by Max Barry
“Thank you for your time, Tom,” she said. “Please do send me those dates.”
As soon as she lowered the phone, Todd the intern turned in her direction, his face brightening.
“No,” she said. She stood. It was after one; she needed to eat something.
The meeting room door opened, revealing the neat, tucked-in figure of Brandon Aberman, her boss, in a duck-egg-blue sweater over a collared shirt, tan slacks, and brown loafers. His hair was a swept-over coif that Felicity always felt could be popped right off and placed on a desk, like that of a LEGO man. He beckoned to her. Todd drifted behind her, covering her exit.
“Hi, Felicity,” Brandon said. “How are you?”
Every conversation she and Brandon had ever had began this way, no matter how recently they’d spoken. She suspected a management book somewhere, a chapter titled “Building Trusting Partnerships with Subordinates.”
“Great.”
“How’s the recycling piece coming along?”
“It’s coming.” That was what she was supposed to be doing instead of harassing District Attorney Tom Daniels. Someone at a recycling center in Hoboken had filmed a truck dumping citizens’ carefully washed plastics and glass into the landfill, and it had become a thing on social media; therefore, the paper needed something on its website as quickly as possible. Felicity had phoned a few people and discovered that the recycling center’s position was more reasonable than it had first appeared, for reasons that were complicated, which prevented her from writing the kind of article Brandon wanted, i.e., “More Secret Trucks Revealed; Recycling Center Has Links to Underworld Crime.” “I’ll have it for you by five.”
He glanced at his watch, which was full of icons. “Do you have enough for a VC spot? They want to post something in the next half hour.”
VC was Visual Content, or possibly Video Content; she couldn’t remember. Either way, it was a bunch of smart twenty-six-year-olds in bright sweaters and delicate blouses compressing news into thirty seconds of hot-button phrases. Felicity occasionally did VC spots—not as many as five years ago, when it was going to save the news business, and no one had realized the social media numbers were lies—and it was always slightly soul-crushing.
“Oh, ah . . . I don’t know if I’m quite there yet.”
“If you’ve spoken to the recycling center, that’s enough. I’d rather have something now than later.”
“They say there’s no way to recycle it cost-effectively,” she said. “Since China closed up, there’s literally nowhere for it to go that doesn’t cost more money than sending it to the landfill.”
Brandon pursed his lips. “So it’s a systemic issue.”
She nodded.
“Why don’t they tell people? Why waste our time sorting plastics if it winds up in the same place?”
“They said it took years to train households to recycle properly and they don’t want us to get out of the habit. A new buyer might enter the market in the future.”
“That sounds deceitful,” said Brandon. “I will have you do a VC, if you don’t mind.”
“Ahh,” she said. “The thing is, also, I was about to cover a murder.” She turned and clicked her fingers at Todd. He jerked toward them. “There’s a big one and Levi’s out.”
Todd cleared his throat. He was only three weeks old, nervous around the rest of them. “I took a call from Detective Jim McHenry of the Crime Scene Unit, who said Levi would want to know about this right away. They have a single white female victim, fatally stabbed while showing a house on 177th Street in Jamaica.”
Brandon touched his chin thoughtfully. There were a lot of murders; the paper didn’t cover most of them. “Suspect?”
Todd shook his head. “He didn’t say.”
“Always ask,” said Brandon. “What else?”
Todd looked at his note. “The victim’s name is Madison May.”
Brandon dug his phone out of his pants and began to manipulate it. “M-A-Y? And she’s a real estate agent?”
“Was,” said Todd, gaining confidence. “Worked for Henshaw Realty out of Laurelton.”
Brandon turned his screen toward Felicity, revealing a website. Beneath a sky-blue banner were the words madison may, sales associate, and a picture of a woman with auburn hair spilling over a dark blazer.
“Pretty,” Felicity said.
Brandon was silent. She could see him imagining how this picture would look above a headline that included the word slain. It would look fantastic.
“What’s Levi doing?” asked Brandon.
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “He’s not answering.”
He was doing Annalise from Ad Sales, Felicity suspected. Levi’s desk was connected to Felicity’s, and most days, as the clock thwacked its way toward twelve-thirty, Annalise from Ad Sales would slide into the newsroom, ease her ass onto the space between them, cross her legs, push back her shoulders, and ask if she could get Levi’s opinion on something. Then, every few minutes, Annalise would tip back her head and give voice to high, girlish peals of laughter that were unlike anything Felicity had heard from her during the office Christmas party, in the company of her husband.
Brandon tapped his chin. Felicity waited.
“All right,” Brandon said. “Check it out.”
“Okay,” she said, buoyed. With any luck, by the time she got back, they’d have found someone else for the VC spot. “Photographer?”
Brandon shook his head. His hair gleamed. “We can get something from the police.”
Even better. She could enjoy her own thoughts instead of sharing a ride with a camera jockey. She could pick up some lunch. And she could figure out what she was going to do about District Attorney Tom Daniels, who expressed sincere sympathy for poor assaulted girls without ever using their name. “You got it.”
* * *
—
The wind switched around, and by the time she reached 177th Street, the sky was beginning to dispense fat drops to puncture the city heat. The police had taped off a perimeter, and at its center was one of the saddest houses Felicity had ever seen. Uniformed cops spilled out of the driveway and onto the street. Through dirty windows, she glimpsed people moving about, uniforms and suits and people in loose white plastic. Every few seconds, one of the windows lit up with flashes.
“Such a terrible thing,” said a woman holding the neck of her top closed against the wind. Beside her stood a broad-shouldered, bearded man in a trucker’s cap, staring at the house with no visible emotion.
“Did you know her?”
“Oh, no. They say it’s the real estate agent. I never met her.” She lowered her voice. “They’re thieves.”
“Pardon?”
“Realtors,” said the woman. “They rob you blind.”
“Oh,” Felicity said. “I see.”
A uniformed cop strayed near the yellow tape and Felicity waved to catch his attention. “Is Detective McHenry here?”
“Who are you?”
“Felicity Staples.” She reached for her press pass. “I’m with the Daily News.”
“No media,” said the cop, turning away.
“I need Detective McHenry. Can I speak to him, please?”
The cop ignored her. She shivered. Rain trickled down the back of her neck. If she hadn’t blown off the VC spot, she would be warm and dry, smiling for the camera, warning people about the dangers of deceitful recycling operators. She hadn’t done real crime reporting for a while. She’d forgotten it could be so wet.
A short man in an olive coat approached the tape, water dripping from the brim of a dark hat. “Who are you?”
“Felicity Staples.” She found her pass again.
“Where’s Levi?”
“Indisposed.”
“I didn’t call you. I called Levi.” He glanced over his shoulder.
She shifted from one foot to the other. Her shoes squelched. She’d assumed the tip wasn’t especially secretive, since it had been left with Todd, but maybe that wasn’t the case: Maybe it was too good to wait. “Levi sent me,” she lied.
McHenry eyeballed her.
She pulled out her phone. “You want me to call him?”
He gave a short shake of his head, spraying water. “Okay, stay here. I’ll see what I can do.”
Felicity glanced around. The woman had left to seek shelter from the increasing rain, but her husband remained, watching the house. Rain ran down his cap and beard. He looked like a woodsman. Like he’d just emerged from the wilderness after a month of hunting boars. With a handcrafted spear. Half naked. She looked away. She had an active imagination.
The window that had been flashing became a solid rectangle of light. A man edged by it with a shoulder-mounted video camera aimed downward, at the carpet, or whatever lay upon it. “What a shithole,” she said, meaning the house, and the street, and the weather, and the situation. The woodsman didn’t respond.
The CSU detective, McHenry, gestured to her from where the police tape was tied to the chain-link fence, and Felicity hurried to meet him. “It’s a messy one. Vic was stabbed half a dozen times. Throat cut.”
She fumbled for her notebook and wrote: throat, 6+ stab. “Can I get in there?”
He shook his head. “No, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not worth my job. The deputy inspector’s in there with his detectives. This is all background, okay? You don’t use my name. That’s how me and Levi do it.”
In the top-right corner of the page, she wrote: bg. “Why did you call Levi?”
“I knew he’d be interested.”
“Because of the vic?” She’d never used the word vic to a cop before. She felt professional. “Because she’s photogenic?”
McHenry looked at her like she was crazy. “What?”
“The victim was pretty.”
McHenry gestured impatiently. “I got no friggin’ idea what she looked like. It’s somethin’ else.”
A light flared on the street. She turned to see a TV crew setting up: a white van, a guy with a camera, a thin woman in a green blazer beneath a black umbrella. A moment later, a man in a gray suit appeared at the front door of the house: the deputy inspector, Felicity assumed. He was tall, in his fifties, with deep lines in his face. He put his hands on his hips to survey the TV crew. Behind him emerged a young woman in a black skirt, who shook out an umbrella and opened it. They descended the steps, the woman awkwardly holding the umbrella for him.
“You want a look inside?” said McHenry, once they’d passed. “Now’s your chance.”
She hesitated, but why else was she here? She ducked beneath the tape.
“That’s Deputy Inspector Moth,” McHenry said over his shoulder, walking quickly toward the house. “Drawn to bright lights.” He climbed the concrete steps. “You get thirty seconds. In and out. No pictures. You got it?”
She nodded. McHenry spoke to a uniformed cop, handed Felicity thin blue gloves and shoe covers, and waited while she tugged them on. Inside was a close hallway and the smell of damp. McHenry knocked on the door to his left, which was opened by a man dressed in white plastic. Behind him stood a light tower, painful to look at.
“Can I open this all the way?” McHenry said. The man in plastic said to wait; the door closed.
“So what’s the ‘something else’?” Felicity asked. She was dripping on the carpet.
He inclined his head toward the door. “You can see for yourself in a minute.”
Obviously. But she wanted to know what she was in for. Was there a body? She wasn’t totally ready to see a dead real estate agent, a woman who’d been stabbed half a dozen times, maybe more, let alone the something else, the extra frisson that made it especially interesting to a newspaper.
The door swung back. Felicity squinted against the light. It was a bedroom, the carpet dark and heavy. A smell reached out to her, rich and wet. She saw yellow-and-black markers. No body, though. Definitely no body.
“Stay where you are,” said the plastic man. “Don’t come in.”
A stain lay near the door, a big one. Then others, smaller, beside plastic markers. It was repulsive and terrible, but she had been braced for worse and it was almost a relief. She didn’t see any something else.
“Look up,” said McHenry.
The drywall had been carved open with thick slashes. There were five angled prongs crossing a circle. Some kind of insignia, she guessed. But none she recognized.
Below that was a word in sharp, furious lines:
STOP
McHenry was so close behind her, she could feel him breathing. She said, “What is that?”
“Beats me.”
The white plastic man raised a camera. The flash discharged, momentarily inverting the colors of the room.
She said, “Can I get that? These pictures?”
“I don’t know about that.” McHenry stepped back. “You gotta go.”
“Wait,” she said, but McHenry began to bundle her out of the house. The plastic man closed the door, and she lost her view of the wall and its message behind it.
3
She directed the Uber to her Brooklyn apartment, because she was soaked. She meant to return to the office—it was only four—but once she was in the shower, with hot water pounding her back, she couldn’t seem to get out. There was a chill at the core of her, as if she’d brought it home from that house.
When she finally entered the living room in a towel, her brave cat, Percival, curled around her ankles, while her anxious cat, Joey, watched from beneath the dining table. She collected her phone and tapped out: Working from home for rest of day if that’s ok.
A few moments later, Brandon’s reply: Certainly.
For all his LEGO hair and careful conversations, Brandon did seem to give a shit about the workers, for which she was grateful. He probably even guessed why she wanted to stay home. She fell into sweatpants and a loose top, sat at the dining table, and cracked open her laptop. Levi was back on deck, his physical appetites satisfied (she assumed); he’d already spoken to the police. She brought up the document he was working on, which was a dozen paragraphs with new words spilling across the bottom even as she watched.
The victim of a brutal stabbing in Jamaica this afternoon was “tk tk tk”, Tk say.
Tk was what you wrote when you knew something belonged but didn’t know what. Beside it hovered a yellow bubble: Quote family / colleague / etc.
She picked up her phone. Levi answered immediately, but the words continued. She could hear him typing. She said: “Do you want me to call her family?”
“Don’t bother. They’re not taking calls. Can you try her office, though? That’d be helpful.”
a ferocious, unprovoked attack
“The real estate people?”
“Number’s in the notes. I need to establish character. ‘She was a bright, beautiful girl with everything to live for.’ You know.”
“Okay.”
“But not that. That, with details. She was planning to go kayaking next month. She collected stamps. She was engaged to be married. Yes?”
“I have written stories before,” she said.
promised to expend every available resource
“Not crime stories,” Levi said. “It’s a different beat from what you’re used to.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, you can say what you mean. You don’t have to run everything by Legal first.”
“I say what I mean,” she said, mildly offended.
“Here’s a tip. Get the receptionist talking. She put me straight through to the head guy and he’s saying nothing. Probably worried about his legal exposure. As he should be, sending a twe
nty-two-year-old out to empty houses by herself.”
“What about the message on the wall?” she asked. She couldn’t see it mentioned in the article.
“We’re holding that back. NYPD is actually a little pissed we know about it.”
“We’re not publishing it?”
“Not yet. When it’s time.”
She supposed he knew what he was doing. There was a dance: the desire to publish on the one hand, the need to nurture and protect sources on the other. “What does it mean, do you think?”
“ ‘Stop’? Beats me.”
“I can’t even figure out who it’s aimed at. Who does he want to stop? The cops?”
“It may not even be related. Could have been there for days.”
It had looked fresh to her. Like a new wound. “Mmm,” she said.
Levi snickered. “Don’t use your imagination. That only gets you into trouble. We find out when we find out.”
would not disclose whether they had identified a suspect, but it is believed a person key to the inquiry will be brought into custody shortly
She asked, “The police know who did it?”
“Some college dropout from Ulysses, Pennsylvania. Goes by the name of Clayton Hors.”
“How did they identify him?”
“Don’t know. But they’re confident he’s their guy.”
Felicity chewed her lip.
“Call me when you have a quote,” Levi said. “Unless there’s something else?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. How do you talk and type at the same time?”
“Practice,” Levi said, and hung up.
* * *
—
She set her elbows on the table, stuck her phone to her ear, and waited while it rang.
“Henshaw Realty, this is Alexandra, how may I help you this afternoon?”
“Hello, Alexandra. My name is Felicity Staples. I’m a reporter for the New York Daily News. I’m so sorry about Madison.”
A brief silence. “Thank you.”
“Do you have a minute? I’m hoping you can tell me something about the kind of person she was.”