Hard news - Jeffery Deaver [99]
He eyed her up and down and said, “There you go, Lee, I told you them girls look alike. No wonder I shot the wrong one.”
chapter 32
IT WAS LIKE THE TIME SHE HAD THREE FROZEN MARGARItas, crazy drunk—her mind giddy and spinning, her body sick.
She tensed to leap up out of the chair. But Jack shook his head. “Naw, naw, don’t bother.” He showed her the butt of a pistol in his waistband.
She relaxed. He was right. There was no place to go even if she’d had the strength to get past Maisel, which she didn’t. Maisel closed the door and leaned against it.
Her mind was racing, trying to pin down the speculation. “It was you?” she whispered.
Maisel sighed and nodded.
Rune said, “When I called you at home you just pretended to call Eustice and Krueger and the cops, right?”
“That’s right, Rune. There won’t be any cops.”
“You did it just to get me here. So you could kill me.”
Maisel didn’t answer.
“You bastard,” Rune hissed at him.
Jack wore a short-sleeved striped shirt over his huge belly and gray baggy pants and some kind of rounded, scuffed brown work shoes. He looked her over then picked up a cup of coffee, noisily drank from it.
“Sorry, Rune. I’m so sorry.” Maisel gave her a grim smile but the disappointment and disgust in his face overwhelmed it. He blew air slowly out through his rounded cheeks. Rune could see he was suffering.
Good, she thought.
Maisel poured his drink down in one swallow. “I don’t know what to say to you. I tried to stop it all without hurting you.”
Jack said, “Yeah, he’s right. We tried to kill Boggs in prison. That would’ve solved—”
“You tried to …” Rune looked at Maisel; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Paid to have a buddy of mine in Harrison kill Boggs. Then when you got him out I tried to do it myself. But that man just wouldn’t die.”
“It wasn’t Piper? But she did everything she could to stop the story.”
“Well, sure,” Maisel said. “The story would’ve been bad for her image—she didn’t want the EEOC suits coming to light. She hated having the courts to fight her battles for her. But just because she didn’t want the story to run didn’t mean she was going to stop it.”
“You encouraged me to keep going with it.”
“There’d been rumors that there was more to Hopper’s death than just Randy Boggs acting alone. We needed you to find the evidence, witnesses. We knew we could control you.”
Rune said to Maisel, “Why did you do it?”
“What does it matter?”
“It fucking matters to me!” she snapped.
“Beirut,” Nestor said.
“Shut up!” Maisel snapped.
“The story where those people got killed?”
“Right.”
“She doesn’t need to know,” Maisel muttered.
“Why not?” Nestor said. “You fucked up, Lee. You may as well admit it.” To Rune he said, “You know Lee’s big scoop a few years back? His big fucking award?”
She remembered his Pulitzer. She nodded.
“Well, it was all fake. He made up the interviews, he made up the names of the locals. Who understands all those raghead names anyway? He said they had machine guns and hand grenades and rockets. He scooped everybody.”
“Jack …,” Maisel said angrily.
But Nestor kept right on going. “Only the problem was the U.S. Army believed the story and when they went into this village they were loaded for bear. Some Arab kid shot a round at a dog or rabbit or whatever they got over there and, jittery trigger fingers, the whole platoon opened up. When the smoke cleared there were a bunch of dead ragheads and a couple of our own boys. All friendly fire. All courtesy of Mr. Newsman here.”
“You made up the whole story?” she asked.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Maisel said bitterly. “I mean, it shouldn’t’ve been. I didn’t even think anybody’d pay attention to it. You have to understand—there’s so much pressure to get stories. There’s so much time to fill and so little hard news. And always the fucking competition breathing down your neck. I started just adding a few quotes and the next thing I knew it got out of hand. I never thought it would have any consequences.”
“But it did,” Jack Nestor said, laughing cruelly. “And one of ‘em was that Lance Hopper was going to