Today, he was able to dominate the frame because the seat next to him, usually occupied by the member from Illinois, was empty—the member instead forced to hold a press conference denying he had patronized a gay escort service.
Following the hearing he had rushed out Interstate 66 to the headquarters of the National Rifle Association for a reception honoring its retiring president. After a late but pleasant dinner with a lobbyist at one of his favorite Georgetown restaurants, he had discussed campaign strategy with several of his aides until 1 a.m., sleeping on the couch in the den so as not to disturb his wife and awakening at dawn Wednesday with a crick in his neck.
Thanks to the ad agency’s creative types and his campaign media advisers, the footage from the plant had been condensed into a thirty-second TV spot ready for his approval Wednesday morning. Technically, the spot was designed to build support for The Liberty Agenda, not for his campaign. Indeed, he hadn’t even formally declared. But everyone understood The Liberty Agenda and the Dorn for Senate movement were one and the same. He had been more than a little nervous when his aides put the disc in the machine in his office and the commercial began to play.
He needn’t have been. The people at the agency were worth every penny. The plant and the American flags and the blue skies and the cheering workers were the very images of prosperity and liberty. In a mere thirty seconds they had fully captured his vision. When the words “Trust The People” came up on the screen, he was moved to tears.
The ad had been scheduled in test markets during prime-time Wednesday night, but just as his savvy aide had predicted, the ad itself—or more properly, the news that there would be an ad—became a story on all the major networks by dinner time Wednesday. The media had recognized the commercial for exactly what it was—“the first shot across the bow,” a commentator intoned, “and it was fired by the hottest star on the political scene, Congressman Harry Dorn.”
The airing of the ad itself had added even more energy to the day’s biggest news story. The Liberty Agenda’s web address had been shown during the last five seconds of the spot and within two hours the site’s server had crashed, overwhelmed by users trying to download the Internet version of the ad or make contributions. Dorn’s staff found their voice mail boxes full and the phones ringing off the hook. The callers were united with one message: Harry Dorn for senator. Fully half mentioned the presidency. Just as Dorn and his aide had hoped, the ad aired in its entirety on most of the 11 p.m. television news shows as anchors sought to explain the phenomenon.
Dorn had spent Wednesday night with his press aides carefully negotiating his Thursday appearances on all the networks’ morning news shows as well as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN during the rest of the day. Keeping all the networks happy while simultaneously negotiating for the prized interview time slots was a delicate balance, and the negotiations were not completed until midnight. The CBS limousine had arrived to pick up Dorn at his Georgetown home four hours later.
He had gone to bed Thursday night with a stack of telephone messages unreturned. One pile was from his party’s biggest donors. Others were from the captains of the American business establishment. More than a few indicated a desire to be involved. Most mentioned checks. On top of that, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had called and was looking to put together a golf threesome including himself, Dorn and the chairman of Carbon Forward.
Dorn’s mind raced. Donors. Political appointees. The Liberty Agenda. The plant, symbol of it all. Despite his exhaustion, it had seemed like hours before he fell into a shallow, dreamless sleep.
Only to be awaked by the ringing of the phone in his den a few minutes later.
Dorn reached the phone just as the answering machine clicked on. He was about to unplug the line but he was stopped short by the caller’s frantic voice which came through the tinny speaker. “This is Josh Gibbs.”
Who the hell is Josh Gibbs? Dorn racked his brain before the voice—which was going on about a daughter, cancer and health insurance—finally told him. “Once again, this is Josh Gibbs. The publisher of the Winston News. The guy with the daughter. Please call me.”
Dorn replayed the message, this time scribbling Gibbs’ number on a scratch pad lifted from the Willard Hotel. He’d pass it along to Richey in the morning.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Josh watched the sky lighten outside his kitchen window—the beginning, he could tell, of one of those fresh, clear June days in the Ohio Valley, early enough in the summer that the river still cooled things, before the heat of July drew up its moisture and spread it across the land like a blanket.
Pen in hand, he sat at his kitchen table, a half-full Winston News mug resting near his left hand, his cell within quick reach of his right. The scent of coffee permeated the air. He heard the daily newspaper from Charleston plop on his doorstop. Uncharacteristically, he ignored it, returning instead to the stack of lavender note paper on which he had just written All You Need Is Trust and a Little Pixie Dust! He folded it, put it in a small envelope and tossed it into a pile with a half dozen others.
Parents, especially single parents, were mothers and fathers before they were anything else, he believed. He had promised his dead wife and himself he would do everything in his power to make up for the fact that his daughter’s mother was gone. So Friday morning Josh focused on Katie, asking himself the one question he always asked when it came to caring for his daughter: What would Sharon do?
What would Sharon have done for a daughter coming home from soccer camp to face chemotherapy and surgery for osteogenic sarcoma? Bake cookies, for sure. And make something to cheer her up in the hospital, something that would show she was loved and that would make her smile, not just on the first day but every day. So he arose before dawn to write a series of notes, one for his lovely daughter to open each day. They were messages of love and hope, phrases like Fingers Crossed and the one promise he knew he could keep: I’ll Always Take Care of You. And, All You Need Is Trust and a Little Pixie Dust, Katie’s favorite line from Peter Pan.
It was just after 7 a.m. when the sun finally poked over the eastern hills, bathing the kitchen in light. Josh placed the notes in a straw basket. He found a scrap of ribbon in Sharon’s sewing kit and labored for twenty minutes before he was able to tie an acceptable bow on the handle. He stepped back and concluded that it had all the marks of something put together by a man. But Sharon would have approved.
He packed his leggings, coonskin cap, buckskin jacket and set out for a half-day’s work at The Winston News, followed by an afternoon rehearsal for the pageant.
His cell phone rang as he arrived at his desk. He recognized Washington DC’s 202 area code from the caller ID and answered in the manner he’d adopted in Atlanta, “Gibbs here.”
“Joel Richey. Representative Dorn asked me to get back with you regarding your daughter.”
Josh felt reassured. At least someone was listening. He explained his problem with the insurance company and the hospital’s reluctance to modify its charges. “So what they’re saying is, ‘We need to make more money and the price is your daughter’s leg.’ It’s not fair,” Josh concluded. “I think there ought to be a law.”
“That’s something to think about, although the Liberty Agenda frowns on government interference in private enterprise.”
At least the aide was polite about it, Josh thought. “Katie can’t wait for legislation anyway. Perhaps the congressman could perform a constituent service and make some phone calls to the hospital and the insurance company. I’m sure everyone would prefer to avoid a clamor in the news media over this case, something that might lead to calls for reform.”
“I’ll inquire,” Richey said coolly.
Well, Josh thought, it’s the best I can do for now.
He hung up second-guessing the propriety of his implied threat to have the newspaper lobby for insurance reform. Using the power of the press to advance
a personal objective, particularly a family matter, was way over the line. Journalistic ethics was a slippery slope and, in suggesting he might publish a story if Dorn didn’t deliver a favor, he’d begun the slide.
He became aware of a faraway shrieking—an alarm, he realized. He hurried to the lobby to find the transom over the News’s front door shattered and the receptionist screaming. Furbee was right behind. Alerted by a brilliant strobe, Jimmy Mayes and the non-hearing pressmen burst in a few seconds later on high alert, like linebackers looking for the ballcarrier.
Furbee punched in the code to quiet the alarm. The receptionist fell silent with it.
“What the hell was that?” Josh asked. For the benefit of Mayes and the non-hearing he asked the same question using sign language, leaving out “the hell” part for brevity.
The receptionist pointed to a rock the size of a baseball and a rolled-up copy of the Winston News in a mosaic of glass. Mayes picked them up and carried them to Josh.
“Want me to call the insurance company?” Furbee asked.
“What about Chief Holt?” said the receptionist, now more angry than shaken. “I don’t care if he is overworked, I could have been hurt.”
“First, let’s get the glass cleaned up,” Josh said.
Someone had already pulled a broom from the utility closet.
Josh handed the rock to Furbee and turned his attention to the newspaper. It was the current week’s edition, wrapped around something heavy, cold and wet and cinched with two thick rubber bands. He removed the bands. The newspaper unrolled. A dead catfish smacked to the floor. It had already begun to smell.
“What the heck!” he exclaimed.
“Maybe it’s someone payin’ a bill,” Furbee offered.
Josh laughed. When he passed along the line in sign language, the pressmen did, too. Everyone remembered—or if they didn’t actually remember had heard the story of—the local farmer who’d tried to pay his classified advertising bill with a hog that he’d offered to the newspaper, butchered or alive.
“If they wanted to call us a fish wrapper, it would have been a lot easier just to send a letter,” Josh joked.
But in truth, he was troubled by what had happened. It wasn’t unusual for a newspaper to provoke strong sentiments. All you had to do is look at the Letters to The Editor column in any decent daily to see that. It wasn’t even that rare for a newspaper to be called a fish wrapper, a birdcage liner, and even worse. What was unusual was for an aggrieved reader or advertiser to express himself in such a dramatic fashion.
And it was particularly uncommon at a small weekly newspaper like the Winston News, where coverage was more likely to focus on church news, obituaries and the featured speaker at the Rotary than on controversy and scandal.
Josh told Furbee to call the glass company for a replacement window, signaling an end to the impromptu meeting. Josh took the newspaper and unfolded it on the lobby coffee table. The back pages were still wet. Furbee and Mayes sidled up beside him.
“Any note?” she asked.
Josh paged through the edition without finding one. He scanned the paper for items that might have upset someone. The front page featured stories about uneventful meetings of the Winston school board and the city council, and an interesting photo of Hattie Duvall’s ’68 Buick Roadmaster halfway through the front window of Bill Booth’s Barbershop on Main Street, an incident that had occurred when eighty-eight-year-old Miss Hattie hit the gas instead of the brake. Miss Hattie was uninjured, there were no customers in the barbershop at the time and Booth had gone to lunch. So the headline Josh had written above the photo was a natural. “Close Shave.” Josh still liked it. The inside pages contained a routine array of ads and the usual selection of high school sports news, obituaries, garden club notes and the like. Nothing popped out.
“No clue,” he said. “Normal news week.”
“People do strange things,” Furbee said. She pointed to the floor where the fish still stared at the ceiling with one cloudy eye. “What do we do with that thing?”
Mayes pointed to red lesions behind the gills. “Looks nasty,” he signed.
Josh blanketed the fish with a fresh newspaper and hefted it. “Eight-pounder, easy.” He handed the package to Furbee. “Put it in the lunchroom freezer for now. I’ll tell Chief Holt. He’ll complain but, truth is, he’d be disappointed if a crime in Winston went unreported—even it is just vandalism.”
Josh returned to his office, brooding. Maybe it wasn’t just vandalism. Wasn’t there a mob expression about sleeping with the fishes? Maybe he had overlooked something. In terms of stories, it was always the stuff you never expected that bit you on the butt. Then again, offended readers generally could be counted on to tell you what had offended them.
Amidst the usual assortments of checks, bills, press releases and bulk mail advertising, Josh came across a postcard that sent him soaring.
Hi, Dad-
I LOVE all my friends here!!! They are SOOOOOO nice!!! Can I come next year?
See you soon!!!! Love, Katie.
Then, plummeting back to earth.
P.S. I met a boy.
So it begins, Josh thought.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Allison had left her first message for Chief Holt as she and Josh drove to Columbus Thursday evening. She’d left another message at 6 a.m. Friday.
It was now almost noon and she was increasingly edgy, worried about her patients. The pregnant woman with the stomach rash—Mia McQuigg—had returned earlier in the day because oatmeal baths had not alleviated her symptoms. Allison learned McQuigg had worn belly button jewelry, although she hadn’t bought it from Spike. Allison had immediately given her a dose of Prussian Blue and arranged for her to be admitted to a hospital in Charleston. Pringle and Cloninger hadn’t been found. Cloninger’s boyfriend, Dunn, probably was also suffering.
Beyond that, the source and degree of spread of the contamination had to be identified. Who did Spike sell to? Spike got his metal from Dunn, so who else did Dunn sell to? Where did Dunn get the metal in the first place? Who else got metal from that source? Most importantly, how did the metal get radioactive?
Based on what she’d seen—and she’d been taken aback by the hospital’s casual security regarding radioactive materials; the easy code on the door, the keys above the safe, the fact that nothing seemed in place to prevent a terrorist from stealing a shipment of cesium from UPS—healthcare was a possible source. But only that. Nothing supported the idea of an escape of radioactive materials from it or any hospital, much less a connection to body jewelry. Plus, there were other potential sources like mining, construction and government that needed to be considered.
But it was frightening to think of the contamination out there no matter where it came from. The threat to public health was potentially enormous. Alerting Chief Holt couldn’t wait. She dialed the department again.
Chief Holt was having a good day. Finally, there was something he and his men could sink their teeth into. Not traffic control for 10k runs, not business license violations, not petty vandalism like a catfish through the newspaper’s window. Finally, there was a crime to solve, something that would enable them to be, well, cops. Because both part-time patrolmen were still mopping up at the scene, he was alone in the office when the phone rang. He considered letting the call go to voice mail but decided he’d have to deal with the issue eventually and picked up on the sixth ring. He was incredulous when Allison told him about the radioactive jewelry. “Anybody killed?” he barked.
“No, but—”
“Good, because I’m pretty busy. We found your pal Darryl Dunn dead in his house this morning.” Saying it made Holt feel important. This was big news and he was in the middle of it.
Allison couldn’t believe it. She had just been there. “What happened?”
“Beaten and shot in the head. He looked like hell.�
� Holt said it like it was the kind of thing he encountered every day.
She tried to imagine the scene. “Suspects?”
“Well, the obvious one is the guy you saw smash Dunn’s stuff. We found a baseball bat out there that has his name on it, literally.” Holt reached for the incident report. “Spike Lee. Clarence Lee, officially. We have an APB out for him in six states.”
Allison couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Was the girlfriend there, Candi?”
“Cloninger. No. We didn’t see her. But I don’t think she did it. This was more violent than you usually find with a woman. Dunn must’ve put up a helluva fight. His hands were pulps. And he must have lost a lot of blood—he was real emaciated, if you know what I mean.” Holt hadn’t encountered that many dead bodies in his years on the force. Except for Old Cheese Face, Dunn’s corpse was the grossest.
Holt’s radio squawked. The patrolmen were reporting in. “Gotta go,” he said. “Hang on to that jewelry. But right now, I got bigger fish to fry.”
Allison hung up reeling. Darryl Dunn would not be answering any questions about who, in addition to Spike, had purchased his metal or where it had originated. Her search for the source of the radioactive metal literally had just come to a dead end.
Then she remembered the records she had taken from his home. Dunn could no longer provide information himself but perhaps the records could. She wondered if the same information she’d intended to use to track down Dunn and Cloninger contained clues to the metal’s origins.
She retrieved what she had assumed was Dunn’s diary but found it wasn’t. After puzzling over the entries, she deduced it was his trucking log book which recorded the pickup and delivery runs he’d made for the past two years. Date. Departure time. Departure location. Beginning odometer mileage. Ending odometer mileage. Arrival time. Estimated fuel used.
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