by R. G. Belsky
* * *
There was a small crisis in the office during July when the news director of another station made a run at Cassie O’Neal—trying to get her to jump to his station.
“They’re offering her $50,000 more than she gets here,” Jack Faron said when he told me about it.
“Gee, that works out to $1,000 an IQ point for her,” I said.
“I wish you’d take this seriously, Clare.”
“It’s a little hard to take a woman like Cassie seriously who thinks The Maury Povich Show is intellectually challenging television.”
“She never said that.”
“Okay, but she did ask me once if the New York Times came out weekly or every day.”
“She looks good on camera and all our viewer surveys show that she’s very popular. I don’t want to lose her. That’s the bottom line.”
“Give her the friggin’ $50,000.”
“No, you give her the $50,000, and it comes out of your news budget.”
“I was going to hire another reporter with that money.”
“Well, you get to keep Cassie instead.”
“Lucky me.”
Basically, we were going to give her a $50,000 raise because she looked good on the screen. There was something inherently wrong about that. I knew what was going to happen next, too. After Cassie turned them down, someone was going to come after Janelle. Then we’d pay her more money. That seemed obscene, too. When it was all over, Cassie and Janelle would be making more money than me—who was their boss. Brett and Dani were already making more than I was.
Damn.
I understood the reality of it, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. No one was going to offer me more money, because I was over forty—and none of the men who ran the stations wanted to see women past forty on TV.
* * *
In late August, I spent my two weeks of vacation at Jack Faron’s summer house in Sag Harbor on the eastern end of Long Island.
I was uncomfortable at first going there by myself. But it worked out all right. Jack and his wife and his kids were there on the weekend, and I liked them. Janet came out for a few days, too, to keep me company. Mostly, though, I enjoyed the solitude. I read, tanned myself at the beach, and took long walks beside the ocean.
For the first time in my life, I was thinking a lot about the future.
I was forty-five years old. I had no husband and no children and no family. I did have a good job, but I didn’t feel the same passion for TV news that I used to for newspapers. The truth was there was really nothing I was passionate about anymore. That sort of bothered me.
Maybe I was just going through a midlife crisis.
I called Sam, my last ex-husband, one night. It was late and I was lonely and I just dialed his home number. I wasn’t sure exactly why. Maybe I hoped he’d broken up with this Dede woman he’d told me about the last time we talked. Or that he’d lied about her just to make me jealous. Or that the sound of my voice would fill him with so much passion that he’d dump Dede and their unborn child and run back to my arms. I should point out that I had drunk a large amount of alcohol at this point and may not have been thinking as clearly as I would have otherwise. But it didn’t matter anyway. A woman answered the phone. Dede, I assumed. I didn’t say anything to her. I just hung up.
I talked to another one of my ex-husbands again, too. The first one, the doctor. I went to a Fourth of July barbeque, and he was there. He had his wife and their two kids with him. A boy who was nine and a girl he said had just turned eleven. I thought about how she was the same age as Lucy Devlin was when she disappeared. My ex was friendly enough, and his wife was very nice to me, and the kids were cute—but the whole encounter depressed me. I made some excuse about having another place to go and left the barbecue as quickly as I could.
Janet fixed me up with a couple of other men that she thought might be good for me, but none of them ever called back for a second date. Which was fine with me. I was tired of dating anyway. I was tired of all the games. I was just tired.
* * *
When I got back to work after Labor Day weekend, there was a phone message waiting for me. It was from Oscar Robles. At first, I didn’t even remember the name. Then it came to me. He was the police chief of Mountainboro. The guy who saved me from the bikers at the bar in New Hampshire. The message just said I should call him.
“What’s up?” I said when I got him on the phone.
“When you were up here a few months ago, you asked me to contact you if I ever thought of anything else,” he said. “I might have something.”
Like I said earlier, every story has a life of its own.
There’s always a moment when the story can either die or suddenly lurch back to life. I figure there were times even in Watergate when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward could have made a decision or a move that would have killed the story right there. Sometimes it’s about being smart, sometimes it’s about instincts, sometimes it’s just about blind luck. In this case, it was probably a bit of all of that.
I’d chased after a lot of leads, hoping one of them would pan out. Most of them didn’t. But Oscar Robles did.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about something you said. About how there might be some common link between all six of the dead kids that got them killed. So anyway, one day I just decided to run some checks. We got this new FBI hookup here not long ago that gives us access to all kinds of computer stuff if we want it. I ran all six of the victims’ names through the computer, just to see what turned up. I got a hit with one of them. It turned out one of them had a police record. Joseph Manielli.”
“What’d it say?”
“That he stole a car.”
“I already knew that. His parents told me. He was only twelve, so the Pennsylvania authorities just let him off with some kind of juvenile probation. I checked later.”
“This was in San Jose, California.”
“California? How would a twelve-year-old kid get to California?”
“It happened last month.”
It took a second or two for the enormity of what he was telling me to sink in.
“Last month,” I repeated.
“They took the kid’s fingerprints back in Pennsylvania for that first car heist, even though he was so young. So they were always in the system. Guess what? They matched up to this guy who’s arrested in San Jose. He’s using a different name, of course. But he’s the same one who was arrested at the age of twelve in Pennsylvania. How does a kid who died years ago get arrested for car theft after all this time? Simple answer. He never died.”
“Who’s the body they dug out of the grave that’s supposed to be Joseph Manielli?”
“I have no idea. Raises some interesting questions though, doesn’t it?”
Yep, it sure did.
Elliott Grayson had been the one who identified the bodies of the six children in that grave.
Now Grayson was on the verge of being elected to the Senate. After that, everyone agreed he had a big political future ahead of him. The possibilities were endless for Elliott Grayson. Maybe even the White House one day.
But he had lied—or at the very least been wrong—about Joey Manielli.
If that wasn’t Joey Manielli in the grave in New Hampshire, what about Becky Gale, Donald Chang, Tamara Greene, William O’Shaughnessy, and Emily Neiman?
And what about Lucy Devlin?
PART III
ELECTION DAY
CHAPTER 36
WITH JUST DAYS to go now until the September Democratic Senate primary election, the latest polls showed that Elliott Grayson continued to hold a seemingly insurmountable lead over Teddy Weller.
The experts also still predicted Grayson would have an easy time beating the Republican opponent in November.
He sure had the look of a winner. His campaign speeches were no longer attacks against Weller. He talked instead about his vision for the future of America, how he was going to represent New York in Washington, the
kind of Senator he wanted to be. The message was clear: This election is already over—everyone better get on the victory train now, before it pulls out of the station.
But Grayson was more than just a successful politician. With his good looks and his charisma, he had somehow achieved a kind of rock star popularity. Young people were returning to politics in droves to campaign for him and ring doorbells and hand out literature. In an era when young people—and most voters in general—seemed to have apathy and disdain for politicians, Grayson had figured out how to connect to voters like no other candidate had in years.
He was making the gossip columns regularly, too. For the past couple of months, he’d been dating an actress who was a star in one of the daytime soaps. They showed up everywhere together—movie premieres, the best restaurants, and even some campaign appearances. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Just like him. Even I had to admit, they made a terrific-looking couple.
A lot of people suggested the actress was the final part of the puzzle for him. Since he wasn’t married, voters might have started to wonder if they didn’t hear anything about his personal life. But here he was dating a high-profile woman. Yep, that Elliott Grayson was a cool guy, all right.
I wondered idly if maybe that was the reason he’d asked me out back in the spring. I was a TV newswoman, which is a pretty high-profile person. Maybe he thought I would be good for his campaign at the time, too. The ultimate politician and the hotshot Pulitzer Prize–winning newswoman arm-in-arm. No question about it, he could have used me for political purposes. On the other hand, maybe he really did like my legs. Of course, there was no way I was ever going to find out the answer to that one now.
I thought again about how I’d just walked out on him that night in his bedroom when he brought up Lucy Devlin just before we were about to have sex.
Why did I do that?
Even I had to admit it was an over-the-top reaction to a seemingly innocent and joking remark he made. And Grayson apologized right after he said it. Hell, I’ve said a lot of politically incorrect things—cracked a lot of dark humor jokes—when I talk about people in the news like Lucy Devlin. Believe me, I’m really used to that kind of stuff from working in a newsroom for so long.
Except this was different. I couldn’t explain why to anyone. I suppose I couldn’t even explain it logically to myself.
But—deep down somewhere in my subconscious—I knew why I had walked away from Elliott Grayson like that.
Even if I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
I found an article in the clips that had an interview with Gwen Thompson. She was Grayson’s special assistant, the one I’d had the run-in with on the phone before my first meeting. She gushed about how wonderful he was and how dedicated she was to his career and campaign. She said she’d wanted to do something to make the world a better place. “I remember reading about John F. Kennedy in the White House in history class,” she said. “How people loved Camelot and the New Frontier. How he made people care about politics again. Well, that’s how I feel about Elliott Grayson. He’s the John F. Kennedy of our times.”
No question about it, everyone loved him.
Well, almost everyone.
His primary opponent, Teddy Weller, kept hammering away at alleged questions about his character and his record as a prosecutor and his fitness for the Senate.
“Is this the kind of man you want to represent you in Washington?” Weller implored voters at nearly every campaign appearance now. “Is this the kind of man you want making decisions about the future of your children and your families? Is this the kind of man worthy of the public trust of a great state? I’ve shown you by my record over many years in office what kind of a man and what kind of a public official I am. What has Elliott Grayson shown you? A lot of slick tricks, public relations hocus-pocus, and self-aggrandizing law enforcement stunts. You cannot put a man like this in the seat of power in the Senate. He simply is not worthy of this office, and the true story and the true character of Elliott Grayson will eventually come out. Believe me, it won’t be pretty. There is a clear-cut choice in this election. I offer you substance over slick PR image, leadership over rhetoric, and honesty over deception. I will never betray the public trust. Remember that when you go to the polls to decide between me and Elliott Grayson on Election Day.”
But there were never any specifics. All Weller had were just a lot of vague generalizations and innuendo. He seemed desperate, an almost pathetic figure flailing at the wind.
I remembered Cliff Whitten telling me how Weller—despite proclaiming himself as the honorable candidate in this race—had always had a reputation as a dirty, no-holds-barred politician who would do anything to win an election.
I also remembered Janelle telling me how the people in the Weller campaign kept talking about some big scandal that was about to bring Grayson down.
What were they all talking about?
It was possible, I suppose, that Weller had set this all in motion by sending the original e-mail to Anne Devlin about the mysterious biker named Elliott or by getting Marston and Big Lou on his payroll or something. Part of a smear campaign to ruin Grayson’s reputation.
If so, it had backfired badly on him.
That made me wonder again if Grayson himself could have been the one who sent that e-mail to Anne Devlin, somehow knowing it could only help him in the end. But that still didn’t make a lot of sense either. How could Grayson have even imagined the sequence of bizarre events which followed that propelled him into such a big lead in this Senate race?
Whatever the reason, the results spoke for themselves.
“The election is pretty much over,” one political columnist wrote the week before the primary. “The only thing that can stop Grayson now is some big scandal or monumental gaffe or terrible revelation about him. Teddy Weller keeps promising us some kind of smoking gun in his accusations against Grayson. Is there a smoking gun like that out there? I don’t think so. If there is, someone better produce it pretty fast.”
A smoking gun?
Not yet.
Not until now.
Now I just might have something.
All I had to do was figure out what it meant.
CHAPTER 37
I TOLD JACK Faron the next morning I needed to see him right away in his office about a story.
“What’s the story?” he asked when I got there.
“Elliott Grayson.”
“His political campaign?”
“No—his possible involvement in the story about Lucy Devlin and the six dead children.”
Faron sighed.
“My God, you’re not going to start obsessing about that Elliott Grayson conspiracy theory stuff of yours again, are you, Clare? I thought we decided a while ago it was time for you to drop all of this stuff.”
“That was then.”
“What’s changed?”
“I have new information.”
I told him the story about Joey Manielli’s arrest in California, years after his body had been identified by Grayson’s task force as one of those buried in the mass New Hampshire grave.
“Everything about this case—all of the information—comes from Elliott Grayson,” I said. “The deaths in the shootout with Marston. The discovery of Lucy Devlin’s body based on evidence Marston supposedly supplied because he had abducted and killed her. The identification of the six bodies in New Hampshire. Now we find out that a key piece of information—something we took for granted, the identity of one of the kids’ bodies in the grave—was wrong. That means—”
“Everything else could be wrong, too.”
“Nothing is what it seems here, Jack.”
I’d thought I was wrong about Grayson before. I thought that I had simply jumped to some hasty conclusions and assumed he could have a violent past that he was now trying to cover up. I decided then I was mistaken. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe my first instinct about him had been right, after all.
“This doesn’t ha
ve anything to do with the abortive relationship you had with Grayson, does it?”
“C’mon, Jack, I’m more professional than that. I’ve had abortive relationships with a lot of men. I don’t generally take my frustration out on them this way.”
“We’re all human, Clare. People react in different ways to certain situations. Maybe that’s what’s happening here with you. A woman spurned and all. So you try to get back at Grayson by—”
“I wasn’t spurned by Grayson,” I pointed out. “I walked out on him. I’m the spurner. He’s the spurnee. So that theory doesn’t hold up.”
I was kinda pissed at Faron that he would even suspect it.
Okay, maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe I was just being a little bit vindictive and petty because things hadn’t worked out between Grayson and me. Or maybe, just maybe, there was some significance to the fact that he kept turning up everywhere I looked.
“What does Grayson say about all this?” Faron asked.
“I haven’t asked him yet. But I have to do it quickly. Before Election Day. This could be a game changer for the Senate race.”
Faron shook his head.
“Clare, we have to be very careful here. Elliott Grayson is about to become a powerful man in Washington.”
“Or he could be about to go to jail.”
“What are you saying?”
“Someone killed those six kids. Lucy Devlin, too.”
“Now, wait just a minute … there’s a big difference between finding out Grayson misidentified a body and suggesting he’s a killer. And this could have all been an innocent mistake anyway. Why would Grayson give the wrong identity on purpose? What’s he got to gain from it anyway?”