Her sister didn’t.
Nicole took a month off and came to New York, determined to destroy Powers’s blog and, if possible, his entire career, based, as it was, on the practice of dolling up sensationalism and half-truths and calling it journalism.
She posed as a part-time J-student and cocktail waitress ten years older than her real age and went for a frumpy, disheveled, and overly made-up look (her personal tastes tended toward Herrera and Karan). She fawned her way into an internship for no pay (she needed anonymity) and set about reading every one of Powers’s blog posts for the past year. Doing so, she learned his weakness: He’d write about any hint of a conspiracy, true or not, and without any regard for the larger implications of the story and who was injured in the process. She’d decided to use his lust for stories like this to hook him. But what bait would be good? Then she had a thought: She recalled reading a newspaper article about interring family members at home; the story mentioned the graveyard on the estate of the Kesslers and referred to some problems with a plot reserved for an aunt who had just died.
Plot...
Perfect!
The overheard conversation in the bar was a fiction, but it could easily have happened, so she felt justified in dangling the words before the blogger. And, of course, Powers went for the shiny lure, like a hungry fish. He’d turned Nicole loose to research Kessler and she’d assembled thousands of pages of news stories and notes about the developer. Then, yesterday, she’d sprung the trap — dropping off all the material for his reading pleasure.
She now continued to Cathy, “Everything I gave him was true, all the stories. I had to play fair. Even the story about their aunt passing away and the graveyard.”
“If he’d read that,” her sister said, “he would’ve spotted the line that the ‘plot’ referred to a grave.”
“True. It was a risk. But I guessed he was so focused on conspiracy that he was only seeing what he wanted to see.” Nicole gave her sister a wry glance. “I’ll admit I wasn’t innocent. I tipped Dan Leavitt that Powers might be running with a questionable story... and then told Powers that Leavitt was asking around. Which he was.”
“So Powers would move faster and not check his facts as thoroughly as he should.”
“Vanity and ego.” Nicole sipped some of the oaky wine and examined the glorious sunset. “I did something else to him.”
“I like the expression on your face when you say that,” Cathy said. “What?”
“That pig... he was sleeping with one of his students. She came by to drop some classwork off and I saw the way she looked at him. I knew. She was eighteen, nineteen tops.”
Cathy wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“So I told him that Leavitt was using spies to steal stories. I imagine — well, I hope — he decided she was one of them and he ended it.”
“What’ll happen to him?”
Nicole said, “Don’t know, don’t care. But none of it’ll be good.” Her hand dropped onto her sister’s arm. “How’re you doing?”
“Some days are all right. I miss him.” She smiled. “Sam was a crusader, you know. That’s why he took that money. He would’ve approved of this, what we did to Powers. Not the getting-even part. But cleaning up dirt.”
Nicole’s phone chimed with a text. “My limo’s here. I’ve got to get to the airport. I’ll see you and the girls on Christmas Eve. Maybe earlier. I’m expecting an early verdict in a trial I have going on.”
The sisters embraced. Then Cathy gave a sharp laugh, as they stepped apart and Nicole donned her coat.
“What?”
“Just occurred to me. There was a plot after all.”
Nicole frowned. “There was?”
“Sure. Yours.” Her sister offered a droll smile. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“To be honest, I enjoyed it. It was good seeing justice done and not having to worry so much about the law, all the rules, the court dockets.”
“Maybe you’ve found a new calling.”
Nicole cocked her head and looked over her sister with amused eyes at the thought. Then she laughed once more, a bright sound that matched perfectly the lovely autumn evening sun streaming into the hotel room.
Another embrace and Nicole was out the door.
The Way They Do It in Boston
by Linda Barnes
Unlike most of the other authors featured in this issue, Linda Barnes has never before appeared in EQMM. She will, nevertheless, probably be well known to our readers. She is the bestselling author of seventeen novels, twelve in the Carlotta Carlyle mystery series and four in the Michael Spraggue series. Her work has won the Anthony and American Mystery awards and received numerous nominations for the Edgar and Shamus awards.
Drew gives a single yank on the whip-thin leash. Gid strains against the collar and makes a noise deep in his throat.
“Nice dog,” Jay Harley says. “Gideon, right?”
Gid, a brown, black, and white shepherd mix, is compact and powerful, with one torn ear and fierce, mismatched eyes. When you see him, “nice dog” is not the phrase that springs to mind.
Some people say dog spelled backward is God. Gid spelled backward is Dig.
“Just Gid,” Drew tells Harley.
Gid got his name in the army. The shredded ear is courtesy of the service as well. The shelter dude said the dog left the service early because he lost his sense of mission, basically went AWOL and played catch with Afghan kids. As soon as she heard that, Drew felt a sense of kinship with the dog, a bond. She got blown up and put back together in Iraq. Lost her sense of mission, too, in the desert near Fallujah. The shrapnel in her left leg sets off screaming alarms at airports.
“Any problems tonight?” Harley asks. He’s a big man, soft in the middle, with graying hair combed over a shiny scalp.
“That light in the back row, it’s dead again.”
“I’ll get Parsons on it. Anything else?”
“Nope, it’s calm.”
She could have substituted boring for calm since guarding a tow lot is flat-out boring on the best of nights, but Drew doesn’t mind. The night work is an antidote for chronic insomnia, plus the lot perches on the edge of the waterfront, the tide ebbing and rising under the wharf. She doesn’t know Boston well, not yet, but her grandparents did, that’s one of the few things she recalls her dad telling her, how her forebears used to swim in the Charles when they were young, legally and safely at the old Magazine Street Beach, how they’d go boating in the harbor, the same harbor where a crate of plastic-wrapped assault weapons washed up last week, video at eleven on Breaking News, Channel 7.
The V.A. shrink says Drew came to the city to find her past. She doesn’t know about that, but she does know this: Patrolling perimeter when the path meanders along the Atlantic Ocean and the tiny lights of tugboats and cargo ships wink at you as they make their way into the harbor isn’t so bad. And she likes working with Gid. She isn’t so keen on Harley. He smells like sweat and tobacco, leers occasionally. Still, the job is an improvement over patrolling unnamed hunks of wind-scoured desert, and something better is bound to turn up.
“Gid want a treat?”
Harley tosses the biscuit to the ground. Gid eyes Drew till she gives an imperceptible nod. Then he scarfs it up. Rigid and unbending, Harley doesn’t come across as a dog lover, but he carries treats.
Drew wears jeans tucked into knee-high boots. Her long-sleeved tee melts into the darkness. She peers at the harbor lights, her stance balanced and ready. Her face is too thin, nose too sharp, eyes too big, but the whole thing pulls together; she’s attractive, could be striking if she bothered to care.