I could feel a storm approaching in Zoey’s mood. This whole situation made me feel ill. I said nothing and stared down at my food in shame.
“I’m sorry Zoey,” I said softly. “This is just how things work in my world.”
“I don’t live in your world. I live in the real world and I can’t do my job if I don’t have the freedom to report the truth,” Zoey said. Her face had taken on a hardness and determination that frightened me, “I’m not just going to be a pawn for Durant Industries.”
‘That’s not what I’m asking!’ I tried to say, but it didn’t even get out of my mouth.
“That is what I’m asking you to do, isn’t it?” I said instead. I really couldn’t do it. If the choice was between asking Zoey to sacrifice her principals or losing my family’s support, “I can’t ask you not to run the story. Forget I said anything.”
“I wish I hadn’t told you,” Zoey replied, looking miserable. “If I hadn’t told you, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
She was right. I wished she hadn’t told me. Because now that I knew, I also knew what my family would want me to do: cover everything up to protect Senator Ellis.
“What do we do?” I asked her, “I can’t stop you from running this story. It’s news. I get it. It’s big news. But it’s very bad news for my family by extension.”
Zoey sighed, poking her food as if it had suddenly turned into garbage. She’d only eaten a few bites. She shook her head in confusion.
“I don’t want to cause problems for you,” Zoey said, and when she raised her eyes to me they were full of such a sweet, loving expression that I was certain I didn’t deserve her. “But I don’t want Angelica to get away with murder. I have to do something, even if its…”
Zoey trailed off, biting her lip. She’d thought of something. I watched the idea grow on the surfaces of her face in fascination. I could almost hear the wheels turning behind her eyes.
“Nathan,” she finally said, her expression turning resolute, “I have an idea.”
“I’m not going to like it, am I?” I asked warily.
“I’m not sure,” she replied, “I know I don’t like it. What if I research the story, the whole thing. I chase the story as best I can, but instead of publishing it, I give to someone else. Another paper. So, the truth gets out, but your family can’t be mad at you.”
It was my turn to be shocked and confused.
“You’d give it away?” I asked, “like, to a competitor for free? Isn’t that bad business?”
“Yes. It will sell a lot of papers,” she said, shrugging, “but I’d rather have the truth come out somewhere, wouldn’t you?”
I considered her proposition.
“Ok,” I said, warming to the idea, “that could work. I’m sorry Zoey. I really am. I know I was asking you to compromise your ideals.”
Zoey smiled and reached across the table to grab my hand.
“That’s sweet but you shouldn’t worry,” she said, “Now I know never to tell you if I’m working on a story that so much as touches on Durant Industries. Trust me, the next time a story this big comes along, you’ll be reading about it in the Monitor, not hearing about it from me. I’m not going to be controlled by Durant Industries. Ever.”
I could see on her face that Zoey was one hundred percent serious. As frightening as it was that she might be a real liability to me one day, I also respected her for it. I wouldn’t want her to just roll over and accept my corporate censorship, and clearly, she wouldn’t ever do that. The look on her face dared me to say another thing on the topic.
“Great,” I said sarcastically, “what have I gotten myself into?”
“You got into bed with the press. You really should have thought of that before making a gossip columnist your live-in girlfriend,” Zoey’s smirk was unsympathetic.
“Yeah, but you’re so cute!” I replied, smiling. We were going to be ok. “And you aren’t a gossip columnist any more. It’s worse than that, you’re a newspaper editor with the power to take down a senator’s daughter. For murder.”
“I’m not there yet,” Zoey admitted, “I need to get confirmation on some of the points in Tara’s story. I need to make sure that Evelyn Hunt will confirm about the nanny cam, and I need to see if I can get any footage off the deleted memory card.”
“That’s right,” I answered, “you wanted to borrow Victor, didn’t you? I have a feeling he’ll be all too happy to help figure out a way to take Angelica down if he can. He really did not appreciate someone getting through his security protocols twice. I’ve seen him pull files off a computer that got run over by a truck before. No promises, but if anyone can do some technological wizardry on the memory card, it’s Victor.”
50
Zoey
“You know I’m not actually a wizard, right?” Victor complained when Nathan and I presented him with the teddy bear and a longwinded explanation at noon the following day. Phil was with us, since (to my annoyance) he happened to be the right man for the job. Phil had a lot of experience covering the metro section and was still on staff. Was he a creep? Yes. Was he also a good reporter? Sadly, also yes.
I’d explained the political considerations to Phil this morning at the Monitor. He was actually much more understanding than I expected. At least until he gave me an ultimatum and I understood why.
Phil wanted to leave The Monitor and take the story with him. Reluctantly, I agreed. It was only fair that he used the story as his golden ticket if he was going to help me to research and write it. Besides, I wanted him gone immediately. He was too much of a sexual harassment risk to stay on staff. There were plenty of excellent reporters out there who wouldn’t behave inappropriately toward young women.
“But the files should still be in the RAM if the data hasn’t been overwritten,” Phil asserted confidently.
“Yeah, in theory,” replied Victor, eyeing Phil suspiciously, “but there’s absolutely no guarantee that I’ll be able to get a thing off it.”
Victor picked up the teddy bear and popped out the card from its little hidden hatch in the teddy bear’s butt.
“These things give me the creeps,” he mumbled, “why does everything have to watch and listen to us all the time?”
The question was rhetorical, but Phil answered anyway.
“You think it’s creepy until you need it. One time my wife’s favorite babysitter had enthusiastic anal sex with her boyfriend on our couch,” he offered, “our kid was only a few feet away, sleeping like a log. We never would have known if not for good old Mr. Teddy.”
Nathan, Victor, and I looked at Phil with varying degrees of confusion, disbelief, and disgust.
“Um, thanks for sharing, Phil,” I managed, then immediately changed the subject, “should we come back in a little while, Victor? We don’t want to bother you while you work on recovering the video from the card.”
“No,” Victor said, plugging the SD card into a digital camera on his desk and tip-tapping a few things into his keyboard with his stubby, thick fingers, “this ought to be really quick, actually. There’s only one thing on here anymore.”
Victor frowned deeply and tapped for a few seconds, and then, as if by actual wizardry, a video popped up in a little window. We all watched as it began to play with rapt attention.
In the video, which was obviously shot in a very differently decorated version of Angelica’s bedroom, an elderly man was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper. The Philadelphia Monitor, to be exact. The teddy bear must have been up on a dresser or table, because it had a near perfect view of the bed, and the man. This must have been Albert, I deduced. He looked quite a bit younger than eighty-nine. Not a day over seventy really. Still totally inappropriate marriage material for a woman in her twenties, but not nearly as infirm as I imagined. He was very much alive. A timestamp in the corner of the video coincided with the day that Albert died three years ago.
Albert continued reading the newspaper for a few minutes. It was impossible to tell what
time of day the video was taken, but his bedside table light was on. There was a plate next to him on the table, with what looked like a half-eaten sandwich on it. Nothing happened for about the first three minutes of the video.
Just as I was about to request that Victor advance the video and see if anything useful was captured on it, the man put down the newspaper to look at the door. A noise must have captured his attention. Angelica entered the frame next. She looked virtually identical to the way she appeared today, right down to her snobbish expression.
There was no audio on the video, which was fine since there was no conversation between Albert and Angelica. She strutted through the room, disappearing from the camera and then reappearing a moment later. Meanwhile, Albert watched her momentarily and then unfolded his newspaper again and reached for his sandwich.
This wasn’t a very interesting video so far. Albert took a bite of his sandwich, turning his newspaper over to the comics section. He took another bite as Angelica reentered the frame for a second time, sitting down on a nearby chair to put on a pair of high heels she’d carried with her.
Suddenly, Angelica’s attention turned abruptly to Albert. He was laughing? No, he had been laughing at something he read, but now he was coughing. She watched him from the chair with wide eyes. Albert continued to cough, dropping his newspaper and then beginning to motion with his hands toward Angelica and his throat.
“Oh god,” I heard myself whisper. Nathan put a hand on my shoulder. The four of us watched the video in horror. We all pretty much knew what we were about to see, but it was still absolutely awful.
He took forever to die. In the grainy, silent video, Albert continued to gesture urgently to Angelica. She rose from the chair she’d sat down in, moving closer to him, but not assisting. Albert continued to struggle, pointing at his throat and clearly begging Angelica with his eyes to assist. Finally, when he realized she wasn’t going to help him, he reached over to grasp at the phone sitting on the nightstand.
Only then did Angelica act. She pulled the telephone receiver from his weak hand and stood over him as he continued to choke to death. I had no idea that it took so long for someone to die from suffocation. Eventually he slumped over in the bed, his extremities going limp and his head lolling over to the side with the eyes still wide open in panic.
Angelica continued to stare at him for a long, silent moment. She’d just stood there and let him die. Was this a murder? I wasn’t sure. It was definitely wrong. Only a monster could have just stood there and done nothing while another person struggled from a preventable death.
Eventually, Angelica moved. She turned and went back to the chair to put on her shoes with total calm. Then she rose and walked out the room, smiling slightly.
I buried my head in Nathan’s warm chest, and he wrapped his strong arms around me. Nathan looked like he was going to be sick, but he was taking this better than me. Tears were starting to leak out of my eyes. The general consensus was that Albert Hunt had been an asshole, but even assholes deserve mercy. That man died in pain while his wife watched him with all the affection she’d give to dying insect. Nathan and I clung to one another in silence. Each time I stole a glance up, the video continued, focused on Albert Hunt’s dead body sitting upright in bed. His eyes continued to stare into eternity and straight into the camera.
“Shit,” Victor said as the video cut off, breaking the silence after a few minutes. He looked completely horrified. I’m sure we all did. Except Phil. Phil looked excited.
“This is going to sell so many newspapers,” Phil said next, “can you put that video on this flash drive?”
How One Journalist Almost Solved the Murder of the Century
Ida Gonzales, The New York Statesman
A call from a stranger started it all, a reporter’s obsession with an oil mogul’s death and a suspicion that a terrible crime had gone unpunished for years.
The man, Albert Hunt, died of seemingly natural causes at the age of eighty-nine. Due to his advanced age, Hunt’s death did not attract intense scrutiny. How exactly he died had been a mystery but some of the people close to him thought they knew. Nearly three years later a still-anonymous source told a local reporter a theory and he decided to look deeper.
That began a whirlwind six-month odyssey for reporter Philip Paderewski at the Philadelphia Monitor, leading to the opening of a murder case, the exhumation of a body, and the biggest murder trial of the last twenty-five years. The man’s killer: his wife, or a tuna salad sandwich. It depends on how you look at it.
“If it weren’t for Phil Paderewski, this case would have never happened,” said Norman Eckert, special prosecutor in the trial. “There’s no question about it.”
Angelica Hunt, 30, was acquitted in November of second-degree murder in the death of Albert, whose official cause of death was asphyxiation (aka choking). Mrs. Hunt was facing up to twenty years in prison.
For Paderewski, a 37-year-old reporter and now the news director at GNN radio, the trail and ongoing civil case mark ongoing milestones in a journey through NASA records, a family torment, a web of high-profile lies, Russian espionage, and the long life and abrupt death of a man who’d been in the public sphere for more than six decades.
That journey began with an unexpected phone call.
When Paderewski arrived at work one day in July, he received a call from an anonymous source. When he finally met the source, she told him a story that was so incredible that it would change the course of his entire career.
The source said she needed help to bring down, Mrs. Hunt, who was on the verge of getting away with her part in a highly publicized conspiracy to kill Durant Astronautics CEO Nathan Breyer. Her proof of Mrs. Hunt’s involvement was a surreptitiously obtained recording of Angelica talking with a man then known to the world as Marcus Sousa who was actually a Russian criminal named Oleg Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov was targeting Breyer because the astronaut-turned-CEO had an illicit affair with his fiancée Ysenia Antonova aboard the International Space Station which led to her imprisonment and eventual death in Russian military prison.
The audio recording the source produced was a game-changer. In it Kuznetsov could be heard blackmailing Mrs. Hunt into granting him access to Durant Astronautics with the threat to “show everyone the video of you and what you did to your husband.” The video disproved Mrs. Hunt’s prior story that she was manipulated into her actions through an abusive romantic relationship and hinted at a much larger crime.
But that wasn’t all the evidence the source had with her that day. She also had a nanny cam in the shape of a teddy bear that had been given to Mr. Hunt by his youngest daughter Evelyn shortly prior to his death. Although the memory card was blank the source assumed that the bear—which had been given back to Mrs. Hunt by Kuznetsov under the guise of being a romantic gift—could have been the source of the recording.
The next day, Paderewski was able to recover footage from the teddy bear camera’s empty memory card. The video was stunning. Although the video was later leaked online and has now been viewed an estimated twenty million times despite many attempts to remove the explicit footage, when Paderewski watched the recording of Angelica Hunt declining to render aid to her choking husband, he understood immediately that this was the story of a lifetime.
Paderewski knew that the fame and fortune of those involved coupled with the seriousness of the case meant his investigation needed to be perfect. Eventually he devoted hundreds of hours to the case, more than 95% on his own time. He resigned his post at the Philadelphia Monitor to focus full-time on it and compiled a 35-page investigative report.
In almost eight years at the Philadelphia Monitor in Pennsylvania, Paderewski had covered the police beat, metro desk, and local events, but he had never done a major, investigative piece. His formal journalism education had consisted of one high school course.
But he knew a good story when he saw one, and most importantly, he had the proof.
By the time Paderewski contacted GNN a
nd broke the story, the news cycle on Breyer, Hunt, and Kuznetsov had already moved on, but it took less than twenty-four hours before every newspaper, news site, network, radio personality, and pundit was focused on the murder of Albert Hunt.
The justice system also reacted. Angelica Hunt was arrested for second-degree murder, Albert Hunt was exhumed, and a high-profile, protracted murder trial that far surpassed that of OJ Simpson eclipsed everything else for months.
In the end, Mrs. Hunt’s attorneys successfully argued that because she possessed no special skill to aid a choking victim, she could not be found to have violated any laws, including good Samaritan laws that obligate observers to render aid in many circumstances. Mrs. Hunt was not held criminally liable for not rendering assistance to help Mr. Hunt, even if she could have, in the situation that resulted in his death. This was true only because she was not the cause of Mr. Hunt being placed in the position that killed him. Reportedly, video of Mrs. Hunt snatching a phone receiver from Mr. Hunt during his final moments was replayed at the request of the jury more than one hundred times during their eighteen-hour deliberation. Although consistent with precedent, the verdict of the Hunt murder trial remains highly controversial.
Mr. Hunt’s death, whether a murder or an accident, will stay in the public consciousness for many years. She regularly receives death threats and is consistently identified as one of America’s “most hated people”.
Mrs. Hunt, while legally innocent of murder, has been ruled liable in a massive civil case that has stripped her of almost all of her multi-billion-dollar inheritance.
Although now on appeal, after the preliminary verdict in the civil case, the six children of Albert Hunt from his numerous marriages gathered at his gravesite to celebrate with Paderewski: Evelyn Hunt, 21, Dylan Hunt, 25, Melissa Washington, 30, Kimberly Quint, 45, Michael Hunt, 63, and Simone Hunt-Dillinger, 68.
Kiss and Tell (Scions of Sin Book 2) Page 23