Front Page Fatality Read online

  “Thanks for the stuff you sent me.” I leaned back in my chair and smiled when he stopped in the doorway. “It was good. Nicely done, scoring an exclusive with the families.”

  “Thanks. And anytime.” He walked into the room with his hands in the pockets of his navy blue slacks. “What are you going to do tonight?”

  “I have no plans,” I said. “After the day I’ve had, I should go home and go to bed. But I’m starving. So I need to eat first.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like a plan. I could eat. Mind if I join you?”

  Really? I opened my mouth to make an excuse, and realized I didn’t have a good one. I eyed him for a second. Oh, what the hell? I’d been to dinner with people from work before, and he’d certainly been a lot of help.

  “Why not?” I stood up. “Let me grab my purse.”

  “Anyplace in particular you were planning to go?”

  I grinned as my stomach growled. “Do you like barbecue?”

  Pop-Tarts were never intended to provide an entire day’s nutrition, and the hickory-and-meat smell in the air reminded me of that as I climbed out of my car in the restaurant’s postage stamp of a parking lot a few minutes later.

  Parker strapped a shiny red helmet to the seat of a still-dealer-tagged BMW motorcycle in the space next to me and I raised one eyebrow. It was a nice bike for a reporter’s salary. Maybe he had family money or something.

  I followed him through the picnic tables on the covered porch. He held the door as I stepped inside, the fantastic aromas coming from the kitchen momentarily overpowered by a clean, summery cologne when I ducked under his arm.

  “I have an ulterior motive for inviting myself to dinner,” he said as we joined about ten other people waiting in line in the cramped entryway. “Did you read my column today?” His eyes dropped to the floor and I laughed.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to hear, but that wasn’t it.

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” he said. “But I can’t stand it anymore. If it sucked, you can tell me.”

  “I have not,” I said, wondering why he cared what I thought. “Though not because I don’t want to. I will, I promise. And you know, I meant it when I said your stuff was good today. So I’m sure it doesn’t suck.”

  “I hope not. Sometimes I wonder if people are just nice to me because I used to be a decent ballplayer, you know? But you’ve never seemed impressed by my slider.” He cocked his head to one side, and I surmised he wasn’t too used to people who didn’t fall all over him. “You’re the real deal. Syracuse, right? I hear their j-school is the best. How’d you end up here, Texas girl in Virginia by way of New York? There has to be a story there.”

  I stepped up to the counter and ordered a chopped barbecue sandwich and a double helping of sweet potato fries, glancing at Parker as I signed my credit card slip. “There’s a story. I’m not sure it’s very interesting, but everyone has one, don’t they?”

  He ordered ribs and spoon bread and dropped a few bills from his change into the tip jar, stuffing a thick wallet back into his hip pocket and turning from the counter.

  “Something tells me yours is more interesting than most.”

  We found a booth in the back of the tiny dining room, talking about how the place should really be bigger. It boasted what was easily the best barbecue I’d ever eaten, and given my Texas roots, that was saying something. With less than a dozen tables inside, standing room only was a common state of affairs.

  I left Parker at the table with his bottle of Corona and went to fill my glass with the best sweet iced tea in town, glancing at the flat screens on the far wall as I waited in line. One offered a cooking show, the other a Red Sox game. His and hers entertainment. What ever happened to talking to each other over dinner?

  Parker flashed me a grin when I sat down across from him again.

  “So? What brings you to this neck of the woods, Miss Clarke?” He leaned forward on the wide walnut bench, resting his forearms on the scarred wooden table and looking genuinely interested.

  “You really want to hear this?” I laughed.

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, I did grow up in Dallas, and I did go to Syracuse,” I said. “I thought I was hot stuff when I graduated, too. I was the editor of the Daily Orange. I was a University Scholar, which is a big deal award given to twelve people in the graduating class every year. I even got to go to a dinner at the Chancellor’s house for that one. I carried a double major in print journalism and political science, and I just knew the Washington Post was going to fall down and beg me to come take their seat in the White House press corps.”

  “Ah. But they didn’t so much commence with the begging?”

  “They did not.” I shook my head. “They all but dismissed me. The politics editor wouldn’t even see me, and the metro editor said he didn’t need the headache of training a green reporter. Told me to come back when I was seasoned.”

  “Ouch.”

  I nodded. The memory stung a little, even half a decade later.

  “That’s about it. Confidence shot to hell, I figured I wasn’t going to get hired anywhere. My mom let me whine for a while and then told me to apply in a medium market close to D.C. and get to work making the guy sorry. Bob took a shot and gave me the police beat. I saw a way into the courthouse when they started slashing personnel two years ago, and I took it. I’m just waiting for the story that’s going to make the Post notice me. I thought Ken and Barbie might get it, but so far…crickets.

  “The FBI interest in this one makes it sexier than your average accident. Maybe if there’s really something to this and I can stay ahead of Charlie this week, I might blip up on their radar.”

  He nodded. “See? Interesting. And good luck. Though it could be hard for Bob to fill those heels of yours if they stole you from us.”

  They called our order and he stood up before I could.

  “You hold the table,” he said. “They’re a precious commodity in this place on a Saturday night.”

  He disappeared into the growing crowd.

  A pulled pork sandwich, sitting tall in the plastic basket next to a huge pile of cinnamon-sugared sweet potato fries, appeared in front of me with a flourish.

  “Dinner is served, ma’am.” Parker’s Virginia drawl didn’t quite lend itself to the Texas accent he tried to affect.

  “Why thank you, kind sir.” I grinned, not even waiting for him to sit down before I popped a fry into my mouth. I devoured half the pile in the ensuing three minutes, ignoring the fresh-from-the-fryer temperature. I moved to get up as I gulped the last of the tea that was soothing my blistered tongue and Parker raised one hand.

  “Iced tea?” he asked, already on his feet. “You eat. I’ve seen starving linebackers who couldn’t plow through fries like that. Something tells me you’re hungrier than I am.”

  I thanked him when he came back with my refill, and tried not to laugh when he dripped barbecue sauce down the front of his pumpkin-orange polo before he’d taken two bites of his food.

  “Blot it, don’t swipe at it,” I said when he made the stain twice as big trying to get it off.

  “Oops. Oh well. I see shirt shopping in my future.”

  “Spray some hairspray on it and let it sit,” I said. “It’s my mom’s cure-all for stains and it’s never failed me.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow, then shrugged.

  “Who am I to argue with mom?” He washed the beef ribs down with a swig of Corona. “Speaking of your mom, you said yesterday she had breast cancer. Is she okay now?”

  I nodded. “She’s been in remission for almost four years. Five is the benchmark. She’s pretty amazing.”

  The conversation drifted into a natural lull as we ate, and my thoughts strayed to my mother, and how proud I was of her. Not many women would have been able to do the things she’d done, leaving California the day after she graduated high school with her seven-month-old in the backseat of the car that held all her worldly possessions, and stopping
in Texas because the bluebonnets were the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. She’d raised me by herself after my grandparents disowned her. Her pregnancy, and subsequent refusal to marry her boyfriend, embarrassed them at their Hollywood cocktail parties.

  She fussed over me and I tried to make her proud. We had danced around our cozy living room like Publisher’s Clearinghouse had arrived with a giant cardboard check the day my acceptance from Syracuse came.

  I’d been determined to go, thousands of dollars in student loan debt be damned. Then the week before I’d turned eighteen, my absentee grandparents dropped the bombshell of all bombshells. A courier arrived with a fat yellow envelope full of legal papers from a firm in Malibu telling me I had a college fund.

  The smaller envelope that fell out of the paperwork had “Lila” written in intricate calligraphy, and my mom had tears in her eyes by the time she finished reading the letter.

  Her mother wrote an apology, explaining there were no strings attached to the gift and they hoped I’d use it well. I’d read it so many times in the last ten years, I had to tape it back together when the paper gave from being folded and unfolded over and over. I’d often picked up the phone and started to dial the number in the letter, always hanging up before I pushed the last button. Ten years and a free education later, and I still wasn’t sure if I could forgive them for not wanting me. Or for punishing my mother for so many years just because I existed.

  “Did you find out anything more about what happened to your drug dealers from yesterday?” Parker’s voice snapped me out of my reverie and I tore a paper towel from the roll on the table and wiped my mouth.

  “I didn’t even have time to ask,” I said. “But the good news is, neither did anyone else. I’ll check Monday, though.”

  “Your job is never dull, huh?” He spun his empty beer bottle back and forth between sure hands.

  “Very rarely. Though it’s usually not quite this insane, either. I miss my happy medium.”

  We chatted about nothing in particular for another half hour. As the sun sank in the western sky, I told him goodnight and slid behind the wheel of my car, flipping my scanner on and sighing in relief when I heard nothing but normal Saturday night traffic cop chatter. Thank God. I wanted nothing more than to sleep until Monday.

  By the time I tended to my Pomeranian, Darcy, and crawled under the duvet, my thoughts were tangling again, my headache threatening to return. Charlie. Shelby. Dead people in a boat accident nobody could explain. Dead drug dealers nobody robbed. They all fell together in a hopeless jumble, making my brain hurt. I wondered, as I closed my eyes, if the odd cast of characters heaped together in my head would create weird dreams. If they did, I didn’t remember them by morning.

  My phone was ringing when I got to my desk on Monday. I stared at it for half a second, my innate inability to ignore a ringing telephone battling with the certainty that answering it would make me later for the meeting.

  “Clarke,” I sighed, picking it up. “Can I help you?”

  “Nichelle?” The voice that came through the line was so hesitant I almost didn’t recognize it as belonging to my narcotics sergeant.

  “Mike? Is that you?” Maybe Sorrel had something on the dope dealers. I dug in my bag for a pen, flipping over a press release and scribbling Mike’s name and the date across the top. “What can I do for you?”

  “I, uh, I need to talk to you. There’s some stuff I think, well, you might be interested in.” He sighed. “Not might. Will. It’s big. Can you meet me for coffee?”

  “Sure.” Curiosity made it difficult to keep my voice even. I knew Sorrel fairly well, and he didn’t sound like himself. “Meet me at Thompson’s in twenty minutes?”

  “NO!” I moved the phone away from my head, but it was too late. His Greek heritage came with a booming voice that left my ear ringing. “I’d rather go someplace out of the way. Can you meet me at the Starbucks in Colonial Heights in forty-five minutes?”

  Agreeing, I cradled the phone wondering what was all the way out in Colonial Heights.

  I hitched my bag back onto my shoulder, the desire to avoid snapping a heel on my newish, strappy red Manolos the only thing keeping me from breaking into a sprint on my way to find out.

  6.

  And curiouser

  I sipped my white chocolate mocha while I waited for Sorrel, recalling my first meeting with him. After I’d managed to get past my rookie jitters and through the interview about the biggest drug bust in department history, my first crack at covering cops had come out pretty good. Good enough, at least, to earn Sorrel’s respect and trust. And leave my mind racing, a half-dozen years and hundreds of stories later, through possible explanations for his peculiar call.

  Just as I was digging in my bag for my Blackberry, I saw his unmarked cruiser turn into the lot. He pulled a briefcase out of the passenger seat and ambled toward the door. Mike was about as tall as I was, and twenty years of chasing bad guys kept him in good shape. He had broad shoulders, but a wiry build, and with his dark coloring and clean-shaven face, he cut a striking figure in his pressed chinos and camel-colored blazer.

  I waved unobtrusively from my post in the corner. He picked up his coffee and sat down in the simple wooden chair across from me, pulling a file folder out of the handsome black leather case and pushing it across the shiny round table.

  “We have missing evidence,” he said.

  “Missing evidence?” I echoed as I reached for the file. “From where?”

  I scanned the page on top and gasped, casting a quick glance around and ducking my head even though no one was paying attention to us. I looked at Mike, my eyes wide.

  “The drugs and the money? How the hell does that even happen?”

  He shrugged. “I wish I could tell you.”

  I turned back to the file. Between my two murdered drug dealers, the police department had confiscated nearly four hundred thousand dollars in cash and a veritable truckload of various narcotics, the last of which had been cataloged on Friday afternoon. It should’ve stayed in the PD’s evidence lock-up until after the killer’s trial, when the drugs would have been incinerated in a sealed steel drum, and the cash given to the city to subsidize the cost of the narcotics unit. But that morning when Mike went down to look at one of the prescription bottles from the second murder scene, he’d discovered it was all gone.

  “Did someone break into the evidence locker over the weekend?” I asked the obvious question first, but I knew I would’ve already heard about it if that were true.

  Mike shook his head. “No. This thief had clearance. A cop, or someone from the CA’s office, maybe.”

  In Virginia, prosecutors are known as commonwealth’s attorneys instead of district attorneys, a quirk I’d finally gotten used to.

  I nodded as I scribbled, and he continued.

  “There was no sign of forced entry.”

  My mind colored some of those blank pieces in my drug dealer puzzle with stolen evidence and the possibility of crooked cops. Hot damn. Talk about a sexy news story.

  “Are you sure, Mike?” I exploded in a loud whisper. “That’s…wow.”

  He just nodded.

  “How much can I have on the record?”

  “That depends on how you feel about using unnamed sources. I don’t want it attributed to me, at least not now. If it’s someone in the department, it could get ugly.”

  I flipped through the file and nodded. “This corroborates what you said. I have no problem citing it as ‘a police department source.’ ”

  I paused and studied him for a minute, taking a longer drink of my cooling latte.

  “This is huge. And it’s not going to make the department look so good,” I said. Mike was nothing if not loyal. “I’m grateful to be sitting here, but why bring me this? Why not keep it quiet?”

  He exhaled slowly and toyed with his keys. “Because this is just flat-ass wrong, any way you look at it,” he said finally. “You’re my insurance it’s not going to disap
pear. While I don’t relish the idea of the department being dragged through the mud, I also know if I don’t say something, this may never go anywhere. It happens. Shit like this goes on and it just gets swept under the rug. I love my job, Nichelle, but I hate how I’ve felt about it the past couple of hours. I’ve known some of the guys I work with for more than twenty years, and now I’m looking at everyone like they’re a suspect.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a cop,” I offered. “Didn’t you say something about the CA’s office?”

  “If they can tie it to a lawyer, they will. Keeping the department’s collective halo shiny is priority one.” He tapped the file. “The only prosecutor who signed in this weekend came in yesterday afternoon. The major crimes unit is picking him up for questioning, but if someone’s going to steal evidence, they probably wouldn’t sign the log at the desk.”

  “Doesn’t everyone have to do that?”

  “I don’t,” Mike said. “Anyone my rank or better can go in and out at will. Since we go in the most, it simplifies the record keeping.”

  “Was there anything else missing?”

  “I don’t know. The inventory will take a while. A few days at least.”

  I nodded. “Did you talk to internal affairs?”

  “Yeah, right before I called you. I’ve never done that before. I feel like I’m tattling to the teacher on the playground.”

  I jotted a note to call the captain of internal affairs, wondering if he’d tell me anything. A lock of hair escaped the clip at the nape of my neck, and I pushed it behind my ear as I looked back up at Mike and reached for the file folder. “Can I take this with me?”

  “What the hell?” He pushed it toward me. “If I’m going to risk my badge to get a story in the newspaper, I might as well not half-ass it.”

  “What’s the use in that?” I winked. “I’ll keep it safe.”

  “Make sure you keep you safe, too.” Mike drummed his fingers on the table. “You read about this happening in other places, but you never think it will happen in your own backyard. I want you guys to blast this all over the front page. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. It’ll force the brass to figure out who did it and fire their sorry ass. But be careful. If this was a cop, they’re into something very serious. Something they could go to prison for. And going to prison is pretty much every cop’s worst nightmare.”