The Ways of the Dead Read online

  He ignored the rest of the room, glaring at Melissa. “But what if that narrative this time is inconveniently wrong? What if our first idea wasn’t the right idea? What if the freight train is rolling down the wrong track?”

  “Don’t sit here and patronize me, either one—”

  Eddie unfolded one of his arms and waved it up and down briefly, a terse cease-and-desist motion.

  “Okay,” he said, and all eyes moved to him. “Interesting arguments all the way around. It’s good reporting work, Sullivan. Melissa and R.J. both raise considerations worth thinking about. The good news, for us, is—”

  “He’s a drunk with an ax to grind.”

  Melissa said it softly, looking at Edward. “No, Eddie. Please, no. We cannot trust him on this. You want somebody else to verify and take—”

  “I said I heard you.” Eddie’s tone was ice, cutting her off. He turned to the rest of the room.

  “As I said, the good news is that Sullivan has put us way out front on this. We don’t have to do anything right away. It is even possible that Miss Pittman’s sister, Sullivan’s source, might take this information to the police herself. If that happens, and they move on it, then we can report on police activity in an ongoing investigation, and not go out on a limb and report our own findings about a public figure’s indiscretions. That would have us following an investigation, not creating one. A lesser story, certainly. But it has the merit, as Melissa points out, of us not being perceived as picking on the family of a murder victim.”

  He paused. Sully cut in.

  “Not to keep moving the goalposts, Eddie, but I would add to R.J.’s thought that we seem to be forgetting our original line of investigation. It was not just Noel Pittman’s death. It was also the deaths of Lana Escobar and, now we know, of Rebekah Bolin and the missing and likely dead Michelle Williams. All this within a three- to four-block radius. Is the Reese murder an outlier or part of some bizarre thread? That’s the story line I was working.”

  Eddie nodded, still skeptical, but bending a little now.

  “And it may be the one we publish. Now. On another point. Have you gotten anything—anything at all—that suggests a link between Judge Reese and the three young men in the store—the ones charged with killing his daughter? Would they want to, in some way, retaliate against him?”

  “No, I haven’t been through his case history, but every reporter in town, and I’m sure law enforcement, has been. Nobody’s made a match. It appears random.”

  “Okay. Maybe they’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe it’s a tie between Pittman and those young men, and she’s the link back to the judge. I don’t know. Just look at that.”

  Eddie took two steps forward. “Other than that, dig through everything you can get your hands on about Pittman’s personal history. Do it with an eye toward Reese. We want to document what happened to her, but we absolutely must know how Reese was involved. I don’t see how we can publish a story about her disappearance without mentioning the affair prominently. If it turns out that it’s all too muddy, just a big mess of glop that we can’t put in context, then the answer may be not to publish anything at all. We hold on to lots of secrets about Washington. This may turn out to be another one of them.”

  He looked at Melissa, pointedly. She had decided to bide her time, Sully saw; she was sitting back for now.

  “But whatever else you find, I want you to go to Reese’s office when you’re finished reporting and confront him with this. We want that interview on the record. We owe him a fair standard of publication and a regard for his privacy. We don’t owe him a free ride.”

  Someone opened the door, and Melissa half spun in her chair, back to her desk. The meeting began to break up. Sully was about to lean over and say something to R.J. when Eddie stopped in front of him.

  “Sullivan, the suspension. The Judge Foy matter. Reese doesn’t like you, and if what he said to us in a sworn deposition was true I don’t blame him. I also can’t imagine, one way or another, that you hold him dear.”

  “You believed him, you didn’t believe me, Eddie. He lied, in my humble opinion.”

  “Fair enough. So. I’m not going to pull you off this. You’ve done all the work. But remember that every bit of this reporting has to be above reproach. The interview must be recorded. I would imagine he’ll record it himself. Keep in mind that he’s going to release anything on that recording about you that might not be flattering. So keep your temper. Watch your language. Remember that anything you say might turn up on the evening news, excerpted by other news organizations who would be delighted to have us showing some sort of bias, some sort of personal vendetta. Agreed?”

  Sully nodded. “Yeah. Agreed.”

  “When do you think you’ll go talk to him?”

  “Not for a day or two. I want to hit the neighborhood with his picture. Go to Halo, see if anybody recognizes him from the VIP room or whatever they call it out there, just to check. Go back through Noel’s things. See if I can find a note from him, a picture, anything that would lock that relationship down or spell out more clearly what it was. All the due diligence. Then—then I’d go see him.”

  “Good,” Eddie said, patting him on the arm, hard. “But, Sully? If you’re wrong on this? On a fraction, on a day, a date, an hour, on a decimal? If I get one more report of bourbon at your desk? Or of you drinking on assignment? I’ll fire your ass all the way back to Bumfuck, Louisiana.”

  thirty-two

  On April third, Noel had breakfast at the Hunger Stopper for $4.37 (she’d noted a two-dollar cash tip) and went to work at Satin and Lace, parking at Union Station’s garage for six hours, punching out at 5:19 p.m. She bought groceries at the neighborhood Giant, apparently on the way home, the $38.15 receipt time-stamped at 6:43.

  She had been frugal, and she had to be. The lingerie store was paying her about nine dollars per hour, and Halo was two hundred dollars per night plus tips, but she was paying her way through school, paying for her own place, her own car, the works.

  Sully and Lorena had been back at the files, building the chronology for hours. The evening was getting on, the delivery pizza demolished, nothing left but bits of crust on the cardboard. Lorena was still in her work outfit, the two of them plowing through datebooks, receipts, everything Noel had left behind. Lorena had run out to a copy shop, and now there was a blown-up street map of the city leaning against the couch. The map’s center, like a bull’s-eye target, was Noel’s apartment on Princeton Place. There were red, blue, yellow, and green pins stuck into the map, with tiny bits of paper flagged to each one, tagging her movements based on receipts that had a time/date stamp. Blue was for the first week of April, yellow the second, green the third, and red for the last week, up until the twenty-fifth, when she disappeared.

  “I went by Satin and Lace right after you left this morning,” Lorena said.

  “I thought you were going into work.”

  “I called in. I wanted to work on this. You’re the first person who’s shown any interest.”

  “Okay. What’d they say?”

  “I walked in and talked to the girl on the floor, got fifteen seconds into saying something about Noel turning up dead and she used to work there and this girl cuts me off. Said she started six months ago and didn’t know anything. So I asked for the manager. She says, ‘What for?’ You know, with some lip to it. I said, ‘To ask about my sister.’ She goes in the back, comes back out. Says the manager’ll be right with me. Ten minutes later, this redhead with her hair in a bun comes out, said she’s called corporate and says she can’t say anything. I said, ‘This is my sister I’m talking about.’ She puts her hand on mine—bitch put her hand on me—and says, in this whisper, personnel laws, privacy, she was sure I’d understand. I said I sure as fuck did not understand that somebody murdered Noel, her employee, and all she could say was not a fucking thing.”

  “I don’t
think that—”

  “She called security.”

  “Ah.”

  “I was asked to leave.”

  “You can apply for your press card now.”

  “I went two steps outside the door and called Detective Jensen, left a message that Satin and Lace had information about Noel’s disappearance and they were concealing it. Real loud. They were standing there staring at me, I was standing there staring at them. Three women in heels, looking like we were ready to take it outside.”

  “So what did Jensen do?”

  “Called me back fifteen minutes later and asked if I was alright.”

  “Were you?”

  “I was sitting in my car in the parking garage shaking.”

  He looked at her, staring off into space, her face tight, clenched.

  “Then I was going to go out to Halo,” she said. “Playing Nancy Drew. Like somebody’s going to tell me something. They’ll see I’m her sister, tell me everything.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But they’re more likely to be more nervous around you for all the same reasons. Why don’t you let me head out to Halo, see how it goes.”

  “You think they’re going to talk to you?” Yooouuuu. The sarcasm.

  “I have been known to be persuasive.”

  She hunched her shoulders, as close as he was going to get to an agreement.

  “Well,” he said. “Sometimes I’m persuasive. I got Regina Blocker, owner of the dance studio, on the phone? Our conversation was shorter than yours at Satin and Lace. But I think you should let me go to Halo.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re making the rounds.” She was looking in her purse, her bag, then pulling out and tucking a business card into his palm. It was for the Eric Simmons Photography Studio. It took him a second: the man who shot the nudes.

  “Thanks,” he said, putting it into his back pocket. That he had already seen the pictures, leaked to him by a police executive, seemed to be something that might be good to forget to mention.

  Now he looked down at the chronology. “I’m not seeing anything for the last few days before she disappeared.”

  She looked down at the paperwork, reached out and touched it, like she was trying to jog a memory. “I was trying to—to stick to doing it sequentially, and I haven’t gotten that far yet. And besides—” She was sitting on the couch, but her spine had curled and now she was hunched over.

  “Too much in one day?”

  “Confronting her death? Like this, following her around, her old jobs? It’s morbid. If this is what you do for a living . . .” She blinked, went in another direction. “My mother, she had to leave us in Jamaica when she first came here. My dad was off working in Kingston, then he followed her here when she could sponsor him. We got left in Maidstone, our village, with Mrs. Bailey, who lived down the road. This is up in the hills. Way up in the hills. We went to Nazareth All-Age School. It was one building, yellow and blue, concrete block, with a courtyard. The boys could play and get dusty and dirty, but the girls couldn’t. In the mornings, you had to clean the floors, which were also concrete, and in the afternoons, the teachers would open the windows and there was this breeze, I guess coming up from the ocean, and it was just the best thing you’ve ever felt in your life. We were there two years, maybe three, with Mrs. Bailey. There were phone calls from Mommy twice a month, on Saturday mornings. I wound up more like Noel’s mom than her big sister. Mommy finally flew back to get us when they could afford to rent a big enough place for all of us here.”

  She got up, went to a stand by the window that was filled with family pictures and small houseplants. The picture she handed him was a worn five-by-seven in a simple frame. It was a close-up, showing two little girls and a mom, the girls’ hair done to perfection, a plane in the background. They must have been on the tarmac.

  “This is the trip to the U.S.?” he asked.

  She came to sit beside him. “Yes. Noel and I had never been to an airport before, much less on a plane. You’d have thought we were flying to the moon, we were so excited. I had bought—look, see right there? I had bought Noel that necklace with the charm on it, her name, for the trip. You can’t see the rest, but we were in blouses, skirts, white lace socks, black patent leathers.”

  “When people dressed to travel.”

  “I thought the streets here were made of gold. I really did, the way people in Maidstone talked about America. You have to realize this was a place of maybe four hundred people, without a streetlight or a traffic signal. There were five or six shops on the main street, with tin roofs. Two of them were pink. Mrs. Bailey ran one. Hers was one of the pink ones. Then we came to America.”

  “And?”

  “And we lived on Kennedy Street. Don’t get me started. Point is, Noel loved that necklace. Wouldn’t do anything without it. And when I was cleaning out her place, it wasn’t there. She must have been wearing it when—when—”

  “—she died—”

  “—she died. But it wasn’t with her, her body. It’s just gone.”

  “Could have been stolen. Could have been lost there at the bottom of that house.”

  “Or whoever killed her could have snatched it off her neck, thinking it was worth a lot more than it is. But that’s what has been sending me over the edge all afternoon. Her necklace. I can’t find her necklace. Since she died, it’s been like my temper, my patience, goes off in weird directions, and today it’s this. The damn necklace.”

  “Maybe it got lost in—in the dirt down there.”

  “It was silver. I asked the police to do the metal detector search. I asked them to go back and look.” Her body turned awkwardly and her hands fluttered.

  Before he could stop himself, he reached out to touch her hand, catching himself, then leaning forward, going ahead with it, but then he felt a rush of heat to his face when her shoulder twitched away from him, just half an inch. She looked at him, then down.

  “So—so I’ve pretty much got the receipts in order, the ones close to the date of her disappearance. I just haven’t keyed them in yet,” she said, sniffling, blowing a strand of hair away from her eyes, getting it back together, giving him cover to pull his hand back. “There are some others that don’t have a store name on them, so I didn’t really know what to do with those.”

  Sully turned and saw a stack of receipts on the floor. The laptop was on the coffee table. He started thumbing through the receipts, sweat pooling in his armpits. He pulled his arms away from his sides to keep the sweat from showing in the folds of his shirt, embarrassed in a way he hadn’t felt in years. Had he really been reaching out to touch a murder victim’s grieving sister?

  He looked through a box of sheets and papers she had set out apart from the others and came across the story written in the campus paper, the Hilltop, about Noel’s disappearance. He’d seen one piece they’d done, but not this.

  Noel had made her last class of the week, MKTG 544, Marketing Research and Strategy. It was on the third floor of the School of Business, at 2600 Sixth Street NW. The story noted she carried an A average and quoted a classmate, Alicia Mabrey, who said she sat next to Noel and had seen her walk out of the building and into the courtyard. He entered this on the chronology, then went on with the receipts Lorena had left out, immersing himself in building the timeline.

  He had lost track of time when he got up, went into the kitchen.

  “Bourbon, by any chance?” he called out.

  “Chardonnay’s in the door of the fridge. It’s all I got.”

  He found a glass, opened the refrigerator door, noting the paucity of food inside, and saw the wine front and center. All that was left was a slosh at the bottom. He turned to see if she was looking, then turned the bottle straight up, draining it. The digital numbers on the microwave showed it was almost nine.

  Dusty was supposed to be working at Stoney’s tonight. To g
o or not to go. She was great, sure, but . . . the gap yawned wider. He didn’t want it to be so but it did. Who made him this way? God? Darwin? He wasn’t particularly fond of either at the moment. Flicking off the light in the kitchen, he walked to the opening that led to the dining table on his left, and the wider open area of the living room off to his right. Lorena was still there, not looking up, keying in more facts, more figures, all in the belief that it would help him write something that would lead to the arrest and conviction of her sister’s killer.

  There was a remote buzzing.

  “You left it in there,” she said.

  He hitched himself up and limped back into the darkened kitchen, the stone floor cool beneath his feet.

  The number was Eva’s cell. He called her back, turning his back to Lorena and walking to the far side of the kitchen.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Meet me at Stoney’s,” Eva said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  “What? What is this? Christ, it’s—it’s nine at night. I’m sort—”

  “You’re wasting time,” she said, and disconnected the call.

  thirty-three

  Half an hour later, he was slouched back in the booth, a bourbon in front of him. Eva leaned forward and asked, “So how close are you to publishing?”

  She meant the story on the missing girls, he was pretty sure of that. She did not know about Reese, and there was no way he could tip her to that. He sipped the whiskey, snuck a look over at the bar, trying to get Dusty’s eye, stalling.

  “Maybe not for another week. There are some leads I got to run down. It got a little complicated.”

  “It’s about to get a little more.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We have a confession from one of the Reese suspects,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Bullshit.”

  “Reginald Jackson. Seventeen and wants to be sentenced as a juvie.”