Murder at The Washington Tribune (3 page)

“Yes. Her name's Georgia. We have a daughter, Roberta.”

“They okay with you coming to work here?”

“At first—yes, they're fine about it.”

“Good. They won't see much of you once you're here,” he said, opening the door. “HR'll work out moving expenses, benefits, that sort of stuff. No deep, dark secrets in your past, Joe? A good-looking young guy like you'll have the broads here in D.C. salivating, wife or no wife. HR'll run a background check, fingerprints, the works, like you were going in the army. Or the CIA. Welcome aboard. See you in three weeks.”

Three weeks later, Joe Wilcox arrived again in the nation's capital as one of a number of new hires at the powerful
Washington Tribune.
And now, twenty-three years later and forty pounds heavier, he and his wife sat in matching green recliners in the den of their home in Rockville, a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, a finger-pour of Kahlua in her glass, shoes off, feet up, the awards evening behind them.

“Here's to Roberta,” Georgia said, raising her glass.

Wilcox lifted his glass and sipped.

“She's off to a good start,” Georgia said. “It was sweet what she said about you tonight.”

“It was good of her,” he said, then added, “but obviously not true.”

Georgia started to respond, but held back. The moment had all the trappings of what had lately become a frequent scene in their marriage, her husband lamenting what he considered his failing career, his wife trying to change the subject.

“Did you see what that silly congressman from New Jersey did yesterday on the floor of the House?”

Wilcox nodded and sipped his drink. “Silly is kind,” he said.

Joe wasn't a heavy drinker; Georgia had never seen him even slightly tipsy in all the years they'd been together. But unlike some people who became morose after a few drinks, or expansive or even combative, Joe Wilcox tended to become somber and reflective, occasionally about life, especially his own. There were times, but only a few fleeting ones, when Georgia wondered whether her husband could ever become suicidal, so dark were his moods.

“Anything new on the murder at the paper?” she asked.

He shook his head as he went to a small bar, refilled his glass, and returned to the recliner. “Morehouse is on a rampage, wants it solved in-house by staffers, not the police. He wants the story. Edith Vargas-Swayze says he's even stonewalling the cops.”

“Is he?”

“Could be. The guy gets more paranoid every day. Somebody comes up with a new rumor and he's ballistic.”

She tucked her stocking feet beneath her. “It's scary to think someone at the paper might have killed her.”

“It is, isn't it? I get these pep talks from Morehouse that are supposed to motivate me to crack the story open, come up with some goddamn source within MPD who doesn't exist.” His laugh was a snort, and he swirled the ice around in his glass. “Know how I know, Georgia, that the fire's gone from my belly?” She didn't respond. “I know it when I really don't care who killed Jean, except to want to pull the switch on him myself. God, to see a beautiful young woman like that have her life snuffed out by some sick bastard. I care about that. But getting the story? It just doesn't seem that important to me any more.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “It's a matter of priorities. But getting the story is your job and—”

“Is it, Georgia? Maybe it was. I go to work these days because of the pension. I might as well work for some transit authority, be a toll taker or brakeman on a commuter train.” He raised the glass to his lips again, drank, and intoned, “All aboard! Take your personal items with you and watch the closing doors. Toot! Toot!”

She laughed, although she didn't find it amusing. “You wanted to be a journalist, Joe, and you are, with one of the country's most important newspapers. You have every reason to be proud of what you've accomplished.”

“Really?” There was an edge to his voice that wasn't lost on her. “I'm no journalist. I'm a reporter. Proud of what, Georgia? Working the cityside beat for twenty-three years covering cops and robbers? That's hardly what I came to Washington for.”

She finished her drink and stood. “I'm beat,” she said. “Come on, let's go to bed.”

“I'll be up in a while.”

She kissed him on the forehead.

After she'd left the room, he got up and went to the wall where the family photos chronicled the past thirty years. Family,
this
family, was important to him. It was the only family he had. His mother and father were dead, as were uncles and aunts, their offspring somewhere in the country. He hadn't kept up with them. His only sibling, a brother, hadn't been heard from in twenty-five years.

Photos of Roberta on the wall at various stages of her life took center stage—graduation ceremonies from junior high, high school, and college, interspersed with candid color shots of birthday celebrations, family vacations, and other passages of a young woman's life. He was immensely proud of his daughter; taking out his handkerchief, he realized he was tearing up, which sometimes happened when he'd had a few drinks and slipped into his introspective self.

He shifted focus from the pictures to the few awards he'd garnered over the years. They amounted to nothing more in the aggregate than pro forma acknowledgments of having been with the
Trib
for twenty-three years, no more meaningful than yearly merit raises. At least the raises bought something tangible.

He was glad Georgia had abandoned him and gone to bed. Had she stayed, he knew what he would have heard from her:
“You have everything to be proud of, Joe. You're a respected reporter. More important, you're a good and decent man, a wonderful husband and father. I hate hearing you degrade yourself and what you've accomplished.”

Fair enough. He'd feel better about himself—for a minute or two.

But then he'd point out that while he was proud of his family and his place in it, having achieved something greater in his career would not have diminished his role as a husband and father:
“Christ, Georgia, career success and family happiness aren't mutually exclusive.”

They'd go back and forth a while longer before both realized the issue was beyond resolution. They weren't arguments; they were too predictable to qualify as such. The problem was—and he was quick to acknowledge to himself that this represented only his view—she didn't understand what happens to a man whose dreams are dashed. It can do bad things to you.

He poured what was left of his drink in the kitchen sink and went to the bathroom where his pajama bottoms hung from a hook on the back of the door. He brushed his teeth, rinsed, and took a long, hard look at his mirror image. He hadn't aged any worse than other men. There were jowls where they hadn't been thirty years ago, and his reddish-brown hair had thinned somewhat. His waist had thickened, as one might expect; he'd never been slender, built as he was on the stocky side.

He thought of his wife asleep in their bed, and his depression eased.
You're one lucky guy,
he silently told himself, and carried that thought with him to bed where he kissed her cheek before turning off the bedside lamp.

It took a long time for sleep to come.

THREE

Edith Vargas-Swayze sat at the counter of the Diner, on Eighteenth Street in Washington's Adams Morgan district and tried not to look at the man seated next to her. He was noisily enjoying French toast slathered with maple syrup and a side order of turkey hash. It was seven in the morning, too early to process that. She focused on her cornflakes with sliced banana and black coffee, her usual breakfast fare at this neighborhood institution open 24/7 every day of the year.

She wore a multicolored blouse over a white turtleneck and black slacks, more to conceal the bulge of her standard-issue Glock pistol than to make a fashion statement. She'd been an MPD cop for fifteen years, the past four of them as a detective in the Violent Crimes Branch, which used to be known as Homicide until the MPD brain trust, aided by high-priced consultants, conquered the city's appalling homicide rate with a stroke of the pen.

She'd been starting her day at the Diner for the past two years since she'd left her husband, Peter Swayze, and moved from downtown where they'd lived together to Adams Morgan, the ethnically mixed, lively community north of Dupont Circle named after John Quincy Adams and early settler Thomas Morgan. Their names also became a symbol of racial harmony in 1954 following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. The Board of Education. A white school, Adams, and a black school, Morgan, were merged into one, creating the city's only truly integrated community.

Divorce and relocation had been good moves. The marriage had been a mistake from the first. Not that Peter was a bad guy, nor could it be said that Edith hadn't worked at the marriage. But if there had ever been a clash of cultures, it was between the Hispanic Edith and the decidedly WASP Peter. “Good God, Peter, you don't even speak Spanish,” his mother had said to him after being introduced to her son's choice of a mate. Edith laughed long and loud. She'd been born in the good ol' USA, thank you, in El Paso, Texas, and her English was every bit as correct as Peter's mother's, albeit decidedly saltier. There was also the divide between how she and Peter spent their days. Each morning, he went to his white-collar job at a local bank where he did something with money, while she spent her days and nights chasing crack dealers down unlit alleys and trying to not get her shoes bloody at grisly murder scenes. Even their skin tones had created a breach. Peter was the palest human being Edith had ever known, constantly changing sides of the street to avoid the sun. Edith couldn't get enough of it, turning her already dusky skin more like copper each summer day. Opposites certainly had attracted, and had repelled as quickly.

Moving to Adams Morgan had reunited her—mother Mexican, father half Spanish and half Irish—joining more than a quarter-million Hispanics living there: Cubans and Dominicans, Brazilians and Mexicans and a token number of Puerto Ricans. Plus, a growing Muslim population, plenty of African Americans, and Asians. Happily renting an apartment with a roof garden, she was free to spend her leisure time up there in a canvas recliner, a tall travel mug of iced Cuban coffee at her side, and ideally never again hearing Peter say, “You'll end up with skin cancer.” That he was probably right wasn't the point.

She caught the busy waitress's eye, wrote in the air, and the check was placed before her as the man on the adjacent stool ordered another plate of hash.

“You get the papers yet?” the waitress asked Edith.

“Any day, says my lawyer. He's been saying that for weeks. Can't wait to get it over with and drop the hyphen in my name.”

Although she'd been told repeatedly that she never needed to pay for her breakfast at the Diner—“Nice having a cop around,” she was told—she always paid full price. She'd seen too many cops get in trouble for less than cornflakes and bananas. She left the Diner and started walking south briskly to catch the nearest Metro at Dupont Circle, a good hike, when her cell phone vibrated, then rang.

“Hello.”

“Buenos dias.”

She smiled. He always greeted her in Spanish.

“Hello, Joe.
Como está usted
?”

“
Bien, gracias.
You didn't know I was a linguist, did you?”

“I still don't. What's up?”

“Jean Kaporis. What else could be up for me?”

“Nothing new, my friend, but I haven't clocked in yet.”

“Morehouse is on the warpath. Or will be soon.”

“Until he puts on war paint and starts carrying a spear, I wouldn't worry.”

“What about poison arrowheads? He has several.”

“Then I suggest you buy yourself a big shield and keep your distance. Look, I can't walk and talk at the same time. Chew gum either. I'll catch up with you later—
if
there's a break in the case.”

“Thanks, Edith. Any scrap will do to feed the animals.”

As Violent Crime Branch Detective Vargas-Swayze, soon to lose her hyphen, picked up her pace again, she couldn't help but think of the night she and Wilcox had ended up in bed together. Tell someone to not think of pink elephants and . . . A one-night stand, it was called, although they spent little of that night in a standing position. It had just seemed to happen, and it only happened once. Plenty of excuses on her part—the divorce, pressures at work, too much to drink, too long since she'd been in bed with a man. Him? He'd been riddled with guilt, which she'd tried to assuage, successfully, it seemed. “Let's forget about it,” she'd said. “It was a one-time thing, Joe. Let's not let it get in the way of the friendship? Okay?”

“Okay,” he'd said.

They hadn't mentioned it since.

Wilcox wasn't thinking of that night as he logged on to his computer in the
Trib
's vast, carpeted, smoke-free, peaceful, and virtually silent newsroom, which had all the ambience of an insurance company. Only the barely audible tap dance of keyboards being stroked intruded on his thoughts.

His meeting earlier that morning with Paul Morehouse had gone poorly.

“Look,” Morehouse had yelled once Wilcox and Rick Jillian, a new reporter assigned to the Kaporis story, had settled in chairs across from him, “they're eating our lunch. Jesus Christ, she gets killed right here off our own newsroom and we're last on the MPD food chain. Come on, Joe, you used to be sourced over there, better than anybody on the beat. What's happened? How come all of a sudden they're stonewalling you?”

“They're not,” Wilcox responded. He resented a need to go on the defensive. As far as he was concerned, he'd been working the case hard. “Nobody's eating nothing. All the other outlets have is speculation, and they make that sound like inside info. It's all BS.”

“Even your daughter?” Morehouse asked.

“What about her?”

“She claimed on the tube that an interview she did with Jean's mother revealed possible suspects and motives. Was she right? What did the mother say?”

Wilcox didn't respond.

“You interviewed the mother. Right?”

“Right, and she didn't say anything that would point to a suspect or motive.”

“Maybe you didn't ask the right questions.”

“I asked the right questions. Paul, the decision was made upstairs to not turn Jean's murder into a tabloid circus, not here at the highly respected, above-the-fray
Washington Tribune.
Remember?”

The younger reporter turned in his chair to physically look away from Wilcox's sarcasm. Morehouse pretended to take in something interesting in the airshaft outside the office's single window before slowly returning his attention to the reporters. “Rick,” he told the younger one, “run another check on visitors who signed in the day Jean died. I know, I know, we've been over it a hundred times but do it again.”

Jillian and Wilcox stood.

“Stay a minute, Joe,” Morehouse said.

The door closed, Morehouse said, “Come on, come on, Joe, lay it out for me.”

“Lay what out?”

“What's eating you.”

Wilcox started to respond but Morehouse pressed on.

“You know damn well what I'm talking about. You've been walking around lately with a chip on your shoulder, or looking like you swallowed one. That doesn't do me any good, or the paper. You're the best cops reporter I have, or am I talking past tense?”

Again, he didn't allow Wilcox to reply.

“I met with Mary yesterday. She's greenlighted a task force for the Kaporis story: you, Rick, a couple of researchers, a graphic artist, and that computer whiz, Kahlia, from Research. I want you to spearhead it—but not if you're about to go off the deep end and start seeing a shrink five times a week.”

When Wilcox said nothing, Morehouse asked, “Are you?”

“No.”

“Good. As long as we're leveling with each other, what's going on at MPD?”

Wilcox shrugged. “They're working the case. That's all I know.”

“They're not talking to you?”

“Yeah, they're talking to me, but they don't have a hell of a lot to tell me.”

“Because of Roberta? They punishing her old man because of the stuff she did on them?”

“No. That's not happening.”

“How do you know?”

“I just—know.”

“How far did you get talking to people here?”

“Staffers MPD questioned?”

“Yeah.”

“I hit most of them, I think, at least those I know about.”

“You think there are others? You think the cops talked to someone we don't know about?”

“It's possible.”

“Get the list from MPD.”

“They won't release it.”

“Jesus, Joe, I don't care about it being
released.
Get it off the record. They spent days here interviewing people.”

“And they still think she was killed by one of us.”

“If that's true, then everybody upstairs would be very happy if we solved it in-house. Jean's murder is still high profile a month later. Still hot, and will continue to be. There are actually people out there who think the world would be better off if all reporters got whacked. Maybe we can't play Sherlock and bust the case ourselves, but we should at least be out front with coverage. We're it. Come on, Joe, suck it up. Get your team together and pull out all the stops. You'll have your own account number to bill the team's expenses against. This could be the story you've been waiting for your whole goddamn career.”

When Wilcox returned to the newsroom, Rick Jillian was there along with Kathleen Lansden, one of two researchers recruited to join the Kaporis task force. Wilcox sat heavily in his chair and looked up at them. “Task force,” he said. “Why didn't they come up with a task force a month ago?”

“I guess because—” Jillian started to say.

“Yeah?” Wilcox asked.

“I guess because they figured you were all they needed, Joe. You know, with your sources and—”

“And they were wrong. Is that what you're saying?”

“No, I'm not saying that. Anyway, you want me to get the others together?”

Wilcox smiled to break the tension. “A meeting is a good idea,” he said. “How about the end of the day, say six? Nail down a conference room and we'll lay out everything we have. You'd better get on what Morehouse said, check that list again of visitors the day Jean got it: guests up here in editorial, tradespeople, everybody.”

“Okay.”

Wilcox said to Kathleen, “Pull up that database again, Kathleen, the one listing interviews other media did with Jean's friends and family. Compare it against the interviews I did—
we
did. Let's see who we missed.”

“Shall do.”

Now alone, Wilcox pulled out notes he'd made. The list was long, more than forty names, many of them editorial coworkers known to have been in the building the night Kaporis was murdered. Interviewing them had brought out overt resentment in some:
“What the hell are you saying, Joe, that
I
might have killed her?”
Many of them had also been interviewed by a team of MPD detectives headed by Edith Vargas-Swayze, who'd asked tougher questions than Wilcox. He'd placed a red dot next to their names, and a green dot for those individuals claiming to have seen her in the newsroom that night. But even they had little to offer:
“No, I didn't see anything unusual.” “No, I didn't see her talking with anyone in particular.” “No, I don't know anybody who was getting it on with her.”

Wilcox knew that the list of men and women working that night couldn't be conclusive. It was built upon those names scheduled for the night shift, which didn't, of course, include anyone from the day side who'd decided to work late, or to come back after hours to follow up on a story. There wasn't any record of employees coming and going in and out of the building. All you did was wave your badge at the private security officer on duty in the front lobby and you were in. Had Kaporis's killer been an editorial staffer who'd come in late that night but denied having been there? Unless someone testified to having seen him (or her) there, they were home free, their word the last word. Which was the case with him, Joe Wilcox. After dinner at home with Georgia, he'd returned to the newsroom a little after nine to put the finishing touches on an article about a new MPD initiative to combat gang warfare in the District's southeast quadrant. He'd told the police of his movements and activities on that night, and his own name headed the list on his desk, a tiny red dot next to it.