by Lauren Carr
“Ryan, why are you so convinced that Sam didn’t kill Ross?” Daniel asked.
“Especially when he basically confessed to doing it?” Tanya asked.
“Sam never confessed,” Kathleen said. “He doesn’t remember doing it.”
Ryan turned both phones around to face them.
The doorbell rang. Barking, Elmo ran for the door. In route, he raced past Lucy and Ethel who arched their backs and hopped in a dance of protest to their home’s broken tranquility.
“Our witness is here!” Nikki joined the stampede to answer the door.
“What witness?” Tanya asked.
“Debra Gregory,” Kathleen said. “She was sitting right outside Ross’s office when the crime was committed.”
“No, she was down in the mailroom,” Daniel said as Nikki escorted Debra into the dining room. He jabbed a finger in Ryan’s direction. “Does this have to do with Ross’s body temperature? Why can’t you just admit that it’s some sort of anomaly? Maybe his body temperature was naturally low to begin with. Ross always was a pretty calm guy.”
“This experiment will prove whether it was a fluke or not,” Ryan said.
Kathleen invited Debra to sit down at the table in front of one of the phones. “Do these phones look familiar?”
“They’re the same kind we used to have at the station before our system went digital,” Debra said.
Tanya folded her arms across her chest. “What kind of experiment are we doing?”
“We’re recreating the crime.” Nikki picked up Debra’s witness statement from the case file.
“For the purpose of this experiment, Dad temporarily set up the phone system to make it appear as if we have two landlines and an intercom system. This system is strictly internal.” Ryan picked up the receiver on his phone and pressed the intercom button. The other phone rang, and the intercom button blinked. He took the seat at the opposite end of the table and placed the phone in front of him. “I’m playing the role of Ross. I’m in my office. This is my phone on my desk.” He pointed to the other phone resting at the other end of the table. “That is Debra’s phone located in the outer office.”
“Are we ready?” Nikki asked.
Ryan tapped a button on his cell phone. “Are you ready, Dad?”
Harrison’s voice erupted from the speaker. “I’m just about—No, Elmo, I put that there for a reason. You don’t need to put that away. It’s okay there. Put that down. It’s okay. I’ll be sure to put it away when I’m done. Good boy. Now just sit there and chill.” They heard a heavy sigh. “We’re ready when you are, Son.”
“Harrison is monitoring the behind-the-scenes special effects,” Kathleen said with a proud grin. “He’s so good with his hands.”
“And Elmo’s good with his snout.” Nikki referred to Debra’s witness statement. “At three o’clock, Wyatt Altman left Ross’s office and closed the door. He told Debra Gregory that Ross was on the phone with Devon Simpson, an executive producer with our Washington office. He did not want to be disturbed.”
Ryan picked up the receiver from his phone and pressed one of the buttons to open a line for the call. The light corresponding with the line lit up on Debra’s phone.
“I forgot who Wyatt said Ross was talking to, but that light was on when Wyatt came out after his meeting was over,” Debra said.
Nikki continued through Debra’s statement. “About twenty minutes to a half hour later, Ross had finished his phone call with Mr. Simpson and called you on the intercom to ask you for Ms. Marlo Kelly’s phone number with the New York office. You read off the number and he hung up and called Ms. Kelly.”
Debra watched as the light for the first line went dark. The intercom rang.
Across the table, Ryan sat with his fingers laced together and resting on top of his head. Daniel’s and Tanya’s eyes grew wide. The receiver for his phone remained off the hook.
“You should answer that, Debra,” Nikki said.
The retired assistant seemed afraid to pick up the receiver. As she placed it to her ear, she whispered, “Hello?”
“Hello, Debra, I can’t find Marlo Kelly’s phone number. Can you read it off for me?”
Debra jumped out of her seat at the sound of the voice of a man who had died decades ago. Kathleen took her in her arms. “It’s okay. We just needed to see how he did it.”
“Who did it?” Debra gasped. “Wyatt? Why?”
“We’re still working on why,” Nikki said. “But now we know how.”
“Call me stupid,” Tanya said, “But I don’t know how.”
“Are we done?” Harrison asked through the speaker on Ryan’s phone.
“We are, Dad. They need you to come up and explain it to them.” With a wave of his hands, Ryan said, “In a nutshell, it all has to do with the phone lines. Even though the phones are on the same system, each phone is connected to its own switch in the control box in the maintenance closet. Wyatt had left the receiver off the hook and the line open in Ross’s office to make it look like he was on the phone. Then, he went downstairs to the phone box and unplugged Ross’s phone.”
“He shut off Ross’s phone by unplugging it at the main switch,” Harrison said as he entered from the stairs leading to the basement. He placed a toolbox on the table. “If he knew which switch was connected to Ross’s phone, none of the other ones in the building would have been affected. Only Ross’s.”
“What about calling Debra on the intercom?” Tanya asked.
Harrison opened the toolbox and extracted a phone, identical to those on the table. “He plugged another phone into the switch for Ross’s phone. He took the receiver off the hook and put it back on while pressing the line buttons to make it look like Ross was making phone calls inside his office.”
“And Ross’s voice?” Debra asked with a choked voice.
Harrison pressed a button on his cell phone. Ross’s voice floated from the speakers. “We found some old editorials that Ross had done for the news. All you have to do is a bit of editing.”
“Which Wyatt knows because he cut his teeth in the audio department at WKPG,” Kathleen said.
“Nah! That doesn’t work.” With a shake of her head, Tanya gestured at Debra. “How could Wyatt be able to edit enough audio to respond to Debra in an actual conversation?”
“We’re talking about a couple of hours between when you claim Ross was killed and his body was discovered,” Daniel said. “Even if Wyatt was an expert in audio editing, could he have found enough recordings of Ross’s voice to splice together for a conversation that sounded natural?”
“Like when I came back from the bathroom and Suzanne was there,” Debra said. “If Wyatt was down in the maintenance room, how was he to know that I was going to call Ross on the intercom?”
“Isn’t that what you always did when Ross was working behind closed doors?” Kathleen asked.
“But Wyatt was down in the basement when Suzanne appeared unannounced and insisted on seeing Ross,” Debra said. “How could he have edited an audio recording for that conversation in advance?”
“You do have a point.” Slowly, Ryan shook his head as a slim grin crossed his lips. “Wyatt may not have needed a recording.”
“Wyatt’s not an impressionist,” Kathleen said.
“He wouldn’t have to be,” Ryan said. “Our brains tend to naturally fill in the blanks. If the majority of factors are in place, then generally most people won’t notice the minute piece that isn’t.”
“What did he just say?” Tanya asked Harrison.
“Talk to us like we’re six years old, Spaulding,” Daniel said.
“Why do so many people have such a hard time proofreading their own work?” Ryan asked. “Granted, not everyone, but some have more trouble than others. They know what they wanted to write. They know what words are supposed to be on the page. But they can�
��t see their own mistakes. It’s because their minds automatically correct the errors so that they can’t see them, even though they’re right in front of their eyes.”
“They see what they want to see,” Nikki said. “It’s the same principle behind how we can’t see our lover’s flaws. They’re there, but our minds correct those flaws so that we can’t see them.”
“Exactly.” Ryan snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Everything else was in place. Debra was sitting at her desk. She knew Ross was in his office. The intercom rang with the number indicating it was from Ross’s phone. She picked up the intercom and it was a man’s voice on the other end of the line.”
“She assumed that male voice belonged to Ross,” Daniel said.
Debra was doubtful. “But …”
“Of course, if Debra had picked up the phone and she’d heard a woman’s voice or a voice with a heavy accent, she would have noticed something was wrong,” Ryan said. “But I think enough factors were in place, that all Wyatt needed to do was make his voice low enough and speak in the same general style—”
“We’re not talking Shakespeare here,” Nikki said. “The conversations were short.”
“Even if it was not an exact match, she could have dismissed it without a second thought,” Ryan said, “because she had no reason to suspect it wasn’t Ross.”
“I guess I could have done that,” Debra said. “But what about when Suzanne came up and insisted on seeing Ross. I called him on the intercom. Are you saying Wyatt picked up down in the maintenance room?”
“Maybe Wyatt had sent Suzanne up,” Nikki said with a nod of her head. “You told us that she was insistent on seeing Dad. She wanted you to open the door, but you called him on the intercom instead. If you had given into her demand, the murder would have been discovered much earlier.”
“At that point, Wyatt had achieved his goal of getting a witness to state that Ross was alive after he had left the office,” Ryan said. “As time passed, he was probably getting anxious to have someone discover the murder.”
“Good theory, but you have no way to prove any of it,” Tanya said.
“Actually, we do.” Nikki slapped a report down on the table in front of them. “It took a lot of work on the part of our accounts payable department, but they found our phone bill for the month Dad was killed. The phone calls listed in Wyatt’s statement, about Dad being on a phone call with Mr. Simpson, that’s a long-distance phone call. Never happened. Debra said Dad called asking for Marlo Kelly’s number. She was in New York. No calls were made to these people from WKPG on the day Dad was killed.”
“Then Wyatt wasn’t telling the truth about Ross being on the phone with Mr. Simpson when the meeting broke up,” Debra said.
Nikki flipped through the pages of the phone report. “However, that morning, Dad did make a phone call to a number in Youngstown, Ohio.”
“Who’s in Youngstown, Ohio?” Daniel asked.
“The phone number now belongs to a bistro,” Nikki said. “Back then, it belonged to an automotive repair shop that was really a chop shop run by Walt Altman. He died in prison five years ago. He was Wyatt’s cousin.”
“Why would Ross be calling Wyatt’s cousin?” Daniel asked.
“Who ran a car theft operation?” Tanya asked.
“Were you aware that Suzanne Lipton owned a red BMW during that time period?” Nikki asked. “Weren’t you looking for a red Beemer?”
Daniel shook his head with a chuckle. “Yes. I know what you’re thinking, but Wyatt called us himself when he found out what type of car we were looking for. He and Suzanne had left the country club a good hour before Noah Harper was killed. I looked at Suzanne’s BMW myself. There wasn’t a scratch on it.”
“Oh, but there should have been,” Nikki said. “Suzanne had backed into Meredith Norris’s blue Mustang the month before. Suzanne’s rear bumper was smashed. That’s what Suzanne and Meredith had gotten into a fight about on that Friday night when Dad ordered Wyatt to take Suzanne home.”
“The party was at the Bedford Elk’s Country Club, which is in the same area where Noah was run down,” Kathleen said. “Suzanne was drunk. It would be like Wyatt to let her coerce him into letting her drive.”
Nikki said, “If Suzanne’s BMW didn’t have a mark on it when you looked at it, then that means she’d had body work on it after the hit and run.”
“And if Wyatt had a cousin who ran a chop shop in Youngstown, then he could have had it repaired under the radar outside the area of our dragnet,” Daniel said.
“Wyatt and Suzanne didn’t come into work that Monday,” Debra said. “They must have been in Youngstown waiting for the garage to finish doing the body work.”
“Getting rid of the evidence,” Ryan said.
“That’s why Ross called me.” Daniel cursed. “He didn’t want to confirm us going fishing.”
“I hate to put a damper on things,” Tanya said, “But even if everything we’re speculating about is true, we can’t prove any of it. I guarantee that BMW is long gone. You said the guy who did the body work died in prison. We have Debra on record saying that her father killed Ross. We have nothing.”
“We still have Ashleigh’s murder,” Nikki said.
“We’ve found no proof that Ashleigh was working on any story,” Tanya said. “Her laptop is still missing. You say Becca Cambridge got a threatening phone call from a man who mentioned Ashleigh. That may or may not have anything to do with Ashleigh’s murder. He may just be a crackpot.”
“We’re still waiting for the lab to come up with a DNA profile on the skin found under her fingernails,” Ryan said.
“Even if Ashleigh was working on a story about Ross’s murder, she thought it was Sam who’d killed Ross,” Debra said.
“But does Wyatt know that?” Nikki asked.
Chapter Fifteen
“Well, I have to say, when I agreed to take over managing WKPG-TV, I did it with no intention of changing anything for the time being,” Nikki said to the men and women sitting around the conference table.
Elmo broke the rare moments of silence with snores and snorts from where he was taking his late-afternoon nap in a dog bed in the corner. In the few days since his arrival, every room on each floor had been outfitted with a dog bed. Many employees and crew members had brought in dog biscuit jars with goodies to entice Elmo to visit them.
Nikki felt strange sitting at the head of the table in the station’s executive conference room. In Nevada and every station where she had worked during her career, she would have never ranked being in the managers meeting. She was one of the worker bees—out in the field sniffing out stories. That was the way she liked it. Playing political games with network executives never turned her on.
Now, she was sitting at the head of the conference table with everyone’s attention on her. Her assistant, Casey sat directly behind her. The other ten chairs were filled with managers and the executive producers of the local programs. Their administrative assistants sat along the wall behind their bosses.
This was a high-level meeting—as high level as you can get when you are a regional affiliate of a national station. As the station’s biggest stars, Meredith Norris and Suzanne Lipton also ranked an invitation.
His forehead black and blue from his encounter with Kathleen, Wyatt Altman sat at the other end of the table. As general manager, he was second in command. It was a position he probably never would have acquired if it had not been for Ross Bryant’s death—murder—a murder that he had committed.
Nikki had to tear her eyes from Wyatt to focus on something else.
Looking bewildered about why she had been invited, Becca Cambridge sat in a chair behind Wyatt.
“Circumstances have dictated that adjustments be made.” Nikki looked at the faces around the room. “We can’t not have an anchor for the evening news. We’d love it if Meredith Norri
s was able to fill that slot, but she’s turned us down.”
Meredith smiled as her colleagues encouraged her to change her mind. “You need someone younger and with more energy to chase the story.” She cast an encouraging smile in Becca’s direction.
“After some deep thought, I have decided that since we do need to make some changes, then we might as well change things up here at WKPG-TV,” Nikki said. “It’s time for us to do like the big dogs—have anchors who not only know how to work in the field, but who do work in the field. Becca Cambridge’s breaking news story about Bob Wheeler and the board of education has been getting national attention. We need more stories like that.”
Becca Cambridge’s cheeks turned bright pink as the managers around the table applauded her.
Sitting near Wyatt, Suzanne Lipton narrowed her eyes to slits. Under her husband’s glare, she clapped one pat at a time.
“That’s why we are offering the anchor slot for the evening news to Becca Cambridge,” Nikki said.
Becca let out a shriek not unlike that of a beauty pageant contestant announced as the winner of the crown. The department managers stepped up their applause while shouting words of encouragement. Wyatt stood from his seat and offered his hand to Becca.
Suzanne bolted from the room. She left the door open during her abrupt departure. Nikki watched her disappear down the hallway.
“She honestly believed that you were going to invite her back to the evening news,” Meredith whispered to her.
“To believe that is delusional,” Nikki said.
“Exactly,” Meredith said. “We want to take WKPG forward into the future. That means fresh blood. You’re making an excellent decision with Becca.” She gave her a quick hug. “I hope you have a great weekend.” With a cheerful farewell to those who were still in the conference room, she hurried out to meet her family for a birthday party.
The other managers were close behind. It was closing in on five o’clock. The office staff throughout the station was making a mass exodus. Within minutes, the only ones left would be the on-air journalists and crew for the news broadcasts in the studio on the ground floor.