The Other Daniel - A Camille Grisham Novella (2 page)

"I'm being serious. Make her believe that
she's getting just as much out of this as you are and you won't
have any problem getting her to open up."

"How exactly does talking about Daniel Sykes
benefit her current situation?"

"You write your sympathy piece, only instead
of focusing on Sykes, focus on Camille. The world deserves to know
what really happened during that confrontation, and what happened
to her as a result. Get people to understand Camille's back story
and they might be more apt to listen to her regarding her friend's
murder. Win for her, win for you. Actually, Pulitzer Prize for
you." The gleam in Meredith's soft brown eyes was trumped by the
wide smile that had spread across her angular face. She was pushing
all the right buttons again.

With a gleam of his own, Jacob returned to
his phone - same silent scrolling routine as before.

"What are you looking at now?" Meredith
asked, feeling slighted for a second time.

"The next flight to Denver."

Suddenly she didn't feel the least bit
slighted. "So Camille is our girl?"

Jacob tucked his phone into his pocket as he
stood up. The white Oxford shirt he wore was wrinkled and at least
two sizes too big. Meredith made a note to recommend a stylist
befitting the world's next great true-crime author. And if she had
anything to say about it, that is exactly what Jacob Deaver was
going to be.

"Camille is our girl," he said with
confidence.

"The only problem is that she hasn't been
seen much in public lately. How will you even know where to find
her?"

"Promise me that Pulitzer and I'll go to the
ends of the earth if I have to."

For the sake of their bestseller, Meredith
hoped like hell that he meant it.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SHARK

The City Perk Café was a
trendy little coffee shop
located in a
section of the city that felt overrun with trendy little coffee
shops. Like most of the others, it was normally crowded with
wide-eyed college students pounding away at their Apple MacBooks
and sipping delicately on their custom-made cappuccinos. If you
weren’t one of them, the air of determined self-importance created
by their collective efforts could be suffocating. As a result,
Camille Grisham rarely allowed herself to stay longer than the five
minutes it took to make her no-whip skinny mocha.

On this particular morning, however, the
City Perk was nearly empty – a first in the two months that she had
been coming here. Without the hordes of twenty-something’s
occupying every square inch of space the atmosphere was bright,
like one of those festive French bistros you see on the Travel
Channel. Having not spent much time in bright atmospheres lately,
she couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a seat while she waited
for her coffee.

“If you want to hang out, I’d be happy to
put this in a mug for you,” the barista whose name Camille couldn’t
remember said when she noticed her sitting.

With little on her agenda other than the
fruitless hours she planned to spend staring at a blank notebook
with the words PRO and CON written at the top, Camille decided to
grab a newspaper, stake out a small table in the back, and take in
as much of this Travel Channel experience as she could. “A mug
would be great,” she told the barista with a smile that wasn’t
entirely manufactured.

For more than an hour she skimmed the
morning paper, sipped delicately at her latte the way the college
kids did, and allowed herself to simply exist. Normal, just like
everyone else. There had been moments of normal in the past six
months, but they were always fleeting, like the illusion of liquid
blue in an otherwise barren desert. Camille worried that this
moment of normal would eventually meet the same fate, but she
basked in it nonetheless.

Only a handful of customers entered the café
during her time there. A few took up seats in the empty tables
around her, huddled in close conversation or staring intently at
their electronic tablets. The rest took their orders to enjoy
elsewhere.

Camille kept a close eye on each one.

Watching people, studying their movements,
their expressions, their body language, had been a habit engrained
in her as an FBI profiler. Though it had been some time since she
used the skill in any official capacity, she instinctively applied
it to every situation she found herself in. Camille was once
afflicted with the notion that she could break down a person’s
entire psychological make-up within two minutes of meeting them.
These days she wasn’t nearly as confident. But it didn’t stop her
from trying.

She knew, for instance, that the middle-aged
couple sitting two tables away was in the midst of a relationship
crisis that the French bistro cheeriness of the City Perk did
little to alleviate. His wandering eye was most certainly to blame.
Her blatant indifference to it didn’t help. That wandering eye
landed on Camille, as it had every other woman who walked into the
café. A couple of the younger girls met the handsome man’s gaze
with passive smiles and that unmistakable
lock-of-hair-tucked-behind-the-ear signal of flirtation. Camille
responded with the thousand-yard stare indigenous to prison yards
across the country and perfected through her eight years spent in
the company of the planet’s most hardened criminals.

No great surprise that his eyes failed to
find her a second time.

She was used to the attention, even before
the tabloids made her face a fixture in hair salons and hospital
waiting rooms across America. When it came to her appearance,
Camille could be self-effacing to the point of being extreme;
meeting most every compliment she received with a sneer, a sigh, or
an eye roll. On really good days an unsuspecting suitor got all
three. But the compliments kept coming. Even after a bullet
fragment cut across her left cheek, dotting her light olive
complexion with a one and a half-inch scar, no Camille Grisham news
story was ever complete without at least one reference to what they
termed her ‘fashion runway’ looks. The last story even went so far
as to suggest that she play herself in the movie version of her
life, since very few actresses on the current SAG roster could fit
the bill. Little that Camille read about herself inspired genuine
laughter. That last bit certainly did. Unfortunately, it didn’t
make the glare of the spotlight any less harsh.

The stares from admirers and curious
onlookers were easy to deal with. Sometimes they pointed, sometimes
they took pictures with their cell-phone cameras, but they always
did so at a respectful distance.

The cold, hungry stares of the media sharks
were something else altogether. There was no casual curiosity with
them; no respectful distance. The sharks only wanted blood, and in
six months of pursuing Camille’s story they had gotten plenty. But
true to every shark’s nature, it was never enough. No matter how
many sound bites they got, they wanted more. No matter how
dutifully her ex-police sergeant pit-bull of a father fought them
off, they found a way to slip past him. No matter how bright and
festive the atmosphere around her was, they managed to darken
it.

The man sitting near the café entrance was
just such a shark. Camille knew it the moment he walked in, though
his humble smile, weathered tweed jacket, and crisp blue linen
shirt offered an admirable disguise. Despite making a concerted
effort not to look in his direction, she could sense that he had
been watching her. His attention was subtle – passing glances
mostly – but it was persistent. When she finally returned his
attention with the hardest glare she could summon, he shifted
nervously in his chair and promptly looked away. The real sharks
rarely looked away, and for a moment Camille wondered if she had
misjudged his intentions. Perhaps he was nothing more than the
young English Lit professor that his attire suggested him to be. Or
maybe it was a rare case of the prey finally getting the best of
the predator. Either way, Camille couldn’t help but feel relieved
when he stood up, took one last pull from his coffee cup, and
hoisted his messenger bag around his shoulder.

The thousand-yard death
stare strikes again,
she thought as she
allowed an easy smile to spread across her face. That stare was by
far the most effective weapon of defense that she had. And she
didn’t even need a license to carry it.

Once he was out of sight, Camille turned her
attention back to the unhappy couple. The husband’s eyes were now
firmly planted in a newspaper while his wife’s drifted impassively
out the window. She was very pretty; elegant yet understated. But
behind the carefully constructed veneer, Camille saw a broken
woman. A woman not unlike herself. But unlike Camille, there
appeared to be no fight left in her; no death-stare capable of
combating the predators. She didn’t know what tragedies may have
stained this woman’s past, but she was well aware of the tragedies
that stained her own. She lived with them every day. Yet she still
had the will to fight, and the strength to push back when she
needed to. That strength wasn’t always easy to come by, and Camille
would need a lot of it in the days and weeks ahead, but she was
confident it would be there.

She found herself staring at the woman in an
effort to get her attention. She had little more to offer than a
smile and a nod of understanding, but she hoped that the quiet
acknowledgement from a kindred spirit would be enough to help her
find the resolve to look beyond the black hole of hopelessness
sitting across the table from her.

Unfortunately her gaze was not enough to
break the spell of whatever daydream the woman had retreated
into.

It was enough to attract her husband,
however. His eyes narrowed as they fell on Camille and she could
sense the makings of a smile come across his chemically-tanned
face. Camille smiled too as she imagined his reaction to the stiff
middle finger she was about to shoot in his direction. She was on
the verge of pulling the trigger when something diverted her
attention.

The man with the messenger bag was
approaching her table.

Suddenly forgetting about her crusade
against Mr. Chemical-tan, Camille grabbed her coffee mug and stood
up. She had been right about the shark’s intentions all along and
was upset with herself for not leaving the moment she saw him.

Her abrupt movement caused him to stop a few
feet short of the table. He smiled in a way he probably thought was
disarming and took his hand out of his pocket as if he were
preparing to extend it.

Camille stopped him before he could begin
the pitch for whatever it was he wanted to sell. “Sorry, I was just
leaving.”

He blocked her path as she tried to walk
away, still trying to disarm her with his less-than-charming smile.
“Just a quick moment of your time. That’s all I ask.”

Resisting her first instinct to shove him
into the table, Camille rigidly stood her ground. “If you start by
telling me you’re with the Post or the Mile High Dispatch, that
moment will be quicker than you can possibly imagine.”

“I promise I’m not with
either one. My name is Jacob Deaver and I should say, in the
interest of full disclosure, that I am a former journalist with the
Boston Globe. Former
being the operative
word. No respectable news agency would touch me with a ten-foot
pole now.”

“And this is supposed to
make me feel
better
about talking to you?”

He chuckled nervously. “Probably not. But I
swear my intentions are good.”

“A journalist with good intentions. That
would certainly be a first.”

“That’s precisely why I left
journalism.”

“If you aren’t angling for a story then why
are we talking?”

“I never said I wasn’t angling for a story.
I merely said I wasn’t an active journalist.”

His voice was laced with a know-it-all
smugness that reminded Camille of the college kids who usually
occupied the café. Despite his thick beard and conservative
appearance, he probably wasn’t much older than any of them. He
certainly wasn’t any more tolerable to be around. “Did you come in
here with the intention of invading my personal space or did the
notion just randomly strike you?”

The self-assured grin he fought to maintain
suddenly abandoned him and the hand he had prepared to extend fell
into his pocket. “I didn’t follow you here if that’s what you’re
suggesting.”

Camille didn’t believe him, but saw no
benefit in belaboring the point. “Either way I don’t have time to
chat. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be with some kid who has
nothing better to do than waste his time pursuing a story that has
already been told a million times.”

“I’m not a kid, Ms. Grisham. And I can
guarantee this story hasn’t been told.”

She had been prepared to walk away, but his
unwavering tone gave her pause. “What makes you so sure about
that?”

“Because I haven’t had the good fortune of
meeting you until now.” With that, he lowered his messenger bag and
pushed a chair back from the table. “Two minutes. Please.”

Camille watched with wary eyes as he sat
down. She continued standing. “Who are you?”

“My name is Jacob Deaver.”

“You’ve already told me your name. But you
haven’t told me who you are.”

“I’m someone who wants to give you an
opportunity that no one else has.”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “And
what opportunity would that be?”

“The opportunity to let the world hear from
you in an unfiltered, unedited way – your thoughts, your
experiences, your opinions.”

“Same spiel I’ve heard countless times, Mr.
Deaver. Still not interested.” Camille turned to walk away, but the
words he said next stopped her cold.