Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (24 page)

he newsroom was peaceful when we returned. By ten o’clock on a typical Friday night, there are usually more people working on the Sunday paper than are still fretting over Saturday’s edition, so no one is in too big a hurry. It’s not that we didn’t take Saturday seriously, but . . . oh, hell, who am I kidding? We didn’t take Saturday seriously. It was our smallest paper of the week and the one day a week that didn’t count toward the numbers we gave to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. It was the closest a daily paper could come to taking a day off.

Tina had another two hours before she could abandon ship and focus her energies on entertaining me. I thought about borrowing her house key, crashing on her couch for a while, maybe rifling through her underwear drawer for fun. But—and maybe I just watch too many horror movies—I didn’t want to be the male equivalent of the dumb blonde at home alone when the axe murderer was on the loose.

Besides, if I went back to Tina’s place by myself, there would be nothing to do but mull things over, and there was no sense in letting my brain do too much catching up. I was afraid it would put me on the next flight to the Bahamas if it did.

So I ambled over to chat up Peterson, night rewrite man nonextraordinaire, to see what mayhem he was chronicling. Peterson started at the
Eagle-Examiner
as a clerk, when he was seventeen. As best I could tell, that had been 150 years ago—give or take. He moved into night work early in his career and had been doing it ever since.

Peterson’s job essentially consisted of waiting for people to die. If they died of natural causes, he wrote an obit. If the cause was unnatural, he wrote a news story. It would be impossible to put an exact number on how many thousands of New Jerseyans had their demises chronicled by Peterson. But when you figure he averaged two hundred bylines a year, the numbers added up.

Yet it never seemed to grow old to him. He attacked each death with relish, eagerly ferreting out the details that would allow him to write that the deceased was beloved by all (if it was an obit) or that a death had shocked an otherwise quiet community (if it was a murder) or that the deceased met his end amid the squeal of skidding tires and the shriek of breaking glass (if it was a car crash). His penchant for cliché was legendary.

But on this night, he looked bored.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.
“Pretty quiet tonight,” he said glumly. “Only one shooting.” “Is it anything you can turn into a story?”
“I don’t think so. Just another Newark kid.”
He yawned out of boredom. I yawned because yawning is

“Police give you an ID?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going.
“Nope. He’s John Doe. They’re still looking for next of kin. We’ll be lucky if we get an ID in Monday’s paper.”
“Where’d it happen?”
“They won’t say.”
I cocked my head.
“What do you mean they won’t say?” I asked. If nothing else, we could always get a location.
Peterson yawned again. “They were being coy with me. Gave me the old ‘it’s an ongoing investigation’ and told me to call back later.”
“What time did you have that conversation?”
“I don’t know, an hour ago?”
“Well, it’s later now, isn’t it? What do you say you give our good friend Hakeem Rogers a call?”
“Good point,” he said, grabbing the phone and jabbing at the numbers. Peterson was from the manual-typewriter generation and therefore believed all buttons needed to be depressed with brute force, lest they fail to register.
“Rogers, it’s Peterson,” he said into the handset. “What’s going on with the kid who ate the bullet?” He waited. “I know you don’t have an ID. But you gotta have a location for me.” More pause. “Well, what gives, Rogers? How am I supposed to write a story that says someone got killed but we don’t know who and we don’t know where and we don’t know how? This is a newspaper, not a game of Clue.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t give a rat’s ass what your captain says. Tell your captain the law says the public has a right to know and I got a deadline.” Briefer pause. “Fine. Put him on.”
Peterson cupped the phone and looked at me. “I don’t know why they’re always playing these games with me. Every night, it’s like Professor Plum with the wrench in the study.”
Peterson returned the phone to his mouth. “Hi, Captain, it’s Peterson. Am I going to have to sic our lawyers on you guys or can we get a little cooperation here?”
The captain started speaking and Peterson’s hands suddenly came to life. He flipped his notebook to a blank page and began scribbling madly. Peterson was excitable by nature, so it was hard to tell if this was routine or if he was onto something big. I did my best to divine what was happening from Peterson’s half of the conversation:
“No kidding . . . Unbelievable . . . The exact same place? . . . Against the back fence? . . . How many? . . . Where? . . . Damn. And the call came in when? . . . Any witnesses? . . . You think it’s connected to the thing from before? . . . Yeah, I’ll hang on.”
Peterson cupped the phone again. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But they found another body in that vacant lot down on Ludlow Street.”

For example, I would never ask, “Did anyone see a white van driving off?” Because maybe the first person you talked to wouldn’t have seen the van, nor the second. But eventually word gets around the Bird Man is asking about a white van and, lo and behold, someone who wants to get a little attention will say they’ve seen it.

So as I waded through the throng, I tried to stick to nonleading questions—simple stuff like if anyone knew who the victim was or had any ideas about what had gone down.

Over the next five or ten minutes, as I worked my way closer to the crime scene, I heard the usual assortment of theories. Half the people were absolutely certain it had something to do with the earlier Ludlow Street murders. An equal number were just as convinced it was unrelated. The shooter was believed to be a local drug dealer named Antoine, a rogue Newark cop who went by the street name “Radar,” or a jealous boyfriend who found another guy making time with his girl.

The shooting was everything from five shots (the supposedly correct version), to one shot (always popu lar), to a massive gun battle that nearly clipped an innocent bystander (according to the man who claimed to be the innocent victim and wanted my opinion as to whether he could sue someone and recoup damages on account of the trauma he suffered).

But no one had much of an idea who the victim was. That was a constant.
Finally—after receiving enough double takes from people who couldn’t believe a white guy was in their neighborhood at such a late hour—I made it to where the yellow police tape separated the civilians from the professionals.
The cops had put up some portable lights, allowing me to see into the back of the vacant lot. Sure enough, the body appeared to be exactly where I had seen the bloodstains earlier in the week. The corpse was covered with a white sheet, with only the sneaker-clad feet sticking out. I was beginning to think we were just going to have to wait on the police for an ID.
And then I saw it, lying no more than three feet from the body: a backpack adorned with soda can tabs. Rashan Reeves’s backpack.
I dropped to one knee. It was either take a knee or topple over. A few hours earlier, Rashan Reeves had been riding in my car, asking me about what it was like to be a newspaper reporter, alive and inquisitive, possibly beginning to consider a world with alternatives beyond pushing drugs. And now he was just one more dead drug dealer, his life—and whatever potential he had— oozing out of him onto the dried weeds in some frozen vacant lot.
I felt like crying. And screaming. And ripping out every damn last one of those weeds so that maybe, come springtime, I could plant flowers there instead.
But none of that was going to do any good. So I just did my job. I pulled out my cell phone and called Peterson, informing him the victim was Rashan Reeves of Newark.
“How do you know?” Peterson barked.
“Because I interviewed him earlier this eve ning. He copped to being a drug dealer in the network that sold ‘The Stuff.’ He even told me how he got recruited.”
“Uh-huh,” Peterson said, and I knew he was writing as fast as he could.
“Here, let me just dictate. You ready?”
“Shoot.”
The words came racing out of me.
“Another dealer connected to the brand of heroin known as ‘The Stuff’ was killed in Newark late last night,” I began.
“Rashan Reeves, twenty-two, appears to be the fifth victim in a lengthening chain of violence that continues to unsettle New Jersey’s largest city. His body was discovered in the same Ludlow Street vacant lot where four of his fellow dealers were found dead earlier this week.
“Newark police have not yet confirmed that this most recent victim is Reeves, identifying him only as a young black man who was shot five times in the head. Police also would not speculate whether the two Ludlow Street crimes were connected.
“But shortly before his death, Reeves told an
Eagle-Examiner
reporter he had been dealing ‘The Stuff’ for four months, ever since his release from East Jersey State Prison.
“Reeves was carrying four gruesome postmortem photographs of the Ludlow Street victims and a memo penned by a person who claimed to have killed them. In the memo, the killer— identified only as ‘the Director’—writes that he eliminated the four dealers as punishment for selling a weakened version of ‘The Stuff’ to their customers.
“Reeves was killed less than three hours after the interview ended, possibly in retribution for having spoken to a reporter.”
“Slow down, slow down,” Peterson said. “This is great. Are you sure it’s all true?”
“Never been more sure,” I said, then helped Peterson with the details and background he needed to finish off the story.
“Tell Tina to stick this on A1 next to the story about the fires,” I said.
“Oh, and Peterson?” I added. “Screw the new policy. Put my byline on it. I want this guy to know I’m coming for him.”

The Director had little trouble deciding what approach to take with Rashan Reeves. It was partly based on the psychological profile in Reeves’s Department of Corrections dossier, which Alvarez had been nice enough to provide. But it was also based on the Director’s instincts on where Reeves could be most easily exploited.

Greed. It was Reeves’s weakness. It was many people’s weakness. The Director made the phone call himself, telling the young dealer he was aware of the visit he had just made to Hector Alvarez’s house with the
Eagle-Examiner
reporter. The Director did not hide his disappointment and told Reeves he had considered terminating their contract. But, the Director explained, that would scarcely solve the publicity problem if the reporter were to publish Reeves’s story.
So the Director made Reeves an offer he was sure the reporter could not match: in exchange for retracting his story and ending all contact with the reporter, Reeves would be given a leased Lexus. He would be allowed to use the car as long as he continued his loyal service. Did that sound fair? the Director asked.
Reeves had practically jumped out of his skin to accept. Sure he wanted a new Lexus. Didn’t everyone?
Having thrown out the bait and set the hook, the Director needed only reel in his catch. It was easy enough. The Director told Reeves that, since he was to be the primary driver of the new Lexus, he would need to be a cosigner on the lease. Could he meet with the Director at eight o’clock with his blindfold on, like it was their normal weekly product delivery?
Of course he could. The young man was remarkably guileless. Reeves had asked only one question: “What kind of Lexus will it be?”
They settled on an LS 430 and the conversation ended.
The Director had the “lease” ready by the time he picked up Reeves. It was really just a sample lease Monty had downloaded off a car dealer’s Web site and then hastily altered. The Director insisted Reeves read the entire thing before signing it. The young man anxiously pored over the document, skimming maybe a quarter of the paragraphs and understanding even less. Then he signed it, scarcely able to believe how his dung pile of a life had suddenly turned into a hill of diamonds.
The Director told Reeves they were going to pick up the car at the dealership, with a quick stop at Ludlow Street on the way. The Director spun a tale about wanting to clean up the four dealers’ shrine just a bit, and asked if the young man might help. The Director could only chuckle later: Rashan Reeves didn’t have the slightest inkling what was happening, not until nanoseconds before the first bullet entered his skull.
It had all been so easy. Then again, the Director reminded Monty as they drove off, the situation was only partly contained. There was still the matter of the reporter. Carter Ross was clearly a more sophisticated enemy.
But killing him would be just as easy. Because the Director had a plan, one that involved exploiting Ross’s greatest weakness.
His curiosity.