Ecstasy (35 page)

Which means… the minute I got out of jail, I got suspended.

The long and the short of it was that although nobody really believed that yours truly ran the Gabriel outpost of the Medellín
drug cartel, it didn’t matter. Chester, our much-detested publisher, has always been obsessed with the “family newspaper”
thing—and having one of his reporters get busted with a kilo of coke doesn’t make for an image of milk-fed wholesomeness,
if you know what I mean.

Marilyn was very apologetic; she said she was sorry I was getting royally shafted, but her hands were tied. Until the whole
mess got resolved, I wasn’t welcome anywhere near the
Monitor
newsroom. And I wasn’t getting paid, either.

Now, normally I would’ve been just as happy to go running home to Mom and Dad, where I could get lots of sympathy and not
have to worry about grocery money. But under the terms of my bail, I didn’t get to leave the county. So there I was—stuck
at home, with no desire to show my recently incarcerated face in public, and so financially freaked out I was living on Lipton’s
pasta packets.

Sure, my friends stopped by after work with red wine and news-room gossip, but I felt like I was already halfway up the river.
Cody called me every night, but for some reason I didn’t want to see him until this idiotic nightmare was over. I guess I
was feeling like Typhoid Mary, and I didn’t want my criminal squalor to rub off on him. And to make matters worse, I was living
alone—Melissa having gone straight from the hospital to visit friends in Toronto. My only company was my dog and her cat.

After a few days of this, I was ready to chew my own foot off. Although I’m a big fan of hanging around and doing nothing,
I don’t much enjoy doing it against my will. And even though Cody had promised it would all be over soon—obviously, there
was no way I was going to get indicted—even the remote possibility that I was going to spend my next thirty birthdays in Bedford
Hills was enough to send me into one whopper of a depression.

Then I got indicted.

If that surprises you, well… imagine what a mother of a shock it was to me.

How, you may wonder, could this possibly occur? I mean, obviously, I didn’t do it; I’ve never even
tried
cocaine, much less sold it. So how could the system shove an innocent person such as myself one giant step closer to the
hoosegow?

The answer is simple: Somebody lied. According to my lawyer—a sweet, motherly lady who proved to be a goddamn banshee in the
courtroom—a guy who’d been picked up on drug charges was told he could cut a deal if he named his supplier.

He said it was me.

The guy even testified to that fact, under oath, to a grand jury. If I wasn’t entirely screwed before, I was now.

And by the way: The person who screwed me was named Robert Adam Sturdivant.

They’d picked him up at the Miami airport, where a test of some new facial-recognition software had paid off within the first
two hours. Sturdivant’s ugly mug triggered a hit from the fugitive database, and the next thing he knew he was on a plane
back to New York. After getting interrogated by every law-enforcement agency with jurisdiction over the Melting Rock deaths—not
to mention the Gabriel cops—Sturdivant started talking.

Unfortunately, what he told them was that I was the drug queen of upstate New York.

Naturally, Sturdivant’s accusations were duly documented in the
Gabriel Monitor
—so in addition to being railroaded and framed, I was also intensely humiliated. My beloved colleagues even took the head
shot from my movie review column and ran it on page one under the headline
LOCAL REPORTER INDICTED ON COKE CHARGES
. Within five minutes the Walden County D.A. was trying to convince my lawyer that I should do myself a favor and flip on
my
supplier in return for a reduced sentence. Overnight, I’d gone from Alex B. to goddamn Josef K.

It was all so ridiculous, it would’ve been funny. That is, if it were happening to somebody other than me.

Granted, I had a lot more going for me than most people who get shafted by the system. I had a high-priced lawyer, gratis;
I had a cop boyfriend who swore up and down he was going to get me out of this, despite the fact that he’d been told to steer
clear of my case or else; and I had a couple of friends (Mad and Ochoa) who pledged to defend me like some semi-inebriated
Knights of the Round Table.

But I was still pretty terrified.

Finally, three days after the grand jury threw me to the wolves, something good happened. To wit: I woke up mad as hell.

It’s true; I was positively furious. After a week of wallowing in self-pity and abject fear, I finally got pissed off. Somebody
wanted me out of the way—specifically, I was pretty sure they wanted me off the Melting Rock story—and so far, they were doing
a damn good job of it.

Well, as far as I was concerned, that was bloody well over. If somebody didn’t want me to figure out what had really happened
at Melting Rock, then that was exactly what I was going to do. Although I wasn’t officially working for the paper at the moment,
I was still a goddamn reporter. And if I had to trick people into thinking I was still representing the
Monitor
—well… too damn bad.

Thus jazzed up, I plopped myself on the porch swing with my faithful canine at my feet and tried to figure out just what the
hell I was going to do. In an effort to be organized—not something that comes naturally—I decided to make a list entitled
Things to Figure Out in No Particular Order.

It was depressingly long, but here it is:

1. Who put the coke in my car? Why? How? When? Where did they get it?
   
2. Why did that jerk testify against me?
   
3. Who broke into my house?
   
4. Who killed Axel? Why?
   
5. Who made the poisoned LSD?
   
6. Were Shaun, Billy & Tom really killed on purpose?
   (Duh.)
   Who did it?
   
7. WHY???
   
8. Is whoever had me framed the same person who killed the guys?
   
9. What does Dorrie know?
   
10. Does Lauren know anything she hasn’t told me? Trish? Cindy? Alan?
    
11. What’s up with Mohawk Associates?
    
12. Did Deep Lake really spend $50K to shut up the opposition?
    
13. When is Gordon breaking his stupid story?
    
14. Am I going to jail?
    

I crossed out that last one because I didn’t want to think about it.

I stared at the list for a while, trying to figure out where to start. It made sense to begin with the easiest question and
go from there; unfortunately, all of them seemed pretty hard. So I read over the list again and again—and every time I did,
my eyeballs stuck on number nine.

What does Dorrie know?

All of my snoopy reporter’s instincts were telling me that she was hiding something; I couldn’t believe that she’d smacked
me across the face purely out of moral indignation. No, I definitely got the feeling that she was agitated about something.
But how could I get her to tell me what it was?

Blackmail her,
came the answer from the devilish corner of my psyche.
Prove that she’s the one who got the Deep Lake Cooling key for Robinette, and threaten to tell on her unless she comes clean.

That much decided, I went back to the top of the list. Finding out who’d framed me was, obviously, the most pressing issue
of all; solving the Melting Rock case wouldn’t do me much good if I wound up playing the lead in a chicks-in-prison movie.
And in terms of solving question number one, question number two seemed key.

On one hand, it could be that Sturdivant had fingered me just because my arrest had been in the news. But then again, maybe
there was something more nefarious going on; maybe whoever had put the drugs in my car had put him up to it, just to make
sure I was well and truly screwed.

Considering the situation I was in, my money (and, come to think of it, my entire future) was riding on the second version.

Believe it or not, that struck me as good news. If Sturdivant had really been told to railroad me, that meant he was a link
to whoever had ordered it—as far as I could see, the
only
link. If I could get him to talk, then maybe I could find out who’d gotten me into this mess. But how?

For a while I sat there imagining how great it would be if Cody beat the guy senseless until he confessed. Sadly, such an
event did not seem likely to occur in the real world.

I was distracted from this happy fantasy by the ringing phone. It turned out to be Gordon.

“Hey, Alex, how are you doing?”

“Astonishingly shitty. How the hell do you think?”

“Do you want to get together for lunch today? I’m buying.”

Now, if Gordon Band were a normal human being I might have assumed that he was trying to be nice. As it was, however, the
idea never even occurred to me.

“Gordon,” I said, “if you think I’m going to give you anything on the record about my miserable predicament, you’re out of
your nasty little mind.”

“But—”

“Listen very carefully. My only comment to you is ‘No comment.’ ”

“Comment? Who said anything about comment?”

“Then what do you want?”

“Can’t a friend take a friend out for lunch?”

“And why would you want to do that exactly?”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Huh.”

“Hey, what’s your problem? Are you that pissed about the story?”

“What story?”

“The one in today’s
Times.
”

Shit.
“Please don’t tell me it has anything to do with goddamn Deep Lake Cooling.”

“So you saw it, huh?” To be fair, Gordon did seem to be making some little attempt not to gloat. Unfortunately, he was failing
big time. “I just live for this kind of—”

“Jesus …all right, you win.” I scratched number thirteen off the list so hard my pencil broke. “Go ahead, rub it in. How the
hell did you get onto it?”

“Wasn’t that hard. That town of yours is such a bunch of freaks, it was obvious there was something up when I heard only a
handful of people showed up to protest the Deep Lake opening. So I did a little digging, and I finally got a source to tell
me the university was doling out fake consulting fees to keep people quiet.”

“Somebody who was in on it?”

“Nah. Somebody kind of on the sidelines. I guess some documents went missing from someplace—source wouldn’t give me the details—and
the people behind Mohawk Associates just immediately went apeshit that they were gonna get caught. She’d had her suspicions
before, but that’s when she figured out what was up and tipped me off, so I zipped on over to the library and found the company
in the Deep Lake papers. Broke the story this morning, and from what I hear, Shardik’s gonna be clearing out his desk by noon.”

“So who’s this source?”

“Like I’m gonna tell you.”

“At least tell me how you got the source to talk.”

“No way.”

“Come on, Gordon. Dazzle me.”

“Okay, but…I’m only telling you because it’s a riot.”

“I’m listening.”

“Source called me because she had a vision.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. You know how I drive a, er …a Volkswagen Vanagon, right?”

“Sure. Sometimes you sleep in it.”

“Shut up. Anyway, apparently this person was looking for guidance about who to tell about the Deep Lake racket, and a voice
spoke to her. Wanna know what it said? It said, ‘Tell the man in the van, man. Tell the man in the van.’ Can you believe that
shit?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “It was Guinevere.”

“Son of a…How did you—”

“Small town. So, did you ever figure out who was in charge of Mohawk Associates? Like, who was running the operation?”

“Uh…no. But I will eventually, you can bet your—”

“Good-bye, Gordon.”

“Hey, wait a second. If you haven’t actually seen the story yet, how’d you even know about all this stuff?”

I hung up on him; it was rude, but satisfying. The phone immediately started ringing again, but I ignored it and got back
to the porch just in time to see the
Monitor
deliveryman pitching the paper onto the neighbor’s lawn. Since the guy had already left for work, I decided to temporarily
snag it.

Now, I knew that reading the paper was probably going to upset me even further; being reminded of my suspension from the news-room
was like a punch in the gut. But I didn’t anticipate
how
upset—or that the reason for it would be the banner headline stripped across the top of page one:
JASPERSBURG TEEN INJURED IN HIT AND RUN
.

The subhead said
CHAMPION ATHLETE IN CRITICAL CONDITION
. The main photo was of an ambulance parked by the side of a rural road. And the name of the victim was Alan Bauer.

A
CCORDING TO THE STORY
—byline, Cal Ochoa—Bauer had been out on his nightly five-mile run when he’d been struck. If some Good Samaritan hadn’t happened
along the country road just minutes afterward, the kid would already be dead. As it was, he was barely hanging on.

The car, which had been stolen from a Jaspersburg body shop the night before, had been found abandoned a mile away. “Alcohol,”
Ochoa wrote, “is suspected to be a contributing factor.”

But what the story didn’t say—what I’d have to find out directly from the reporter’s mouth—was that the ’94 Trans Am had been
covered in Bauer’s blood and stinking of whiskey. They even knew what kind of whiskey; a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam had
been found on the floor of the passenger’s seat.

The Jaspersburg cops were calling it a hit and run.

They were calling it a joyride gone awry.

They were calling it another drunk-driving tragedy.

I was calling it attempted murder.

I mean, what were the odds? All along I’d been suspecting that Bauer was meant to be the fourth victim, and now he was next
door to dead. How could this so-called “accident” be anything but yet another setup?

I posed this very question to Ochoa when I met him for lunch on the Green a couple of hours later. And yes, I did get a few
snarky comments from strangers—but I thought, to hell with it. I was damned if I was going to spend any more time holed up
in a cave like I was actually
guilty
of something.