Buried Leads (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery) Read online

  I turned at the sound of tires on the leaves, wishing I’d known I could drive back here so I wasn’t facing a hike back to my car in the dark. A late-model Jaguar stopped near the teenagers and a petite blonde flew out of the driver’s seat and swooped both of them into her arms.

  I ran the flashlight over the hole one last time, to see if I could guess the height of the deceased, and the beam glinted off something white, nearly buried about halfway up. A missed bone fragment?

  I turned toward Officer Charming, but he was deep in conversation with Ms. Jaguar. I knelt carefully next to the hole and poked at the soil with my pen, unearthing a small piece of odd paper.

  Not regular office paper, and not cardboard, either. It was shiny, which was why the light had hit off it. I used the pen to brush the loosened soil away.

  The dirt had been sifted, but it looked like the paper had been turned just right to slip through and escape notice. I had no idea whether or not it had anything to do with the dead guy, but my curiosity was piqued.

  It wasn’t even an inch square, torn on two edges with a pair of tiny holes punched in the top, like a staple had been removed. Using the pen, I flipped it over and found ink along the torn edge on the backside. I fished my Blackberry out of my pocket and took pictures, laying the pen next to it for size reference. Standing, I brushed my knees off and waved to Officer Charming.

  “What the hell are you doing nosing around in my crime scene?” he demanded.

  After I explained what I found, he glared at me, then used tweezers to slide the scrap into a baggie. “If your prints are on this, I can charge you with interfering with an open investigation. Damned reporters.”

  “This ‘damned reporter’ is not stupid, officer.” I handed over my pen. “Here. I dug it out of the soil with this. You’re welcome.”

  I shoved my Blackberry into my pocket and ducked under the tape, leaving him muttering as I strode away.

  I passed the Jag on my way to my own car and the woman turned from tucking the still-silent kids into the backseat and waved at me.

  “My son said you asked him questions for the newspaper,” she said, her voice neutral, but guarded.

  I introduced myself.

  “Is there any reason you must use his name in the press?” She fiddled with a heavy gold charm bracelet, then dropped both hands back to her side. “I can’t imagine him having to relive this for reporters until a better story comes along. I’m not looking forward to the therapy bills, just from what he told me.”

  “Not at all.” My beat didn’t often involve minors, but when it did, I didn’t use their names without consent unless they were being tried as adults. Moreover, this was protecting a child’s privacy—the poor kids huddled on the calfskin seats in the back of that Jag were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  She thanked me and slid behind the leather steering wheel, nodding in my direction before the engine purred to life.

  I pulled in a few lungfuls of blissfully uncontaminated air when I got closer to my car, thankful for the relief. On the drive home, I ran through what I wanted to lead with, not even noticing the sleeping city that blurred past the windows.

  By the time I turned into my driveway, I was torn between wanting to take a shower—my default response to eau de dead guy—and wanting to write my story.

  Shower first, I decided. I could work when the olfactory evidence of a decidedly odd late night was swirling toward the water treatment plant. Grabbing my bag out of the backseat, I completely overlooked the sleek black Lincoln sitting in front of my neighbor’s house.

  I’d made it almost to the kitchen steps before the smooth, familiar voice stopped me.

  “Nice night to be outside. I thought I might interest you in a walk. But that was a couple of hours ago.”

  Joey. I turned and stepped toward the front porch, ignoring the tiny flip my stomach did. My sexy Mafia friend enjoyed his air of mystery, stopping by whenever the whim struck him. Or whenever something important stirred in Richmond’s criminal world.

  He strolled into the light spilling from the kitchen porch lamp, and my insides positively cartwheeled. It had been several weeks since I’d seen him, and his olive skin, strong jaw, and straight nose looked even better than I remembered. The shoulders under his Armani suit coat were broad; his lean, strong frame obvious through his tailored clothes.

  “I might have gone for that. But if you come much closer, you’ll get a whiff of why I can’t. I’ve been poking around a body dump in the woods out toward Goochland.”

  “Anyone interesting?” He didn’t look surprised, a sardonic smile tipping up the corners of his full lips. That was an upshot to having a Mafia boss as a friend. I could talk to him about the more disgusting aspects of my job and not freak him out.

  “No ID yet,” I said. “But I was the only reporter out there, so I’m going to write it up anyway. We can get it on the web first thing in the morning. The coroner will probably know who it is by tomorrow.”

  “Bodies don’t get dumped in the woods by good guys.”

  “Could be interesting.” I nodded.

  “You all right?” he asked. “How much did you see?”

  It took a minute for me to figure out that he was asking if my mental state had been impaired by the sight of the half-eaten dead guy.

  “Yeah. I’m jaded enough that I don’t go catatonic or throw up anymore. I think I might understand a little bit of how doctors get to be clinical about telling people they have some horrible disease. After a while, it’s just a bad day at work. Not that I don’t love my job. I just love the dead guys less than the rest of it.”

  “I can appreciate that.” He nodded, starting to step forward and appearing to think better of it. “I suppose I should let you get to work.”

  “I need a shower before I do anything. I feel like there should be a little Pigpen-esque cloud of funk around me.” I grinned, stepping toward the kitchen door when my toy Pomeranian started yipping and scratching the other side of it. “But thanks for coming by. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. It might work better if you called first, you know. My cell number is eight-oh—”

  He held up a hand. “I know your phone number. I like surprises. Maybe we’ll get to take that walk next time. I need to talk to you.”

  “Anything pressing?” I asked.

  “It’ll wait. Watch yourself on this one, okay?”

  “Why?” My stomach flopped again, for a different reason. What if Joey knew something about the dead guy? That idea wasn’t nearly as appealing as a moonlit walk.

  “We’ll talk,” he said with a low smile before he offered a tiny nod, then turned and strode back to the car.

  The taillights disappeared around the corner before I shook off the uneasy feeling and hurried inside.

  Two teenagers looking for a peaceful view of the stars found a body in the woods near the Richmond City limits late Tuesday, sending police on a search for the identity of the man, estimated by coroners at the scene to be in his early thirties.

  “There’s not a path out here, and I was looking at the ground, trying to make sure we didn’t trip over anything,” one of the youths, whose name was withheld at parental request, said at the scene. “First, there was the smell. I thought there was a dead animal around somewhere, and I told [my companion] to cover her nose and tried to walk faster, but then it was right there, and I saw a shoe.”

  My editor was thrilled with the early story, especially since the mystery dead guy led the morning TV news. He was also ecstatic to have exclusive comments from the scene.

  “Good move, getting all that on the record.” Bob sat back in his big leather chair after he finished reading it before the morning staff meeting. “Very nice, kiddo.”

  I returned his smile and stifled a yawn. I’d gotten up a half-hour early to run in
lieu of my usual body combat class. “Anything for the team,” I said.

  I clicked my pen in and out. “I found something out at the scene last night,” I began, but Eunice Blakely interrupted. Our features editor came bearing a foil-covered pan of deliciousness, as she did at least once a week—in spite of Bob’s restricted diet. He may have had a heart attack last summer, but he still longed for Eunice’s southern culinary creations.

  “What’d you bring me?” I grinned, my growling stomach taking precedence over the paper scrap.

  “Armadillo eggs in honor of Texas clinching their division last night.” She grinned and set the dish on the corner of Bob’s desk closest to me. “I know how much you love them.”

  I lifted the foil and snatched up an oval lump of yummy wrapped in amazing before she could lower herself into the other orange armchair. They were still warm.

  “Not as much as I love you,” I told her, the words muffled by the food.

  “Cheese-stuffed jalepenos coated in sausage and Bisquick? What’s not to love?” Bob stared sadly at the tray, and I stopped mid-chew.

  “I brought you something, too.” Eunice pulled a Ziploc of brownies from her oversized pink tote. “Carob, black bean, and cocoa. Taste one before you turn your nose up. They’re pretty damned good.”

  Bob took a tiny bite and grinned. “Eunice, you could put topsoil in that stand mixer and it would taste like heaven.” He popped the rest of the square into his mouth.

  Brownies that wouldn’t widen my ass?

  “Can you do that with white chocolate?” I asked, watching the rest of the armadillo eggs vanish as the other section editors filed in.

  “I don’t know, sugar, but I’ll give it a shot.” Eunice winked over the sports editor’s head as he wolfed down an armadillo egg and asked her to marry him, which he did every time she brought food. Spence swore his wife wouldn’t care, either, if Eunice would cook.

  Bob started the rundown with sports.

  “It’s September.” Spence tapped a pen on his notepad. “I got baseball winding down and college football gearing up, a Redskins injury report that ought to make the fantasy diehards cry into their Coors, and a great column from Parker on that foundation the Generals set up in Nate DeLuca’s memory.”

  The meeting flew by. My feature on an inner-city family and part one of the baseball season wrap-up led as the big stories for the coming weekend. When the international desk chief started arguing ideology with our political reporter, Trudy Montgomery—who had more big D.C. names in her phone’s favorites list than I could count on both of her perfectly-manicured hands—I pulled out my Blackberry and checked my email.

  “Politics is perception.” Trudy’s words faded into background noise as I clicked an email from Aaron White, the police department’s public information officer. “This election isn’t going to come down to the economy or the schools or the roads or any of the things people should give a damn about. It’s going to come down to the guy who looks best on camera or the one who doesn’t say something stupid in the next seven weeks.”

  She went on about the senate race, hotly-contested for the first time in almost two decades, and I tore my eyes from the “loading” icon on Aaron’s email. Covering politics was my dream job, and Trudy was one of the best on the east coast.

  “Trudy, polling shows voters are more concerned about the environment and foreign relations than ever,” Edwin Caruthers, who’d been covering foreign affairs in Richmond since The Bay of Pigs, objected.

  “People don’t always tell pollsters what they really think,” I said. “Sometimes they say what makes them sound smart.”

  Trudy winked at me. “Thank you, Nichelle. My point exactly. The polls are close because they both look good on TV and they’re both suave. Add that to the uproar in D.C., and of course it’s tight. But Ted Grayson’s smart. He’s also got a well-oiled campaign and a gift of charisma I haven’t seen since Clinton. He’ll pull it out.”

  I nodded, and Bob thumped a paperweight onto his desk to recall order. He quizzed the business editor, and I returned to Aaron’s email.

  Hot damn. The coroner hit on the dental. My dead guy was Daniel Amesworth, twenty-nine, of Henrico. By the time Bob dismissed us, my fingers itched to hit the keyboard.

  I detoured through the break room to refill my coffee mug, frowning at the light weight of my white mocha syrup bottle. My coffee habit was going to get expensive if I started pigging out on a seven-dollar bottle of syrup a week.

  Back at my desk, I searched Amesworth’s name in Google. He was a lawyer. Private firm in Henrico, single, no police record. Not even an unpaid traffic ticket. I found a picture of his whole, smiling face on his Facebook profile. Poor guy.

  “How did you end up bobcat chow, counselor?” I mused, sipping my coffee and staring at his blue eyes. He was good-looking, in his tan jacket and azure silk tie. And he had a mother somewhere who would miss him. People are the reason I do my job—finding the truth, bringing them closure. It makes the grisly parts bearable.

  Grabbing the phone, I called Aaron for an update.

  “I heard you poked around our scene last night,” he said in lieu of hello. “I wish I’d known you were going out there.”

  “Did I forget to mention that?” I asked.

  Aaron and I got along well after nearly seven years of working together, so I could tell he wasn’t really upset. I could also tell he wasn’t going to say much about the victim. Which meant there was something worth hearing.

  “You did. But I forgive you. You get my email on the dead guy?”

  “I did, thanks. It’s kind of thin. Google tells me he’s a lawyer. You know anything else about him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Liar.”

  “Sorry, Nichelle. No one gets anything but the basics.”

  “Has his family been notified?” I clicked back to Amesworth’s Facebook account. Nothing helpful in his public information, which wasn’t terribly fleshed-out.

  “They have,” Aaron said.

  “Then why so cryptic?”

  “I’m sorry, Nichelle.”

  That was Aaron-ese for “no comment.”

  I thanked him for being no help at all and hung up, turning back to my computer. There was something about this guy, because Aaron wasn’t that tight-lipped about anything unless he’d been ordered to be.

  I went back to the search results, staring at the name of the law firm for a long minute.

  “Where have I heard that?” I tapped a pen on my desk and waited for their corporate page to load.

  Holy Manolos. The pen fell to the desk when the firm’s logo came onto the screen. Trudy. I’d heard Trudy talk about this firm because they did corporate and tax law—and political lobbying.

  The latter wasn’t advertised on their website, of course, but a quick search of the firm name plus “lobbying” landed me a list of the most influential lobbies in Washington and how much cash they funneled to campaigns.

  The victim’s firm was number five. And their biggest client? The largest tobacco company in the world, headquartered less than twenty miles from where I sat.

  A dead lawyer is one thing. A dead tobacco lobbyist is entirely another. Washington. Politics. Murder. Everything I’d ever dreamed of.

  I sighed, slumping back in the chair. It could be a hell of a sexy story. It also might not be my sexy story.

  I opened an email and typed Trudy’s name in the address line, tapping out the victim’s name and where he worked, because anything inside the beltway was her domain in the pared-down twenty-first century world of newspapers with too little space and too few reporters. Twenty years ago, it had taken a bureau of four people paid by the Telegraph and living in D.C. to do Trudy’s job, and it had taken three to do mine.

  Arrow hovering over the send key, I s
canned the message again.

  There was no evidence, really, that the guy’s death had anything to do with politics. Other than my knowledge of Aaron’s psyche and my inner Lois Lane screaming that something was up.

  I trashed the draft I’d started, telling myself I just wanted to poke around, see what was going on. Between the upcoming election and budget deadlock, Trudy was swamped. She didn’t need me bothering her with a murder.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered me, either.

  2.

  A thousand words

  Twelve hours since Jack and Tina found Amesworth’s body, and the coroner’s office still hadn’t released a cause of death. Someone had to know how he died. Fortunately, an agent at the Richmond FBI office owed me a favor. Maybe he’d talk.

  “What can I do for you, Miss Clarke?” Craig Evans asked when he picked up the phone.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I said. “I have a hunch, and I was hoping you could answer a few questions.”

  “Yes. Yes, I can,” he said with a chuckle.

  Hooray for guilt trips. I tossed out a few roundabout inquiries concerning lobbying and impropriety, hoping maybe he knew something. He just said the FBI commonly did months of planning and undercover work when they suspected such things.

  “Why?” Evans asked as I scribbled the last of his comments. “You uncovering more corruption?”

  “Corruption seems to have fitted me with a LoJack,” I said. “But I don’t have anything definite on this yet. Can I call you back if I get something?”

  “Please,” he said. “We can’t have you people stealing all our fun. You want to share what you’ve got so far? If I can come up with anything on this end, I’ll tell you what I find.”

  Come again? The FBI was notoriously tight-lipped with the press, and the public information officer in Richmond was a nice enough woman, but she’d rather have a root canal than willingly give up details on anything they were doing.