Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [107]
“You have a Lava Lamp?”
“Had,” Rune corrected sadly.
“Where’re you staying?”
“With Sam for a while. Then I’ll get a new place. Someplace different. I was ready to move anyway. I lived here for over a year. That’s too long to be in one place.”
A tugboat went by. A horn blared. Rune waved. “I know them,” she told Sutton, who twisted around to watch the low-riding boat muscle its way up the river.
“You know,” Rune said, “I’ve got to tell you. I kind of thought you were the one behind the killings.”
“Me?” Sutton wasn’t laughing. “That’s the stupidest crap I ever heard.”
“I don’t think it’s so stupid. You tried to talk me out of doing the story then offered me that job in England—”
“Which was real,” Sutton snapped. “And got filled by somebody else.”
Rune continued, unfazed, “And the day of the broadcast, when you ad-libbed, the tapes were missing. Even the backup in my credenza. You were the only one knew they were there.”
Sutton impatiently motioned with her hand, as if she were buying candy by the pound and wanted Rune to keep adding some to the scale. “Come on, think, think, think. I told you I was on my way to see Lee. He asked me if you’d made a dupe. I told him that you had and you’d put it in your credenza. He’s the one who stole it.”
“You also went through my desk after Boggs escaped. Danny saw you—the electrician.”
“I didn’t want any of that material floating around. You were really careless, by the way. You trust too many people. You …” She realized she was lecturing and reined herself in.
They watched the tugboat for a few minutes until it disappeared. Then Sutton said abruptly, “You want your job back, you can have it.”
“I don’t know,” Rune said. “I don’t think I’m a company person.”
A brief laugh. “Of course you’re not. You’ll get fired again. But it’s a peach job until you do.”
“The local or the Network?”
“Current Events, I was thinking.”
“Doing what? Like a script girl?”
“Assistant producer.”
Rune paused then dropped a pair of scorched jeans into the trash pile. “I’d want to do the story. The whole thing. About the Hopper killing. And I’d have to include Lee this time.”
Sutton turned back, away from the water, and stood up, looking over the huge panorama of the city. “That’s a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Current Events won’t be running any segments about the Hopper killing. Or about Boggs.”
Rune looked at her.
“Network News covered it,” the woman said.
Rune said wryly, “Oh, that’s right. I saw that story. It was about sixty seconds long, wasn’t it? And it came after the story of the baby panda at the National Zoo.”
“The powers-that-be—at the parent—decided the story should go away.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Can you blame them?”
“Yes,” Rune said.
In her prototype Piper Sutton voice, Piper Sutton snapped, “It wasn’t my decision to make.”
“Wasn’t it?”
Sutton took a breath to speak then didn’t. She shook her head slowly, avoiding Rune’s eyes.
Rune repeated, “Wasn’t it?” And surprised herself again by hearing how calm she sounded, how unshaken she now was in the presence of this woman—a woman who wore suede and silk and bright red suits, a woman richer and smarter than she’d ever be. A famous commentator, who now seemed abandoned by words. Rune said, “You’d rather the competition did the story? Prime Time Tonight or Pulse of the Nation?”
Sutton stepped up on a creosoted railroad tie bolted into the pier as a car barrier. She looked in the water; her expression said she didn’t like what she saw. Rune wondered if it was her reflection.
She said simply, “The story won’t run on Current Events.”
“What would happen if it did?”
“If you want to know I posed that exact question. And the answer was if it does the parent’ll cancel the show.” Then she added, “And I’ll be out of work. You need a better reason than that?”
“I don’t think I want my job back, no,” Rune said. She’d found some of her old comic books; they’d miraculously survived both the fire and looters. She looked at the cover of a 1953 classic—“Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” who swung out of a tree toward a startled lion. The cat