Hostile Makeover (21 page)

Lacey didn’t know how to get ahold of Tate Penfield, Amanda’s documentarian, but she figured Hansen would, so she hiked over to the photography department.
The Eye
’s photographers were beginning to rely more and more on digital images, but there was still a busy darkroom stocked with chemicals where the traditionalists hung out.

She found Hansen looking over his photos of Amanda in Dupont Circle on his computer screen. “Hansen, do you know where I can reach Tate Penfield?”

The photographer nodded. “Sure. He’s in there.” He pointed toward the darkroom as Penfield emerged with a couple of proof sheets. Penfield smiled when he saw Lacey, and she was struck again by his good looks, though at the moment he looked tired. For that matter, she thought, so did she.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said.

“Hansen and I both took photos last night at Dupont Circle. Hell of an evening.” He set the proofs on a light table and bent over to examine them. “We were both freelancing for Amanda, but it turned out to be a news shoot instead.
The Eye
got some photos, and your editor wants more,” he said. “We’ve got digital and film, and he’s putting some on the Web—”

“Right,” Lacey said, not needing a photo play-by-play. “Tate, I was wondering if I could talk to you about last night, for my story.”

“Sure.” He kept his attention on the pictures. “What do you want to know?”

“Where were you when Amanda was attacked?”

“Lousy timing. I was late for the shoot—it feels odd to call it a ‘shoot’ now. The Metro was delayed. I was stuck on the Red Line. When I arrived the police and ambulances were on the scene.” He straightened up and stretched, obviously weary. “Once I got there, I started taking pictures. Video and film. I know it sounds cold that all I could do was take photos, but it’s an automatic response.”

“Yeah, and Mac wants to see them soon,” Hansen chimed in.

“You heard that she died today?”

Tate rubbed the back of his neck. “I heard. It’s terrible news.”

Hansen picked up his camera. “Hey, Lacey, as long as you’re here, why don’t we take a couple of candids and keep MacArthur Jones quiet on the old column-photo front?”

“Very funny, Hansen.”

“No, that’s a great idea,” Penfield said, grabbing his camera. “Let me take a couple.” She demurred. “Come on, that’s a beautiful suit. You wear it well.”

“He’s really good, Lacey,” Hansen said.

“He’s a flatterer.” She gave Penfield a look of disgust. But she did love Aunt Mimi’s suit, and it gave her an extra measure of confidence. And Mimi certainly would have liked it preserved in a photo. “And I look tired.”

“Don’t worry. Penfield is the glamour man,” Hansen said. “Or you could get stuck with me, and you know what I can do with nostrils.”

Lacey was exasperated, but she figured this was a losing battle. “A couple of shots, if you promise to tell me anything else that you remember about last night and Amanda.” She gave Hansen a look. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to okay a photo on my column.”

Penfield asked her if she wanted to comb her hair. She did, and she took a moment to touch up her makeup, allowing him to highlight her cheekbones with blush and offer her a couple of tips on enhancing her features for the camera. He took her over to a window where the light filtered in softly. “I’m not going to bite,” he said.

“Be careful, I might,” she said.

“You look so serious,” Hansen said.

“No, it’s perfect,” Penfield told her. “You don’t need to smile if you don’t feel like it.”

She tried to look pleasant, but she felt troubled, and she was sure it showed. It was the best she could do at the moment. She relaxed a bit, endured a few more shots, and soon it was over. He wasn’t a shoot-the-whole-roll kind of photographer; he knew the look he wanted and he got it.

“Okay, your turn, Tate. Talk to me. What do you remember?”

He set the camera down on the desk, then leaned against the wall, arms folded. There were shadows under his beautiful brown eyes. “I was taking the Red Line from Woodley Park. There was some sort of train delay. You know the Metro—it happens all the time; they never tell you what it is. I got off and walked down Connecticut to the Circle, but by then it was all over. I heard sirens, and people were running away, not wanting to get involved. I ran toward it.” He straightened up and took her arm. “Here. It’s easier for me to show you.”

He led Lacey to the light table and pointed out the photos: Amanda lying on the stretcher, her eyes open but in shock. Zoe being restrained by a policeman. In another, pain and disbelief apparent on her face. And amazingly enough, John Henry Tyler also appeared in a couple of the pictures, lurking in the corner.

“That’s the guy they think was stalking her,” Lacey said, pointing to the proof sheet.

“Where?” Penfield asked, and he and Hansen crowded around her. Tyler’s gaze was focused on Amanda; her blank eyes were glazed over as she was being lifted onto a stretcher. Tyler’s body was obscured by a policeman whose back was to the camera, yet his eyes looked feverish even in the picture. “Good eye, Lacey.”

“I’ll show these to Mac along with my shots,” Hansen said.

“What happened to the guy?” Penfield asked.

“He was in police custody last night, but they let him go. I’d like to get ahold of him,” Lacey said. “Is there anything else you recall?”

“It’s kind of a blur. I’m sure I’ll remember more as I think about it,” Penfield mused. “The pictures help reconstruct it for me.”

Hansen gathered photos and proofs and tapped Penfield on the shoulder. “I’m off to see the wizard.”

“Watch out for the winged monkeys,” Lacey said. “Oh, and Felicity is peddling tarts today.”

“Great, I’m hungry.” He disappeared.

“What do you think, Lacey?” Penfield asked. “Amanda stepped on a lot of toes. And you saw her in action. Not quite at her worst, but a typical day.”

Lacey leaned against Hansen’s desk, remembering. “Yes, it was pretty much, ‘Hello, I’m Amanda, let me insult you.’ Did she ever mention Caleb Collingwood?”

“Oh sure, Cal. Cal Collingwood. The ex-boyfriend before Dr. Frankenstein. The kind of guy you feel sorry for; God knows I do. I asked Amanda the whatever-happened-to-old-Cal question for the documentary, but she never wanted to talk about him. Of course”—he tapped Lacey’s arm—“you’ve heard all the rumors. Collingwood died in the woods. Amanda killed him. He killed himself to spite her. And so on. And you heard how crazy it made her to talk about him.”

“Do you think she had anything to do with his disappearance?”

“Boy, any suggestion of that just drove her out of her mind. She denied everything. And she said she hadn’t heard from him since that last note, the one she told you about.”

“I remember. The smoking-gun suicide note.” Lacey eased herself into Hansen’s chair. “I tried looking up Caleb Collingwood on the Internet and made some calls, but no one seems to know much about him. Except for Tyler’s little homemade Web site. If he died, no one knows where he’s buried.”

“The Internet is such a reliable source of information.”

“I know, a pack of lies at the speed of light. For instance, I didn’t find that much on you,” she teased.

“Oh, please,” he said, mock offended. “There are at least ten Web sites with my name all over them. You know, ten thousand words on Amanda, and on me, one line: ‘Photo by Tate Penfield.’ But some poor slobs have no links at all.”

“Well, your high school yearbook is posted on the Web. I read that Tate Penfield was very shy. It said he was cute, didn’t talk much, instead ‘he spoke with his camera.’ ”

“He was very shy, but he’s not so shy now.”

“You grew up in West Virginia?” Penfield nodded. “And you didn’t know Collingwood?”

“The state is not as small as you think, Lacey. We don’t all know each other. We aren’t all even related, or marry our first cousins. But a fair number of us do wind up in Washington. No jobs back there.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said, remembering that people often assumed she knew everyone else in Denver.

“But don’t worry; I’m working on building those links. We can’t all be the darling of Conspiracy Clearinghouse, like you.”

“Oh, Tate, you don’t really read that Dead Fed nonsense, do you?”

“Before I read the sports page.”

Lacey groaned audibly. “You know it’s all wildly exaggerated, don’t you? It’s the Web equivalent of the
National Enquirer
crossed with
News of the Weird
. ‘Government Coverup: Aliens Abduct Pregnant Bigfoot from Pentagon!’ ”

“I’m shocked. I didn’t know she was pregnant!” Penfield’s eyes twinkled at her. “So are you going to try to find this guy, like Amanda wanted?” Lacey looked at him questioningly.
Does he know about the letter?
“I was there, remember? I heard her ask for your help.”

She sighed and shrugged. “All I can do, and all I ever promise, is that I’ll ask questions.”

He leaned against Hansen’s light table and looked her in the eyes. “But you have bumped into killers before?”

“One thing led to another. That’s all.”

He nodded and tapped her shoulder in a friendly way. “Go get ’em, tiger. Be careful.”

“You be careful yourself; you look beat.”

Tate rubbed his face with both hands. “I was up all night. I’m trying to see if I can salvage the documentary. Amanda would want me to, as long as it ends with the killer being caught.”

Lacey glanced once more at Penfield’s proof sheet before trudging back to her cubicle. Luckily the tarts were all gone when she passed by Felicity’s desk. The woman had been in a cooking frenzy since returning to work after her minivan blew up.
Be kinder to Pickles,
she told herself.
It’s just the way she deals with stress. But does her stress relief have to make the rest of us fat and stressed-out?

Lacey heard a low sound, like someone gargling. “Hey, Smithsonian.” It was Wiedemeyer, looking perhaps a little more miserable than usual. He peered around for Felicity, the object of his misplaced affections.

“Why are you whispering, Harlan? She’s not even here. Probably off browbeating somebody into wolfing down four times their daily calorie allotment,” Lacey said, immediately breaking her resolve to be nicer.

“I gotta know if she’s seeing that guy, you know, that big guy who was here earlier eating her tarts!”

“You’re kidding!”
Harlan’s jealous of Broadway Lamont? Oh, no.
“Felicity has never even seen the guy before. He’s a detective, and he was here to talk to me.” Ignoring him, she sat down at her computer and called up the file she had been working on.

“He was affected by her,” he whined. “Attracted to her. I could tell. God, how many poor bastards have fallen at Felicity’s feet?”

“Get a grip, man! Just ask her out if you like her. Tell her you long for a taste of her hot, sweet buns.” Wiedemeyer’s jaw dropped in horror. “I’m serious! You may not get lucky, but at least you won’t go hungry.”

“Ask her out and risk being shot down by the warmest, most fascinating, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known?”

He looked as though Lacey had suggested he jump from the roof of
The Eye
. If only she could just shake some sense into him, but Wiedemeyer made her a little queasy, and she really didn’t want to touch him. “I’m getting tired of this alternate reality we’re in here, Harlan. Please go back to your daily disasters beat.”

“You’re right. I have another one that’ll curl your toes.” She pointed the way to his desk. “Another poor bastard got his ticket to eternity punched at one of those monster hardware stores on Route One. Right near you, Lacey. Out of nowhere, lawn tractor falls fifteen feet off the top shelf and crushes him to death.”

“That’s too bad, Harlan.” She turned away, seeking refuge in her blank computer screen.

“I’ll say, and he wasn’t even looking for a lawn tractor. He was in the wrong aisle. He’d been wandering in there for hours, looking for air purifiers, and he made a wrong turn at plumbing supplies—”

“Good-bye, Harlan.”

“Poor bastard would be alive this afternoon, if he’d only turned left through the power tool aisle instead of right through—”

“Turn left, Harlan. Or turn right. Just go away.”

“Sure.” He didn’t move. “Only keep me in the loop on the fair Felicity Pickles?” He started musing to himself. “Felicity rhymes with complicity. Pickles rhymes with tickles.”

“Yuck! I don’t have any more cars to lose, Wiedemeyer! Go. Now.”

His eyes registered shock and dismay. “That was harsh, Smithsonian. Really harsh.”

At this rate, she would never get her story written. She jumped out of her seat, pointed his way down the hall, and snarled, “I’m on deadline here!”

He moved quickly now, but he was not one to hold a grudge. “In the loop. Keep me in the loop, Lacey,” he pleaded. “In the loop? About Felicity?”

Wiedemeyer was finally gone, but Lacey still felt as if she were caught up in a tornado of events swirling around the murder of Amanda Manville. The facts kept dancing like feathers in the wind, and she couldn’t catch them all. And that was before Trujillo, animated with the juices that flowed when news happened and deadlines pressed, sailed down the aisle with another news flash.

“Hey, Smithsonian, remember that Spaulding guy, the surgeon boyfriend of the dead model?”

“He’s been arrested?”

“No, he was gunned down on the street outside his hotel.”

“What?” She jumped out of her seat. “When?”

“Hang on, Lois Lane; you can’t fly without Superman.”

“Spill it, Clark Kent.”

“This story’s got you awfully wired.”

“Everything’s got me wired! I deserve to be wired. And Wiedemeyer was just here looking for his dream girl.”

“Wiedemeyer? Now you’ve got me spooked.” Trujillo looked around cautiously. “As long as you don’t take any favors from him, you should be okay.”