old pal Sgt. Mazolli. The uniformed officers are carrying a pick and a sledgehammer. They linger by the elevator. Amber walks our way. Melinda stiffens.
“Amber.”
“Melinda.”
She has a badge dangling from around her neck and is wearing a dark blue windbreaker with “FBI” emblazoned on it. “The guard says you’re in charge tonight.”
“Yes.” Melinda tucks the Tiffany key back inside her sweater.
Amber hands her a folded set of papers. “Then I’m serving you with this search warrant.”
While they talk, I am digging through the files in my briefcase. I find the old notebook and leaf through it. And I finally understand.
Chapter Forty-seven
Every few seconds, a smashing sound echoes out of the small room, the kind of noise that slams through the ears into the bones. Amber, Melinda, the detectives, and I stand and sit in the Governor’s Office. One of the guards had opened it for the cops. It’s still just the way it was the day he died. The newspaper that day sits atop his modest wooden desk, now wrapped in plastic to preserve it. His smoking jacket dangles from the coat rack. The 1920s-style lights hang from the ceiling, casting light and shadow.
The bathroom at the far end of the office isn’t preserved. Just as Karl Zimmer had told me, the old toilet and sink had been removed. And where the toilet once sat is a recently poured concrete slab, flush with the floor. The slab sits atop a dead space between the floors of the brawny old building. New floor covering was supposed to be installed on top, to make the room look like a storage area. Zimmer never got that far. Now the cops are digging into the slab. One will give a few blows with a large pick, and then the other will step inside to bang with the sledgehammer. It has all come down to this. It’s slow going.
Melinda sits in the Governor’s desk chair, her eyes dazed. She holds the search warrant in her hands but she hasn’t looked at it. She asks me what they’re looking for and I don’t answer. I look at my hand, where I had held the pendant, and I wonder. Coincidences happen. This is just an ugly one on a night like this. The digging echoes through the room.
The digging goes on for half an hour, then the detectives take off their jackets and take over for the other cops. Their uniform shirts are dark with sweat. Mazolli gives me a vinegary expression and lugs the pick into the bathroom. In a few moments, the heavy blows of steel against concrete begin again. A fine dust begins to drift through the air in the Governor’s Office.
“We ain’t getting anywhere.” This is Mazolli’s verdict as he emerges from the bathroom, his face bright red and dripping sweat. My abdomen tightens. “We can bring in a crew tomorrow. Maybe it’s just bad information. Wouldn’t be the first time that came from a newspaper.”
He sees my expression. “Unless the columnist wants to try some manual labor.”
I’m already up and stripping off my jacket. “Sure.”
He hands me the pick. It’s even heavier than it looks. The uniformed cops snicker. I walk into the bathroom nearly dragging the thing. Mazolli leans against the doorjamb.
I know the principle. Use the force of gravity and the weight of the tool to do the work. But just raising it above my shoulders using a two-handed grip is difficult. I aim the first swing into the eight-inch diameter hole that the cops have already made in the middle of the slab. It’s a pathetic effort, the pick nearly coming out of my hands. The cops laugh.
I get mad.
Again. Again. After the fourth swing, I find a cadence of sorts, letting the bounce-back from the concrete help move the pick into the air for the next trip down. I stop to loosen my tie, and then I resume. My heart is pounding and I breathe in the dusty air like a runner pacing himself. Again. Again. Shards of concrete fly out of the growing hole and scuttle across the aged tile of the room. I aim for the deepest part of the hole, missing it sometimes, hitting it more and more.
The next strike sounds different, deep and hollow, and the pick doesn’t come out. I lean forward on its shaft, breaking out more concrete, and I pull it out to make another try.
Then the smell is in my nostrils. I’ve smelled it once before in my life. You’d never mistake it. You want to throw up.
“Okay, okay.” Mazolli gently grasps my shoulders and backs me into the office. He nods to the officers. “Back at it.”
I turn and see that the night cops reporter, Kathy Deane, has joined us.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispers to me. Then she sits on the edge of the desk, swinging her legs, reading the search warrant, and making notes in a reporter’s notebook. The cops don’t pay attention.
“My God, what it that awful smell?” Melinda is by my side, giving me a beseeching look. I just wipe the sweat off my face and shake my head. Amber stares grimly ahead, her arms folded across her chest. More slams of pick and sledgehammer reverberate out of the bathroom. Melinda nearly yells, “What?”
Then the cops stop and silence falls like the concrete dust.
Kathy refolds the warrant and says, “That’s Megan Nyberg.”
Chapter Forty-eight
When I look back to check Melinda’s reaction, she’s gone.
I ask and nobody’s noticed. Then I am walking quickly through the empty Governor’s Library, the red leather chairs misarranged, the big conference table littered with newspapers, and then out into the ghost newsroom. It’s deserted.
Adrenaline powers me as I take the flights of stairs to the main newsroom. I rush through it, but she’s not there. The computer in her cubicle is turned off. The desk drawer where she keeps her purse is empty. The wall clock says midnight. So I take the elevator down to the lobby and run out into the street, only vaguely aware of the burning pain in my shoulders and back from swinging the pick. The street gleams from a light shower that has passed through, but it’s not raining now and Melinda’s not on the sidewalk. I jog to the corner and look down the hill. One set of taillights has reached First Avenue and a signal flickers a right turn. The sidewalk is empty. That couldn’t have been Melinda’s car. She couldn’t have moved that fast, wouldn’t have been able to park that close to the building.
Returning to the corner, I take another long look each way. Something makes me stare up at the newspaper building. The lights are on in the newsroom, as they should be even at this time of night, and the windows of the Governor’s Office are bright. The rest of the tower is dark. Except for several sets of windows on the top floor, shining out into the night. The first of what promises to be many Seattle Police cruisers to visit rounds the corner and parks. Before the cops get out, I go back in the employee entrance. I ask the guard to find Amber and tell her where I’m going.
***
When the elevator door opens, I see light streaming out of the publisher’s office and I hear Melinda’s voice, shrill, nearly hysterical.
“You told me you were going to pay her to go away!”
I can’t hear the response.
Then
, “Why did you get involved with her in the first place?!… I don’t care!… Do you know what you’ve done?”
“He does.” I say it as I step from the secretary’s office through the threshold into the inner sanctum of James Forrest Sterling.
His eyes flash and he rushes toward me from behind his desk. I give him a hard check with both hands against his shoulders and he falls backward to the Persian rug that sits between his desk and conference table. His glasses fly toward the far wall and he’s splayed out on the floor. He’s wearing jeans, a white polo shirt and sandals with gray socks.
“Don’t hurt him!” Melinda pushes against me, but I stretch out one arm and firmly but gently move her aside.
“I’m not going to hurt him. I don’t do business the way his friends do.”
He rubs his shoulders, where I shoved him. Then he rubs his beard. His beard. Heather had said Megan went with a man “who looked like me.” I have grown a beard, and that night I found Heather I was wearing a suit, the usual outfit of the publisher, as well. Other things Heather said start to gel, too.
“Megan Nyberg came to you for protection.” I pull over a chair and sit on the edge of it, facing him but above him.
“So she did.” His high voice regains a certain command. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”
“What about me?” Melinda demands. “Don’t you owe me an explanation? You said we were going away tomorrow. Was that a lie, too?”
I stare at her. All I can say is her name.
Melinda says mine back, sadness in her voice. Her face is red from crying. “Jim and I have been together for years. What? You have your playmates. You were never going to really love me. What does it matter to you?” Her voice grows fierce as she reaches the end of the last sentence. All I can say is that now she’s implicated in one homicide, maybe more.
I glance at Sterling’s large desk, stacked with files. Beside the high-backed desk chair is a large paper shredder.
I cock my head. “Destroying evidence?”
Melinda drops to her knees and puts a sheltering arm around Sterling. “Leave him alone,” she pleads. “I let you put your story in. Why do you want to hurt him?”
“Why did you let me put the story in?” I speak quietly.
“Because I knew he’d believe it was the right thing to do, too.” She starts sobbing again. “He just isn’t thinking. His family has betrayed him, betrayed the newspaper. Then these people got control of him. He’s a good man. If I could let you hurt them, then they couldn’t hurt him…”
“Shut up, Mel!” Sterling says, grating my ears with his mangling of a lovely name. “What story? What fucking story?”
“The story that’s going to put your buddies at Olympic International and Praetorian in jail.” I relax in the chair and force my voice into a calm, easy shade. This isn’t a confrontation. It’s now an interview.
“Are you insane!” He starts to lift himself up off the floor but I raise a hand. I’m taller, bigger, and stronger than he is and he knows it. He sits back on his hands but commands Melinda to stop the presses. For a long time nobody speaks, and in the silence the walls and floor conduct the rumble of the big machines.
“Mel!” His eyes are wide, desperate.
“No.” She says it quietly. “I can’t. The story is too important. And that you would want to stop it… Oh, Jim, tell me Zimmer didn’t kill that young girl.”
I say, “Sterling killed her himself. Zimmer just brought her body into the building in an oil drum one weekend. There had been a leak in the toilet in the Governor’s office—the plumbing was probably seventy years old, and Zimmer’s crew took it out. But they had to replace a lot of the tile and dig down into the space between the floors. Your boyfriend here had him put Megan’s body in and pour a new slab over it. She was in a tomb that would never be found, even if the newspaper closed and somebody converted the building to condos. Zimmer did it because it felt he owed the Forrest family. But he couldn’t live with it. There’s no use, Jim, Zimmer has told us everything.”
Melinda is strangely silent. She lets her hands drop from him. Sterling stares at me, blinking fast. “I had to…take care of her, or they would have killed me. You don’t understand. If we publish that story, they’ll kill us both.”
“We’re way past that, and I’m surprised your buddy Pete Montgomery didn’t tell you about it. But I guess you’re out of the loop. Not like Troy.”
“Troy.” Sterling looks like he wants to spit. “Troy was the one out of the loop.”
“Out of the loop of eleven/eleven?”
“Yes.” He says it defiantly.
“But you had him killed.”
“Not me. Praetorian,” he says. “Mission security, they called it. Mission security was paramount. Troy became a liability. All we needed from him was help with the money.”
“Hiding it. Laundering it in the capital markets. Making it look copasetic on Wall Street.”
“Why the hell do you think Troy’s fund did so well the past few years? He was no investment genius.”
“Black ops money.”
Sterling nods. “He was never a part of the group. He was the bookkeeper as far as we were concerned. Then he started getting too curious. He wasn’t reliable. He heard too much.”
“Like Megan heard too much.”
“I don’t know about any of that. I didn’t want to know. Don’t you understand? Megan was Pete’s girlfriend. Sure, she heard more than she should have and she knew it. They were going to dispose of her and her friends. Anybody she might have told. She came to me to protect her. I told her I would. But if Praetorian had known, they might have killed me! So I had to do it and get it disposed of.”
It.
I say, “She was more than just Pete’s girlfriend. Megan couldn’t resist showing her sister the Tiffany key pendant that her prosperous older lover had given her. It looks just like the one you gave Melinda. You were her lover, Jim. She trusted you to protect her, and you murdered her.”
Melinda hisses, “Oh, my God.” She falls back on her haunches and leans on the edge of the desk.
“Megan was a regular at the parties, at the island.” I throw the dice. It’s the kind of question that can open a door, or let the guy know you’re a fool. I speak it with conviction, adding, “You didn’t seem like the type who went for the underage girls, but I guess we don’t really know anybody, do we?”
Sterling gazes past me, as if he’s reliving it. “The group came to the island to relax. The girls were a big draw. Clean, middle-class, intelligent. A little wild, an eye for wealthy men. Nobody was supposed to be hurt.”
“The island?” Melinda asks.
Tyee Island. It is one of some 450 in the San Juans, off the tip of the Washington state mainland. The Sterlings and Forrests have owned Tyee for decades. It’s secluded, exclusive. So private as to be nearly secret, even within the company. Even the executive editor has never been there, but Melinda has. So had Troy Hardesty; he mentioned it in passing when I wrote the first column about him. Couldn’t resist bragging to me, “I’ve been to the island,” and letting me know he had connections to my publisher. That vital fact had been buried in my old notebook, one of the documents the fake National Security Letter demanded. I had overlooked it before.
Tyee Island. It’s where the Governor himself had built a little Bavarian village. One house was supposedly painted in a nursery rhyme theme. Hardly anybody outside the family knows much about the island. But I remember one of the photos of the village that ran in the Seattle Times the day it reported on the Free Press’ impending closing. One showed a house decorated with Jack and the Beanstalk. A detail that Heather, who came to the island as an adventurous virgin, remembered.
“The island is where they cooked up eleven/eleven,” I say, working hard to check myself from asking too much, too fast. But I also know Amber will be here soon and then he may not say much. Right now, even though he’s on the floor and I pu
t him there, he thinks I’m just another idiot who works for him. Being underestimated can be an advantage—you want it from every source in a confrontation interview.
Sure enough, Sterling can’t resist. “It was where the group relaxed. Business wasn’t generally talked about. The slip with Megan showed the risks of that.”
“The group,” I say. “Pete Montgomery, you…” I swallow hard. “Craig Summers.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waves his hand. I understand where the cliché phrase “my heart sank” originated.
“You’re a pretty good digger.”
“Summers,” I repeat.
“He’s former CIA,” Sterling says. “But you know that. He’s serving his country just like the rest of us. He’s in over his head, but we need a guy like him. We couldn’t freeze him out. We couldn’t…”
“Kill him?”
Sterling looks like he wants to stand up and take me on. Then he thinks better of it and just shakes his head. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. This isn’t just a few guys from the Northwest. It’s international. Some of the richest men in the world are in the group. Politicians. You’d be surprised who some of them are. It’s been in the planning for years. I was lucky to get in, thanks to my friendship with Pete.”
He says it as if he’s talking about a smart investment tip picked up at the Washington Athletic Club, which I suppose is how his brain processes it.
“But why didn’t you stop me when I wrote about Olympic?”
“Because I knew it would just make you dig deeper. Hell, you might have given it to the Seattle Times. But you ended up fucking up the deal.”