Into the Night

by Herb Scribner

"It is what it is," he says.

  That doesn't really give me confidence that this is going to be fine, but it's the best I can do for now. You have to take the advantages where they come. Sometimes they come from a police officer doing you a favor. I've played that game way too many times in the past to start worrying about it now.

  I shut the door behind me once I'm inside another hallway that leads to a staircase. So I hurry down the stairs into a pit of darkness. As I travel downward, I'm worried that this is all a setup, and that I'm going to find something disturbing down here in the darkness. What if he didn't want me to see the body? What if he didn't want anyone to help me? What if this is all a clever rouse to prank me? It wouldn't be the first time a police officer has duped me.

  There's a door at the bottom of the staircase. The front face of it glows a brilliant auburn yellow. I touch the handle and attempt to move it, assuming it'll be locked. But it's not. The door budges open. The hinges scream from rust as the door fully opens, revealing a scene that is straight out of the movies. A dead body lays on top of a silver slab of metal, covered by a white sheet. A man wearing a white doctor's coat writes busily on paper locked to a clipboard. He turns his head up when I open the door and offers a slight smile at me.

  "You must be Ms. Gardner?"

  "Yes?" How does he know that I was coming?

  "Detective Bailey said you'd be on your way today. I've been expecting you. Come on in."

  I accept his invitation and enter the room fully, closing the door behind me. It's much colder in here. The chill from the freezer breaths around me. The fluorescent lights buzz above me like the sound of a bee. The rectangular lights cast the entire room a white-blue glow.

  It doesn't matter what morgue you go to. They all pretty much look the same.

  "I would show you the body, but it's evidence, so Bailey said that was off limits. But what I can do is tell you what we found during the autopsy."

  "I assume you found hand marks around her throat?"

  "That and then some," he says, setting his clipboard down on the spare table where there is no dead body. My eyes fleetingly glance back at the body covered by the sheet, worrying that the body is going to popup and announce itself like the walking dead.

  He leans against the free table, somewhat blocking my view of the other body.

  "When the body came into the morgue, the first thing we saw was that there were choke marks around the through. Deep purples circles, all connected to choke marks. We took the prints, but it was no use. Whoever did this use some sort of glove that we've never seen before. Technology, am I right? We're still in the process of identifying the gloves brand and make. Hopefully that will lead us to who did this."

  "Well, that doesn't sound too bad."

  "It wouldn't have been too bad, if that was the only thing we found."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We thought it was just choke marks. But one of my colleagues discovered that the choke marks weren't as rough as they should have been if that was the only cause of death. We knew she had been choked inside the national pool, so we figured maybe this a case of drowning. So we checked in on that. But the amount of water still in her throat, her lungs, her body, wasn't consistent with normal drown victims."

  So she wasn't choked to death, nor was she drowned in the pool. Both of those reports running rampant through the media were in accurate. She had died by some other way. And yet the police hadn't said anything about that yet. They were still under the impression that she had choked or died -- that was the story they had crafted and the one they still agreed with.

  But if that wasn't the truth, then how did she really die?

  "We did a quick check on her stomach, her blood, her urine, all of that gross stuff. And what do you know? She died by poison."

  "Sorry, what?"

  "Someone poisoned her, well before she was killed in the national pool. Well, let me correct myself. She was given some sort of pill or medicine that poisoned her body. She wouldn't have stood a chance of making it. Somehow in between her being poisoned, she was brought to the national mall, and that's where she was choked to death and drowned all at once. But she definitely died well before all of that."

  "There's no way that's possible," I say. "The stories are all saying she died in the pool. She was screaming. I was there that night and heard her."

  "She might have been screaming, she might have been in a struggle, but she died from poison. Its name is unfamiliar to me. But it's chemically consistent with a lot of other factors associated with poison."

  "How do you have this much information so soon? I thought it takes months for this sort of stuff."

  "When you're dealing with the feds and the national parks, you bet your ass you can get stuff figured out a lot quicker."

  He's not wrong. It's not secret that the location and circumstance surrounding the murder clearly led to more access to necessary tools to figure out what happened. That made a lot of sense.

  But what didn't make sense was the information he was handing me. Kayleigh had died from a poisoning. She had been killed by a chemical or a pill or something of the sort. Someone had drugged her and killed her. The woman in the pool didn't drown her. She didn't choke Kayleigh to death. Someone else had killed her.

  Could it be a setup? Had the woman who choked her in the pool poisoned her and then brought her to the pool for a reason? Did she want to be noticed?

  That was clear. She left a body outside two major national monuments. She wanted the attention.

  It just wasn't clear why.

  The doctor explains to me a little bit more about when he expects to get results of the autopsy and when they can start to tie up loose ends. I guess I'll have to wait those out/ I offer him my card so he can contact me when it's time to figure all of that out.

  When I'm back upstairs, Bailey is waiting for me. He's standing outside of his office with his arms crossed, a scowl sketched across his features. He looks a lot less nice than the version of him I saw only a few short minutes ago.

  "You good?"

  "Yeah, I'm alright." I say. "I just can't believe any of this."

  "Can't believe any of what?"

  "She wasn't joked," I explain. "She was poisoned."

  "Oh, that. Yeah, it's pretty insane. We're being quiet about it. And I hope, as a favor to you, that you're quiet too."

  "Why aren't you telling more people about this?"

  "We're still figuring out what the name of the drug was, and how it was injected. We don't want anyone to know about that until we know the full picture."

  "Controlling the narrative."

  "Being responsible," he corrects me. "We don't want this to get out hand."

  That makes sense, and I can't really fault him for it. So I agree to keep the news quiet. I'll break the story eventually once they give me permission. Or I'll tell our crime and courts reporters about it and they can do a follow. But for now, I agree. They gave me access, and I gave them my word.

  Later, I step out of the police department into the cool, early-morning air. The questions about who poisoned Kayleigh, and what they used to do it, still circle my mind. I still don't even know who killed her, and what it all means in regards to the senate hearing.

  But I'll have to wait. My editor is waiting for me. Time to talk over where my story is going next.

  And I definitely have an entirely new direction.

  The office is as busy as I expect it to be. The main bullpen of reporters, editors, digital journalists, print specialists -- everything -- is alive and well. Journalists working on stories are busy chatting away with their sources. Others are typing away like their fingers are glued to the keys. A few reporters walk down the stretch of desks toward their destinations.

  Allan Parker nods at me as he slides by the desks towards the door. Ashley Hyde does the same, offering me a glowing smile and a simple hello. I don't know everyone who works here in the office. One of the beauties of working as a freelancer at first and n
ever getting my own desk. I work from home most of the time. And that definitely has its benefits.

  I stroll down the hallway of desks with an eye on the faraway office of my editor. Sandra Kim. She's sitting at her desk, clicking away her screen. Her features show a harsh grimace. I wonder if she's reading someone's article and is upset with the direction it took. Or if she's reading some negative news about the future of the journalism industry. There are a lot of possibilities.

  When she picks her head up and sees me, she unglues her eyes from the screen and looks through the glass door at me. She waves at me and then invites me inside. I grab the door handle and slide into the room, closing the door behind me and sitting down at a chair across from her. Another empty chairs sits next to me.

  Sandra clicks once final time and then leans back in her chair. Her harsh grimace never leaves her face. She's holding it there, unhappy with what's going on. I'm just not sure what's bugging her so much.

  "Well, I'm glad to finally see you," she says. "It's been awhile since you stopped by the office."

  "Yeah, sorry. I've just been out doing all of this reporting for these stories. And plus with all the shutdown stuff there hasn't been a lot of things to cover. Just working on a few sources."

  "Yeah, I'm really interested to see what you're planning to do next."

  "Next?"

  "Well, we have this shutdown and all these negotiations going on about how they're going to open up if they can strike a deal. They're still figuring out all of these regulations against tech companies. You've been covering a lot of the daily stuff, but I'm really just wondering what you're thinking for the long-term. You were hired to do a long-form piece about New Surge and the ongoing hearings. And it looks like the shutdown has thwarted it. So I wanted to get your ideas about where to take the story."

  I don't want to tell her what I really have in mind for the story. She won't like it. Like she said, she wants me to tell her what I plan to do with the story now that the shutdown is nearing the end of its run. She wants me to plan out my next long-form piece.

  But that's the farthest thing from my mind right now. I care more about what's going on with Kayleigh's death. I care more about how a senator potentially killed her.

  Isn't that just a little off? I'm not even interested in the story I'm covering anymore. I'm more interested in an entirely different topic.

  I open my mouth to tell her all of this, to let her know that I really just care about the murder and the weird happenstance with it. I mean, the cameras not catching anything. The body being poisoned before she was choked inside the national pool. That's more than your average story.

  But I shut my mouth and keep all my conspiracy theories to myself. I would need a source to go on the record to talk about all of that.

  Plus, if I'm going to pursue more information about the story, then I don't need to tell Sandra about it. She just cares about what's going on now with this tech story.

  Sadly, I don't really have a good answer for her.

  "I really don't know. I've just been so distracted with everything going on. I mean, being there for the murder the other night just took all the energy out of me. I'm just so confused about what I'm supposed to do with all of that and if they're going to want to interview me. It's just a mess."

  "Yeah, it seems like a headache," she says, spinning her chair around. She does this when she wants to think through some ideas. When she finishes spinning, she sets her glance on me and offers a half-smile.

  "I'm just thinking through everything that you've been working on, and with all the shutdown stuff, maybe it's best to put our story on hold."

  Her words catch me off guard. I try to catch my breath, hut I can't. What does she mean hold the story? Like, just, stop reporting on it? Hold off until after the shutdown? Why does she want me to stop reporting so suddenly?

  "Wait, what?"

  "Look, we have this shutdown going on. And when it's finally open again, there will be new tech regulations that will impact New Surge, Up Sync, all of those companies. So if that's true, we're going to have to wait to see new information, which means your story could radically change. So I would say just keep an eye out for what's going on, and if anything interesting happens, we'll work on it. Keep an eye on the daily stuff. But maybe let's hold off on the longfkrm story for now."

  Just like that, my idea for a story has crumbled. She no longer wants me to write this long-form piece about the tech industry and where it's headed, or how federal regulation will impact all future tech organizations. She's cut it just like that.

  I can't exactly be mad at her for cutting the story, either. It makes total sense. The entire game is about to change. The regulations, the rules, the pitfalls, and the promises -- all of that is about to change, so it wouldn't make sense to write about something that is so close to changing.

  And, on a personal level, my brain doesn't want to focus on the regulations and problems from the tech industry. I want something more. I want to follow this new thread about the killer.

  "So, I hope you know, that we couldn't publish your story yesterday about the connection between the victim, Kayleigh? And the New Surge hearing. Ethics, you know?"

  "Oh, no one told me."

  "We had someone else write it up," Sandra says. "Because you're a witness to all of that and you're involved in the negotiation, we couldn't let you report on it. Objectivity is key, you know?"

  "Of course."

  "But, here's the thing -- is there anything you've seen or heard that you want to tip us off on? I'm not saying you have to reveal anything you've learned, but if we can get ahead of this story it'll be a good PR move for us, you know? Like, just if we can report that you're innocent, then we can knock some other journalists off of our back."

  "Well, I'm not a suspect," I say. "The police told me that on the first night. He said I wasn't a suspect and they have no reason to believe that I killed anyone. So, yeah, I'm not a suspect."

  "That's great news! Okay. We'll have one of our crime reporters follow that."

  She taps away at the screen and clicks away a few seconds later. I assume she's telling someone about what's going on, and that's totally fine. She's my boss, this place is employing me to write for them, so I have to offer something with all of the information I have.

  "Do you have any theories?"

  "Theories?"

  "About who killed her? I mean, you saw it happen. Could you describe what you saw? We could probably put together a story on that -- what you saw, what you remember. See if we can get the statement you signed to the police to build out the story."

  "Oh, well, I don't really remember much. Just a shadow of a tall figure. The person, and I really think it's a woman, just dipped out into the night. Ran away and just left me and the dead body there."

  "Are you sick of it?"

  "Sick of what?"

  "All the murder. I swear, wherever you go there is just murder and people following you."

  "Yeah, you get used to it, I guess."

  "Do you think the killer is targeting you?"

  "Sorry?"

  "Well, it's just weird, you know? You're on a run through the Lincoln memorial and then someone is killed right there before your eyes. Then they disappear. And it just so happens the person they killed is also deeply connected to an article you're working on? Seems a little strange."

  "Yeah, and if there's one thing I learned, there's no such thing as coincidence."

  "That's why I love having you on the staff. You're not one to ignore what you see."

  "You should never distrust what you see."

  We talk about the ethics of the story for a little longer before her phone rings, which is a clear sign for me to leave the room. I wish her well and tell her I'll have more daily stories on the shutdown if anything comes of it. She waves me away because she's busy talking to people on the phone.

  I step out of the office and walk back through the bullpen. No one says anything to me. Some people gla
nce up and nod, but no one utters a single word to me. I guess they're all just busy with their respective days.

  When I step outside again, the chilly cold envelops me and carves right down into my bones. I hold up on the side walk, waiting for my Uber to arrive and bring me back home. I have no reason to do anything else today. I thought the office visit would go longer.

  My pillow buzzes in my pocket. I want to leave it alone, but it continues to buzz, all the signs of a phone call. I pull it out and see that a number I don't recognize is calling me. I think about letting it go to voicemail. But there have been so many unanswered calls and weird stories this week that I can't just let it die. I need to see who is trying to call me.

  "Hello?"

  "Is this Annette Gardner?"

  "Yes. Who is this?"

  "My name is Marty. You called me?"

  I almost drop my phone in shock to hear his voice on the other end of the phone. Just like that he called me up. Just like that he has returned my call. I needed to talk to him all day about this story, so it's good that I finally have the opportunity.

  "Marty, hey. Thanks for calling me back. My former editor Jon said I should talk to you."

  "What are you working on?"

  Wow. Right to the point. He's not even trying to hide his interest in whatever reporting I'm doing. I know he used to be an editor of the Scribe, so it's clear that the editing bug never leaves you.

  "New Surge. Up Sync. All of these tech companies and regulation. It's supposed to be a long-form story, you know? But they just told me to take a break from it for a little bit since there's all the shutdown stuff going on."

  The silence on the other end of the line surprises me. I don't remember the last time I've received so little silence from an editor about a story. Is he thinking about my story? Is he trying to come up with a unique angle? Or is he just shocked and surprised by what I'm reporting?

  "Can you meet up today?"

  The question strikes me off guard. A nervous feeling buzzes in my stomach. I don't really want to meet up with him. But then again, he might have answers for me when it comes to reporting on this story. He might have some extra knowledge that I can use.