by Jan Brogan
The footsteps stopped, and for a moment I heard nothing. I felt like a race car stuck on a track. White-hot fuel replaced blood in my veins. I had a front-page story. Maybe another shot at the investigative team. I had to get out of here and meet Leonard before he gave up on me. I paced back to the door and stared into the hallway. I couldn’t get out of the building without the dispatcher buzzing me through.
“I want to get out of here!” I shouted down the hall. The female state trooper returned and guided me back into the room.
“Just another minute or two.” She had the faintest accent, as if she’d immigrated here as a teenager. “Detective Sergeant Randall should be here any minute…problems with the little one at home, I think.”
“I don’t care about his problems at home,” I said. “I’m late for work. You can’t hold me here!”
“You are upset,” she said soothingly, as if to validate my anger. Raising a finger that asked for another minute, she backed out of the room. “I understand. Very upset. I’ll see what I can do.”
I paced the small room for the next five minutes waiting for her to come back. The police couldn’t actually charge me with counterfeiting. I’d paid money for those things. And if they weren’t going to arrest me, they had to let me go.
Finally, I went back to the conference table, grabbed my knapsack from the floor, and swung it over my shoulders. If they wanted to keep me prisoner, they were going to have to physically subdue me. Police brutality. Wait until I wrote about that on the front page.
But I didn’t get far. Just as I reached the door, it swung open. It wasn’t Corporal Linsky, the female state trooper, or the detective sergeant I’d been waiting for. It was Matt Cavanaugh holding his hands up in front of him as if to protect me from ramming into his chest.
I stepped back awkwardly. “I want to get out of here,” I said.
Matt was dressed for the office, but in rumpled clothes: a pair of chinos, button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and loosened tie. He was carrying one of those vat-size cups of coffee and he had dark circles under his eyes. He looked both wired and weary, and for a moment, I felt for him. But when he shut the door behind him and gestured for me to take a seat at the table, I got pissed off all over again.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I repeated.
“Just a few questions and I’ll drive you back to your car, I promise.” His eyes met mine. The offer seemed genuine. I felt relief. A way out of here. A way back to my car.
“How long ago did you buy these tickets?” he asked.
“The night I met you,” I said, sitting down again. “The night Barry got shot.”
Something clicked in his eyes, and I knew he remembered me waving my winning scratch ticket at him when we stood together at the register. He shook his head again, as if awed by the chain of events. “What are the odds of this happening?” he asked, mostly of himself, as he dropped to the chair beside me and put his coffee cup on the table.
“To a reporter working on the story? Pretty long odds, I’d say.”
He looked physically pained by this remark. And then his expression grew determined. “You can’t write about this incident, Hallie. You’ve got to promise not to write about this.”
“Are you kidding?” Nabbed as I tried to cash in scratch tickets purchased at a convenience store where the owner was mysteriously murdered? Without one word of confirmation from Matt, without any other connection at all to Barry’s murder, I had a front-page story.
He took a moment to regroup. The tone became more personal. “Couldn’t we work together on this? Couldn’t you wait just a couple of days?”
“For what?”
He refused to answer. But he looked away, as if he was just too tired to deal with me, and I sensed an opening.
“Oh yeah, you expect me to trust you, but you won’t give me anything to work with. Why should a couple of days make a difference?”
He turned to me with an open look of exasperation.
“What am I waiting for?” I repeated.
“I just need time to get a search warrant, all right?” he said in frustration. “That’s off the record, by the way. Completely off the record.”
“Search warrant? For what? What are you looking for?”
He shook his head to indicate that there was no way in hell he was going to part with that information. But I had a pretty good idea what he must be looking for: the tape Leonard had promised me.
“Maybe,” I began, “maybe, if I knew what the hell we were working on together. Maybe if I knew who was doing the counterfeiting, who really killed Barry.”
“No way.” He had the weary, determined eyes of a man who has been working too hard and too long on something he wouldn’t see destroyed. And then, the boulder moved in my brain and cleared the path again, and I knew: Matt wasn’t part of a cover-up, he was part of an investigation. A long-term investigation into the sale of counterfeit scratch tickets, which was probably why he was in Barry’s that night in the first place.
“So could you just give me a couple of days?” he asked, sounding so tired and so frustrated that I felt an unexpected tug on my heart. A part of me wanted to agree, but if I gave him this promise, I’d be stuck with it. Leonard might give me first crack at the story if he was sincere about making amends, but he wasn’t going to wait for days before breaking it himself on late-night radio.
Matt was watching me closely, reading my calculations. He began to say something, but stopped himself. Then his expression grew cold. “It could take a few hours to get you out of here.”
That asshole.
“If I have to get the newspaper’s lawyers involved to get out of here, it’ll be sure to make the six o’clock news,” I returned.
We faced each other, our mutual threats. Finally, he just shook his head at me. The look of disappointment cut deeper than anything he could have said.
The drive back to the state lottery offices was long and silent. There were a few names he would have liked to call me, but he was too professional. He pulled up beside my Honda and stopped the car.
I swung open the door, not really caring if I scraped my own paint. But then I hesitated. Matt was staring directly ahead of him at the lottery building, refusing to even look at me. “I’m sorry,” I said.
But he was not about to forgive me. “Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Get yourself killed over this one. But you might want to ask yourself first: Is a front-page story really worth it?”
CHAPTER
19
BY THE TIME I got to Rufful’s, Leonard was nowhere in sight. I asked Livia, the prematurely gray-haired waitress, if she’d seen a man waiting alone. She pointed to a booth that now held what looked like a college-age couple. “Almost an hour; he kept watching the door.”
I went back to the newsroom to use the phone. Sitting at an empty desk in the sports department, I tried Leonard’s apartment and got no answer. On his cell phone, his voice mail picked up: “Your call may or may not be important to me. Leave a message and let me decide.”
It was noon, and even though it was a raw, windy day, Leonard was probably out riding his bicycle. Religious about the mileage, he’d told me, something like thirty miles this time of day no matter what the weather. I wasn’t sure of the exact route Leonard took, but I thought he’d mentioned something about Barrington. I was too fidgety to hang around the newsroom. Even if it was desperate, I had to try to go find him.
I headed to the elevator. If I couldn’t find him on the streets, I’d wait for him at his apartment complex, be there when he got back. Just as I reached the lobby, I felt someone touch my arm.
It was Dorothy Sacks. “Good job on the story today.” I turned. She was looking at me with a funny expression, as if pleased that I’d actually come through. I might have been offended, but I knew she meant well. “I had someone call in sick; I was wondering if you’d consider working for me tomorrow? The last WaterFire is tomorrow night.”
I stared at her dumbly
. WaterFire was the outdoor performance-art event along the river at sunset. It was usually an arts assignment.
She read my confusion. “Arts is short staffed, so it got transferred to my budget. You don’t have to do any artsy critique or anything, just cover it as a news event.”
I intended to be writing a major exposé of Barry Mazursky’s murder by the end of the day. I expected to be too busy with the follow to write a sappy WaterFire feature tomorrow. But I wasn’t ready to tell Dorothy this yet, so I stood there, not sure of what to say.
“You’d be doing me a huge favor,” she said, in a tone that suggested she would be grateful to me forever. Because I couldn’t come up with an excuse, I still didn’t respond.
She decided to take this as a yes. Reading from some kind of schedule, she told me I needed to be there at the 4:48 P.M. sunset tomorrow, and suggested I work daylight savings into the lead.
“You headed to South County now?” she asked, gesturing to a sealed manila envelope in her hand, one of those interoffice communications meant for Carolyn.
“I worked a double yesterday, so she made me take the day off.”
She cocked her head, as if to ask what the heck I was doing in the newsroom on my day off. I knew I should tell her about the counterfeit scratch-ticket story, the hours spent at the state police barracks. The reporter in me wanted to spill all, pitch it to the editor and sell it to tomorrow’s front page. But I hesitated. I didn’t want to write half the story; I wanted the full tie-in to Barry’s murder, the story that would exonerate me, prove that my suspicions had been on the right course all along. “I just came in to pick up the paper,” I said, lying.
She glanced at my hands, which were empty.
I shrugged, as if embarrassed by my own distractedness. “I got waylaid by a phone call.” I walked over to a stack on the floor, picked up a copy, and glanced at the photo of the shoe in midflight across the front page. Above my story was one with Jonathan Frizell’s byline: “Feds Investigate City Leases, Lopresti Denies Favoritism.”
“They officially hire him on the investigative team yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Dorothy said. I could tell by the way she looked away that she felt it was just a matter of time.
I was stuck in traffic, somewhere on Route 114 in Barrington, a onetime country road that was now crammed with small, upscale shopping plazas. It felt leafy and rich, a suburb with impeccable sidewalks and quaint street lanterns that would never consider widening its thoroughfare. The fuel gauge of my car pointed toward an increasingly dire need for gasoline, but I couldn’t see a station anywhere, just more stores hawking such essential items as tea cozies and teddy bears.
It was the kind of gray November day best spent under an afghan. A gust of wind picked up fallen leaves from the ground and churned them. I heard the wail of a siren. Maybe it wasn’t just the shoppers causing the traffic snarl, maybe a tree was down.
There had to be some kind of accident drawing attention because the cars only inched forward. Leonard’s apartment complex in Bristol was little more than five miles away, but it might as well have been across the bay. On the other side of the road, where there was nothing but a cemetery and a medieval-looking town hall, traffic heading north moved freely, but in this southbound lane, Volvos, Mercedes, and Land Rovers were backed up in parking lots trying to make their way in.
The needle of the fuel gauge slipped another notch. I tried not to look. Warning indicators were notoriously alarmist. There was always more gas in the tank than it seemed. I spotted a cyclist in the distance, pulling out of a plaza parking lot. He was about Leonard’s size. The bike also had thin racing tires just like Leonard’s.
I squinted, trying to will Leonard into view, but as the cyclist got closer, the details started to give way. The man’s jacket was a shade of orange Leonard wasn’t likely to wear and his legs looked especially scrawny in biking tights. The absence of the WKZI emblem on the bike helmet also confirmed that he wasn’t Leonard.
The cyclist began weaving through the stopped cars to the other side of the street. As his wheel bounced across a fancy brick median strip, a bottle fell out of a metal holder on his bike frame and began to roll. The wind and gravity took it onto the northbound lane, where it was crushed under the wheel of an oncoming car.
But on this side of the road, traffic still wasn’t moving. I wished that I was on a bicycle that could weave between the stalled cars, that I could ride on the shoulder or climb up the curb. I glanced at the fuel gauge again. There had to be at least one or two gallons in a special reserve.
There was probably a gas station in the next block, but the green SUV in front of me made it impossible to see anything beyond it. It was one of those enormous vehicles that should be reserved for military use but instead was driven by a lone woman. It probably had three full tanks of gasoline.
Behind me, a car honked. I flipped on the radio to see if there was a news report about the traffic snarl, but there was nothing. Instead, I caught a public-service announcement about the season-finale WaterFire tomorrow night and wondered whether I should have just told Dorothy the truth.
Better to wait until I had all the information, not just pitched, but proven, I reminded myself as I nudged the nose of the car a foot closer to the SUV. The woman driver looked up, in her rearview mirror. I was being obnoxious. She twisted around in her seat so I could know that she was glaring at me.
The engine made a funny sputter, as if trying to suck every last bit of fluid from the tank, but I ignored it. Finally, we were beginning to move and I could see a gas station in the next block. The SUV slipped through the next traffic light, but I got caught at the red light.
First in line at the intersection, I could see what was causing the problem. A police cruiser and an ambulance were up on the curb of the cross street. The back doors of the ambulance were open and there was a huddle of people around a tree.
Three women stood across the street together on a postage-stamp lawn, watching. I searched for signs of a banged-up car, but couldn’t see anything. Then I caught a glimpse of mangled bicycle next to the tree. Bright, iridescent red, just like Leonard’s.
My breathing stopped. I told myself that I was overreacting, forced myself to exhale. Nine out of ten fancy road bikes were probably painted that same shade of red. Because of the bike path in the area, cyclists came here from all over the state. It could be anyone. Anyone but Leonard.
I pulled into the side street without waiting for the light to change. Parking on the corner, I walked swiftly to the accident site. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said to a cop who was standing near the tree, clutching a clipboard. “I saw the accident and I was supposed to meet a friend who was out biking. Just wanted to make sure—you know—it wasn’t him.”
The cop was young, barely out of the academy, with straight brown hair cut in a pageboy under her chin. She was about my height, but stockier, and I could picture her in a field-hockey uniform. Her badge said “Toland.” “We don’t know who it is, the guy’s unconscious and we can’t find any ID.” She sounded irritated, as if she’d already answered too many spectators’ questions.
I took a closer look at the bike, hoping to see the thicker tires of a mountain bike. But they were thin road tires just like Leonard’s. I averted my eyes from the bent metal frame. “It’s probably not him.”
Toland wasn’t listening to me; she was watching the three EMTs, who were now moving the stretcher toward the ambulance. “How old is he? Your friend?” she asked.
“Forty-five maybe. Forty-six.”
Her eyes returned to me swiftly. I saw a glimmer of something I didn’t like and her tone became friendlier. “Maybe you could take a quick look, just to make sure. It would help us if we could identify this guy.”
“I doubt it’s him,” I said, as if repeating it could make it true. But she had already turned, already lifted her hand trying to get the attention of the EMTs. Her pace toward the ambulance quickened. I scrambled after her.
“How bad off is he, this guy?” I said, matching my pace to hers.
“Unconscious, a couple cuts. But otherwise the injuries don’t look too bad. Be good if we knew who he was, though, so we could call his family.”
Another gust whipped up leaves under the tree where the bicycle lay. I pictured Leonard hurtling through the air. I thought of his phone call last night, of the silver sedan that had followed him into the station parking lot. I flinched, involuntarily, remembering the silver sedan that had gunned for me in the street, the way it had nearly crushed my back.
The cop looked over quickly. “You all right?”
“Fine. Did a car hit him?”
Gripping the edges of her clipboard to keep the paper from fluttering, she shook her head. “No skid marks and the woman across the street didn’t hear any car brakes. But she didn’t see it happen. No real witnesses to the accident, right now…” She began waving her arms. “Joe! Joe! Wait a minute, I got someone here who maybe can do an ID.”
The EMT’s back was toward me. The stretcher was already beyond him, inside the ambulance. He turned, a solid, square man in some sort of uniform. A firefighter, maybe. He waved me over, an impatient gesture. Let’s get this over with, quickly.
My legs suddenly stopped. I stood there feeling like this was a big mistake. Here I was wasting precious minutes because of a premonition, a bad feeling in my stomach that probably had to do with hunger. The EMT waved again, with thick, square fingers. Officer Toland gestured for me to get moving. I was wasting time. As I stepped closer to the open back doors of the ambulance, two EMTs parted, giving me room to see. I looked into the sterile cavern, down at the man who lay there bundled into the stretcher. His eyes were closed, a deep cut bled over the brow, and spatters of red spilled onto the chest of the nylon bike jacket.
The world spun in my peripheral vision, leaves blew around my feet. “Leonard Marianni,” I said softly.