“You’re the best, Charlotte,” Franklin says, scooping up the stack of cassettes. “You’ll find a new producer.”
“We’ll see,” I say.
I pull open the office door and the two of us step forward into our new reality.
Head down and almost running, J.T. crashes through the double doors into the newsroom, narrowly avoiding smashing into us. We all stop, regrouping. Franklin picks up the cassettes that tumbled onto the worn once-blue carpeting.
“Sorry, dudes,” J.T. says. He eyes us. “Guess you talked about New York, huh?”
“You know about this?” My voice rises. Never a dull moment. “What, are you leaving, too?”
“Charlotte, he-”
“Listen, dudes, we can deal with that later. In Kevin’s office? That was a call from ENG Joanna. They were taking in a live feed from Liz Whittemore. Joanna said I might want to see it. And she was right.”
“What was it?” Franklin asks.
“Another car fire?” My mind races. If another car has been destroyed, we’re totally on the wrong track. Our Explorer is safely stowed in the station garage. No doubt about that. Uh-oh. “Was there another murder?”
“Nope. Nope. The feed was from downtown, from inside some parking garage,” J.T. says. “The cops found it. They found the carjacked Explorer. It’s red.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You have to slow down. So you can take a ticket.” Franklin points to the black-and-white ticket-dispensing machine, all that’s standing between us and the cops. And, we hope, between us and a lovely close-up VIN view of the carjacked red Explorer. “Push the green button, Charlotte.”
“I know how parking garages work, I’m going to take a darn ticket,” I say. I am almost too impatient to wait for an automatic gate. I hit the brake grudgingly, lean out the window and punch the flashing green dome. It spits out a magnetic striped ticket and the long metal arm slowly, agonizingly slowly, lifts to allow us in.
The Garage at Fifty-Five Friend Street is a multi-storied, poorly lighted, perfect place to hide a car, because it’s where all the other cars are. We could never have found the stolen Explorer. The cops did. According to the faxed news release from HQ that’s now safely in my coat pocket, the license plates had been removed, but unfortunately for the bad guys, remnants of a telltale beach-access parking decal were still in place on the rear window.
“They’re having a news conference, can you believe it?” I say. The car barely clears the gate as I drive through and go up the ramp to the fifth floor, where the police have notified the media they’ll display their find.
“The cops are going to show off this car, trying to prove they’re cracking down on the carjacking situation. But it’s the key to our story. The solution to our where’s the-car dilemma. And it’s right here, served up nicely by Boston’s finest. You’ve got to love it.”
“If it actually is the clone of our Explorer,” Franklin says. He pauses, pulls a tiny spiral notebook from the side pocket of his suede jacket and starts flipping pages. “There are-let’s see-5,600 Explorers in Boston. Possibly fifteen percent of them are red. Plus, if No-Hat, as you’ve now indelibly dubbed him in my head, didn’t get a chance to have his buddies transform the stolen car into a clone, it’ll be a total bust. I mean, it’ll be just another red Explorer.”
“Eeyore,” I say. “You’re always Eeyore. How long can it take to slap on three VIN plates? So I’ll distract the cops while you get a nice shot of No-Hat’s nefarious handiwork with that lovely hidden camera you’ve got. We’ll use the wide shots from Liz and her photog, since they’re covering the news conference.”
I sneak a quick look at Franklin as we hit the straightaway of the second floor.
“Cheer up, partner. We’ve done the hard part, getting video of them stealing our VIN. And now we’re about to be presented a perfect view of the result. I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars it’s the clone of our car.”
Franklin and I always bet ten thousand dollars. Sometimes one or the other of us is down a hundred thousand or so, but it always, eventually, evens out. I ease the car up around the corner, noticing a black-and-red sign indicating we’re on Two Left. With a chill of sadness I realize there might not be time for any new big money bets to even out.
“Where’d they say it was again?” I ask. Changing the subject.
“Left side, space number one, according to the news release.” Franklin says. “And I suppose it’s in the best interest of the cloners to change the car’s identity as quickly as possible. So, we’ll see. All we have to do is get to the VIN number.”
Third floor.
“And since the cops will impound this baby anyway,” I say, “we won’t have to worry about anyone messing with it. They’re actually protecting it for us. Nice. We are having one big fat lucky day.”
I look at Franklin as we head around the curves of the fourth floor, remembering. “Except that you’ve announced you’re leaving me, of course.”
The red Explorer is cordoned off with black-and-yellow plastic tape. Crime Scene, Do Not Cross, it announces in black letters, over and over. Although this is not technically the scene of the crime. There’s no way for us to get close enough to see the VIN. Yet.
Between us and the car, I count six television crews arranged in a semicircle. Six reporters, creating a rainbow of multi-colored parkas, hover next to six photographers. Six cameras with battery-powered lights mounted on top are at the ready on tripods. There’s no power to plug in big portable lights, so the area stays dim, fluorescent tubes across the concrete ceiling struggling to make it approach daylight. The newspaper reporters keep to themselves in a pack to one side. Their parkas, aggressively rumpled, a dimmer rainbow of gray to tan, telegraph their disdain for their on-air competitors.
They’re all waiting for the huddle of blue uniforms to come to a bank of microphones precariously rigged up with gaffer’s tape and retractable metal stands.
Franklin and I stay behind them all. Waiting for our chance.
“Strange, though, that they’d carjack, you know? Why not just steal a car? This is so-out there.”
“Stop fidgeting, Charlotte,” Franklin whispers. “Here they come. They’ll talk, the gang will ask questions, they’ll all leave. Then we can try to get closer.”
“We only need one shot,” I say. I’m calculating the ways we could manage it.
All at once, the garage goes bright. In the instant heat and flare of six battery-powered spotlights, a parade of uniforms approaches the microphones.
“I’m Lieutenant Henry Zavala, Z-A-V-A-L-A, head of the Auto Theft Unit.” A lanky forty-something with a bristling cop-issue mustache and matching eyebrows steps forward. The lights glint on his silver badge. “We are pleased to announce today we’ve recovered…”
“Yeah, yeah, you found the car, big deal,” I mutter as Zavala continues. “So who took it? You know that? That’d be worth a news conference.”
“Shush,” Franklin says. “Maybe they do know.”
The news conference sputters along, a series of self-congratulatory back-pats by the police officers, followed by solemn warnings to citizens to be watchful and keep their car doors locked, followed by fake-aggressive questions from reporters who have no idea they’re on the edges of a real story.
No suspects, the cops finally admit. Victim barely saw the carjackers, can’t describe them. The victims want to be anonymous. Won’t do interviews. Fingerprinting to come. A cop had spied the car on a routine patrol. They confirmed it by the beach decal and a key the owners had hidden under the left front wheel well in a magnetic tin box.
“They haven’t checked the VIN,” I whisper. “Yay.”