Eyes of the Innocent

by Brad Parks

  She shook her head.

  “Yet I’m told you always went to the council meetings,” I said. “Why?”

  She stopped and thought for a moment.

  “I guess I found it interesting,” she said. “That was maybe the one area where we still shared a common interest. We could talk about that. I’d like to think he … I guess I think he valued my opinion on those matters.”

  Uh-huh. Probably Windy was like Tommy. He needed Rhonda to explain stuff to him.

  “But other than that, you barely saw each other?” I asked.

  “That’s true,” she said, shaking her head again. “I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it’s true.”

  “So, and again I hate to be rude”—no, really, I didn’t—“but is it possible your husband has met someone else and is off with her somewhere right now? It happens, you know.”

  Yes, Mrs. Byers, your husband just ran off. No, Mrs. Byers, I’m sure you didn’t do anything untoward. Wasn’t that the illusion she wanted the world to believe? Isn’t that the story she hoped I would buy? The offer was on the table. All she had to do was take it.

  But she didn’t. Maybe she was too smart to be that obvious.

  “I … I don’t know,” she said. “I’m so … More than anything, I’m sad for him. I worry he’s gotten himself in trouble. I just hope he’s all right.”

  She looked at me and blinked, like she was trying to keep tears from tumbling out her eyeballs. Maybe she was. She was so convincing, I actually believed her for a moment.

  God, I felt like a cub reporter. Where was my cynicism? My natural suspicion? That little voice in my head that told me to distrust everything I heard? What was I, going soft?

  “Do you think you have enough for your story?” the sister asked, finally taking control of the situation.

  “Enough for now,” I said, because we had been at it for an hour and I wanted to leave while I still had my disbelief.

  “Then I think it’s time you go,” she said. “My sister has been through too much already.”

  And this time Rhonda didn’t object.

  Neither did I. Short of a tearful confession—which Rhonda Byers was far too cagey to give me—I had gotten what I came for. Raines and I could go over everything now. It was time to leave.

  I bid the Byers sisters farewell and led myself to the door, with Jeanette close on my tail. As I walked through the foyer, I lingered slightly, pretending to fumble with my jacket until I saw what I was looking for: a big, smudgy streak of blood, about two feet long and as obvious as a snake on a sidewalk, on the molding near the floor.

  It seemed odd Rhonda Byers hadn’t cleaned it up yet. Perhaps the police had instructed her to leave it undisturbed, in case they needed to do more testing. I was glad they did because it gave me the chance to study it.

  I’m no forensics expert, but it looked like the kind of smear you’d get if you were dragging a bloodied body out the door.

  Primo cultivated his relationship with Councilman Wendell A. Byers slowly, having learned from other failures not to push too far too fast.

  The important thing was to keep the initial favors small: a phone call to the city engineering department to prod them for an approval; or a letter to the water authority to speed up a permit for a sewer hookup; or an introduction to a fellow council member, with a few kind words about Primo as a developer.

  All the while, Primo kept the contributions coming. A Newark council campaign was a surprisingly expensive endeavor. Sending out mailings, making local media buys, maintaining campaign offices and staff, printing posters and lawn signs—it all added up. Even a longtime incumbent like Byers had to shell out $250,000 or more to hold his seat. What’s more, keeping a healthy campaign fund in between elections helped fend off the wolves. Would-be candidates weren’t keen to challenge a well-financed opponent.

  So the need for cash was constant. And Byers was no different from most politicians in that he hated fund-raising—the glad-handing, the overpromising, the grubbing for money from friends. That’s where Primo came in. The more money Primo gave, the less Byers had to raise himself. It was easy and, above all, it was addictive. Any candidate would enjoy having to spend less time with his hand out.

  Once Byers was hooked on the money, the size of the favors steadily grew. And it became more quid pro quo. Do this, I’ll give you that. Influence for sale. And beyond the help in navigating the city bureaucracy—which saved numerous headaches—was the real golden goose. Land.

  In a place like Newark, city-owned land was abundant. For many decades, owners who fled to the suburbs—or absentee landlords who decided to cut their losses—simply abandoned their properties rather than continue to pay the taxes on them. After a few years of nonpayment, the city would seize the property. After a few more years, when whatever structure left on the property had been vandalized beyond the point of repair, the city knocked it down.

  It all had the effect of making the city of Newark far and away the largest owner of empty, developable land within its own boundaries. For a long time, the land was essentially worthless. But then, as Newark’s building boom began in the late nineties and then picked up momentum after the turn of the millennium, it rapidly began increasing in value. And, under statute, the sale of this land was the purview of the city council, which had to approve all deals.

  For Primo, this was the real benefit of having a councilman in his pocket. Generally speaking, if one councilman wanted a land sale approved, his colleagues would stay out of the way and allow it to happen. Professional courtesy ruled.

  Again, Primo started small, with a parcel here or there, then built up to larger chunks of contiguous land. With the way Primo had his business set up—in an endless chain of seemingly unconnected LLCs—no one even realized Councilman Byers was always recommending sweetheart land sales to the same person.

  It allowed Primo an abundant supply of nearly free land on which to build houses. And in the most densely populated state in America, where land was always at a premium, it gave Primo an enormous edge on the other developers. It was basic economics. Getting one of your chief raw materials for virtually nothing did wonderful things for the bottom line.

  Primo paid for the privilege, yes. But the cost was nothing compared to the benefit.

  CHAPTER 6

  As I drove back toward the office, I could feel one of those wiggling, niggling suspicions trying to work itself free from deep underneath my skullbones. Except, of course, the moment I became aware of it, my conscious brain began doing a little dance all over it. Whatever small hint of genius may have been forthcoming was stomped back down, hopefully to resurface at a later time.

  Clearly, it was something about Rhonda Byers. Had she been too cool? Or too melodramatic with the near-tears? Had she given away anything I hadn’t noticed?

  Nothing came to me. And Kevin Raines wasn’t going to be any immediate help—his cell phone went straight through to voice mail.

  “Sergeant, it’s your confidential informant. Give me a call when you have a moment,” I said, then left my number.

  By the time I got back, it was six o’clock and there was some serious typing going on in the newsroom. Tommy looked like he was holding a staring contest with his computer screen. Tina had her shoes off and feet curled underneath her, a sure sign she was rewriting someone’s lede. Buster Hays was banging on his keyboard with his usual vigor—having been raised on a manual typewriter, he still hit the keys like he was making sure his letters stood out nice and crisp.

  I had barely sat down at my desk when Sweet Thang slid up to me and sat in an empty chair across from me, smiling. Somehow, despite a long day, she still smelled fresh and soapy.

  “Oh, my goodness, I had the most amazing afternoon,” she gushed. “And I’m actually talking about the part after I left you. I mean, the part before that was great, too. But then it got better. Well, I mean, not better better, but really good, you know? You won’t believe what I learned.”

  Thi
s was the first time I had seen her since I read her Twitter post, with all its CR consumption and floorboard grinding. I wondered if she put it there in the hope I’d trip across it, because it would embolden me to make a move. Or maybe she just figured it was one little tweet, and since I wasn’t following her, I’d never see it.

  Or maybe I should get this silly girl out of my head, especially when she was right in front of me, still babbling in my direction at speeds faster than the human ear was trained to perceive. I was already four or five paragraphs behind.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Could you start over again?”

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes—like, what was my problem?—then went back to full speed ahead.

  “I was SAY-ing, I couldn’t get a hold of Akilah’s sister. So I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to bother you, because I bother you enough already, you know? So I tracked down the guy who sent us that e-mail instead.”

  “Uh, what e-mail?”

  “The concerned citizen e-mail. Didn’t you get a copy?”

  “Oh, right,” I said. With everything else going on, I had just forgotten about it. “How’d you track him down? It was anonymous.”

  “I thought it was pretty obvious,” she said.

  “Sorry. Still not with you.”

  “Chuck—sorry, concerned citizen—said something in his message like, ‘I know why you couldn’t find the mortgage.’ And I’m like, hel-LOOO! We never mentioned that we couldn’t find the mortgage in the story. There are only two people who knew that. There was that title searcher, but I’m sure he was too busy getting stoned to read the paper. And then there was that clerk guy. So I went and found him.”

  “Oh,” I said, impressed. “I thought he was worried about losing his job. How did you get him to talk to you?”

  “I just flirted with him,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing this side of making toast.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Flirting.”

  “You don’t think that’s bad, do you?”

  “No. Flirting is good.”

  She flashed me a knowing smile.

  “Anyhow, Chuck—his name is Chuck—was all nervous at first. He was like, ‘I can’t talk to you.’ And then I flirted with him a little more and he was like, ‘I meant I can’t talk to you here.’ ”

  “Well done,” I said.

  She smiled quickly. “Hold off on your compliments until the end. It gets better.”

  “Sorry,” I said, but she was already going.

  “So we agreed to meet outside the courthouse at four—I accept your apology, by the way—and take a walk. At first he was like, ‘I can’t tell you, it’s too deep, you can’t handle the truth, blah, blah, blah.’ So he was like, ‘You have to guess, and if you guess right I’ll tell you.’ I couldn’t guess it, but he told me anyway.”

  “Why, more flirting?”

  “No, actually we were sitting on a bench at that point so I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs.”

  “You realize you’re pure evil,” I said, but couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  “Well, I thought about what my journalism professors would say about it. And they would probably tell me all the reasons I shouldn’t do it. And then I thought about what you would say about it. And I knew you would tell me all the reasons I should. So I thought about what would ultimately have the greatest public benefit and I decided you were right.”

  “I am,” I assured her. “Just remember to use your powers for good.”

  “I will, don’t worry. Anyhow, Chuck said that his boss came up to him this one time and told him to erase this mortgage from the computer. Chuck said he didn’t want to do it, but the boss told him if he didn’t do it, he’d just find someone else who would, so it was like he didn’t have a choice. Chuck thought the orders were coming from somewhere up high—someone with a lot of pull.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyhow,” she continued. “Chuck said he had sort of forgotten about it, but when I came along and couldn’t find a mortgage, he thought I was just being a ditz at first”—imagine that—“but then he looked into it and he realized it was the mortgage he had been told to erase. Ex-CEPT he didn’t totally erase it. He wiped it from the computer but kept a hard copy and put it in a folder in his house.”

  “And so you accompanied him back to his house to get it?” I prompted.

  “Well, he said he just moved, so he wasn’t quite sure where it was. But he said he’d look for it when he got home.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “So why did he think he was erasing it?”

  “He said he didn’t know, but he got the sense it was political or something.”

  Of course it was. If you’re Windy Byers, you’re probably quite keen to make sure no one discovers you’ve bought a house for your girlfriend. So you yank some strings in the clerk’s office and get the mortgage removed lest it fall into the hands of your political enemies.

  Or, worse, into the possession of a nosy newspaper reporter who knows a document like that would allow him to take that juicy little tidbit—something that would otherwise fall into the category of nasty rumor—and put it in print.

  * * *

  Sweet Thang started bouncing up and down in her chair like a third grader who has been told she must wait five minutes before going to the bathroom.

  “So what now?” she asked. “What now? What now?”

  “Well, first, can I compliment you?”

  She pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, you may.”

  “Great work tracking down this guy.”

  “Thank you,” she said, with a smile that would have graded flawless on the diamond clarity scale.

  “Okay, onward. You still have that phone number for Akilah’s sister handy?”

  “Yeah, right here,” she said, using it as an excuse to wheel her chair next to mine, allowing our knees to brush. The girl was a master at creating incidental contact.

  “Bertie said it’s a home number, which turns out to be a nice break for us,” I said, turning to face my terminal. “It means we can do a reverse lookup and see where she lives.”

  My computer screen was dark for some reason, so I pressed the power button. As the monitor warmed up and the image snapped into focus, I suddenly remembered why I turned it off in the first place. But, by that point, it was already too late. There on the screen, in brilliant 256-color, 1024-by-768 pixel resolution, was Sweet Thang’s Twitter page.

  I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye to see if she had noticed, hoping I could click it away before she got a good look. But no, she was peering at it curiously, head tilted, like it was something she had seen before but couldn’t quite place.

  Then I watched as recognition crashed across her face. And it wasn’t a small, gentle-lapping wave. It was one of those tsunamis that wipes an entire Indonesian fishing village off the map.

  “Oh. My. Goodness,” she said.

  Her blush started from the jawbone, then progressed upward, going from her cheeks all the way to the top of her forehead, filling every available inch of skin in glowing crimson.

  “Yeah,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I, uh, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to, uh, you know, leave it on the screen like that.”

  Sweet Thang was, for perhaps the first time in her life, stunned to silence.

  “I was just sort of wasting time and one click led to another,” I explained. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just…”

  I could tell she was rereading the post to check if it was as bad as she remembered. And, of course, it was probably worse.

  “I didn’t realize…” she started, then stopped. “I thought you … I didn’t think … You’re not following me or…”

  “It’s Twitter,” I said apologetically. “Anyone can read it, even if they’re not one of your followers. Facebook is the one where people need to have permission to see stuff you’ve written.”

  “I know, but … I�
��”

  “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t read any of the other ones,” I said.

  She buried her face in her hands and moaned softly. “I’m soooo embarrassed,” she said into her palms.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I insisted.

  “It’s like one of those bad dreams where the entire school has read your diary,” she said.

  I decided to skip the lecture about how you have to assume when you type something that it could be read by anyone—one of the great perils of modern Internet living—and instead just said, “Sorry.”

  “I think I might die.”

  She whirled around and walked away without saying another word. I sneaked a glance to my left and right to see if anyone might have noticed—an intern turning a shade just short of purple might tend to attract attention. Thankfully, it appeared to have been strictly for my benefit.

  I returned my focus to the screen and clicked the X on the upper right corner of the window. This time, naturally, it went away immediately.

  Then I got back to my reverse lookup. Tamikah’s number was unlisted. But that was hardly a deterrent. Few people are careful enough with their telephone numbers to keep them out of the hands of a reporter who knows what he’s doing. The LexisNexis database has millions of unlisted numbers. Even something as seemingly innocent as voting records is a great place to get numbers—no one thinks about it, but if you fill in the “phone number” blank on the registration form, you’ve just made your digits part of the public record.

  So it took about thirty seconds to find where Tamikah—last name Dunwood—now resided. It was an address in South Orange, a street I vaguely recognized as being near Seton Hall University, wedged up against the Newark border.

  And while perhaps that made it sound like the Newark girl hadn’t made it very far, that wasn’t the case. Now that East and West Berlin are unified, there are few starker borders in the world than the one between the New Jersey municipalities of South Orange and Newark. Literally, you can be driving through the hood, on a litter-strewn street lined with tenements and bodegas; then you blink, and you’re in suburbia, with neatly trimmed landscaping and seasonally appropriate lawn decoration. Drive maybe half a mile farther and you’re in a historic part of town, dotted with million-dollar houses and fancy imported cars.