As the chief approached, the cameras swung with him until he stopped outside the car door, opening it and gesturing to Casey with his index finger. She slid out, bewildered, her brain overloaded thinking of pithy things to say or do and gummed up so badly her mouth formed a series of silent curse words. When the chief took her by the elbow and began to walk her through the gauntlet with his eyes sparkling behind their wire glasses and his sunken chin as proud as the father of the bride, the questions rained down on Casey in a torrent of screams.
“Why did you do it?”
“How could you turn a serial killer loose?”
“Who helped you?”
“What if he kills again?”
“Did you do it for the money?”
“Are you working with a movie studio?”
“Do you expect to do jail time?”
“Will you represent yourself?”
“Did you intentionally discredit the Freedom Project?”
“Is it true you got Nelson Rivers’s semen sample personally?”
Casey’s mouth snapped open at that one and her head whipped around in the direction of its source, a tall, tan-faced man with a brilliant set of perfect teeth and thick helmet of hair sprayed into place. She flashed him a look of disgust and kept going. When they got to the top of the station steps, the chief turned and gave them all a thumbs-up with a wide yellow-toothed grin before leading Casey inside.
“How about that?” he said to her. “You wanted media, you got media.”
“Take these stupid things off, you son of a bitch,” Casey said. “And hand me my phone.”
“After we’re done processing you with prints and mug shots, you’ll get all the calls you like,” the chief said, removing his hat and smoothing the thin strands of hair over the top of his bald head.
The two arresting cops appeared and led Casey into the back. Secretaries at their desks and cops leaning on walls all stopped to stare. Casey grit her teeth and went through the indignity of having ink smeared across all her fingers and holding up a thin metal frame full of numbers as her photo was snapped.
As the cop named Hank led her to the holding cage, he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt and said, “I guess your reporter boyfriend’s out there making all kinds of noise. Won’t be surprised if he makes his way into lockup himself from what they’re saying.”
Casey said nothing as he handed her into the metal cage where a ragged woman with frizzy orange hair lay snoring on the bench, with an arm over her eyes and the rest of her face caked with dried blood.
“What the hell is that?” Casey asked.
“Domestic,” Hank said, “got into it with her old man then cauterized his nuts with a clothes iron after he passed out on the bed.”
“Looks like he deserved it,” Casey said, studying the purple blots across her cheeks and arms.
“They all say that,” the cops said, and slammed shut the cage.
54
JAKE LOOKED OUT through his open door and into Dora’s hotel room across the hall. They’d taken the conference call with the head of the network on their respective cell phones and didn’t want to disrupt the call with any annoying feedback, so they stayed in their own rooms but left the doors open so they could communicate nonverbally if needed. Quinton Walsh, the network president, complained about Jake’s personal involvement with Casey.
“Well, he’s very close to it, Mr. Walsh,” Dora said, giving Jake a pleading look, “but that’s the trademark you’ve worked so hard to establish. We get closer. We don’t make the news, but we’re right there when it happens, watching. The rest of them report on what they hear secondhand. Jake’s right there on this.”
“With a story that contradicts everything else we’re hearing,” Quinton Walsh said.
“Because we’re breaking this thing,” Jake said, excited, and feeling as if he’d turned a corner in his quest to convince the network executive that Casey was being framed. “We’ve got the real story. Everyone else is chasing some Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float, blown into being by a lot of Madison Avenue windbags working for the real culprit here.”
“This woman judge, this Rivers?” Walsh said. “You can’t tell me that’s not a story.”
“She’s a story, but page four compared to the real conspiracy,” Jake said, adrenaline flowing. “Graham created the story to discredit her. He’s got a billion dollars in gas leases that would go belly-up if she got onto that court, and some pretty shady partners-”
“We think,” Dora said, waving both hands downward to keep him from going over the edge.
Jake nodded at her and said, “He tries to buy her off, but that doesn’t work. What’s he do? A snake like Graham, plugged in like he is-the great philanthropist-he writes a script that exposes her past indiscretions and he does it in a way that gets everyone’s attention. Brad Pitt, for Christ’s sake, did you see that?”
“This is our theory,” Dora said, cutting in again.
“Your theory?” Walsh asked.
“Yes,” Dora said, giving Jake a curt nod across the hallway, “that’s what we’re working on.”
“A very complex conspiracy theory,” Walsh said, his voice flat. “The other networks are having a field day with this crazy redheaded lawyer, who happens to be gorgeous. She sprung her law professor-a serial killer. Took on a sitting US senator-he gets murdered a few months after the dust settles. And now this. Lifetime even announced they’re rerunning the movie they made about her, but we’ve got a conspiracy theory. Are you listening to yourselves?”
“Why let the truth get in the way of good TV, right?” Jake said, scowling big enough for Dora to see.
“Listen, Blond Bomber,” Walsh said, his voice sour. “I was digging into the Bay of Pigs when you were a wet dream, so don’t get cute.”
“I’m sorry, Quinton,” Jake said, his voice subdued, “but I’m right, goddamn it. You know I don’t just say things like this.”
“I know you don’t.”
“This isn’t about his contacts, is it, Quinton?” Jake asked. “Because I got a mandate from somewhere on high to do this puff piece on the guy, and I’ve got to tell you, it is not what we normally do.”
“You ever take biology, Jake?” Walsh asked after another uncomfortable pause.
“Uh, sure, freshman year at Cornell.”
“Remember the frogs? The ones you cut up?”
“Couldn’t get the smell off my hands for about a week,” Jake said, giving Dora a quizzical look and rotating his index finger around his ear.
“You make your H cut and peel back that white belly and there it is,” Walsh said, “the perfect machine, but by the time you’re done taking the pieces out, you’ve got a mess. Something you couldn’t put back together in a million years.”
“You lost me at the H cut,” Jake said.
“Don’t try to dissect this, Jake,” Walsh said. “No one likes a man with stinky hands.”
“So you’re pulling the plug?” Jake said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Walsh sighed in a gust. “I didn’t say that, Jake. I just said let the surgeon be the one to paw around in the guts. Don’t go poking around about his high-up contacts with the network. Leave that part out of it.”
Walsh paused, then said, “Okay, you two go ahead and I’ll tell the evening news to hold back. If it’s a dead end, then we’ll have struck out in the top of the first.”