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

  “He’s good.” Joyce rested a hand on top of his head. Her voice brightened the tiniest bit. “I tell him all the time, I don’t much care for watching sports on TV, but I love to watch the games with him when he does the commenting. He knows everything there is to know about it, it seems like. And he’s funny, too.”

  “That’s great.” I smiled. “Just know it’s not quite as glamorous as it looks on TV. But this business is never boring.”

  “My baby boy here’s done so much to make his mama proud.” Joyce’s fingers closed around her younger son’s shoulder. “This is just one more thing. My boy in the Telegraph for being a smart kid. This one’s not going to spend his life cleaning up other people’s messes. He’s going to do better. My Troy is going to be the first person in this family to go to college.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Do you know which college will be lucky enough to have you, Troy?”

  Troy plucked at a dingy shoelace, his eyes trained on something on the floor. “That depends on whether or not I get my scholarship, and I won’t know that until after Christmas,” he said. “I’m going to apply to UVA and Tech, and we’re going to try for financial aid.”

  “And we’ll get it,” Joyce said, determined. “And we’ll get loans. And I’ll mortgage this damn house if I have to. It’s paid for. You’re going to college, baby.”

  I stared at her ragged nails, betraying the work she did with her hands every day to keep food on the table and buy a home for her children, as her fingers sank into Troy’s shoulder. I had no trouble believing she’d mortgage her soul to see her son get his bachelor’s. She reminded me so much of my own mother a lump formed in my throat.

  “If it’s my choice, I go,” he said. “There were a few kids in my school last year who got picked to go to Blacksburg to the Tech campus overnight, and I was one of them.”

  “He won an essay contest,” Joyce interrupted. “First place.”

  Troy rolled his eyes. “Thanks, mama. Anyway, I’ve never seen anything like that. All the buildings are so big and the campus is huge. We went in the spring and there were people just sitting under trees reading and guys playing catch in the middle of the grass, and the library...I didn’t think there were that many books anywhere.”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm as I scribbled, remembering the first time I’d ever stepped foot into the library at Syracuse. I’d had that same thought, staring at the shelves that soared toward the heavens on every floor of the four-level building.

  “Troy, your mom is right to be proud of you. You should be proud of yourself. And put that essay contest on your applications. College applications are no place for modesty. You have to toot your own horn loud enough to get noticed among the other kids who are blowing theirs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, nodding. “My counselor at school is helping me, and I’m taking the first SAT in October so if I have to re-take it I can.”

  “You ain’t gonna have to re-take no test,” Joyce said. “You might get an award for the last one.”

  “The National Merit program is a big deal, Troy,” I said. Our schools reporter had forwarded me the Richmond finalist list when Troy’s name popped up on it, and Eunice had jumped at my pitch of a feature on a drug dealer’s brother up for such an award.

  “Damn right,” Joyce said. The first real smile I’d seen on her face radiated pride at her son. “I didn’t spend my whole life cleaning other people’s toilets for nothing. I made sure my boys had plenty to read and took them places when I could, too. I think Troy’s read every book in that library up the street, and he could be a tour guide for most of the historical stuff ’round these parts.”

  “Can you tell me a little about your work, ma’am?”

  “I don’t see how that’s going to make interesting reading. I wasn’t much older than Troy is now, when I found out I was expecting Darryl. I’d have starved right to death waiting for their lazy-ass daddy to get a job. I thought he was Richmond’s own Billy Dee Williams, he was so charming.” She kept her eyes on her hands. “I learned charming wasn’t everything, but not ’til I had my boys to take care of. I’d do anything for my boys. Scrubbing toilets may not be the proudest work there is, but it kept food on our table.”

  “You don’t need to defend anything to me,” I said, something in my tone bringing Joyce’s eyes back to mine. “My mother was seventeen when I was born. And she’s been a single mom all my life. When I was little, she worked as a secretary all day and went to school at night until she got a business degree. She owns a flower shop now, but it took a lot of work to get there.

  “Things happen,” I told Joyce. “I believe it’s what you do when things happen that defines your character. And I’m looking at a young man who scored better than ninety-five percent of high school kids in the United States on a test that’s not exactly easy, as I remember. I don’t see where you have much to defend to anyone.”

  She sat a little taller in the chair and her chin lifted slightly.

  “I saw an ad in the newspaper,” she said. “It said they needed people to clean houses. I figured I could mop a floor or scrub a toilet if it would buy diapers and formula for my baby. When Troy came along, I figured out I’d have more money if I wasn’t supporting their daddy’s lazy behind. So I threw him out, got a second job and paid a lady down the street to watch my boys for me in the evening. When Troy was two, they give me my own crew at the cleaning company, and I could afford to quit moonlighting.

  “In almost fifteen years, I’ve only had one employee leave my crew. They say I’m fair. I got the best crew in the city. We work mostly over to the Fan. Clean houses for big executives. Even got a few doctors and a senator on my list.”

  I nodded, my hand moving like lightning to catch every word exactly as she spoke it. She told me about the weekend days she’d spent showing her boys around the Civil War battlegrounds scattered across the Mid-Atlantic, and taking them to experience the living colonial history that defined the Williamsburg corridor.

  Troy beamed at his mother. “My mama was like the Energizer bunny. She’d come home after being on her feet for ten hours and clean our house, cook us supper, and help us with our homework. I definitely learned the value of hard work. I don’t care if I have to start out bringing someone coffee or making copies. I’ll make the best coffee and the cleanest copies they’ve ever seen, and I’ll have my own mic in the press box one day, you wait and see. When I was just a kid in middle school, I wanted my own column in the newspaper like Grant Parker. But then I started watching SportsCenter, and they get to report on all the games that happen everywhere, not just the ones that are in their town. I like that.”

  I kept writing, but I had an idea. “Troy, I know you want to work in TV, but how would you like to spend a day hanging out with Parker?” I looked up from my notes and felt a smile tug at the corners of my lips as his mouth dropped open.

  “Seriously? Do you really think he might let me tag around after him? I won’t be a pest, I swear it! Do you know him? Can you ask him if that would be all right?” He sounded like a little boy who’d just been told he might go to Disney World.

  Parker owed me a favor. He had been walking around in a megawatt-grin daze for weeks, since I’d decided to play cupid with him and Melanie from the city desk. “We’re friends. I think I can go ahead and tell you it’ll be fine.” I matched Troy’s grin with one of my own. “Do you think you could miss a day of school next week? Parker’s not much for coming in on the weekends.”

  “I’m ahead in all my classes, anyway,” he said. “I have a part-time job at the grocery store two blocks up, but I’m off on Mondays and Tuesdays.”

  “Parker’s column runs Tuesday, Thursday…”

  “And Saturday,” Troy interrupted. “I read it every time it’s in. This is the baddest thing ever, Miss Clarke.”

  I laughed. “I’m guessing you�
�ll see more of what he does on Monday, but I’ll double check that with him and call you later.”

  “Thank you,” Joyce mouthed over her son’s head. I nodded.

  I asked a few more questions about Troy’s classes, and thanked them both as I shoved my notebook back into my bag and capped my pen.

  Troy stood up to get the front door, and Joyce rose when I did. She crossed the shoebox-sized room in three steps and took both my hands in hers. I felt calluses under my fingertips.

  “I’m obliged to you for coming, Nichelle,” she said, holding her back straight. Tears swam in her eyes again, but she didn’t blink them back. “My boys are the world to me.” A tear fell, followed closely by another. “This is something. I’m obliged.”

  “Thank you for sharing your story,” I said, returning the pressure she was putting on my fingers. “I hope I can tell it right.”

  With Larry’s USB drive full of photos burning a hole in my pocket, I pulled back into the garage at the office at ten after seven, detouring past the break room’s vintage soda machine on the way to my desk.

  Sipping a Diet Coke and thinking about Troy’s game-show-host grin, I checked the clock and went past Parker’s office, hoping he’d stayed late. Dark and empty. Damn. There wasn’t a game that night, so he was probably out with Mel. I’d have to catch up with him tomorrow.

  I plugged the drive into the side of my computer and waited for the photos to load, opening a slideshow so I wouldn’t miss anything important.

  Three hours and over a thousand images later, my head was starting to hurt. I rifled through my desk drawer for a bottle of Advil and washed two down with the last of my soda before I clicked to the next photo.

  And found something.

  I checked the information in the sidebar. It was from a charity casino night in April. There was Amesworth, laughing and leaning one hand on the shoulder of a tall, dark-haired man in a sharp tux. They looked chummy, which was interesting, since the dark-haired man was Senator Ted Grayson.

  A tobacco lobbyist and a U.S. Senator in the middle of a bone-crushingly tight reelection campaign laughing over drinks and cards might mean nothing, except that Grayson could deliver a good punchline. But it was a hell of a coincidence. I’d covered crime for long enough to know true coincidences are few and far between. My inner Lois Lane said I might have an exclusive. The photo hadn’t been published, which meant no one else had access to it.

  I copied the photo to the Amesworth folder on my hard drive and clicked over to Google.

  A search for the good senator’s name brought up all the usual suspects: his official Senate page, his campaign site, a long list of minutes for both the Senate and the Virginia House of Delegates, where he’d served for six years before winning his first federal campaign, and a slew of articles. Some of them were written by Trudy, some were from the Washington Post, and some were from various other websites and publications that covered national politics. I clicked on news articles covering political campaign speeches and appearances, scanning the stories and photo cutlines for mention of Amesworth or the tobacco industry. Four pages and seventy minutes of Ted Grayson 101 later, I had bupkis.

  Grayson had a background that consisted almost exclusively of public relations and politics. He did a short stint at his father’s PR firm and then ran for Richmond City Council, leapfrogging through just two terms in the House of Delegates into the national spotlight. Then he went on to the U.S. Senate, where he was running for a second term. Ted Grayson was a political wunderkind.

  I stared at the photo of the dead lawyer and the senator for a long while before I packed my computer up for the night. The pose was too familiar for strangers at a party.

  But with no other link between the two of them, Bob wouldn’t touch it, and I knew it.

  I’d have to keep looking.

  4.

  Tipping point

  My toy Pomeranian was positively indignant when I walked into my house at nearly midnight for the second night in a row. I bent and scratched her head, then opened a can of Pro Plan and scraped it into her bowl, ignoring my own rumbling stomach for the moment. I kicked my sapphire Louboutins off and flipped the TV on, my mind still on Grayson.

  I fiddled with the five-thousand-piece jigsaw on my coffee table, while mulling over the mental puzzle of the story. My Blackberry erupted into “Second Star to the Right” and I jumped, dropping a piece under the table.

  I glanced at the screen. Agent Evans.

  It was midnight. What the hell was the FBI calling me for?

  “Clarke.” I braced the phone against my shoulder, bending forward at the waist to reach for the lost puzzle piece.

  “I have a tip for you that won’t go to anyone else for another twelve hours,” Evans said in a warm tone I wasn’t used to hearing from the FBI. “I think we’re even after this.”

  I forgot the jigsaw piece.

  “I appreciate that, Agent Evans,” I said, rifling through a nearby basket for pen and paper. “At the risk of sounding redundant, you don’t owe me anything, but I’m not turning down an exclusive from the FBI.”

  “There was an arrest this evening in that murder case we discussed earlier.”

  I scribbled, holding my breath. “Who?”

  “James Robert Billings, age fifty-six, of Henrico,” Evans said, rustling papers in the background. “He’s a senior vice president at Raymond Garfield.”

  The tobacco company. Hot damn.

  “Did he confess?” I asked.

  “This is an inter-agency operation with the ATF, and I wasn’t there for the questioning, but I’ll go with no. Bank records show he was paying the vic off the books, and the bullet was fired from a rifle that belongs to Billings.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “Private citizens don’t have to register guns in Virginia.” I listened to Aaron complain about that often, because it made it harder to build a case in a shooting.

  “Good question.” Evans rustled more papers. “I don’t have an answer. This isn’t my case, but the warrant lists the gun as the reason and a judge signed it.”

  “I see. Do they have the weapon, then?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is this: a guy like Billings won’t talk without a lawyer present, and the kind of lawyer he can afford isn’t going to let him give up anything. I imagine his attorneys will call in as many favors as it takes to have him on the early docket.”

  “Who’s the ACA handling this one?” In Virginia, prosecutors are known as Commonwealth’s Attorneys instead of district attorneys, but after covering cops for six years, I’d finally gotten used to the quirk.

  “This paperwork says Corry’s going to take it himself,” Evans said.

  Wow. That in itself was newsworthy. At thirty-four, Richard Corry was the youngest head prosecutor in Virginia history. He rarely showed up in a courtroom or in front of a TV camera, preferring to stay out of the limelight. I’d heard he was a damned fine orator. That should make for great copy when the trial rolled around.

  “Anyway, they’re going to try to get him through without the press knowing what’s going on,” Evans said. “So I thought you’d appreciate a heads up. If you’re at the courthouse by eight in the morning, you won’t miss it.”

  I thanked him, adding a last bit of chicken scratch to my notes. An exclusive was always a good thing. Especially on something like this. The senator would have been a sexier angle, but this was good stuff.

  I stared at my notes and then lifted Darcy onto the sofa when she bounced and scratched at my bare foot. Sifting my fingers through her silky russet fur, I couldn’t help wondering again how well the dead lobbyist knew the senator.

  I texted Bob to tell him I would miss the morning staff meeting and flicked the TV off. Grabbing a protein bar out of the pantry to stave off starvation, I took Darcy out for
a quick round of fetch so I could get to bed. Maybe Billings’s hearing would shed some light on what was fast becoming a tangled mess of a story.

  Dressed in unobtrusive neutrals right down to my most practical square-toed cream heels, I stepped out the door at seven-oh-one for the eight-mile drive to the John Marshall Courts Building on the east side of downtown Richmond. Traffic here was nothing compared to trying to get the same distance on Dallas’ clogged roads, but I wasn’t taking chances.

  I sipped coffee from a tumbler with a hot pink Texas emblazoned across the silver—a gift from my mom—as I watched a jogger cross in front of me at Monument and Malvern. I was excited about the prospect of Billings being the killer. A powerful executive engaging in corporate political hijinks now a suspect in a murder? It was a hell of a sexy news story. And all mine.

  I pressed the gas pedal and the legendary statues of Arthur Ashe, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee that sat in the middle of the road blurred past. I barely noticed them, a moral conundrum worrying around my head. The story would be even sexier if Grayson really was involved. And while the “sexier” factor was definitely there, I was having trouble convincing myself that my intentions were completely honorable. Did I want the story because it was rightfully mine, or because it might give me a taste of covering politics?

  While getting ready that morning, I’d spent a good deal of time brainstorming a way to sell Bob on the idea that the murder should trump the senator’s involvement, if he was involved.

  It was a valid point, but one that made my skin tighten with self-directed anger because it reminded me too much of Shelby Taylor, the copy editor who was perpetually after my beat. Resolving to talk to Trudy if I needed to, I parked at a meter in front of the courts building, forty-five minutes early. I flipped the sun visor down to avoid the glare of the perfect September morning and texted Jenna, “Happy Birthday! Tell Chad feel better. You stocked with frozen peas?”