“That’s what usually happens.” She paused. “You really don’t know the story?”
I shook my head no. Maggie did, too, fast, her gold hair ruffling.
Faith dropped her voice low. “C.J. worked on that story. In fact, the word on the street was that she wrote most of it, like she used to do for Jane. But when the station submitted the story, they accidentally left C.J.’s name off.”
“You’re kidding.”
Faith shrugged. “I guess this has happened more than once. It’s a clerical error more than anything else, but C.J. didn’t take it that way. She was pissed off. I mean, really pissed off.”
“At Jane?”
Another shrug. “At everybody.” She looked at her watch. “Listen, I should go.” Another glance around the hallway. “And I’m thinking that you should probably go, too.”
“I will. I am. I just have to ask C.J. something.” And keep her away from her office until Vaughn can search it. I started walking away, still talking. “Maggie, stay here with Faith, all right? And have Vaughn use that search warrant in there-” I pointed at C.J.’s office “-when he gets here.”
The hallway that contained the editing bays was quiet, the carpeted floor sucking up any sound. My legs felt awkward as I walked. My eyes kept swiveling around, nervous.
There were ten editing suites. Every few steps or so, lights flickered from one, but no noise emanated from their soundproof interiors. I quickly walked past them, slowing at the end, stopping outside number eight.
Through the small rectangular window, I could see the backs of C.J. and an editor, a guy with long black hair. Their shoulders were hunched over a desk filled with grids and consoles. Every so often, they looked up at monitors at eye level and rolled tape.
As I stood outside, I could see Jane’s face gracing the monitors. Different shots showed different sides of her-Jane’s competent anchor personality, her kind smile during a tough interview, her sad eyes when covering a verdict, her mouth laughing and wide, the shot obviously taken when she had flubbed a line.
I took a step closer to the editing bay, careful not to let my shadow fall over the room. I could see C.J.’s face now, lit by the flickering images of Jane. C.J.’s eyes were wide, almost as if she were in shock.
The door of the editing bay opened, nearly knocking into me, startling me. “Oh, hey,” I heard a voice say. It was the editor with black hair. He must have gotten up while I was watching C.J.
C.J. turned to look. Her brows furrowed a bit when she saw me.
The editor looked at me, then over his shoulder at C.J., as if for a clue on what to do.
“I’m here to ask C.J. about a story we’re working on,” I said.
“Yeah, about Jackson Prince,” C.J. said. She nodded at the editor. “It’s okay.”
The editor threw a curious glance at me, then left.
“C’mon,” C.J. said, standing, “let’s go talk in my office.”
“No!” I said fast. I had to keep her away from her office. Just for a few minutes. At least until Vaughn could get there and Maggie could convince him to search the place. C.J. might not have won her own Emmy but she might have Jane’s.
I stepped into the dark of the bay, right in front of her. C.J. paused, looked at me. Did she wonder for a second if something was off? I remembered her talking to me yesterday; I heard her say to go ahead with the Jackson Prince piece for Jane, Do it for her legacy.
The air in the editing bay smelled stale, closed-up, overly personal-the smells of different people in a room together for hours.
Despite the open door, darkness hung like a veil, making the lights on the console shimmer eerily. On the monitors an image was frozen-Jane watching a news conference, her legs crossed, her face pensive.
I looked at C.J. and searched her face for an answer to my question-Did you kill her?
She said nothing, but she stared right back. Then she pulled me inside and pushed the door closed.
79
“W hat’s going on, Izzy?” she said quietly.
“Um, nothing. Why would you ask?”
“Because you just barged into my editing suite and said you needed to talk to me about a story.” Her words sounded like the usual surly C.J., but again, she was calm. Overly calm.
“The story. Right. Well, the story is going well,” I said, trying not to let my imagination go wild. I gave her a quick retelling of the doctors Mayburn had spoken to, the ones we hoped to get interviews with.
When I stopped talking, she stood there gazing at me. The electricity from the editing equipment hummed. The atmosphere in the room felt constricted, as if the fresh air was slowly being cut off.
“So, I guess I wanted to ask you,” I said, stalling for time, “about anonymous interviews with some of the doctors. You know, where their faces can’t be seen. Is that okay?”
She stepped back and sat in her chair, then nudged the editor’s chair with her foot. It bumped me in the knee. “Sit,” she said.
I hesitated, staring at the chair. The room was lit only by the square of light from the hallway and the lights on the console. Was Vaughn here by now? Had I given him enough time to see if there was anything in those boxes in C.J.’s office? There was that one in particular, filled with broadcast awards and plaques. But Vaughn might not even be here yet. It was only minutes since I’d left Maggie and Faith in the hallway.
I pulled the chair back, sat in it. But now, my back was to the door, the chair blocking it, and it became even more apparent to me that it was just C.J. and me. Alone in a mostly dark room.
I tried to lighten the mood. “How’s the tribute going?” I nodded at a frozen image on the monitors-in the frame, Jane’s body language and face were relaxed. There was no artifice, no camera-ready poise. Instead, in her thoughtful gaze, you could see the person behind that beautiful face, a person who was fascinated by life, who had her own demons, her own questions.
“The network wanted to do five or ten minutes, can you believe that?” C.J. said. “Like Jane wasn’t worth an hour or two.” She shook her head slowly, staring at Jane on the monitor.
“With everything that’s been going on,” I said, “I keep forgetting to check in with how you’re doing. I mean, you and Jane were tight.”
She turned her gaze to me. “We were.”
“You were best friends professionally.”
“Yeah.” Her voice was rough for a second. She cleared her throat.
We sat in the silence of the editing bay for a few seconds. “You were more than that, weren’t you?” I asked. I paused. Then I decided to go for it. “You and Jane were lovers.”
C.J. took off her glasses. For a moment, in the square of light, I saw her eyes-smaller than they seemed when she had glasses on, but more clear, more intense. She moved her head away, so that the light of the door fell only on her shoulder. I couldn’t see her eyes any longer.
She reached forward onto the console and clicked a button. The monitors went blank. Jane disappeared. I heard the sound of C.J. touching another button, and the colored lights of the console went dark, too, dying out with a fading hiss.
80
D etective Vaughn strode into the headquarters of Trial TV, trailed by his officers. Two more squad cars on their way.
He shook his head at the thought of Trial TV. It would be better for him, and all of law enforcement, if people weren’t so goddamned interested in the police and the law. He blamed the detective shows. Not that he’d ever seen one. He got enough of that shit at work.
The truth was, he loved his work. And he was good at it. His instincts were almost never wrong. He’d known in this case a woman was involved. So many things pointed to it, especially the DNA evidence from the bed, and then there was Isabel McNeil with her obvious crush on Jane, and all things Jane.
In order to figure out if his instincts were right, the law gave a certain amount of latitude to detectives like him. He could, for example, lie his face off to a witness during interrogation and hey, i
f that witness was being processed at one station and then suddenly taken somewhere else for booking and shuttled to a whole other place for holding, that was fine. And hey, if that witness’s attorney and family members couldn’t find them for a while, that was fine, too. The law, he figured, treated him well and let him pretty much do what he wanted. What he didn’t like right now was that he was being told what to do. By his own suspect.
He stopped a guy with long hair turning the corner, a coffee mug in his hand.
“Excuse me,” Vaughn said. He didn’t need to show his badge. The officers behind him gave him more than enough credibility. “Do you know where Isabel McNeil is?”
“Yeah,” the guy said, his eyes a little jittery. And it wasn’t from the coffee. You could tell he was excited by the presence of the police. He was in the news business, after all. He probably loved to get the scoop on everything, whether for work or not.
“She here now?” Vaughn asked.
“She’s in an editing suite.” He pointed. “Down that way. Past the offices. Or I can take you the short way, through the kitchen.” The guy gestured behind him.
“Let’s do it.”
Vaughn followed the guy to the left, through an empty staff kitchen and into a hallway beyond that. He would find out what was going on here at Trial TV, because he had a new instinct, one that told him that Isabel McNeil was about to go up in flames, right here in front of him.
81
I felt C.J.’s hand snake around my wrist, warm and yet hard. It squeezed me, cutting off the blood flow.
“C.J., please don’t.” My words were as calm as hers, but my body was at once vividly alert.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “Ever. Ever. Ever.”
She kept repeating the word like a creepy mantra-Ever, ever, ever. She squeezed my wrist tighter. I could hear her breathing; could smell a trace of something coming off her, something like sweat, something like fear. I wondered if she could smell mine.
“You hated that Jane got the glory.” My voice was low, but it wouldn’t matter if I raised it. With the booths being soundproof, no one would hear us.
“Shut up.” Her words snapped into the air with such force, such crisp enunciation that I flinched. She tightened her grip around my wrist. “Do you know how much of an idiot you are?”
I said nothing, which just made her squeeze harder, lean closer.
“Do you know how little you know about life?” she asked. “How little you know about the news, about the law, about anything?”
“Yes.” If there was one thing I’d learned over the last year, it was how little I actually knew, compared with how much there was to know about the world. The thing was-I had thought there was a lot more time left to figure it out.
C.J. yanked my wrist, pulled me close to her. I felt alarm swoop in, felt my mind careening wildly.
“Do you know how little you know about love?” C.J. hissed.
“Yes,” I said again. Another easy answer. “C.J., did you love Jane?”
“Shut up.” A pause. “Who did you tell?”
“Tell what?”
“That you think Jane and I were lovers.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” The bones of her fingers pressed tighter into my flesh. I ignored the pain, the fuzzy feeling in my fingers. “Did Jane end your relationship?” I asked. “Or did she try to?”
Fingers tighter. “Why do you ask?” Her voice was calm again. So calm.
“On the day she died, Jane told me she was going to see a friend. She also said she had to tell the friend that she wouldn’t be around much because she needed to focus on her marriage.”
C.J. laughed, although it sounded more like a choke. “She was always talking like that.”
“But was it more real this time?” I thought of everything I knew about C.J. and Jane from working with them, from what Jane had said. “Because Jane had already left you professionally, right? First by winning the Emmy a few years ago and leaving you out, and then by going to Trial TV without you?”
“I understood that Jane needed to grow up. I understood she needed to experiment.” C.J. sounded slightly wistful, almost like a mother, one who has to watch her kid make mistakes.
“You looked after her.”
“When she let me.”
“And you loved her because you knew everything about her. You were one of the few people.”
“I told her she had to stop sleeping around with random guys.” Her grip got tighter. “I told her it would get her into trouble.”
“What do you mean, trouble?” I said the question quietly.
“You can’t do that,” C.J. said. “You can’t cheat on your husband and fool around with different people and not have it come back to haunt you. I was always trying to warn her about that.”
“How did you warn her?” Then it occurred to me. “Were you the one who left the flowers? And the noose?”
I heard a sound in the dark, something coming from C.J.’s throat, a combination of a groan and a grimace, a sound of someone in pain.
“How do you know about that?” she asked.
“Jane called me when she found them.”
She tugged on my wrist, her hand tightening even more. “I can’t believe she called you,” C.J. said. “You.”
“We were friends.”
“No, we were friends. She was supposed to call me, the person she always called, the person she always relied on.”
“She was always turning to other people,” I said. “She was always leaving you behind.”
She yanked my wrist then.
Instinctively, I yanked back hard, and she fell partially on me. I tried to shove her, but she was so much bigger than me that she wouldn’t budge. “Who did you tell?” she said, and her voice sounded like a growl.
“I…”
Suddenly, her hands slipped around my neck.
I struggled against her, but she was as strong as a man and pressing down hard with the weight of her body, the grip of her hands.
“How do you like it,” she said, her hands constricting my neck even more. “Does this make you feel good? It was good enough for Jane.”
I heard myself choking, tried to swallow against the pressure, but my throat was blocked.
“Who did you tell?” Her voice was now tinged with tranquility. Still, she squeezed my neck.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I managed to choke out, pushing hard with my arms. It was true. I hadn’t even told Maggie my suspicion that C.J. had been the one who was having a relationship with Jane. C.J. was the one who worked closely with Jane on a professional basis. Jane won an Emmy one year, and C.J. should have won one, too. She did most of the work on that story, but the station screwed up. Jane got all the glory. Then Jane left C.J. behind to come to Trial TV. Jane said she wanted only staff with legal backgrounds, but she was also trying to step out into her own as a reporter and an anchor. But C.J. didn’t like that. And my guess was that C.J. really didn’t like it when Jane told her their personal relationship was over, too. Probably Jane had told her this before. Probably this was why C.J. had tried to scare Jane by leaving a noose in her house and the flowers. She thought Jane would turn to her. But she didn’t. Jane still wanted to end things. She was trying to tell C.J. that on the day she died.
Most of these thoughts were suppositions, guesses, but they seemed more and more like conclusions the longer C.J. held me around the neck. I began to pant with the short breaths I could barely get in. I felt my face heat. My head felt dizzy, as if the dark editing suite was swirling around me.
Don’t give up, I told myself. With a guttural groan, I pried C.J.’s fingers half an inch away from my neck. I squirmed, but I couldn’t move her grasp any farther. We struggled against each other.
“You killed her,” I gasped. C.J. yelled. No, she roared. She leapt off me at the same time. Stunned by the absence of her weight, I froze for a second. In the low light from the door’s window I saw her reaching the desk, grabbing someth
ing square and black-a small console of some kind. She held it over her head. She yelled again, and I saw the thing coming at me, felt my mouth open, felt myself scream. I kicked at her. I clamored to move away, but the suite was so small.
Then the room was bathed with light. And I was falling backward.
82
T here was a clamor, a scuffle above my head. I was, I realized, lying on my back in the hallway. The door had been opened, and I’d been yanked out. By Vaughn.
“Hold up, hold up!” he yelled, apparently at C.J.
I saw one of the uniformed officers draw his gun. Another pulled me to my feet. Vaughn was facing C.J. in the dark editing suite, his own gun drawn. Her glasses had fallen somewhere and her eyes darted from one officer to another.
“What’s going on?” Vaughn barked.
“Did you search her office?” I asked.
He shot a glance at me but stayed with his body toward C.J., who was still holding the piece of equipment. “Put that down,” he demanded, gesturing at her.
She complied, and Vaughn looked at me. “Now, what are you talking about?”
I poured out the whole story. “I know you’re looking for a woman, someone who was with Jane that day in her bed, someone who killed her with an Emmy, but you shouldn’t be looking at me. You should be looking at her. Vaughn, this is C. J. Lyons.”
“I know who she is. I’ve interviewed nearly everyone at this network.”
“Well, you should interview her again! And you should search her office for Jane’s Emmy. She’s got boxes of stuff in there. One is full of awards and trophies. I saw it in her office one day, and the same day she told me about the Emmy that Jane had won. She talked about winning an Emmy for a story we were working on.”
“And?” said Vaughn dismissively.
“And she was the one in a relationship with Jane, not me.” I told him my theory, my words spilling over one another. “They were together Monday afternoon, but Jane told her it was the last time. I think for the first time, C.J. knew Jane was serious.”
Red Blooded Murder Page 37