The Righteous Men (2006) (27 page)

‘No, I was not believing anything. I just want to go through my notes.’

‘Is there something about the story you’re not sure of, William?’

Damn. ‘No, I’ve just been wondering if there’s more there than
I first realized.’

‘Oh, I would certainly assume that.’

Another dig.

‘You need to be very careful, William. Very careful. Journalism can be
a dangerous business. Nothing more important than the story, that’s what
we always say. And that’s almost true. But not completely. There is
always something far more important than the story, William. Do you know what
that is?’

‘No, sir.’ He was back in the headmaster’s study.

‘It’s your life, William. That’s what you have to look out
for. So, mark my words. Be very careful.’ He left a long pause before
speaking again. ‘I’ll tell Harden you’re getting some rest.’

With that, the editor withdrew back into the semidarkness and began his
stately glide towards the National desk. Will fell back into Walton’s
chair and let out what he knew was an audible sigh. The editor thought he was a
junkie, about to go off the rails and ready to take The
New York Times
with him.

And now he was ‘getting some rest’. It sounded like a management
euphemism for suspension, while they investigated the veracity of the Macrae
and Baxter stories. Was that why the notebook was missing? Had Townsend taken
it as evidence?

His fingers were still balled around the Saddam snow-dome, now misted over
with clammy hand-moisture. He had held it tight throughout the entire
conversation with Townsend. That would have looked great: not only wild-eyed,
but his hand a permanent fist. As his fingers uncurled, he saw it again —
the plain, thin key that would surely open Walton’s desk drawer. He knew
it was madness to try it, having received an all but formal warning from the
most senior man in US journalism. But he had no choice. His wife was a hostage and
that notebook surely held the clue to getting her back.

Will glanced left and right and back again to see if anyone was nearby. He
turned a complete circle, mindful that Townsend had surprised him from behind.
Then, in a single rapid movement he ripped the key from its sticky tape, ducked
down and slid it inside the lock. One jiggle and it turned.

Inside were multiple neat, fawn-coloured files. Between them, hardly
concealed, was the tell-tale white metal spiral of a reporters’ pad. Will
pulled it out and saw the scribble on the thick, front cover.

Brownsville.

Jesus. Woodstein was not kidding: Walton had stolen his notebook. God only
knew why. The story had already been published. There was no scoop to be
scooped. What possible use could it be to him? Will put it out of his mind:
there were enough puzzles to be solved without adding Walton’s bizarre
strain of journalistic kleptomania to the pile.

Will wanted to start flicking through it right away, but he knew he had
first to close the drawer, lock it, replace the key and return to his own desk
— all without being spotted. Exactly what possibility he was guarding
against, he was not sure. He had already been caught by the editor; the damage was
done.

Even so, Will made sure he was hunched over his own desk before he so much
as opened the book. He devised a method. First, a rapid-fire search for
something alien: a note stashed inside that he had failed to see, a scrawled
message in a hand other than his own. Perhaps, through some sorcery that
remained utterly opaque, Yosef Yitzhok had smuggled a message onto these pages.
Look to your work
.

Will moved through it fast, scanning the lines in search of the unfamiliar.
There was nothing, just his own scrawl. The newsroom was so quiet, CNN on
Saturday evening mute, he could hear the pages turn. He could hear his own brain.

Briefly, he became excited by a couple of lines that leapt out, clearly
written by someone else, but they turned out to be contact details for Rosa,
the woman who had found Macrae’s body, scrawled onto the page in her own
hand. Will now remembered that he had promised to send her a copy of the piece
once it was published.

There was no mystery phone number, no smuggled message — not that
there could have been with this notebook stashed in Walton’s filing
cabinet since who knew when.

Instead he would have to stare very hard at the one clue he knew this book
did contain, the thing that had brought him here. There it was, on one of the
last pages, boxed and ringed with asterisks: the quote that had made the piece,
from Letitia, the devoted wife who had contemplated prostitution rather than
let her husband rot in jail.
The man they killed last night may have sinned
every day of his God-given life but he was the most righteous man I have ever
known
.

In an instant, Will was back in Montana, talking to Beth on the cell phone.
It was, he realized, the last conversation they had had before she was taken.
He was telling her about his day spent reporting the life and death of Pat
Baxter. He could hear his own voice, speaking animatedly, before realizing that
Beth was miles away.

‘You know what’s weird. It hit me straight away because no one
uses this word, or hardly ever: the surgeon who operated on Baxter used the
same word as that Letitia woman.

Righteous. They even used it the same way: “the most righteous person,”
“the most righteous act.” Isn’t that strange?’

He had not pursued the point. He had rapidly realized Beth was elsewhere,
preoccupied with the issue that should have been preoccupying him: their
failure to have a baby. He felt his throat go dry: the thought that Beth might
die never having known motherhood.

He pushed the notion away, staring down at his own handwriting on the page.
The
most righteous man I have ever known
.

He had flirted with pointing out this uncanny echo when he wrote up the
Baxter story but had ruled it out almost immediately. It would seem too
self-regarding, noting a similarity between two stories whose only real common
link was his own by-line. Baxter and Macrae lived at opposite ends of the
country; their deaths were obviously unrelated. To notice a reverberation
between one random murder and another only made journalistic sense if both
cases were well-known, their details lodged in the public mind. That was
emphatically not the case here, so Will had dropped it! He had not thought
about it again until that evening, as he and TC stood either side of the
homeless preacher in McDonalds. Every verse of Proverbs 10 he had incanted
seemed to contain this same word, repeated too often to be a coincidence.
Righteous
.

But these murders could not possibly be connected. Black pimps in New York
and white crazies in the Montana backwoods did not mix in the same circles or
have the same enemies. They had lived and died worlds apart.

And yet, there was something oddly similar about these two eccentric tales.
Both involved men who seemed suspect and yet had done a good deed. Or rather an
extraordinarily good deed. Righteous. And both had been murdered, with no
suspect yet arrested in either case.

Will swivelled round to face the computer screen. He logged on to the
Times
website and found his own story on Macrae.

He would read it forensically, looking to see if there was anything else to
go on.

‘… Police sources spoke of a brutal knife attack, with multiple stab
wounds puncturing the victim’s abdomen. Local residents say the style of
the killing fits with the latest in gangland fashion, as in the words of one, “knives
are the new guns”.’

The method of killing was entirely different. Baxter had been shot; Macrae
stabbed. Will opened another window on the screen, allowing him to call up his
Baxter story. He scrolled down, looking for the paragraphs with the forensic detail,
time and method of death. Finally he came to the line he was looking for.

Initially, Mr Baxter’s militia comrades suspected
a macabre act of organ theft lay behind the murder. Unaware of his earlier act
of philanthropy, they assumed Mr Baxter lost his kidney on the night of his
death. As if to add weight to that theory, there were signs of recent
anaesthesia — a needle mark — on the corpse.

Will read on, looking for more, as if he had never read the story before.
Now he wanted to curse whoever had written it: there was no more on the mystery
injection. It had just been left hanging.

He dug into his bag to retrieve his current notebook, the one he had taken
to Seattle. He riffled through the pages to find the interview with Genevieve
Huntley, the surgeon who had removed Baxter’s kidney. He remembered the
conversation, sitting in the front seat of his rental car, cradling a cell phone
to his ear. He had just let her talk, wary of interrupting the flow. According
to the scrawl in front of him, he had not even asked about the recent needle
mark. Looking back, he knew why. He had dismissed the whole business once the surgeon
had told him about Baxter’s kidney op. The story had changed, from
organ-snatching gore to righteous man and that inconvenient detail had got
forgotten. He had forgotten it. Besides, Huntley had said there had been no more
surgery so the recent injection idea did not fit.

Yet, now he flicked a few pages back in the notebook to see his encounter
with the medical examiner and Oxford man, Allan Russell. ‘Contemporaneous’
was his verdict on the needle mark. It was strange but inescapable: Baxter’s
killers had anaesthetized him first.

Will clicked back on to the Macrae story. No talk of injections there. Just
a frenzied stabbing. He sat back in his chair. Another hunch was evaporating.
He had thought he was going to prove these two deaths were somehow connected. Not
just by the odd coincidence of the word ‘righteous’ but something
physical. A real tie that might suggest a pattern. But it was not there. What
had he got? Two deaths which had good-guy victims in common. That was it so
far. In one case, Baxter’s, there had been a weird twist: he had been sedated
before he was killed. That was not true of Macrae.

Or rather, Will had no idea if it was true or not. The police had never
mentioned it — but he had never asked. He had not seen Macrae’s
body; he had not met the coroner. It had not been that kind of story. And if he
had not asked, then no one had. After all, the Macrae death had hardly been a big
deal. Apart from a few briefs written on the night, no paper had run much on it
— until Will’s story in The
New York Times
, of course.

Will reached instantly for his cell phone, punching at the internal
phonebook. There was only one person who could help. He hit J for Jay Newell.

‘T
his is Jay.’

‘Jay, thank God I got you.’ Newell was the member of Will’s
Columbia set who had taken the least likely career route. He was a fast-tracker
at the New York Police Department, leapfrogging over all the old
doughnut-munchers on his way to becoming a big city commissioner before he was
forty. Jay was as resented by the old guard cops as Will was by the aged
newsmen.

‘It’s Will. Yeah, I’m fine. Well, I’m in a bit of a
jam but I can’t explain it now. I need you to do me a very large favour.’

‘OK.’ But the word was drawn out.

‘Jay, I need you to check out something. I wrote a piece in the paper
this week—’

‘About that pimp guy? Saw it. Well done on making the front page, big
fella.’

‘Yeah, thanks. Look, I never checked autopsy reports or anything. Do
you have access to those?’

‘It’s the weekend, Will. I’m kind of, you know.’

Will looked at his watch. It was late on a Saturday night; Jay was a single
guy with a lot of girlfriends. Will guessed he had called at a spectacularly
inconvenient moment. ‘I know. But I bet you have the authority to see
whatever you want, whenever you want.’ The old flattery manoeuvre. Jay
would not want to admit that, as it happened, he did not have that kind of
access.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘I want you to see if there were any unusual marks on the victim’s
body.’

‘I thought the guy was stabbed like a million times.’

‘He was, but he was still in one piece. I want you to see if there was
anything like a needle mark on him.’

‘Some pimp scumball from Brownsville, you kidding? The amount of drugs
these guys are whacking into their veins, he probably looked like a pincushion.’

‘I don’t think so. None of the people I spoke to said anything about
injecting drugs. In fact, no one said he used drugs at all.’

‘OK, my man. Whatever you say. I’ll check it out. This the right
cell for you?’

‘Yeah. And I need whatever you’ve got really fast. Thanks, Jay.
I owe you.’

Suddenly he could hear voices, followed by a burst of laughter. It seemed to
be a knot of men, walking in this direction. And then, louder than the others,
the unmistakable intonation of Townsend McDougal, talking newsroom talk.

‘Can we hold it for twenty-four hours? Do we have this to ourselves?’

Will had no idea why they would be heading towards this barren part of the
third-floor landscape: they had no shortage of meeting rooms at their end. Oh
God. Maybe McDougal was looking for Will, coming with a posse of senior
executives this time, to begin the inquisition right away.

He could not risk that, not now. At top speed, with too little time to check
what he was doing, Will shoved the essentials — cell phone, notebooks,
pen, BlackBerry — off his desk and into his bag, wheeled around and
headed away from the McDougal ambush. The only perk of this faraway corner of the
office, Will realized at that very moment, was its proximity to the back
stairway. He had never used it before, but now was the time.

Once outside, Will gulped in the Saturday night air. He let his eyes close
in relief, leaning backwards against the wall, the
Times
clock just
above his head.