But he didn’t.
“Okay, folks, we appreciate the cooperation,” Simpson said. “We have your contact information and will be in touch should we need anything else.”
“So, we can go?” I asked.
“You can go,” Simpson said.
“What about the body?” Rachel asked. “Is it suicide?”
“It looks that way, yes,” Simpson said. “My partner confirmed it. We appreciate your calling it in.”
“All right, then,” I said.
I turned to head to the Jeep. Rachel did as well.
“I remember who you are now,” Simpson said.
I turned back to him.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I remember who you are now,” he repeated. “I read about the Scarecrow a few years back. Or maybe it was one of those Dateline shows. Hell of a story.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Rachel and I got into the Jeep and drove away.
“That guy didn’t believe a word I said to him,” I said.
“Well, he may get a second shot at you,” Rachel said.
“What do you mean?”
“First, his partner is an idiot for signing off on that as suicide. But the coroner will probably set them straight and it may change to a murder case. They’ll come back to us then.”
That added a layer of dread to the moment. I looked down and saw that Rachel had the printouts on her lap. I remembered glancing back at her in the Jeep while I was being interviewed and seeing her eyes down. She had been reading.
“Anything good in there?” I asked.
“I think so,” Rachel said. “I think the picture is getting clear. But I need to keep reading. Let’s go get that coffee you promised me.”
28
I sat in the conference room with Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. Through the window to the newsroom I could see Rachel sitting at my pod and waiting to be called in. She had asked to use my computer so I knew she was still digging, even as I was attempting to keep her involved in the story. I thought it best that I explain things to Myron and Emily before Rachel came into the meeting.
“If you’ve read my books or know anything about me, you know who Rachel is,” I said. “She has helped me on the biggest stories of my career. She put herself on the line and protected me when I was at the Velvet Coffin, and it cost her her job as an FBI agent.”
“I think it also got the Coffin shut down,” Myron said.
“That’s a bit of an oversimplification but, yeah, that happened then too,” I said. “She had nothing to do with that.”
“And you want to bring her in on the story,” Emily said. “Our story.”
“When you hear what she has, you will see we have no choice,” I said. “And remember, it was my story before it was our story.”
“Oh, wow, a day doesn’t go by that you don’t throw that in my face, does it?” Emily responded.
“Emily,” Myron said, trying to keep the peace.
“No, it’s true,” she said. “I’ve made some major gains on this story but he wants to take what I bring and go off on his own with it.”
“No, I don’t,” I insisted. “It’s still our story. Like I said, Rachel isn’t going to write it. She’s not part of the byline. She’s a source, Emily. She has information about Marshall Hammond that we need to have.”
“Why can’t we get it direct from Marshall Hammond ourselves?” Emily asked. “I mean, I was under the impression that we actually were reporters.”
“We can’t because he’s dead,” I said. “He got murdered this morning... and Rachel and I found the body.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Emily said.
“What?” Myron exclaimed.
“If we had gotten to his place a little earlier we probably would have run into the killer ourselves,” I said.
“Way to bury the lede,” Myron said. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the start?”
“Because I’m telling you now so you will understand why Rachel is so important to this. Let us tell you what happened and then she’ll explain what she’s found out and where we’re at.”
“Go get her,” Myron said. “Bring her in.”
I got up, left the room, and walked to my pod.
“Okay, Rachel, they’re ready,” I said. “Let’s just go in and tell them what we’ve got.”
“That’s the plan.”
She stood up and started gathering the papers she had spread out on the desk. She carried the paperwork under my open laptop, an indication she had something on the screen she planned to show us.
“You found something?” I asked.
“I found a lot,” she said. “I just feel like I should be presenting this to the police or the bureau, not the editor of a website.”
“I told you, not yet,” I said. “Once we publish, you can give it to whoever you want.”
I turned and looked at her as I opened the door to the conference room.
“Showtime,” I whispered.
Myron had moved to a chair next to Emily on one side of the table. Rachel and I sat across from them.
“This is Rachel Walling,” I said. “Rachel, this is Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. So let’s start with what happened this morning.”
I proceeded to tell them how I had stumbled across the connection between William Orton and Marshall Hammond, and how we had gone to Hammond’s home and found him hanging from the crossbeam in his garage lab.
“And it’s a suicide?” Myron asked.
“Well, it was pretty clear the police think that,” I said. “But Rachel thinks otherwise.”
“His neck was broken,” Rachel said. “But I estimated that his drop was no more than a foot. He was not a large or heavy man. I don’t think that kind of drop breaks the neck, and since that is the recurring circumstance in the cases you’re looking at here, I would term the death suspicious at the very least.”
“Did you share this with the police when they said it was suicide?” Myron asked.
“No,” I said. “They weren’t interested in what we thought.”
I looked at Rachel. I wanted to move on from the details of the death. She got the message.
“His broken neck is not the only reason to be suspicious,” she said.
“What else is there?” Myron asked.
“Documents recovered from the lab reveal—”
“‘Recovered’? What exactly does that mean?”
“I believe the killer spent time in Hammond’s lab either before or after he killed him. He hacked the desktop that contained records of much of the lab’s work. He printed out the records. But the printer memory kept the last fifty-three pages he printed. I printed those pages and that’s what I’ve been studying. We now have a good amount of documentation from the lab.”
“You stole it?”
“I took it. If that was stealing, then I would argue that I stole it from the killer. He was the one who printed it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure that that’s what happened. You can’t do that.”
I knew going into the meeting that this would be the place where ethical questions clashed with potentially the best and most important story of my career.
“Myron, you need to know what we’ve been able to learn from the printout,” I said.
“No, I don’t,” Myron said. “I can’t let my reporters steal documents, no matter how important they are to the story.”
“Your reporter didn’t steal them,” I said. “I got them from a source. Her.”
I pointed to Rachel.
“That doesn’t work,” Myron said.
“It worked for the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers,” I said. “They were stolen documents given to the Times by a source.”