Strangled - Brian McGrory [8]
Just like that.
I mumbled “I’ll call you later,” and hung up the phone. I should have been relieved. I should have told her that I understood what she felt. But what I really felt was angry, and, surprisingly, a little fearful, though of what, I wasn’t exactly sure.
Like I said, I knew it was going to be a big day. I just had no idea why.
3
It’s one thing for a reporter to harbor suspicions in a murder case. Hell, suspicion is the backbone of some of the best and most basic newspaper stories. Is the governor right to say she can balance the state budget without raising taxes? Did the president really not have sex with that woman? Did that priest really have all those young boys’ best interests at heart?
But it’s quite another thing for a reporter to be harboring evidence in a murder case, and evidence was exactly what I seemed to be harboring, as I leaned over my desk and studied the driver’s license photograph of a recently deceased woman I never met by the name of Jill Dawson.
She had big blue eyes and shoulder-length dirty-blond hair that looked like it was cut by one of the more expensive stylists — what do they call themselves these days, coiffures? — on Newbury Street. She seemed to have a quiet confidence, like the eldest child of a happily married couple in an affluent suburb like Newton or Wayland. She probably graduated in the top five percent of her high school class, went off to Haverford or Swarthmore, and still takes a vacation with her best friends from college at least once a year. Some guy was probably extremely happy as her boyfriend or husband — unless, of course, that same guy killed her.
Jill Dawson. Yet another woman I met in the past tense. And looking at her, I bet I would have liked her. A lot.
My little newsroom reverie was interrupted by Peter Martin and Edgar Sullivan, who approached my desk the way a cold front approaches New England, which is to say ominously and silently, and beckoned me into the nearby, glass-walled conference room.
“We have the digital tape, but it doesn’t show much,” Edgar said as he pushed a disc into a DVD player. A plasma television screen mounted on the wall lit up, Edgar pressed a button, and the camera froze on the image of a rather overweight security guard sitting at the front desk of the Record, reading — what the hell is this? — the rival Boston Traveler.
“Aha, we’ve finally caught Scully in the act,” I said, maybe a little too animatedly. Both Martin and Edgar ignored me, which I guess is their right, impolite as that might be.
Well, not exactly ignored me. Edgar began his brief presentation by saying, “Jack, if you could just put a zipper on it for about three minutes, that might be helpful.
“As you can see, this camera is trained on the front desk in the lobby. A camera mounted on the wall behind the front desk facing the other way, but was out of order this morning, which is, of course, our bad luck.”
On the screen, Scully flipped the pages of the Traveler, probably from the gossip column to the horse race results. I took Edgar’s counsel and didn’t say this out loud.
“And here comes our visitor,” Edgar said. He now had a pointer in his hand and pointed out the reflection on the shiny tile floor as the big front door opened, then a shadow which was really little more than a fuzzy glare.
The figure seemed to approach Scully from the side of the desk, as if whoever it was had knowledge of the camera angle and was walking outside the line of vision.
“Here’s where we see actual flesh,” Edgar said. And just like that, an arm appeared on the screen, handing Scully the manila envelope that was delivered to my desk shortly after. The arm was partially concealed by what appeared to be Scully, who barely looked up from his paper. Maybe he was trying to figure out if he had hit the trifecta the day before. The arm disappeared, and the shadow receded out the door.
“And that’s it,” Edgar said. “That’s our courier.”
And probably our murderer, I thought.