by Laura Hayden
“That guy.” Kate touched the frozen figure of the Profile Guy on the screen. “I’ve seen him before. He’s an actor.”
Lee nodded. “Yeah. His real name is Mickey Meyer, but his SAG card is under the name ‘Mitchell Mays.’ He lives in Baltimore, and he gets a good amount of work in shows that shoot on the East Coast, especially in New York City.” She patted the machine with affection. “I think this tape may be some of his best work. He definitely needs to add it to his demo reel.”
“So we have actors, dialogue, and intrigue. All this lacks is an underlying score in a minor key. So why in the world would Henderson set up this sort of elaborate charade?”
“Just wait. Something is coming up in a second here and it’ll prove just how far your opposition will go to have a little fun at your expense.” Lee hit the Play button and the action continued. As Henderson and the man walked out, Henderson slapped the man on the back, secretly depositing a bumper sticker that read, Vote for Benton.
Kate groaned. “That man has entirely too much time on his hands. What? Is he in negotiations to host Saturday Night Live and this is audition footage?”
“Look at it this way: he knows you’re looking for some dirt, so he whispers something in the right ear and he leads you to this . . . this parody sketch. ‘Ha ha, fooled you. Don’t you know you’re wasting your time?’”
“He expects me to believe he’s got time—this close to the primaries—to play a stupid practical joke like this?”
“Who knows? In my opinion, this is simply flashy misdirection. Smoke and mirrors. I think he created fake footage to keep you from looking harder. My bet is he was counting on you finding this and not digging any deeper.”
“Then he made a mistake.”
“I’ll say.” Lee stopped the machine, opened it, and exchanged the disc with a second one. Moments later, the machine stirred to life again. “But we weren’t fooled. So we dug.”
This time the picture was a bit grainier. It looked like a different elevator car with the same basic interior as the other one, but the camera angle was different. The footage was black-and-white and had the mild distortion of a wide-angle lens, typical for a security camera. A 6 was superimposed on the lower left corner. When the elevator moved, the number changed to 5 and obviously represented the current floor.
Kate studied the screen. “This is a real feed, right?”
Lee nodded. “We checked. The camera’s in the right location. Even the reflections from the door line up correctly. We can validate that this footage came from the real camera in the real elevator. It has the right date, camera code, and floor readout. If you noticed, the other one didn’t have any indicators other than the date.”
As they watched the tape, a group of kids entered the elevator—loud, obnoxious and profane—then exited en masse three floors higher. That’s when Mark Henderson entered the car. One floor later, two burly men stepped in, and one shifted slightly so that a somewhat chunky brunette could enter as well. One man held a soft briefcase and he leaned down slightly to place the bag on the floor next to him. They all rode in silence until the car stopped and the two burly guys departed. Kate noticed that the man never stooped to retrieve his briefcase but simply left without it. The doors closed and the elevator continued moving down.
At the next floor, Henderson stooped for a moment, going nearly out of frame, then straightened and walked out. The doors closed and the woman’s posture changed from rigid to relaxed. The mirrored wall of the elevator reflected a small smile that flitted across her face.
The screen went black.
“I WANT TO SEE THAT AGAIN.”
Lee complied and they watched the jerky silent-movie reverse action until they reached the beginning of the sequence and the footage went forward again at normal speed. They watched in silence until the man started to place his briefcase on the floor of the elevator.
Kate hit the Pause button. “There,” she said, pointing at the frozen screen. “That’s when he drops it.” Although it was blurred by the motion, the bag appeared to be made of dark fabric and had some sort of insignia or initials on the side facing the camera.
She advanced, then froze on Henderson as he dipped out of camera view. Advancing frame by frame, she watched him rise back into view, hiking a dark strap over his shoulder. She stopped it again as he stood in complete view, the bag with its unreadable insignia tucked under his arm.
“It’s a handoff,” Kate declared softly. “It could be documents. Or private records. But it’s not necessarily something illegal.”
“But it could be. It could be money or drugs, just as easily.”
“C’mon, Lee. The first version was a total farce. But it doesn’t make this second one any less far-fetched because it’s less staged. Today’s crooked politician doesn’t play ‘switch the briefcase’ in public elevators. It’s too . . .”
“Trite?”
“I was going to say risky. But trite works too.”
“So if you were to take a bribe, how would you do it?” Lee raised her hand to cut off Kate’s sputtering denials. “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
Kate ignored the gibe. “Putting aside the theatrics, do we know who those two guys are?”
“Funny you should ask. Yes, we do. They’re on the security staff for Maynard, Seaforth, and Black, a firm lobbying against the new wetlands bill on behalf of their client Fair Energy Source.”
Kate squinted at the screen. “There’s no telling what the logo is—I can guarantee you it’s not MS&B’s. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The question is, is this footage real or simply a more realistic fake?”
Lee tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I think it’s real. Here’s the scenario Sierra and I pieced together. Henderson didn’t realize until after the fact that the hotel’s security camera caught his money exchange. Maybe one of the hotel’s rent-a-cops decided to try a little blackmail. ‘Pay me or I’ll turn the video over to . . . somebody.’”
“It’s happened before. Of course, the blackmailer’d have to figure out what to do with the footage. Who to go to. How much to ask for. I’ve seen these cases prosecuted. It’s trickier than TV makes it look,” Kate said.
“Exactly. So apparently Security Junior asked for help from an older and wiser security guy on how to best approach possible buyers. It turns out that he confided in the wrong man—Security Senior was already on the lobby group’s payroll. But Senior couldn’t simply make the footage disappear without raising the suspicions of Junior. To make things worse, Junior had already contacted a ‘news’—” Lee used finger quotes to signify her distaste—“show and they’d already agreed to buy the footage.” She sighed. “Evidently, the concept of a bidding war was beyond his comprehension.”
“A news show? Don’t tell me; let me guess. Bramble and Friends.”
Lee nodded.
Bramble and Friends was a tabloid show that delighted in airing every bit of real or imagined scandal they could purchase. Unlike The Daily Show, Bramble took the “fake news” scenario in a dangerous and often litigious direction, not looking for intelligent laughs but for titillation and ratings. So far, Kate had kept the show’s prospective anti-Emily stories off the air by feeding Bill Bramble with real leads, albeit small and harmless ones, on the other candidates.
As her grandmother always said, a well-fed dog is less likely to bite. . . .
Lee continued. “So Security Senior goes to Henderson directly and they come up with the idea of creating a really bad fake and substituting it for the real footage. After all, the show will air it, no matter what. The show doesn’t care what’s real and what’s not. Junior will get paid and that’s all that matters to him. When the fake footage hits the air tomorrow minus the bumper sticker punch line . . .”
Kate supplied the obvious answer. “Henderson’s camp will be ready to discredit the footage by showing the whole tape, making clear that it’s a joke, and then place blame at the most likely culprit for the leak, th
e person who has a history of leaking stuff to the show—me. I’ll look naive at best, greedy at worst, for falling for the faked footage.”
Lee nodded. “Emily will come across as totally desperate for having okayed your actions. Combined, it’ll do some harm to both of your reputations. Maybe even completely derail her campaign.”
“Plus it distracts everyone from the idea that Mark Henderson actually did accept some information or money or whatever from someone representing the lobbying firm. They may even forget that, immediately thereafter, he made a 180-degree turn on his position on the wetlands bill.”
Kate’s mind began to churn, examining and discarding a hundred possible tactics to counteract Henderson’s plans. The only way she could stop the show would be to give them something of more value. But she had nothing to trade other than the ammunition she’d been gathering on Charles Talbot. And it was neither the right time nor the right place to use any of that material.
Her stomach began to churn as hard as her mind.
“But wait.” Lee opened the player and replaced the second disc with a third. “There’s much, much more. And this is the best part. Trust me. Watch.”
Kate swallowed the worst of her rising revulsion and watched.
It appeared to be the same elevator, several hours later by the time stamp. The same woman, obviously pregnant rather than just chubby, stood in the elevator, alone. The car beeped; then the doors slid open. Mark Henderson entered and turned around to placidly face the closing doors. But once they did close, he turned and shot the woman a look of undisguised lust. She threw her arms around him.
“Oh, baby, I’ve missed you,” she moaned as he began to kiss her neck.
“I know. It’s—” several muffled words—“to be apart.” He pulled away from her but shifted his hand from her shoulder to her stomach, bypassing any territory in between, which Kate found awfully curious. To her surprise, Henderson cupped the woman’s stomach, of all things, then leaned down and said something the microphone didn’t quite pick up.
“He’s doing fine,” she responded. “Kicking like a mule. The doctor says—” more muffled words—“a sign he’s healthy.”
“Like his old man,” Henderson said, paternal pride etched across his face. “Right, Junior?” He turned to the woman. “I’ve been—” several indistinguishable words—“to name him after my father.”
“I was hoping we could name him after—”
The elevator dinged in warning and the two of them stepped apart as if they’d not been in midembrace and midword only moments before. Two older women stepped in, filling the newly created gap between the man and woman. One of the ladies immediately zeroed in on the pregnancy like a moth to the maternal flame.
The lady spoke loudly as if she was compensating for a hearing loss. “Oh, I remember those days, but it was an awfully long time ago. My youngest is thirty-nine,” she said with a grin. “How far along are you?”
The young woman responded congenially, as if asked this question much too often by total strangers. “Seven months.”
“It won’t be too much longer, then. Those last two months literally fly by. Your first?”
The young woman nodded.
The elevator beeped as it reached the next floor. Henderson exited without any comment to the woman he’d been kissing, much less to the other two ladies.
The conversation continued after the doors slid closed. The second woman chimed in. “Picked out names yet?”
The pregnant woman nodded. “We’re thinking about naming him after his grandfather.”
“Then you know it’s a boy.”
The elevator beeped again and the young woman stepped forward, shooting them an apologetic look as if leaving in midconversation was a sign of bad manners. “Have a nice day,” she said as she exited. The doors closed behind her and the first woman remarked, “Pretty girl . . .”
Then the video clip ended.
Kate stared at the blank screen, not quite sure what she’d witnessed. Finally she turned to Lee. “Is that real?”
“Seems to be. We have the entire footage for a six-hour period with this piece smack in the middle—no signs of tampering, insertion, or editing whatsoever. We can’t say that about the other clips. In fact, someone slipped up, because we have two sets of footage with the same date and time code for the same elevator. They forgot to erase the real footage from the hard drive.”
Kate tapped the DVD player. “I want to see it again.”
Lee complied and Kate watched both sequences again, looking for similar lapses in logic, continuity, anything to help prove this piece of footage was as flawed as the earlier ones.
“What’s your assessment? Real or not?” Kate asked.
Lee patted the DVD player. “It passed every sniff test we could come up with. Trust me, we looked hard. The pregnant woman’s name is Kellie Scarborough, she’s not an actress, and she’s really pregnant. She’s a secretary in an auto insurance branch office in Tysons Corner.”
Lee pulled some notes from her purse and read aloud. “Remarkable coincidence number one: Mark Henderson’s campaign headquarters is in the same building. Remarkable coincidence number two: Shortly after learning she was pregnant, Scarborough stopped using the obstetric clinic that’s on her insurance plan. Instead, now she goes to a very ritzy and exclusive ob-gyn in Falls Church who isn’t on her insurance plan, so someone is paying big bucks for her prenatal care. As it happens, Henderson’s brother, Malcolm, is a pharmaceutical rep who visits the clinic often.”
Kate waited. It was clear Lee wasn’t done.
Lee fast-forwarded to the part where the ladies engaged the pregnant woman in idle chatter and froze the screen. “These ladies are Margaret Naismith on the left and Sheila Rand on the right. They’re sisters from Portland and Seattle, respectively, attending the U.S. Scrapbooking Guild conference.”
“I didn’t know there was a U.S. Scrapbooking Guild.”
“Me, either. But we checked. It’s legit and the sisters are charter members of the organization as well as registered for the conference. They’re rooming together at the Grand Ambassador in room 607. And for the record, they entered the elevator on the sixth floor.”
“So you think this woman really is pregnant with Mark Henderson’s child?”
“She certainly appears to think she is. More importantly, he appears to believe it as well.” Lee removed the disc and placed it and the other two in slim jewel cases.
“Oh, and one more thing. Kellie Scarborough is a scrapbooker too. That’s why she was at the hotel; she was also registered for the conference. But here’s the curious part. Although she makes only $45,000 a year as a secretary, which isn’t a lot in the D.C. area, she somehow managed to cough up $350 a night for three nights in the Grand Ambassador so she could rest between workshops even though she lives less than two miles away in a very nice—emphasis on nice—Crystal City apartment. Just four Metro stops away on the blue line. She could have gotten home in less than twenty minutes. Plus, she’s been eating a lot of expensive room service steaks, skipping the usual rubber chicken conference food at mealtimes.” Lee closed the lid to the DVD player. “She certainly takes her hobby very seriously, doesn’t she? To cough up enough money to cover all that? On her salary?”
Kate closed her eyes. Henderson hadn’t been the biggest thorn in their side until recently, with his unprecedented poll gains. Emily’s plan had been to not openly antagonize the man so that when he eventually tossed in the towel, he’d throw his support to her as he got out of the race.
It made sense. The two campaigns had a lot in common. More than once, Henderson had been sympathetic to their common political agendas and background. In particular, he’d talked with Kate about the fact that both Emily and his wife were lamentably infertile and how much he wanted kids.
Kate shot up in her seat, the word flashing in her mind like a neon sign. Infertile. Infertile. Infertile. Was Henderson so desperate for an heir that he had done an end run aro
und his wife’s problem and gotten another woman pregnant? That could be explosive. Her better nature tried to offer an explanation. Maybe he and his wife were having a child by proxy. But given the look in Henderson’s eyes, Kate didn’t think that was the case. Her better nature lost out. No, she was pretty sure Henderson fathered that baby the old-fashioned way. And in an adulterous relationship.
Even if it was true love, Henderson wouldn’t be able to explain it away and keep his political ambitions intact. Any way it panned out, letting this info into the public debate would ruin Henderson, plus devastate his wife. Kate was almost certain his wife didn’t know diddly about this girl and her child-to-be. And who knew what letting this cat out of the bag would do to a young woman who was seven months pregnant by a married man? what it would do to her baby?
Kate drew in a sharp breath. The important question she should be asking was whether this was on the other side of that bright line Kate always called her “What would Jesus do?” acid test.
Could she, in good conscience, use any of this, knowing it would affect not just one unfaithful man but the two women who loved him? and the innocent child who had yet to be born?
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Kate asked.
Lee sighed. “If you paid me more, I probably would have made the same leap in logic you just evidently did. But my job is to simply find this stuff. It’s up to you how and when to use it.”
“It’s not up to me,” Kate said, tucking the jewel cases into her purse. “It’s up to Emily. And I’m not sure I want to hear what she has to say about this. But I know what I’m going to recommend she do with it.”
Emily was fascinated.
“Let me get this straight. He films himself taking a fake bribe in order to cover up the fact that he took a real bribe? Explain to me in what universe that makes sense.”
Kate hadn’t shown Emily the other footage with the pregnant woman. She wasn’t sure why she’d hesitated. Maybe it had something to do with Dozier’s comments about nuclear strategies. Or maybe it was because no child, born or unborn, should be tangled up in the sharpened cogs of political machinery.