Front Page Fatality (19 page)

They were both there, already drunk at noon and way too excited about having their angling interrupted by a corpse. It was macabre. But also sort of funny, and I needed some levity in my day.

Jake Holly and Tony Ross had decided to spend the day together after they’d been on the early show with Charlie, Jake’s wife said, “and they’ve been sitting on my deck drinking beer and reliving their adventure.”

She put Jake on the phone and a nanosecond later, Tony picked up an extension.

I asked them to get further away from each other to avoid feedback from the cordless handsets screaming in my ear. They reminded me of a couple of little boys who’d caught a big fish. Creepy, but in a “Scooby Doo Meets the Redneck Brigade” sort of way.

“Which one of you jumped in the water to get the watch?” I asked, interrupting their race to tell me loudest and fastest what had happened.

“I did,” Jake said. “Tony was afraid he’d get caught in the current. I’m a better swimmer.”

“You wish,” Tony snorted.

“Why didn’t you jump in there, then?” Jake hollered.

I could hear the effects of the Budweiser and didn’t want the nice woman who’d answered my call to have to break up a brawl in her kitchen, so I moved to the next question.

“Then what happened, Jake?” I asked. “Were you looking around for the watch, or did you see the body right away?”

“My watch landed right next to it. Er, him,” Jake said. “I thought at first it was some sorta joke. Like, somebody had dropped a dummy down there, you know? But I got closer and I could see the man’s eyes, and I knew it was a real person.”

“He came up outta the water screaming like a little girl,” Tony chortled. “I thought he was pulling my chain, but he kept screaming at me to call the cops and get him the hell outta the water.”

“And then the police came?” I asked.

“Yeah, they brought a boat and scuba gear and went down there and brought him up, and the coroner’s office took him away. There were chains with weights around his feet and his middle and his neck. It was pretty gross,” Jake sounded less than excited for the first time since he’d picked up the phone.

Charlie hadn’t asked about the weights. True, Charlie wasn’t quite as invested in the details of this story as I was, best I could tell, but I’d take whatever advantage over her reporting I could claim.

“Weights? What kind? Did you see?”

“The kind you use to exercise,” Jake said. “They were pretty big ones, too. I didn’t know they made those things that big.”

I pictured the shiny rows of dumbbells in the weight room at the police department and wondered if I’d just gotten a break. Surely they’d replaced them by now. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check. Everyone made a mistake somewhere.

They asked me in stereo if their names were going to be on the next day’s front page. I assured them they would, then clicked the phone off while they were still hooting at each other about that.

I thought about the lab report from Neal’s file, which I had read enough times to commit to memory, and dialed the state forensics office. When the tech who’d analyzed the pancake mix picked up, I introduced myself and asked if he remembered the case, crossing my fingers under the desk.

He laughed. “Yeah, I do. We don’t get a lot of stuff through here that’s not what it looks like. I knew when I opened that bag that whatever was in it wasn’t heroin. The smell wasn’t right. I played around with it for a while, trying to see if maybe it was some kind of new street drug, but the compounds in it were all wrong. I was curious, and eventually, I started testing stuff out of my pantry against it. That’s how I figured out it was baking mix.”

“But then the next sample wasn’t,” I said, still scrawling the last of his comment on my yellow legal pad.

“I don’t want to speculate on that, if you don’t mind,” he said. I kept my hand moving, not missing a word. “I didn’t test the third sample, and I can’t speak to what happened with it. All I can tell you for sure is that my analysis was pretty thorough. More thorough than it had to be, because I was curious. There’s no way I was mistaken.”

“Would that be easy? To fake the appearance of an illegal drug with something else?”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” he said. “Clumps of baking soda tinted with a little food coloring come close enough to looking like crack cocaine, and any white or off-white powder could pass for cocaine HCL. As I said, pancake mix outwardly resembles heroin. Even the prescription stuff would be doable, if you were doing it right. Lots of stuff, from baby aspirin to mints, comes in little tablets, in just about any color you could want. A dealer could make a killing as long as he didn’t want repeat customers. People would be fooled pretty easily until they actually took the stuff.”

Except I was pretty sure the fake stuff wasn’t being sold. I thanked him for his help, smiling as I cradled the phone.

The smile faded when a voice from behind me interrupted my thoughts.

“Bob is convinced that you’re going to redeem yourself today.” Les sounded less than convinced. “What do you have, since you skipped out on the meeting this morning?”

I spun my chair around to face him. I’d been avoiding him all day, but Nash was an excellent excuse for missing the meeting.

“I wasn’t in the meeting because I was interviewing the police chief. I told you about that yesterday, remember?” I flashed a Shelby-like fake smile.

“Did you get anything good out of him?”

I bit my tongue. I wanted to tell him I knew exactly why he was giving me such a hard time, and it was a shitty thing for him to do no matter how good Shelby was in bed. But I wanted to keep my job, so I swallowed the words.

“I did,” I said instead. “Turns out Lowe has a record. I’m going to see what I can dig up on that, and I already talked to the fishermen, too.”

“Woohoo. So has everyone else.” He leaned against the edge of the cube and folded his arms over his chest.

He stared at me for a long minute. I didn’t look away.

“I hope you got something new from someone,” he said finally. “You still have a regular job to do around here, and I bet you haven’t even looked through today’s police reports yet. This big investigative reporter act you’re pulling won’t play much longer if you don’t come up with something to show for it, just so you know.” He turned and stalked off.

Dammit. I spun the chair back to the desk and cradled my head in my hands. Shelby made a newbie mistake at the press conference because she was nervous and desperate to ask a question, but her story was good, I had to admit. And with all the unanswered questions swirling around me, Les breathing down my neck waiting to hand her my beat if I missed an apostrophe was crazy-making.

I called Jerry to ask if the PD had released any new information on Neal, the boating crash, or Aaron and Mike. Not surprisingly, he had nothing. And I had less than that in the way of excuses to ask for tour of the gym at police headquarters, so I hung up.

I flipped my computer open and wrote up what I had on the fishermen, which wasn’t fantastic enough to impress anyone but should be sufficient to keep me at the crime desk for another day.

Filing the story with Les, I paged through crime reports. Nothing interesting, and my thoughts kept straying to the weights Jake Holly described.

Someone would have to be strong to heft a grown man chained to huge dumbbells into the river. Lowe was about as likely as Jenna to be able to pull that off. There wasn’t exactly a shortage of biceps at the PD, but Parker’s Polos—tailored to show off the hours he spent in the gym—blipped up in my thoughts, and I wondered if he was the muscle that sank Gavin Neal to the bottom of the James.

“Bob said you had quite a day yesterday.” Parker’s voice came from behind me and I whacked my bruised knee on the underside of the desk again when I jumped. Did the mere thought of him conjure his presence out of the ether?

Turning the chair toward him, I fixed a big grin on my face.

“Just the man I wanted to talk to today,” I said, and his eyes widened.

“Does this mean you read my column?”

Aw, hell. I really would have to get to that at some point.

“Not yet,” I said. “Quite a day, remember? But I do have a question, and you’re my best bet for a straight answer.”

“Shoot.”

I leveled my gaze at his face, watching for telltale signs that something was bothering him as I spoke. “Dumbbells.”

He cocked his head slightly.

“Pardon?”

“Dumbbells,” I repeated, studying him carefully. “The kind someone like you lifts at the gym. How big do they make them?”

Google could have told me that easily, but I wanted to see his reaction to the question.

“There is an actual question.” He laughed. “I thought for a second I was being insulted. My gym has them up to 75 pounds.”

“And would three of those hold a grown man under the water?”

“Your lawyer that turned up in the river.” He narrowed his eyes and nodded. “I’m no physicist, but I would say yes.”

I murmured a thank you, a sinking feeling in my gut. If anything else about him jumped out at me, I’d have to say something to someone. If for no other reason than so they’d know who to blame if I turned up chained to a fridge at the bottom of a lake.

“Thanks. I think I have an idea.”

“I’ll let you get after it, then.” He stepped backward and smiled. “Glad to help.”

I went back to my computer and clicked into the browser, typing what I assumed was the web address for the area’s most popular sporting goods store. I got a popup, courtesy of the paper’s pornography filters (who decided to name a business after that particular unit of the male anatomy, anyway?), and hastily clicked back into the address bar, wondering if there was some sort of porn offender IT list I’d just ended up on.

All I needed was for Les to get the idea that I was looking for penis photos online at one o’clock in the afternoon. I didn’t want to imagine the fun he’d have with that. Shaking my head, I added “sporting goods” to the URL, landed in the right place, and scrolled through product categories.

Dick’s carried large dumbbells. I had a sudden yen for a little shopping.

14.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire

“Three seventy-five pound dumbbells? You sold them Monday?” It took work to keep my voice even, and I flashed the pimply kid behind the counter a grin. Though he didn’t look like he regularly lifted anything heavier than a video game controller, he did look like he was a fan of my smile. And my legs, from the way his eyes kept wandering to the lower half of the glass counter between us.

The two locations nearest police headquarters were of no help. This one was farther out, but that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t what I was looking for. I asked who he sold them to.

“We don’t have a record of that, but they paid with cash.”

I shifted my stance, hiking my hemline up the tiniest bit, and smiled again.

“I know it’s not the kind of question you get every day, but I really need to know.” I frowned slightly. “There’s no magic you can work on that computer that will help me?”

“I don’t think so.” He pulled his eyes away from my quads and looked at his screen again. “Wait, maybe.” He touched a few keys.

I held my breath.

“Well, I don’t have a name, but I have an address. There were only two of those in stock. We shipped the other one.” He rolled out a blank strip of register tape and scribbled on it, then handed it to me.

I glanced at the address. I didn’t know where it was, but it was not police headquarters. Damn.

I smiled and tucked the slip of paper into my bag.

“You have no idea how much better you just made my day.” I checked his name tag. “Jesse, I could just kiss you.”

“I wouldn’t stop you.” He smiled and leaned across the counter. Gutsy, for a skinny kid with skin problems. I couldn’t help admiring his moxie.

“Something tells me your mom might not approve,” I winked. “But thanks for your help.”

“Come back anytime,” he called as I hurried to my car, silently lamenting my lack of a GPS.

My Blackberry binged the arrival of a text as I unlocked the door, and I smiled when I saw my mom’s picture on my screen. “Love you more, kid,” the message said. A game we’d played when I was a little girl, now resurrected for the digital age.

“Nope. I love you more,” I texted back before starting the engine. “Call you later. Been crazy this week.”

Before I made it back to the office, my scanner bleeped an all-call for a bad wreck on the Powhite. Jackknifed big rig and possible fatalities. Shit. I didn’t have time for that, but damned if I’d give Les an excuse to send Shelby to something else. I made an illegal U in the median and headed south, leaving Les’ voicemail a heads-up that we might have an accident story coming as I drove.

I had barely gotten out of my car at the scene when Charlie Lewis tapped me on the shoulder.

“There’s my friend from the print side.” A tooth-bleaching commercial smile beamed through the thick layer of peach lipstick that matched her tailored Nicole Miller suit. “I was worried about you, Clarke. You didn’t show for the lawyer yesterday.”

“I was busy.” I peered over Charlie’s shoulder at the truck, which at first glance appeared to be peeing on the tollway. “What the hell?”

The smell from the amber rivulets running across the pavement wasn’t right for gasoline, and the troopers would’ve long since cleared the scene if that much gas was running across the road. I breathed in deep and giggled. It was beer.

I wondered how long that would have the Powhite shut down and turned my attention from the truck to find Charlie staring at me, one perfectly-waxed eyebrow raised.

“Busy with what?” she purred.

“A little less obvious next time, Charlie,” I laughed. “Not that I’m suddenly in the business of giving you leads, but that was half-hearted, at best. I’m insulted.”

“Then we’re even. I was insulted by that neophyte you sent to the press conference yesterday,” she snapped. “What the hell kind of reporter asks if there’s evidence of foul play in a murder? Don’t you dare bail on me like that again. You keep me on my toes.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I patted her shoulder a little too hard, moving her out of my way as I spotted a state trooper I knew in passing. “Speaking of, I have work to do. Nice chatting with you, hon.”

I made a beeline for the trooper before Charlie could get turned around and collect her cameraman.

No one died at the scene, Trooper Staunton said, but there were serious injuries, some of them to children. That warranted a story. I checked my watch. It was already three. Double shit.

The trucker swerved to avoid hitting a sofa that wasn’t properly secured to the back of a pickup. Out of control, the big rig turned over, began spewing beer, and got hit by a minivan and an SUV. All the occupants of those vehicles, three women and five children between them, had been loaded into ambulances and taken to St. Vincent’s before I arrived.

“Can I talk to the driver of the pickup?” I asked Staunton. “Are you charging him with anything?”

“The trucker said he took off when he saw the commotion in the rearview.” Trooper Staunton shook his head. “The sofa he dropped is over there, and we’re pulling camera feed from the tollbooths a half-mile back to see if we can get a look at his plate. It looks like reckless endangerment. Unless one of those little ones don’t pull through. Then it’s manslaughter, and he just ruined his whole life because he was too lazy to hook a strap over that couch.”