The Newsmakers (15 page)

“Why did it happen?” Erica asks.

“We're going to look into it. Could be mechanical. Or it could be a glitch in the software. These cars are all computerized.”

“Could it have been intentional?”

The maintenance man looks incredulous. “I guess so. But what kind of sicko would want to put someone through that?”

What kind of sicko?

Erica heads out into the welcome air. As she steps to the curb to hail a cab, she looks back at the GNN building and thinks,
That is not a safe place
.

CHAPTER 31

BETH ISRAEL HOSPITAL IS ON
First Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Erica jumps out of the cab, heads into the main entrance, walks up to the front desk, and gets Mark's room number.

She hesitates before stepping on the elevator. As the car rises, she says the Serenity Prayer several times. It centers her, gives her strength and faith. Which she badly needs right now. She feels as if she's moving into uncharted territory. When she dreamed of her career, she never imagined she would find herself caught up in a story this big, with national security implications, where people's lives are at stake. Where she herself may be in danger.

In some core way Erica feels like she's been in danger her whole life—when a little girl's parents use her as an emotional and physical punching bag, a foil for their sad, sick lives, can she ever really feel safe? She thought fame and success and money would protect her, buffer her from pain and fear. Now that hope seems naive. She takes a deep breath, trying to calm the telltale beat of her troubled heart.

Erica walks down the wide hallway. She doesn't like hospitals—all the plastic, all the sickness, all the depressingly cheery colors, all the downcast people coming out of the rooms after visits, all the patients
shuffling down the hallways with walkers. She smiles at a passing nurse. Nurses, on the other hand, she loves—they're on the front line, in the trenches every day, doing the dirty work—the ones she's known tend to be caring, no-nonsense, and a little eccentric. They're real people doing real work that really matters. Heroes.

Erica reaches Mark's private room. The door is open but she can't see him because the curtain is drawn. She can see a middle-aged couple sitting at the foot of his bed, watching him with deep concern.

She knocks gently on the door. “May I come in?”

The woman nods. Erica walks past the curtain and gets her first look at Mark, and her stomach turns over. His head is wrapped in bandages and his face looks like one big bruise, red and yellow and purple and green, grotesquely swollen, blood caked at the corners of his open mouth, several teeth gone, one eye shut tight, stitches along his temple and cheek. There are tubes everywhere, drips and catheters and bags.

Erica and the couple exchange sad, stricken looks. “Are you Mark's parents?”

The man nods. “Chuck Benton. This is my wife, Marie.”

“I'm Erica Sparks, a colleague of Mark's.”

“Mark mentioned you. He likes you,” Marie says. “Thank you for coming.”

The Bentons look like they're still in shock. There are two suitcases beside them.

“I'm so sorry this happened,” Erica says. “How long have you been here?”

“A couple of hours. We flew in from Cleveland.”

“Do you have a hotel?”

“We got a reservation at the Holiday Inn on Houston.”

That sounds depressing. Erica goes out to the nursing station and approaches a young male nurse who is writing on a clipboard.

“Can you recommend a nice nearby hotel?”

He looks up and smiles. “Everyone loves The Inn at Irving Place.
It's about three blocks west, small and very homey. A lot of patients' families stay there. It's not cheap though.”

Erica takes out her phone and calls the hotel. She manages to book the Bentons a room, requests fresh flowers, and tells the hotel to put it on her credit card. Then she calls the Holiday Inn and cancels the reservation there. She walks back into Mark's room and tells the Bentons. Marie Benton's eyes tear up with gratitude. Chuck Benton protests but Erica fibs and assures him GNN is paying, is happy to pay.

A doctor walks into the room. Clearly the Bentons have met him earlier. The doctor recognizes Erica and stands a little taller. “Mitch Kaminer. Nice to meet you.”

The Bentons and Erica watch as the doctor scans the chart hanging at the end of Mark's bed.

“How is he doing?” Erica asks.

“No change. Which is good news at this point.”

“Can you tell me a little bit about his injuries?”

“With his family's permission I can.”

Chuck Benton nods.

“Mark suffered a serious beating with blunt force trauma to the skull. There was swelling on the brain, and we removed a portion of his skull to alleviate the pressure. He also has a broken left arm, a broken right orbital bone, numerous cuts, and severe bruising. Right now his prognosis is uncertain.” The doctor hesitates and then says without much conviction, “But I've seen people recover from worse injuries.”

Poor dear Mark. Erica reaches out and squeezes his hand. “Keep fighting, my friend, keep fighting! You've got a lot of windsurfing left to do.”

The doctor leaves and Erica sits beside Mark's parents, numb, until she loses track of time and all she hears is the hum and gurgle of the machines that are keeping him alive.

A black man of around forty enters the room—he's wiry, kinetic, handsome, with a closed, wary face and eyes that have seen too much.

“Detective George Samuels,” he says without a smile.

Introductions are made. Samuels walks over beside the bed and looks at Mark. He doesn't flinch.

“Can you tell us where and when Mark was mugged?” Erica asks.

“It happened on Charles Street in the West Village, a half block from his apartment, at approximately five thirty this morning. No witnesses have come forward. But this wasn't a mugging. Muggers steal the wallet, the laptop, the cell phone, and then get the hell out of there. This guy—or guys—stuck around to administer . . . this. Which is assault with a deadly weapon, probably attempted murder.”

“But why my Mark? He never hurt anyone,” Marie Benton says. Then she starts crying.

Erica feels guilt rise up like a wave inside her. This happened because of her. She's the one that pulled Mark into this story. It's her fault he's lying in this hospital bed fighting for his life. What if he dies?

“When we see this kind of overkill, it usually means that someone wants to send a message,” Detective Samuels says.

As Erica feels her short hairs stand up, she thinks,
Message received
.

CHAPTER 32

IT
'
S A SOLID WALL OF
stainless steel, his kitchen. Kitchens are so messy otherwise. Food is so messy, a necessary inconvenience. Like sleep. Not that Nylan sleeps much. A couple of hours a night is all he's ever needed, and he can function at warp speed with none at all. Sleep is boring. It has no momentum, no juice.

It's a little before three in the morning, Nylan's favorite time of day. He loves the feeling of being disassociated from the everyday rhythms that the masses live by. Poor things. What meaningless little lives they lead. He's at the stainless-steel kitchen wall, which is at one end of his sixty-foot living room on the seventieth floor of One57. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows—he's floating above the whole tapestry of glittering, glowing New York. The view bores him too. He touches a panel on the wall and an espresso maker appears; he presses a button and it hisses to life.

She's even more intriguing and alluring than he'd expected. And so cunning and curious in her own stunted way. And so heartrendingly sincere. Even idealistic. Idealism is so touching. And so weak. Weakness enrages him.

But she's so beautiful. Her face, her body, the proportions, the curves and swells. She's a genetic masterpiece. And she's
his.

But how did she spring from such barren soil? From a trailer in Maine? From crude, stupid stock. Nylan has always felt people like that should be culled. Sterilized at least. They weaken the gene pool. But then, by some miracle, they bring an Erica Sparks into the world. He should send them a tower of gifts from Harry & David as a thank-you present. He laughs out loud at the thought.

Of course she's made terrible mistakes. You can't throw a guttersnipe into Yale without some growing pains. Like everyone else, she has a breaking point. And she broke. And she'll break again. He smiles at the prospect.

Nylan doesn't break. He never has. And his life hasn't been easy; his childhood was traumatic too. Poor Nylan. His mother died when he was nine. Plowed her car into a tree. It changed everything, didn't it? After all, he grew up so deeply privileged. How many boys have a house with thirty rooms to explore? That grand two-story staircase, the paneled library imported from an English castle with cherubs carved into the woodwork, the living room that seemed to stretch on forever, the nooks and crannies and hidden attics full of secret dreams and secret desires. His private kingdom. Until
she
arrived. He was eleven years old. His father sat him down and explained how lonely he'd been since Nylan's mother died, how the house needed a woman to run it, how he needed a wife by his side, how he was sure Nylan was going to fall in love with Gwen just as he had.

Well, he didn't. He didn't fall in love with Gwen. He fell in hate with her. With her edicts and oozing smiles and swept-back hair, she treated him like he was an afterthought, an interloper in his own house. Ordering the maids not to clean his room. Telling him to stay upstairs when she threw one of her fancy parties. Stealing his father, who stopped taking him to the country club for golf and a club sandwich and a sneaked sip of his Scotch. Forgetting his birthday.
She forgot his birthday!
And then when he told her, she acted all innocent and
contrite, but he could tell that she was lying and that she forgot it on purpose. That was the last straw.

And so he pushed her. Pushed her down that grand staircase that she loved so much—waiting until all the guests had arrived before appearing at the top, to oohs and aahs and laughter and a hundred tipsy, admiring “Gwen!”s tossed up her way. But there was no one in the vast entry hall that night and Father was away on business and he waited in the linen closet—one of four—with the door cracked, waited until he saw her leave her bedroom and walk down the long hallway on her way down to the bar for her nightcap of some girly-Gweny liqueur made from some stupid delicate flower that only grows in the Alps, and just as she set foot on the top step, he stepped out of the closet as quiet as a ghost—
Rush! Rush! Rush up behind her and PUSH! PUSH HARD! SHOVE HER, SHOVE HER DOWN THE STEPS!
And she tumbled, too shocked to even cry out, and fell over herself again and again and again, her head cracking, then cracking again.

And then she lay limp at the bottom. Like a little doll with its limbs akimbo and blood oozing from its ears. And he slipped back to his bedroom and spent the whole night shivering in triumph.

His father was never the same. Served him right.

Ah, youth.

Nylan takes his perfect little cup of espresso and heads down a long hallway, past his bedroom and library, deep into the bowels of the apartment, far from the glittering view, far from the world.

His safe room is dark, with several large club chairs facing a bank of screens. Nylan settles into one of the chairs. He takes a sip of his espresso, carefully places it on a small table, picks up a remote. The footage of Erica reporting from Battery Park comes on one screen. He watches as she makes her perfect intro and then all hell breaks loose as the ferry crashes. The tape is on a loop and it starts again. He clicks the remote and Erica's interview with Kay Barrish comes on a second screen. She's so composed, so charming, and then Barrish clutches her chest and falls to the floor, and Erica falls after her, gallantly
performing CPR. That tape is also on a loop and starts again. He clicks again and Erica stepping into the elevator comes on a third screen. And then the elevator stops and a look of panic comes over Erica's face, and then the elevator goes dark and she screams in the dark, “Help! Help me!” This footage is on a loop too. He clicks again and a fourth screen fills with Erica in her office, undressing. She slips out of a dull dress and now she's standing there in nothing but her bra and panties, just her bra and panties covering her curves and swells, and she doesn't know she's being watched, that his eyes follow her everywhere, and her undressing plays on an endless loop . . .

And now the room, the world, is filled with Erica, and Nylan's eyes move from screen to screen, his pulse quickening, his arousal growing—Erica charming, Erica undressing, Erica screaming, Erica undressing, Erica screaming . . .
Scream, Erica, scream . . .

And he thrusts, lurches forward, and his elbow knocks over the espresso.

And he slumps back in the chair. Oh, Nylan, you've made a mess.

Silly boy.

CHAPTER 33

IT
'
S SIX A.M. THE FOLLOWING
morning. Erica is walking to work, her armor—baseball cap and sunglasses—in place. Her phone rings. It's Greg.

“Good morning.”

“I've got a bombshell, Erica. The LA County's medical examiner just announced a press conference for seven their time. Kay Barrish's autopsy revealed that she didn't die of a heart attack. She was poisoned. Cyanide.”

Erica stops cold on the street, the morning rush surging around her. How could this be possible? “You mean she was
murdered
?”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“How? When?”

“It must have been right before your interview.”