Front Page Fatality

by Walker, LynDee

  I gulped a deep breath. Don’t piss him off, Bob said. And I didn’t want to give Shelby any more ammunition.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, fighting to keep my tone even. “I did talk to the widow, and she told me her husband was suspicious that something wasn’t right in the police evidence room.”

  I paused, waiting for an “attagirl.” He was quiet. I gave up.

  “I have my laptop, and I’m on my way to the PD,” I said. “They never start press conferences on time, anyway. Watch your email for my write-up and tell Ryan to be ready to get it on the web. Has Charlie been out at the recovery site? Did you send photo?”

  “Yes, I sent photo. I know how to do my job. And of course Charlie’s been out there. Even the new girl from Channel Ten has been out there. Everyone has kicked our ass on this, thanks to you. Don’t bother going to the PD. Shelby’s already there. We can take it from here.”

  I slammed my foot on the brake just in time to keep from rear-ending the corvette in front of me, no retort at the ready for that. And the beeping in my ear told me he’d hung up, anyway. I threw the phone across the car and it clattered against the passenger window before it bounced into the floor.

  “Dammit!” I slammed my hands down on the steering wheel. “This is really what I get for not being a heartless bitch? Hey, karma, I think I’m getting screwed, here.”

  The light changed and I drove aimlessly, the urge to kick something (namely Les) pretty strong as I replayed the conversation in my head.

  Coasting up Monument Avenue, I passed the stunning collection of larger-than-life statues that began near the old city limits with Robert E. Lee and ended a mile and a half later with tennis star Arthur Ashe. The street itself was gorgeous, with stately antebellum homes peeking from behind rustling leaves, the shadows cast by the spires at First English Lutheran Church growing long in the evening sunlight. I rolled down the windows and took deep, calming breaths.

  Les would have to eat those words when I exposed the corruption at the police department. And I would very much enjoy watching him do that.

  Feeling more sociable and remembering my date with DonnaJo, I followed Monument until it turned into Franklin, then turned on Ninth, passing city hall and the library before I stopped in front of the John Marshall Courts Building, which housed the CA’s offices. I flipped the mirror down before I got out, dabbing on lipstick and straightening my hair.

  “Let Shelby have her fun,” I said aloud to my reflection. “It won’t matter. Les is just a jackass on a power trip. Just beat Charlie to the punch here, and it won’t matter one little bit.”

  Since I had no way of knowing what Charlie had or didn’t have, I needed to work fast and make sure I got it right.

  I took the elevator up to DonnaJo’s practically deserted office and found her staring at her computer, which was streaming Charlie’s coverage of the press conference, though it still hadn’t started.

  “I didn’t expect to see you.” DonnaJo’s blue eyes widened when I tapped on her doorframe. Judging by the red rims on those eyes and her smeared makeup, my beauty-queen-turned-hardass-prosecutor friend had taken the news about her colleague badly. “Why are you not over at the press conference? You heard about Gavin?”

  “I’m so sorry, honey.” I shook my head. “I was at his house when they called his wife. I stayed with her after she got the call, so the asshole who’s filling in for Bob sent a copy editor to the press conference instead.”

  “Ouch.”

  “It stings, I admit.” I sat on the gray velour sofa near the door. “But it’s not the end of the world. It’s one press conference. Though, good of the paper be damned, I hope she chokes.”

  DonnaJo laughed. “May Charlie Lewis wipe the floor with her.”

  “Charlie will eat her for breakfast,” I said. “But hey, she wanted to play with the big girls.”

  DonnaJo spun the screen so I could see it, too, and my stomach turned as I watched Deputy Police Chief Dave Lowe take the podium outside police headquarters.

  Lowe cleared his throat and faced the cameras, squaring his narrow shoulders as he gripped the sides of the podium with both hands, his dark, curly hair shellacked so the wind whipping the flags behind him didn’t budge it. He wasn’t a big man, probably shorter than me with a slight build. Looking into his round brown eyes, even on TV, gave me chills.

  He began by telling the small group of reporters that Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Gavin Neal was found dead, his body weighted down in the James River after an apparently fatal gunshot wound. Two guys out fishing found Neal’s body after one of them dropped a wristwatch in the water.

  I made a mental note to get their names from Jerry and waited for Lowe to get to something else I didn’t already know.

  “No official cause of death yet from the coroner. We will know more after he completes Mr. Neal’s autopsy,” Lowe said. “The hearts, thoughts and prayers of the Richmond Police Department are with the Neal family today and in the weeks to come.”

  He nodded to the new girl from Channel Ten, who started with the obvious. “Do you have any suspects yet, chief?”

  “We are pursuing a number of leads in this case, and we have been building a list of suspects for nearly a week now,” Lowe said. “Mr. Neal worked within the criminal world for many years, and he may have recently gotten involved, through a case he tried, with a very dangerous part of that world. Our strongest lead, given the circumstances surrounding his death, includes ties to organized crime. That’s all I’m going to say about that today.”

  My mouth fell open. Somewhere far away, I heard Shelby’s unmistakable high-pitched drawl, asking if there was evidence of foul play.

  “Aside from the gunshot wound and the weights holding him under the water?” Lowe kept a straight face as he spoke, but Charlie’s mike picked up her own chuckle at the reply. “There was not.”

  “That’s your girl?” DonnaJo asked.

  “She used to cover the garden club, now she wants my beat.” I felt a little sorry for Shelby. But only a little.

  “Nice.”

  Charlie hit Lowe with a barrage of questions about the exact time and place of the discovery, and how long they thought the body had been there, but I only half-heard, my mind looping back through Lowe’s first answer like a scratched record.

  “What do you make of that, DonnaJo?” I asked her as Lowe thanked the reporters and disappeared. “What he said about the mob?”

  She shrugged, a thoughtful gaze narrowing her swollen eyes.

  “I don’t know what to make of any of it,” she said. “I mean, the Mafia is, well, full of bad guys. But this sounds like something out of a black and white movie. We put people away all the time. We don’t generally end up dumped in the river, though. What the hell is going on here, Nichelle?”

  It sounded absurd even in my head, the idea that the cops killed Neal and were trying to frame the mob, so I just returned the shrug and kept my mouth shut.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But we’re smarter than your average bear. Why don’t we have that drink and see if talking helps us figure it out?”

  She got up and moved toward the door.

  “I’m going to stop in the ladies’ room,” she said.

  I followed, leaving my bag on the floor in front of the sofa.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Capital Ale?”

  “Works for me,” she said, pushing open the bathroom door.

  Drying my hands a few minutes later, I snapped my fingers.

  “Damn,” I said. “I forgot my bag. You go on down and I’ll catch up.”

  DonnaJo eyed me sideways and shook her head slightly. But she didn’t object. “Where’d you park?”

  “Right outside on the street. You can’t miss it.” I turned back toward her office as the elevator chimed. “Be right there.”

  When the doors closed, I sprinted back to her office and grabbed my bag, teetering on my eggplant Nicholas Kirkwoods when I tur
ned toward the door with Neal’s name on it. I took a deep breath and darted inside, no time for second thoughts.

  I jerked open file drawers one after another, finding only folder upon folder of numbered cases. Damn, there was a lot of crime in this city.

  Dropping to my knees, I flung open the credenza doors, already afraid DonnaJo would come back looking for me if I didn’t go downstairs shortly. In the back corner of the cabinet, almost hidden by two reams of paper, I saw the corner of a red file folder.

  I wriggled it free and flipped it open. My article on the Darryl Wright murder lay on top of a small stack of papers, two paragraphs highlighted and a question mark in the margin.

  Jackpot. I wanted to make photocopies, but I was seriously out of time. I stuffed the folder into my bag and ran back to the elevators, smoothing my ivory linen tank dress and taking a few deep breaths while I waited. Before that week, I’d never violated anything worse than a traffic law. In two days, I’d trespassed on a cop’s boat and stolen a file from the prosecutor’s office. If I hadn’t been so focused on the story, I would’ve felt guilty.

  DonnaJo arched an eyebrow at me when I walked outside.

  “You get lost?” she asked.

  “I had to pee again,” I clicked the button to unlock the doors and stowed my bag in the back. “Too much water this afternoon, I guess.”

  “Uh-huh.” She climbed into my passenger seat. “Glad to hear you’re hydrating properly.”

  We politely shoved our way through the after work crowd at the bar and settled into a polished oak booth in the back of the long, narrow dining room. As tables of power-suited professionals dove into platters of gourmet hot wings and fancy hamburgers amid discussions of politics and the stock market, DonnaJo and I sipped Virginia chardonnay and talked about Neal and the police department and the Mafia for two hours. DonnaJo dissolved into tears twice during the conversation, and while I wanted to be invested, I was itching to go through the file I’d swiped from Neal’s office.

  As the stars became visible overhead, I stopped the car and told DonnaJo goodnight in front of her office building, offering my condolences again as she stepped out of the car.

  “Hey Nichelle? I know you’re onto something, and I know you don’t want to tell me what it is,” she said, holding the door open. “I’m okay with that. But Gavin was a good friend and a damned fine lawyer. So don’t screw this up, okay? I want to see the guilty bastards put away. And you let me know if I can help you.”

  “You already have, honey,” I said, easing my foot off the brake. “Get some rest. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  She shut the door and disappeared into the parking garage.

  Snuggling Darcy and sipping another glass of wine, I settled on my sofa and slid my heels off before I opened Neal’s file.

  My story on Darryl was first. He’d highlighted the paragraphs about the similarity in the crime scenes, with drugs being left at both of them, and inked a big question mark in the margin.

  I kept flipping, finding more articles about drug arrests, a copy of his civil service complaint, and several police and lab reports. The upper corner of one page caught my eye, and I pulled it to the top of the stack. I scanned the data at first, then read again with more care, my jaw dropping as a big chunk of my puzzle fell neatly into place.

  “Holy shit, Darcy,” I said, and the dog’s ears perked up. “They’ve been getting away with this for…well, for God knows how long. How many hundreds of thousands—or millions—of dollars are we talking about here?”

  Hours later, my brain refused to stop running questions in circles, and I gave up on sleep. I fiddled with the five-thousand-piece rendering of The Scream that I’d picked up at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ expressionist exhibit when I’d gone with Jenna in May, but couldn’t concentrate enough to finish the border. I gave that up after ten minutes, flipping open my laptop instead.

  I checked my email and then scrolled through shoe listings on eBay, bidding on a pair of aubergine Manolos with transparent silk flowers on the ankle straps and hoping no one else would notice them before the auction’s end on Friday night. I couldn’t afford to go much higher, and they were the cutest pair I’d seen in my size in months. My feet are anything but dainty—a European size forty, which is about a nine in U.S. sizing. Secondhand ones that big can be hard to find.

  Nothing made sleep any easier, though. I ended up staring at my ceiling fan until dawn, mentally paging through Gavin Neal’s secret file.

  By a quarter to seven the next morning, I was dressed to kill for my interview with Chief Nash: black pencil skirt, powder blue silk tank and my favorite black patent Louboutins giving my strut a little extra oomph as I rang Bob’s doorbell.

  “Come to apologize for the earful I got from Les last night?” Bob said when he pulled the door open. He’d traded the pajamas for khakis and a golf shirt, which he favored year-round even though he hated the game.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry I’m not the kind of person who abandons a distraught wife when she finds out her husband turned up dead in the river.” I stepped inside and followed him to the kitchen. “But wait ’til you see what I have!”

  “It better be damned good,” he said, pouring me a cup of coffee and pushing the sugar bowl across the high granite bar. “Les is pushing to give Shelby full rein on this thing with the lawyer.”

  “It’s fantastic is what it is.” I handed him a copy of the lab report I’d found in Neal’s file. The originals were tucked under a loose floorboard in my coat closet, which made me feel both ridiculous and important at the same time.

  He squinted at the places on the report where the ink was faded, thanks to my aging scanner, and then looked back at me.

  “What the hell does pancake mix have to do with heroin?”

  “Everything, when you’re talking about cops running drugs out of the police evidence room. How’s that for a sexy story?” I bounced on the balls of my feet. “This is what I’ve been looking for—well, it’s a big part of it, anyway. Look at the dates on the tests. There was a bag of heroin entered into evidence last summer, and the results of the lab tests to confirm that it was heroin got lost at the courthouse.

  “The ACA on that case asked for another test, and the lab said it was pancake mix. Pancake mix! Then the PD claimed there was a mistake by the lab and sent another sample to be tested, and that time it was drugs again.”

  I stopped to take a breath, the hope this nightmare of a story might have a happy ending—for me, anyway—sending adrenaline through my veins in waves.

  “It wasn’t a mistake,” Bob’s thick eyebrows shot up.

  “No.” I sipped my coffee. “They are replacing the drugs in the evidence locker with ordinary stuff, but only after the samples have been sent to the lab. Heroin looks like beige powder, just like pancake mix. And no one would look too closely after it’s been tested. It’s brilliant. And foolproof, except when someone loses their paperwork. This—” I shook the paper. “This is their mistake.”

  I remembered the copy of my story Neal highlighted, sudden certainty about his reason for going to police headquarters the day he disappeared making me shudder.

  “Neal knew it,” I whispered. “He was down there to test the drugs from the dealer murders, to see if they were still drugs. He figured they were selling the drugs, and probably guessed that his guns were being sold, too. I’d bet my entire shoe collection I’m right.”

  “This is great stuff, kid,” Bob smiled and pushed the paper back across the bar. “But where’d you get it?”

  “Where?” I dropped my eyes to the counter, pretending to be fascinated by the random onyx and cream flecks in the stone.

  “Where.” He drew the word out.

  “I found it at the CA’s office.”

  “You found it? Or you stole it from the dead lawyer’s files?”

  “Does it matter? We’ve finally got something concrete. It doesn’t link Lowe to the actual drugs disappearing, but it shows what they’r
e doing with them.”

  “It’s good,” Bob said. “And you’re definitely onto something, but there’s two things: one, since I didn’t think it was necessary to spell this out for you before, you can’t steal evidence from the prosecutor’s office. Especially not when the prosecutor in question has just turned up murdered. You could get in serious trouble for this. Two, this is good, but it’s not concrete. It says right here that the third test showed a mistake by the lab on the second one.

  “And your guy Lowe isn’t mentioned on it anywhere. We can’t accuse the deputy chief of police of being a drug lord on something this thin. You have to get more.”

  Nice how he could burst my bubble so effectively, yet be kind about doing it.

  “Of course I do.” My shoulders heaved with the sigh that rushed from my chest. “Dammit. That’s why Neal was down there looking for more evidence.”

  Bob patted my hand. “You’re doing good work here, Nicey. I know it’s frustrating, but you really are. Here’s the thing: they’ve barely cleared me to leave the house, and I’m not supposed to drive yet. Les is determined to make you look as incompetent as he possibly can. And while Shelby didn’t exactly earn herself a Pulitzer yesterday, her story was more than decent, and she was there, which is his big argument right now.

  “I pushed back as much as I could and told him you were in a very unusual situation, but he’s going to go over my head if you screw anything else up, and the suits like him better than they like me. I’m just a dinosaur who’s won some awards. Good to trot out for the old folks on the board who remember when I covered Vietnam and civil rights, but that’s about it.

  “Charlie had ten minutes this morning with the fishermen who found the lawyer yesterday. Go find them, get something new out of them, and shut Les up for today. I’m begging you. When you’ve done that, get to the bottom of this, pronto.”

  I opened my mouth to protest and he put up a hand and shook his head.

  “I know it takes time to get something like this right, but your clock is ticking and I can’t do much to slow it down from here.” He sighed. “We need this story, Nicey. Every bit as much as you need it for your portfolio. Nail it down. Just keep me in the loop, and don’t fuck up again.”