Missing Mark (16 page)

“Excellent. That’s what I’m here to find out,” he said.

Noreen must have sensed that I wasn’t done sparring because she jumped in. “Agent Jax was just asking me if anyone from our newsroom might have—”

“Might have what?” I cut her off. “Tipped the competition to our exclusive?”

Then she cut me off. “And I was just explaining to him how unlikely that particular scenario was.”

She and I both glared at him. And he got the message.

“I didn’t tell the newspaper,” he said. “You have to trust me on this.”

“Trust?” I said. “So whose fingerprints were on that letter besides mine?”

He paused like he was considering giving me the usual can’t-comment-on-an-active-investigation line that cops like to use to blow off reporters.

“So where are your loose lips when
I
need them?” I continued.

“Yours were the only prints we recovered.”

“Where did he get your prints?” Noreen asked.

“He stole them.”

“That’s not true. I used a routine law enforcement technique.”

“Where did he get them?” Noreen asked again, louder.

“He took them off a glass I was drinking from. Don’t you need a search warrant for that?”

She reached for her phone and asked Miles to come downstairs.

I picked up her wastebasket and dumped the trash on the floor in front of Agent Jax’s feet. “Want to go through our garbage while you’re waiting?”

“Riley!” Noreen said.

The move was not as spontaneous as it appeared.

Going through Noreen’s garbage was an actual fantasy of mine. As I looked down at the mess, my reporter instincts and ability to read upside down kicked in. Amid a coffee cup, a
Broadcast News
magazine, and some old expense forms, I saw what seemed to be a crumpled copy of an anchor contract for Tom McHale and wondered if there was any way to slip it under my jacket without my boss noticing. As a ruse, I apologized for my outburst and started cleaning up.

“Just leave it,” she said.

“Maybe I should go.” Agent Jax stood up.

But just then Miles arrived and Noreen brought him up to speed on the situation. Now there were three of us glaring at the FBI guy. It felt good to have him so clearly outnumbered even though he was armed with a gun and all we had were our wits. That elation died when Miles told us that Agent Jax actually had the law on his side when it came to swiping my prints.

“Unless, of course, you think the restaurant wants to make a claim concerning the missing glass.”

Noreen reminded Agent Jax that she still expected to hear from him when they made an arrest.

“They already have,” I said. “That’s what I was coming back to tell you. He broke that end of the deal, too.”

More glaring at that now tight-lipped FBI guy.

“Toby Elness just called me from jail. He said they’re holding him as a suspect.”

“Isn’t he that animal guy who used to own Shep? The one in last fall’s pet-cremation story?” Noreen asked. “He always seemed so gentle.”

“Bingo. He says their group wouldn’t risk harming the other fish just to free Billy.”

“Actually, economic sabotage is a trademark of the Animal Liberation Front,” Agent Jax said. “What’s a few busted aquariums when they’ve already destroyed lab equipment and bombed buildings?”

“Want to say that on camera?” I asked.

That threat settled him down some. Feds hate going on camera. He explained that it was not unusual for some of the Animal Liberation Front’s rescuees to actually perish in the rescues. Apparently a bunch of minks recently suffered that fate after being freed from a southern Minnesota fur farm.

“And what do you think the group’s response was?” the FBI guy asked. “Better they die free than die skinned.”

That actually sounded like something Toby might say.

“I’d be surprised if you have a strong enough case against Mr. Elness to charge him before you have to kick him,” I said. Prosecutors must charge a suspect within thirty-six hours or release him from custody unless a judge approves an extension.

“Maybe we have more than you know,” he said.

“What about Toby, Noreen?” I asked. “Do we name him on air now or wait and see if charges come down?”

This was a hard one for Noreen. Show mercy or get the scoop? “If we report there’s been an arrest but don’t name him,” she said, “one, maybe all, of our competitors will.”

“And we’ll look stupid,” I conceded. As fond as I was of Toby, I got the feeling this could be one of those times when mercy might not be practical.

“If we don’t report there’s been an arrest, it’ll leak out anyway.” She threw a pointed glance in the direction of Agent Jax, who once again denied being the newspaper’s anonymous source.

“And we’ll look stupid.” I could see where this decision was headed. After all,
I
wasn’t stupid.

“Try smoothing things over with Toby if you can,” Noreen said. “But we have to run his name.”

I directed my next question to Agent Jax, making a point of remembering his name since he seemed like he was going to be a pain in my life for some time. “So what do you actually have on Toby Elness?”

“Actually our best evidence against him is you.”

“What do you mean?”

“They chose you to receive the letter. So we went looking for ALF members with connections to you. And we found one.”

“I think the animal rights group picked me just because I broke the story that Big Mouth Billy was missing.”

One scoop often leads to another as interested parties perceive which journalist owns a particular story. Everyone likes to back a winner.

“And who did provide you with that juicy nugget?” Agent Jax asked.

That was Miles’s cue to act all lawyerly again. “I think we’re through here. We’re not going to be discussing news sources with the FBI.”

Miles was right. Minnesota has perhaps the top reporter-shield law in the country, though I wasn’t sure how much protection it offered in a federal investigation. Typically the way it works is that for journalists to be compelled to name sources, the government has to prove the information is vital and cannot be obtained by any other means.

In other words, they can’t simply go on a fishing expedition.

hile searching through the back of a closet for a Frisbee for Shep, I found my own wedding gown. The dress was crammed against the wall in a cheap plastic garment bag. Calling it a gown was probably an exaggeration. It was bought off-the-rack, on the fly, at an open-all-night store in Vegas. My choices were that, rent a dress, or get married in my street clothes.

But there’s something tactile and sensuous about wanting to have and to hold your own wedding gown. And there’s something about the pageantry of wearing white that I didn’t want to compromise—even if I was eloping.

Wedding gowns were not always white. Queen Victoria started the trend in 1840. White also had nothing to do with virtue—it was all about wealth. Back then, being married in white signified that a woman could afford to buy a dress that she would never be able to wear again because white was so very difficult to clean. In fact, many brides dyed their white dresses navy after the ceremony for everyday use.

Then, in the 1920s, Coco Chanel unveiled the first short wedding dress and that runway moment cemented white as the preferred bridal color.

My dress was also short and white, but not high fashion. What I spent to play virgin was nothing close to what Madeline Post’s gown cost. That got me thinking about the emotional sway of her wedding dress as a prop. News directors love props, especially on the set. I’d never describe Noreen as a romantic, but even she might not be able to resist the
NEVER WORN
story if she saw Madeline’s wedding gown up close and personal and felt its silky magic.

I held my own wedding dress, labeled polyester, tight against my body. Then moved over to the mirror and closed my eyes.

M
ADELINE SAT AT
a small corner table when I walked into Ursula’s Wine Bar, owned by a guy named Kurt who must have figured he couldn’t create an exotic atmosphere if he called it Kurt’s Wine Bar.

I pulled out the chair across from Madeline and settled in. She handed me a wine list and made a recommendation that I couldn’t pronounce. Fine with me.

“You’re early,” I remarked. I tried not to sound disapproving, but I like being the early one for off-site meetings. I feel like it gives me an edge.

“I wanted to make sure we got a table,” Madeline said.

Probably a good idea, I conceded. The place looked exclusive, yet cozy, with room to seat at most a couple of dozen people. A diner at another table apparently recognized me from the news. She casually pointed me out to her companion, but was too polite to interrupt my meal.

Madeline was meeting me because I had told her I had some new information regarding Mark’s disappearance. And that meant I needed to come up with some new information regarding Mark’s disappearance. Because I could hardly say let’s get together so I can grill you about the night you and your fiancé got engaged. Or how about I swing by and borrow your wedding dress because my boss is unenthusiastic about your misfortune? Those are the kind of topics best broached after developing a trust relationship over alcohol. So we were off to a promising start.

In our case we also shared an interesting cheese-and-fruit plate with crunchy bread while I shared the new information I had acquired. And yes, I actually did have new information.

After an evening of playing cyber detective, Xiong had retrieved three interesting items from Mark’s laptop.

The first was a nude photo that his ex-girlfriend, Sigourney Nelson, had sent to him a few days before the wedding. She thrust her breasts toward the camera, perky nipples up close. Her hands were clasped against her stomach in an understandable attempt to hide an extra ten pounds. Her pose wasn’t obscene, but it wasn’t FCC-approved material either. We could air it, as long as we put black bars in strategic places.

Mark hadn’t replied to her and had even tried deleting the photo, but Xiong found it anyway. I wasn’t going to share that picture with Madeline. Not yet, at least. I’d tried contacting Sigourney at her e-mail address but had heard nothing back. Either she was ignoring me, or it was a dead address.

Xiong also discovered an e-mail from the best man, Gabe Murray, sounding a little more anxious about the two grand he loaned Mark than he admitted to me. Mark responded with a relax-I’ll-have-the-money-soon e-mail. Gabe sent a few more, asking his buddy where he went and when he was returning. The notes started out curious and grew increasingly panicky.

Mark never replied.

“Was Mark in any trouble financially?” I asked Madeline, trying to appear casual.

She shook her head. “Mark didn’t have the same means I did, but he also didn’t have the same wants. So money wasn’t an issue between us.”

I was trying to decide whether to tell her she’d been courted on borrowed money when our entrées arrived, mine a sautéed chicken breast with lime sauce, roasted Roma tomatoes and grilled asparagus, Madeline’s a penne pasta with shrimp, goat cheese, pine nuts, and red and yellow peppers.

While we picked at our plates, I also weighed the best approach to bring up the most intriguing thing Xiong pulled from Mark’s computer. That was the real reason I’d invited Madeline to dinner, specifically so I could press her about a Web site her groom had accessed the week before he disappeared.

Escapeartist.com—a how-to guide on restarting your life abroad.

“Was this anything you ever discussed?” I asked Madeline.

She shook her head. But my reporter’s gut told me she didn’t seem as surprised as she should have been under the circumstances. I expected an outcry of “What?” or a denial of “Not my fiancé!” Instead she mumbled something about how everyone fantasizes about getting away from it all.

That’s when I explained why it’s important that journalists have the full picture during an investigation.

“You’re not keeping anything back, are you, Madeline?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she replied.

“Like who asked who to marry them?”

“Oh that.” She apologized for her “little white lie,” explaining she hadn’t known me very well then and felt embarrassed talking about her engagement.