Front Page Fatality (2 page)

I had grabbed the police report on the first drug dealer murder from my file drawer on my way into the meeting, and I pulled it out and read it again. Noah Leon Smith, age twenty-six, had died the Friday before Memorial Day of a massive head injury inflicted by a .45 caliber bullet. He’d been found sprawled across his own sofa in a neighborhood that saw more than its fair share of violence. The easy assumption was that he’d been killed by another dealer, or maybe a desperate customer. But now did a second victim prove that easy assumption faulty?

My eyes scanned the detective’s narrative with that in mind, and four simple lines jumped out at me like a pair of old sneakers at a Manolo collection debut.

Bathroom sink, lower cabinet: four kilograms beige powder, two large plastic bags dried, green leafy substance. Upper cabinet: fifteen large bags containing tablets, various sizes and colors. Lab results: powder: heroin. Green leafy: marijuana. Tablets: Oxycontin, Vicodin, Zoloft, Effexor, Ritalin. Kitchen, freezer compartment: three paper grocery sacks containing a total of $257,400 in large bills.

I’d dismissed it before. Sure, a business rival or a junkie would have stolen the drugs and the money—if they had time, knew where to find it, and weren’t already flying on a sample of Noah Smith’s pharmaceuticals. But another dealer with holes where he shouldn’t have them made me wonder if the crime scenes were similar. If the new victim still had a house full of smack and cash, now that was a story.

My fingers wound around a lock of my hair, my thoughts hijacked by scenes from old Charles Bronson movies as I considered the possibility the shooter was more interested in payback than a payday. That could be a very sexy story.

Bob’s endearingly cheesy dismissal snapped me out of my reverie. “All right, folks,” he said every morning. “My office is not newsworthy, so get out and go find me something to print.”

I paused outside Bob’s door, where Grant Parker was chatting with the international editor about the baseball season. I couldn’t remember ever having spoken more than a dozen words to Parker, an almost-professional pitcher who was regarded around Richmond as just slightly less than Zeus’ son, but the column he’d talked about in the meeting caught my attention.

I cleared my throat lightly and he turned his head, his bright green eyes widening a touch when they met mine. He was tall, but in my heels, I was almost nose-to-nose with him.

“What can I do for you, Miss Clarke?” He flashed the smile that made most women here channel their corset-bound ancestors and swoon—and sold a fair number of newspapers, too.

“I wanted to say thank you,” I said, shifting my file folder to the other arm. “For the column you’re doing today. My mom is a breast cancer survivor, and it’s nice you’re writing about it. The sports section isn’t usually where you’d look for a breast cancer story. So thanks.”

“You’re so welcome.” His eyes dropped to the square-toed perfection of the shiny blue stilettos I’d shoved my feet into between my early morning body combat class and my mad dash to the meeting, then raised back to mine. “Nice of you to say so. I didn’t know you read my column.”

“I don’t.” I smiled. “But I will tomorrow.”

“I guess I’d better be on my A game, then.” He ran a hand through his already-messy blond hair and grinned at me again. 

“I guess you’d better.” I took a step backward. “I’m told I can be tough to impress.”

“I do love a challenge.” He raised his eyebrows and twisted his mouth to one side.

“I bet you do.” I shook my head, making a mental note to call my mother as I turned and headed for my ivory cubicle, Parker and his too-perfect smile forgotten. Charles Bronson. Dead guys. The nagging feeling there was something beyond the obvious on the murdered dealers got stronger the more I thought about the scattered details I’d heard on the scanner.

My hand was already on the phone to call Aaron again when I snatched up the pink slip on my desk, but the message was from my friend Jenna. She was probably looking for my input on which restaurants had sufficiently-stocked bars for our every-other-Friday girls’ night, which I’d been looking forward to roughly since the opening gavel banged on Monday morning.

Before I could pick up the phone to return her call, my favorite detective returned mine.

“Why didn’t the shooter take the drugs and the money in Noah Smith’s house? The dead dealer, from last month?” I asked, barely bothering to tell Aaron good morning. “And was the murder scene this morning the same?”

He sighed, and I felt my eyebrows go up. That would be a yes. I fumbled for a pen.

“It was,” he said after a pause. “And we’re not sure.”

“You think it was the same shooter?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head as he weighed what to tell me. The uncomfortably symbiotic relationship between police departments and the media was an odd line to walk: I needed him for stories, and he needed the stories for the key witnesses they sometimes brought in his door. I didn’t have to file a Freedom of Information request for every routine report, but Aaron’s job was to let out only the information the department wanted to release. Mine was to get my readers as much as I could. Most days, we struck a decent balance.

“We rushed the ballistics, but it still won’t be back for another few hours at the earliest,” he said. “Maybe not ’til Monday. I don’t know how busy they are. You want to come by this afternoon?”

I asked for the first half-hour he had available. “Bob wants something on this for tomorrow, and it is Friday. I’d like to leave at a decent hour one night this week.”

“I hear that.” Aaron laughed. “We’ve been busy down here lately, too. Too many bad guys out there. I saw your piece on the conviction in the Barbie and Ken case this morning. Such a sad story.”

I murmured agreement as the mention of the capital murder trial I’d spent the whole week chronicling called up unwanted impressions of the poster-sized, high-resolution crime scene photos the prosecutor left on display for the jury the entire day before.

It had been nearly two years since budget cuts (and a little finagling on my part—trial stories were bigger and often juicier than initial crime reports) had added the courthouse to my list of responsibilities as the crime reporter. It meant insane hours, but I didn’t mind, considering almost a third of our news staff had been laid off and I still had a job.

I’d dreamed of being a journalist ever since I could remember. It paired my love of writing with the ability to do good in the world. I hadn’t yet developed the intestinal fortitude covering the Richmond PD often required, though, and the trials were worse.

Aaron promised I’d have my interview with him in time to make the first Metro deadline.

Lacking anything pressing to do, I called Jenna back to see if she had her heart set on anything special for our dinner date. I was in the mood for Mexican food. And a margarita. That damned trial had made for a long week.

“Nicey!” Jenna practically shouted the nickname I’d reserved for those closest to me since preschool, when a playmate’s speech impediment had dubbed me “nee-see” and my mom had turned it into an endearment.

“Anything good going on in the news today?” My friend’s tone came down a few decibels.

“There’s seldom anything good in the news I write,” I said. “But I think I might have something interesting. And Grant Parker is working on a great story about the women’s basketball coach at U of R.”

“Oh, yeah? And how is Virginia’s hottest sportswriter this morning?”

I laughed. “He seemed all right. And you’re still, you know, married.”

“Married. Not blind,” she said. “Speaking of my darling husband, I told Chad not to wait up, so we have no curfew. Have I told you how glad I am the baby isn’t nursing anymore?”

“Just now, or the other fifteen times I’ve heard that this week?”

“Only fifteen? And I thought I was excited about this.”

“I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘thrilled,’” I said. “Possibly even ‘euphoric.’”

She laughed again. “Euphoric. Yes. Has a nice, festive ring to it. Anyway, what do you feel like doing tonight?”

“Margaritas?” I knew Jenna was more interested in libations than food that particular day. “I want Mexican if that’s okay with you.”

It was. I returned the phone to its cradle after promising to meet her at six-thirty, and went to tell Bob to save me a little space for my drug dealer story. Even he hadn’t escaped the cost-cutting, inheriting the metro editor’s job duties when she’d quit the year before.

His door was open, as usual, but I tapped the doorframe before I walked in anyway.

“Hey, chief,” I said, sticking my head around the corner. “Got a minute?”

“Just one.” He turned from his monitor to face me, tucking a pen under the tuft of thinning salt-and-pepper hair that peeked over the top of his left ear. “Anything on your dead guy yet?”

I took the same high-backed orange armchair I’d occupied at the morning meeting. Bob’s office décor was heavy on Virginia Tech’s sacred maroon and orange, his walls cluttered with a hodgepodge of framed copies of his favorite
Telegraph
photos and our best front pages. I flipped my file open.

“I think I have something coming from the PD this afternoon.” My roaming eyes lingered on Bob’s Pulitzer, centered on the far wall in an impressive bronze frame, before I focused on him. “Or, I know I have something. I’m waiting to see how good it’s going to be. I’m going to headquarters this afternoon to talk to the detective who’s working on this morning’s murder. Both murder scenes had hundreds of thousands of dollars in drugs and cash left behind.”

He raised his thick white eyebrows. “They think there’s a vigilante on Southside?”

“Maybe. That’s kind of what I’m thinking, but Aaron hasn’t said much. They’re waiting for ballistics to come back on the second bullet before they assume it was the same shooter.”

“Sounds like you have at least a promise of a decent story there.”

“We’ll see. A vigilante is definitely sexier than a broke addict looking for a fix. I might only have a short write-up on the murder tonight, depending on when they get the ballistics results, but we’ll have it in there tomorrow. And I’ll have more if anything comes of it.”

“Sounds good, kid.”

I would’ve bristled at the last word from anyone else, but I knew he meant it affectionately, and the feeling was mutual. I didn’t make it all the way to my feet before he picked up the newspaper on his desk and spoke again.

“You know, you really have turned into quite a reporter since the first time you walked in here, hugging your little college portfolio, afraid I wouldn’t give you a job,” he said, his voice a little softer than I was used to hearing it. “I wasn’t at all sure you could handle both cops and courts when you came in here begging, either—”

“Hey! I can be accused of doing a lot of things for a story, but I have never begged,” I objected.

Bob grinned. “Beg, wheedle; ‘bench, beach.’ Call it what you will, I know wheedling when I hear it—I was married for almost thirty years. My point is, I made a good call. Both times.” He thumped my final report on the Barbie and Ken double homicide case, which was destined to become an over-dramatized TV movie. “We sold more newspapers this week than we have in any single week since the end of the ’08 election. And what’s good for the bean counters is good for the news department nowadays. Good job.” 

Well, hot damn. To say Bob wasn’t terribly forthcoming with compliments would be like saying John Edwards was a little unfaithful to his wife. The journalism equivalent of a decorated war hero, my editor expected excellence from his staff and rarely commented on anything that wasn’t a shortfall. My week suddenly seemed less taxing.

Upside down pictures of the victims smiled at me from the newspaper on Bob’s desk. It was the sort of story that wasn’t much fun to write, but everyone wanted to read—the essence of my love/hate relationship with covering crime. The cops and courts beat was among the best places to begin building a career, though, and I told myself that reporting on crime kept people aware of their safety, and what was going on around them, which was a good thing. It made the parts of the job I found less than fun easier to take, especially with stories like that one.

All the elements that drove producers (I’d counted five at the courthouse the day before) to stalk heartbroken couples who’d just buried their children were there: a crime of passion perpetrated against beautiful people, a lopsided college love triangle, and a conviction that left the last man standing facing Virginia’s electric chair, probably before his thirtieth birthday.

The TV folks, ever fond of their graphics-friendly catchphrases, had dubbed the case “the Barbie and Ken murder” in homage to the victims’ perfect, flaxen-haired good looks. I had twenty bucks in the courthouse pool those words would appear somewhere in the movie title.

The usual sandpapery scratch returned to Bob’s voice as he dropped the paper and smiled at me. “Go get your dead dealer story. And then go have a good weekend. Treat yourself to a new one of those crazy puzzles of yours, or a pair of shoes. I believe you’ve earned it this week.”

Still glowing with pride twenty minutes later, I fit my back against the trunk of an ancient oak tree at a tiny, hidden park on the banks of the James River. It was my preferred place to ponder a story, write, or just sit and think when I had the chance. The water whispering over the rocks and the postcard-perfect downtown skyline were still enough to make me wonder if being on the east coast would ever stop feeling like a vacation to me.

Vacation. The word roused unexpected images from my memory: the beauty of roadside seas of bluebonnets in the spring, succumbing in the summer to flat, oppressive heat that browned the landscape and shimmered off the streets in visible waves by noon. My last trip to Dallas had been more of a vacation than a visit home.

It’s probably nice to know where home is, even if you can’t go there again,
I thought. I supposed my cute little stone craftsman in the Fan—the historic neighborhood named for the way its tree-lined streets fan out from downtown Richmond like the paper and lace creations that once aided Virginia ladies with everything from cooling to courting—was as good a place as any to feel like I didn’t belong. But I wished there was someplace I did.

The rootless feeling was unsettling. I shook my head as though I could clear it like an etch-a-sketch and shifted my thoughts back to the comforting familiarity of the dead dealer and the detective I was interviewing in a couple of hours.