The Guilty - Jason Pinter [25]
quote the Boy had left up on that rooftop. He wondered how
Parker felt, if, like the Boy, he was glad Mauser was dead.
The Boy looked at the gun one last time, could picture the
bullet crashing through a helpless skull, and went to sleep.
14
Paulina's telephone rang. She hesitated answering it, focusing instead on the morning edition of the Dispatch spread in
front of her. Her hand gripped a red pencil. She was already
worked up from having to explain to Bynes that a prank caller
had impersonated her. That even though she thought Louis
Carruthers was an idiot she wasn't stupid enough to spew a
racist diatribe to a receptionist.
She was making small notes in the margins, passages that
could have read better, accusations that could have been a
little more salacious without bordering on libel. The article
on Joe Mauser's murder had been written by some hack in
Metro. Paulina's piece on Athena was on page three. Mauser
got page seven. In the kingdom of selling newspapers, heroic
cops were cow shit compared to rich heiresses. Way it went,
and Paulina didn't think twice.
She looked at her caller ID, recognized the area code,
figured if she didn't pick it up he'd just keep calling back. She
picked it up.
"What?"
"Miss Cole, it's James."
"Hi...James."
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Jason Pinter
"Hi?" Hi as a question. As if the word would offend her.
James Keach was a junior reporter at the Dispatch. About
five foot ten, two hundred and ten cookie-dough pounds,
with razor's-edge-parted hair that looked ready to recede
the moment anyone said anything nasty about it. Just two
years out of J-School, James never left the newsroom,
followed reporters around like a beagle awaiting a biscuit,
and was generally more of a nuisance than anyone you didn't
either sleep with or work for had a right to be. The kid had
pulled a solid C+ average, but his father was golfing buddies
with Ted Allen and apparently promised to give Allen an unlimited supply of mulligans at Pebble Beach if his son was
given a shot to learn the ropes. James didn't seem so much
eager to learn the ropes as he did to simply climb halfway
up and hang on for dear life.
Paulina had given James his very first assignment, which,
she stressed, was every bit as important as any story she was
working on that year. Seeing as how he'd spent every previous
waking moment peeking around the watercooler in the hopes
of overhearing gossip, she knew offering Keach a bone would
make him salivate.
So last week, while laying out her eventual hatchet job
on David Loverne, she decided to bring James into the
fold. She wore her highest heels that day, a low-cut blouse,
and a sweet new perfume called Sugar. James would have
driven a lawn mower to Antarctica to report on penguin migration that day.
His assignment, she told him, was to shadow Henry Parker
twenty-four hours a day. Find out where he goes when he's
not at home or at the office. Find out who he speaks with and
what they speak about. Find out who his friends and enemies
are, what he has for breakfast, whether he wears matching
The Guilty
81
socks, everything. She wanted to tie Parker into the Loverne
piece, show how a combination of her father's philandering
and Parker's snubbing drove poor Mya Loverne over the
edge.
For years, Mya had been the consummate politician's
daughter. Bright, attractive, never a hair mussed or sentence
misspoken. She got good grades, and never got into trouble.
Her life had taken a terrible detour when she was attacked by
a man who broke her jaw during an attempted rape. Mya
fought him off, but she had never been the same. Paulina attributed this to her disintegrating family and love life, her
dreams vanishing in a puff of lies.
And so far James was everything she wanted in a bloodhound: loyal, dependent and weak. If reporting didn't work
out, he'd make a hell of a peeping Tom. Hell, just yesterday
Paulina learned that Henry took his coffee with skim milk and
three Splendas. Not exactly front-page material, but Keach
was