The Last Scoop

by R. G. Belsky

  I told the definitive story on the Becky Bluso murder, too. About the troubled young man named Dale Blanchard who had killed her in a fit of rage. About how Blanchard had heroically saved another man’s life in Iraq months later. And about Blanchard’s deathbed confession of the murder to that same man.

  Believe it or not, Russell Danziger thanked me later for telling the secret he had held onto for so long. He also thanked me for everything I had done for Terri Hartwell. And Danziger even said I should reach out to him if I ever needed his help on anything. I think Russell Danziger actually liked me. Go figure.

  But soon I began ceding the story over to the rest of the news team to do the reporting and broadcasts.

  I had plenty of other things to do. Brett and Dani were back to screaming at each other off camera about their sex lives; Jack Faron kept telling me to be a news director again and stop playing reporter on the big stories; and everyone was uptight about the big ratings sweeps week coming up for our newscasts.

  In other words, everything was back to normal.

  There was still one loose end though.

  Who killed Marty Barlow?

  Morelli had insisted he didn’t do it, and the authorities believed him. Parkman, who admitted to everything else, also said he knew nothing about it. So there was no obvious connection to either the corruption scandal or The Wanderer killings. In the end, the murder of Barlow seemed to be what it always appeared to be for police at the beginning. A senseless, random crime in New York City. Marty had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it cost him his life. As everyone always said, a lot of the murders in this city never make any sense. And, after a while, we stopped caring.

  But I still cared.

  I still wanted some answers about Marty.

  And, so, one day—just for the hell of it—I went back to the eight buildings he had gone to investigate that started all of this.

  Things were sure different at all the locations now. The elevator had been fixed at the Lower East Side, and the building’s new owner was dealing with many of the other tenant problems that had been neglected for so long, people there told me. The pizza parlor was still in business, but under new management—and the long lines of double-parked cars were nowhere to be seen. The gambling operation and other illegal activities were gone from the other spots that I visited—replaced by hair salons, coffee shops, and other familiar-looking stores. The last place I went back to was the kinky sex dungeon on East 23rd Street. It was now a childcare center.

  This was all nice, but I knew the mob influence in New York City was not gone. It had simply moved to other locations because of what I’d done. That was confirmed when I asked someone at the day care center if they knew the business that used to be run out of their building. They told me they did, and they’d heard the woman there then—Rebecca Crawley—had moved her operation to a warehouse building on East 36th Street, north of Herald Square.

  I decided to go there and visit Rebecca Crawley again. Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. But this was the story Marty had started working on before he died, even before The Wanderer. Maybe there was something there that could give me some answers about his death.

  So that’s exactly what I did.

  And when I got to Rebecca Crawley’s place, I found out what I’d been missing all along.

  Michelle Wincott was there.

  Marty’s granddaughter.

  I almost didn’t recognize Michelle at first. She was wearing a wig, lots of makeup, and dressed in leather from head to toe. She was as shocked to see me as I was to see her in that place.

  “You work here?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What about being an actress?”

  “I lied. I couldn’t make a living doing that. I didn’t want to admit that to anyone. Certainly not my father.”

  Suddenly, it all made sense. Marty had gone back to the sex dungeon that last night looking for more information on the corruption story. He’d accidentally run into his granddaughter, just as I did. And then something had happened between them. Something totally senseless. Like so many murders turn out to be.

  “He just started laughing,” Michelle Wincott would say later in her confession, sobbing as she did so. “Laughing about what my father would say if he knew I was working as a hooker. All I ever wanted was for my father to love me. Now I knew that could never happen if he found out the truth. Afterward, I waited outside the house for my grandfather to come home. I was going to beg him not to say anything, to keep this a secret. But when he got there … I don’t know what happened. I guess I went crazy for a few seconds. I picked up a heavy tree branch that had fallen onto the street and I hit him over the head with it. I didn’t want him to die. I loved him. I just didn’t want my father to know. I didn’t want to disappoint him again.”

  No, it wasn’t me who turned Michelle Wincott into the police. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to ruin her life. I knew Marty had loved her, and she loved him, too. But she insisted on confessing to the authorities. She’d been living with the guilt and said she needed to try to make things right. Sort of like Dale Blanchard needed to do a long time ago.

  I was never exactly sure why Marty went back to the BDSM dungeon that last night after he’d seemingly stopped working on the corruption story to focus on the hunt for The Wanderer. But Marty had gone to that community board meeting earlier in the day where the topic of building corruption had come up. I think he probably got curious about it again and went back to check out those buildings where he’d been before. That was Marty. He could never stop working on a story until it was finished. This time it cost him his life.

  One day, not long afterward, I went to the Sunrise Coffee Shop on Madison Avenue, Marty’s favorite place in the city. It was the spot where I’d promised to meet up with him when I could find time. Except I never did.

  I sat now in a booth by the window where I knew Marty used to like to sit and people watch on the street outside. I ordered two cups of coffee. One of them I pushed to the other side of the table, the spot Marty would have sat in if he were with me. It was a silly ritual, I knew that. But somehow it made me feel better.

  Marty used to say no story ever works out exactly the way you expect. “You pull on a thread at the beginning, and you see where it takes you,” he told me once back when I was a young reporter at that newspaper in New Jersey. “Sometimes it takes you places you don’t want to go,” Marty said. “But that’s what being a journalist is all about. Following the facts, no matter what. And then you report the story, you report the facts, whatever they turn out to be. That’s the job of a journalist.”

  I drank my coffee and thought about everything that had happened since that last meeting in the Channel 10 offices when Marty accused me of only being interested in “fake news” these days instead of being a real journalist. He’d given me a chance that day to work on a real news story again with him. I didn’t take it. Not then. But, in the end, I’d done my job as a journalist. The kind of a journalist that Marty had taught me to be.

  I like to think that Marty would have been proud of me.

  CHAPTER 62

  I DEAL IN lies for a living. Big lies. Little lies. My job at Channel 10 News is to catch people in their lies and reveal these lies to the world.

  I have wrapped myself in the cloak of truth for a long time. As a journalist and as a person. Proclaiming loudly that I believe in the truth. I tell the truth at all times. I expose anyone who doesn’t tell the truth.

  But everyone lies.

  Including me.

  The thing about lying is it gets easier the more you do it. And a lie—any lie, no matter how small it starts out—becomes a bigger and bigger one the more a person repeats the lie. Eventually, before we even realize it, we find ourselves caught up in an endless cycle of dishonesty and discretion.

  I’ve been living a lie for most of my adult life.

  A big lie.

  It was fin
ally time for me to tell the truth.

  I drove to Linda Nesbitt’s house in Westchester, Virginia, and knocked on the front door. I hadn’t told her I was coming, but she answered on the first knock. I had a feeling she had been waiting for me to show up again. I didn’t want to waste any time with what I had to say to her; I’d wasted too much time already. I put the lead right in the first paragraph as any good newswoman would.

  “I’m not just a reporter,” I blurted out to her. “I’m your biological mother. I gave you up for adoption when you were born.”

  “I know,” she said.

  I stared at her.

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Hey, my mother is a hotshot investigative reporter. I guess I inherited some of those genes. Maybe I could be a reporter, too, huh?”

  “Why didn’t you say anything before this?”

  “I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

  Then she hugged me.

  “Hello, Mom, glad I finally met you,” she whispered into my ear. I hugged her back as tightly as I could.

  And I cried.

  I cried all those tears I’d been holding back for so long.

  Now there was just one more thing I needed to do.

  I told her all about it—and she agreed.

  At 6 p.m., the pulsating theme music signaled the beginning of another Channel 10 newscast. Brett and Dani at the anchor desk went through the top headlines of the day. “But first, we have a special report from our news director, Clare Carlson,” Brett said. And then I was on screen.

  “I won a Pulitzer Prize as a newspaper reporter for my coverage of the Lucy Devlin disappearance story,” I told the viewers. “And then here at Channel 10, I reported two years ago on what authorities said was the discovery of Lucy’s body and the confirmation of her death.

  “But I have never told you the whole truth about me and about Lucy Devlin.

  “That’s what I’m going to do tonight.

  “Twenty-eight years ago, I gave birth to a baby girl …”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like my earlier Clare Carlson books, The Last Scoop is a “ripped from the headlines” mystery inspired by sensational crime stories that I covered as a journalist.

  I’ve spent a lot of years working in the New York City media. I was metropolitan editor of the New York Post; managing editor of the New York Daily News; news editor of Star magazine; and a managing editor at NBC News. I wound up covering most of the big news stories of recent years: crimes like Son of Sam, O.J., Etan Patz, Casey Anthony, and Jodi Arias; political sex scandals like Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, John Edwards, and, of course, Donald Trump; and celebrity deaths like John Lennon, Michael Jackson, and even Elvis.

  No way some of this real-life news isn’t going to find its way into my fiction!

  And so when people ask me where I get the ideas for writing crime novels, I tell them, “Hey, I just go to work in the newsroom every day.”

  In The Last Scoop, I drew upon two of the most popular types of tabloid stories I covered—serial killers and unsolved cold cases.

  The serial killer in the book—the man I call The Wanderer—comes in part from the Son of Sam case, which happened when I was a young journalist. I still remember the day in our newsroom at the Post back in 1977 when news broke that police had linked a series of unsolved murders to one killer—the man later known as Son of Sam. It would become the most sensational crime story in New York City history.

  But I also have always wondered what would have happened if the police hadn’t connected those murders so quickly. Would Son of Sam have continued to murder people without anyone realizing there was a serial killer out there? And would there have come a time when he went public himself because he wanted media attention for his deadly work?

  Those were the kind of questions I tried to deal with when I created The Wanderer for The Last Scoop.

  The first murder in the book, Becky Bluso in Indiana, is also based on memories of a notorious murder case from my youth. The shocking murder of a teenage girl in her home that never made sense and never was solved. In real life, police will probably never get the answers to the crime after so many years. But that’s the great thing about writing mystery novels. You get to make up your own answers as I did with Becky Bluso.

  And I draw on my journalistic expertise to write about two other tabloid staples here, too: government corruption and the mob. Especially the mob stuff. I’ve seen so many sensational mob stories—from Crazy Joe Gallo to John Gotti and all the rest. You can’t make up stuff any wilder than some of those real-life mob stories I’ve covered working in New York City.

  But the biggest “ripped from the headlines” element I wanted to convey to you in this book is about the people who work in big-city newsrooms.

  People like Clare.

  And to show you the adrenalin, the insanity, and the pressure these people have to deal with every day on their jobs.

  People always ask me if Clare is based on any journalist I worked with in a newsroom. The answer is yes, she is. Plenty of them. Believe me, I’ve known a lot of Clare Carlsons in my life.

  I suppose there’s a lot of me in Clare Carlson, too.

  Especially the part about how seriously she takes the job of being a journalist and the responsibility that goes with that. She looks upon it as a noble calling, like being a priest or a doctor. And I love the quote from Humphrey Bogart’s old movie Deadline USA that she uses about being a reporter: “It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.”

  Yep, that’s the way Clare Carlson feels about going to work every day in a newsroom.

  Me, too.