Dead File (32 page)

Maxi moved on to the big topic. “How do you feel, Sandie, about your boss, Carter Rose, being arrested in connection with the attack on you?”

Sandie’s eyes darkened. “Shocked,” she said. “And sad. If it’s true, I have no idea why he would have wanted to hurt me. After all my years there . . .”

She pulled a handkerchief out of her jacket pocket and fumbled with it, and Maxi was afraid she might break.

“You’re doing beautifully, Sandie,” she reassured her. “I’m finished with my questions.” Mentally, she decided she’d just edit out Sandie’s words,
After all my years there …
and let her answer stand without it.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say, Sandie?” she asked then.

“Just that … it’s been a very rough time for me. And for my dad. I never would have made it without him.” With that, she beamed a small, grateful smile over at Bill Schaeffer, who was sitting close by in his wheelchair. Maxi made a mental note to make sure Rodger got an ISO shot of Bill Schaeffer later, so she could edit it in for reaction after Sandie’s loving tribute to him.

“But I think it’s done me a lot of good to tell my story,” Sandie went on. “Thanks for the opportunity, Maxi. And now I’m looking forward to getting on with my life.”

A perfect closing button for her piece, Maxi knew, and she signaled Harbaugh to stop tape. She was satisfied with what they got and was ready to do her reversals.

“I’m going to sit closer to you now, Sandie, while Rodger shoots over your shoulder at me asking what we call reverse questions. That’s just so I’ll get a little face time in the piece, to prove I was really here. Otherwise they might not pay me,” she said with a wink, and Sandie laughed.

Harbaugh picked up the camera and tripod and carried them over to a spot behind Sandie, then he set up to focus on Maxi’s face. He knew to include a little of the back of Sandie Schaeffer’s head and shoulders in the shot, another one-camera television news trick to show the viewer that interviewer and interviewee were indeed both in the same room. After he shot Maxi’s reversals, he would come around to the front of the couch and widen out to a two-shot, handheld. Then he’d shoot the two of them walking into the living room and sitting down on the couch together, closer than they actually had been sitting during the interview—this would be the establishing shot that would begin the piece, with Maxi voicing over her setup to the story.

When they finished getting all these elements on camera, Maxi said she had to run; she had a lot of work ahead of her to get the piece cut for the evening news.

“Thanks, Sandie,” she said. “You came off like a star. And thanks, Bill,” to Sandie’s father, who looked relieved that it was over. Maxi took the tape cassette that Harbaugh handed her and hustled out to her car, leaving her cameraman to get final cutaway shots, feed them in from the truck for her editing process, then gather up his equipment, pack up the Channel Six News van, and move on to his next assignment.

In her car, rolling back across town eastbound on Sunset Boulevard, Maxi started mentally planning her work. The first thing she would do when she got the tape back to the station would be to lift a few salient sound bites from the interview to use on the air as teases all afternoon, leading up to the Six O’clock News. She started choosing them in her mind.

Maxi led the show with her Sandie Schaeffer interview, which ran almost a full five minutes, under a Channel Six EXCLUSIVE banner. She knew that television news operations and newspapers all over the country would pick up her story and credit her and Channel Six in Los Angeles for it. She felt good about that. But still, something bothered her. That business about Gillian’s crystal award. The more she thought about it, the more it nagged at her that it had seemed to come out of nowhere. She was too busy before the show, jamming to get the piece done on deadline, to look into it, but after the news was off the air she intended to put a call in to Detective Salinger or Barnett and ask if they knew anything about a crystal artifact being broken at the crime scene.

She went on with the show, moving into other stories, the business news, the weather. About twenty minutes in, while she was intro-ing the sports reporter, Wendy’s voice sounded frantically in her earpiece. At first Maxi was annoyed that her producer hadn’t waited until Roggin was into his sports report, knowing that Maxi would then have a break for a few minutes, but then she was shocked as she processed what Wendy was yelling into her ear. “Maxi, Capra is pulling you off the air! He’s sending Tran down to replace you.”

Before Maxi could ask why, she saw weekend anchor Sylvie Tran, who worked as a reporter during the week, come in through the studio doors and rush onto the set. “We have to swap out during sports,” Sylvie whispered to her while the cameras focused on Roggin in the next chair giving the sports scores.

This was unheard of. Maxi had never witnessed a shift of anchors during a show. She wasn’t about to make a scene while the show was live—she removed her mike, disconnected her Telex, and got out of the chair, which Sylvie quickly filled. Curious and indignant both, she picked up her purse from the floor beside the anchor chair and strode off the set, out of the studio, up the stairs, into the newsroom—and into Capra’s office.

“Explain this,” she threw out, standing squarely in front of his desk.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Maxi?” her boss asked, looking hard at her face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Capra paused for a beat, still scrutinizing her face. Then he said, quietly, “Sit down.” He indicated a chair in front of the bank of monitors, one of which was tuned to Sylvie Tran, now anchoring the Six, the others tuned to other stations, monitoring the competition.

“What do you—” she started indignantly.

“Sit down,” he said again.

Capra walked over to the screens, bent down, pushed the STOP button on the VCR that was recording the station’s Six O’clock News in progress, then pushed EJECT. He grabbed the tape as it was sliding out of the machine, jammed it back into the VCR, pressed the REWIND button, then let it play. Maxi dropped into the chair and watched the opening credits roll, still pictures of herself and the other personalities featured on the Six as the announcer intoned their names, then watched herself on-screen leading off the Six O’clock News with her exclusive interview with Sandie Schaeffer. Capra fast-forwarded through it, and through a succession of other stories, then let it play from a few minutes before he’d yanked her off the air.

“Look carefully,” he said to Maxi..

“What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Just watch.”

“What—”

“Shhh. Wait a minute, till you’re on in close-up.”

Maxi watched the end of a story on a local robbery. When the tape ended, she saw herself come on screen in close-up. And gasped.

She bolted out of her chair and over to the twenty-five-inch color screen that electronically transmitted her image. “Good God,” she whimpered, clutching her face in her hands. “I …
I’m going to die!”

Her two eyes, larger than life size in close-up on screen, were a bright, glittering, shocking pink.

68

T
he what the chimerical eye color meant, and she also knew that realization had hit her immediately. Maxi knew exactly she couldn’t take the time to explain it to Pete Capra. Snatching her purse, she’d run out of his office, raced across the newsroom and out the security door, taken the stairs two at a time, blasted down the wide, ground-floor corridor, causing people to start and jump out of her way, and exploded out into the parking lot, all the while crying aloud,
“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God . . .”

Gillian’s eyes had dramatically changed color. And then she died. It was poison, Dr. Riker had confirmed. Someone had to have deliberately poisoned the woman, the doctor had said.

Sandie Schaeffer!

Maxi unlocked her car, jumped in, and gunned the motor. Saint Joseph Medical Center was just a few blocks away from the station. She sped out of the midway, trying to stay focused on getting to the hospital—she had no idea how much time she had for an antidote to be able to successfully reverse the fatal effects of the poison she knew had to be in the experimental cosmetic eye-color product.

Jockeying her old Corvette up Catalina Street then down Alameda Avenue toward the Burbank hospital, pieces of the puzzle, unbidden, came rocketing at her consciousness as if shot at her from a cannon.

Sandie Schaeffer had poisoned Gillian. It wasn’t Goodman Penthe, and it wasn’t Carter Rose. It was Sandie, the only person in the entire dismal cast who had been in a position to poison both of them: Gillian and now herself.

How did she do it? Gillian kept samples of the fledgling BriteEyes product in her office. Sandie had access to that office every day. All she had to do was slip poison into the product vials, knowing that Gillian, not wanting anyone to know what she had, had been testing BriteEyes on herself. Sandie knew it was just a matter of time before Gillian would use the product again. And she did, of course—on the night when she wanted to show Goodman Penthe how fabulous it was.

How did Sandie Schaeffer know what kind of poison would be readily soluble in liquid, hard to detect, and not routinely traced? Easy. For eight years she had been the right hand of Gillian Rose, product-development chief of Rose International—as such, she’d worked continually, on a close-up basis, with elements and components in the Rose product line. And the reason she’d got that job in the first place would probably have been her background, her working knowledge of drugs and supplements: she was the daughter of a pharmacist and for years had worked in the family drugstore. And she no doubt still had access to the pharmacy. Figuring out what to use, and getting her hands on the substance, would have been easy for Sandie Schaeffer.

The harder question was
why.
Why would Sandie poison her longtime friend and boss? And why Maxi?

With the clarity often spawned in panic, some answers occurred to Maxi, but before she had time to think them through, she’d arrived at Saint Joseph Medical Center. Screeching to a stop in front of the Emergency Room entrance, she parked illegally behind a pair of ambulances and ran up the steps and inside the door.

“Help me,” she gasped, grabbing the arm of the first white-coated staffer she ran into, a young medical intern working the ER.

“You’re Maxi Poole,” he said, recognition lighting his eyes. Then he saw the color of hers. “My
God
—”

“I’ve been poisoned. With selenium. If we don’t hurry, it’s going to kill me.”

He knew what selenium could do. He grabbed her by the arm and led her quickly across the wide waiting room. When they passed the admissions desk, a white uniformed nurse said, “Excuse me, Doctor, this patient has to be processed in—”

The intern waved her off, and pushed Maxi ahead of him through the double doors of the ER.
“Testing, stat,”
he bellowed to anyone and everyone, and three white-coated staffers immediately appeared. They got Maxi into a treatment room and up onto an examination table.

“Get me a full panel of electrolytes,” the doctor ordered tersely, then set about checking Maxi’s vital signs.

“It’s not the pink eyes,” she babbled while he worked. “That’s something else. But trust me on the selenium, Doctor.”

A technician tied a tourniquet around her upper left arm and injected a syringe into the inside of her elbow to draw blood. Maxi winced, turning her head to the side, and squeezed her eyes shut. She was in capable hands now. She was going to be all right. She’d made it in time. They would save her.

Twenty minutes later, the doctor again stood over her. “Maxi,” he said. “Maxi Poole.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him.

“Your electrolyte values are normal,” he said.

“Wh-what?”

Putting a hand on her arm, he said, “It’s not selenium.”

69

E
xceeding the speed limit over bumpy Coldwater Canyon, Maxi felt herself driving light-headed, almost in a trance. Was she getting sick—was the poison kicking in? Or was she just panicked? Nerves frozen with fear? She willed it to be the latter.

The young intern at Saint Joe’s, Dr. Gotler, had chased her out the door of the ER to the entrance rotunda, trying to hold her back. “Wait, Ms. Poole!” he’d called. “We need to send a specimen to a reference lab to be sure. We’ll have the results back in twenty-four hours—”

She didn’t have twenty-four hours. As he looked on helplessly, she’d scrambled into her car, which was still parked illegally among the ambulances at the entrance. It had been there for half an hour—thank God it hadn’t been towed yet.

If it wasn’t selenium, then what? Only one person knew the answer to that. When she emerged from the cellular dead zone that she knew from experience stretched all the way down through the long canyon, she picked up her phone and punched in 911.

The bright lights of Sunset Boulevard flashed and glimmered just ahead. The clock on her dash read 7:52 P.M. Calmly, she told the dispatcher who came on the line that this was a life-or-death emergency, and that she should alert the paramedics to bring as many poison antidotes as they could get their hands on.

“What kind of poison?” the woman asked.

“That’s just it—I don’t know. But I’ve been poisoned with something, and I know it’s something that will kill me.”

She told the woman who she was, Maxi Poole from Channel Six, hoping that would lend her some credibility. And she gave her William Schaeffer’s address in Pacific Palisades.

“Stay on the line with me,” the woman said.

As she drove, Maxi gave her a sketchy account of what was going on and prayed that the dispatcher wouldn’t think she was some kind of wacko impersonating newscaster Maxi Poole and making a wild crank call.

A light shone through the three front windows at the Schaeffer house. No fire-department paramedics van out front. She’d beaten them there. God, she fervently hoped that the dispatcher had believed her story and they were on their way.