Superstition (24 page)

CBS, take me away.

“Morning, Nicky. You doing okay?” The speaker was Carl Glover. She didn’t even have to look around to be sure: She would recognize that deep, velvety voice anywhere. As one of the two other on-air reporters for
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
—the third was Heather Hanley—Carl was both coworker and rival.

Nicky dropped her purse into the drawer in which she kept it, then turned to smile at Carl. A shade under six feet tall and about her own age, he was leaning a broad shoulder against her doorjamb, looking gorgeous, as always, in a navy pin-striped suit that had probably cost the earth, white shirt, and pale blue silk tie, his dark blond hair brushed until it gleamed and worn long enough so that it flipped up at the ends, his baby-blue eyes—they almost exactly matched his tie, which had been chosen, no doubt, to bring out their color—sliding over her.

Lasciviously. He barely bothered to try to hide the lecherous gleam in them.

“Sure,” she said, although it wasn’t entirely true. But despite his calendar-boy looks, Carl was a snake—no, a shark—and to show him any weakness at all was to invite getting eaten. “How about you?”

“Oh,
I’m
fantastic.” He smiled at her. “But you look like hell. Maybe you should think about taking a few days off. To recover, you know.”

Okay,
Nicky told herself as she fixed him with a cold stare, she probably did look like hell. A dying yellow-and-purple bruise formed a semicircle around her left eye, and various other scratches and contusions were hidden beneath her well-tailored black pantsuit. Getting to sleep the night before had proved almost impossible, which probably meant that she had visible bags under her eyes and lines of fatigue around her mouth. But concern for her well-being was not his motive. This was a cutthroat business, and Carl was a player. Did the insufferable egotist really think she didn’t know the score? If she took a few days off, that would mean more stories and more airtime for him, to say nothing of Heather. Of course, it was always possible that if Nicky took his advice and stayed home, he would push Heather under a car.

“Don’t you have some place you need to be?” she asked.

“Actually, I do.” His smile widened as he straightened and saluted her. “I have an eight-fifteen appointment with Sid. See you later.”

He turned and disappeared down the hall. It was all Nicky could do not to glare at the empty doorway in his wake. Dropping that disturbing pebble into the previously smooth pool of her morning had been the reason for Carl’s visit, Nicky realized.
Sid
could only be Sid Levin, and telling her that he had an appointment with him was akin to announcing an appointment with God. Nicky narrowed her eyes. Carl never did anything without a purpose, and therefore, his needling of her had a point. The question was, what?

It took her a minute, but she finally realized that frowning into thin air wasn’t going to help her figure it out. If it concerned her, the point would be revealed in its own good time.

Doing her best to dismiss Carl from her mind, Nicky tried to throw herself into her routine and almost immediately ran into another problem. Usually when she got in to work, she dropped off her stuff in her office and made a beeline for coffee before coming back to start her day by checking her messages. But today was different. Today, she wasn’t going to be able to do that. To get to the coffeemaker, which was in a small break room at the south end of the hall that also housed vending machines and assorted goodies, it would be necessary for her to walk past Karen’s cubicle.

She wasn’t up for it. Not yet. The sheer shock of Karen’s death was beginning to wear off, but the pain and sense of unreality remained strong. Last Friday morning when she had passed Karen’s office on her way to get coffee, Karen had come out and gone with her. They had talked about the upcoming trip to Pawleys Island. Karen had been excited about it. . . .

Nicky closed her eyes and willed the memory away. The impulse to just turn around and walk off the floor and out of the building was suddenly all but overwhelming. She had sick days, personal days, and vacation days that she could use to stay home and, in Carl’s words, recover. But with Carl and Heather and the realities of television and sweeps month in mind, she rejected that option almost at once. She was at work and staying at work and, since that was the case, the only thing to do was get busy. Reliving the nightmare over and over again in her mind was useless. It had happened, and there was no undoing it.

As callous as she felt even thinking it, the cold, hard reality was that life—and
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
—went on.

As if to prove it, the third floor was its usual Friday-morning hive of activity. People walked down the hall chatting and calling to each other as they passed open doors. Phones rang. TVs droned. One of the overhead lights buzzed a little behind its metal grate, as if the tube was about to burn out. Her computer hummed as she turned it on. She almost hated to check her messages—the one from Lazarus508 was seared into her brain—but e-mail was vital in her line of work, and she couldn’t avoid it.

The little thrill of fear that slid down her spine as she opened her mailbox was unnecessary, as it turned out. A quick scan of her new messages revealed nothing alarming. Unless, of course, she considered an e-mail from
jfranconipawleysisland.gov
scary.

“Thanks, and good-night to you, too,” it read. He’d signed it, “Joe.”

Nicky was reading it again, her back to the door, when someone walked into her office.

“Nicky. I wasn’t sure you’d be in. Nobody would have blamed you if you’d wanted to stay home today, you know.”

So engrossed was she that the interruption was startling. She almost jumped, but managed to catch herself in time. Feeling ridiculously self-conscious about the message she was reading, which suddenly felt way too personal in nature, Nicky clicked it away before turning to smile at Sarah Greenberg.
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
’s supervising producer was a no-nonsense type in her early fifties, about five-five, with short, dark brown hair and hazel eyes. As a behind-the-camera type, she had allowed herself to age naturally, which meant that her face had all the usual wrinkles and her waist and hips bore some extra poundage. Today, she wore black pants with a pale blue sweater set and sensible, low-heeled shoes.

“I’m fine,” Nicky said. It was beginning to feel like her mantra. If she said it often enough, it might even start to feel true.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Sarah’s tone was brisk. “Sunday’s special got the highest ratings we’ve had all spring, by the way, so congratulations again. And your mother was wonderful. We might want to do something else with her down the road.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell her.”

“Well, no point in beating around the bush. The reason I’m here is to pass on a message: Sid wants to see you in his office as soon as you can get up there.”

“He does?” Nicky would have been excited, anticipating praise for Sunday’s special if nothing else, if she hadn’t known that Carl was also meeting with Sid just then. And there was something about Sarah’s choice of words and tone. . . .

Nicky frowned at her. “So what’s up?”

Sarah shook her head. “You’ll have to talk to Sid.”

Horror pierced Nicky’s soul as a hideous possibility occurred to her. “Oh my God, we haven’t been cancelled already, have we?”

A smile touched Sarah’s mouth. “It’s not as bad as that, but I’m not telling you anything else. Go on, go up and talk to Sid.”

There was no moving Sarah when she looked like that, and, anyway, begging was unprofessional. But something was clearly awry. Turning all possibilities over in her mind as she rode the elevator to the top floor, Nicky was still drawing a blank by the time she arrived in the reception area of Sid’s penthouse office.

Whatever was coming her way—my God, was she going to be fired?—she was going to face it with her head up, her shoulders back, and her stomach in a knot.

“You can go in now,” the receptionist said after phoning Nicky’s name through to her boss.

Nicky thanked her, did a quick check of her appearance in the brass-framed mirror behind the desk—no hair straggling from her smooth updo; makeup in place; slim black pantsuit meeting the triple test of being unobtrusive, flattering, and businesslike—then, taking a deep breath, she walked past the receptionist, opened the door, and strode into Sid’s lair.

If office space was allocated according to an individual’s status within the company, Sid was clearly master of this particular universe. His office was huge, with three walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the tall skyscrapers and narrow, canyon-like streets of the city. Outside, the sky was gray and overcast, and light rain blew against the building, pattering against the glass. Inside, the incandescent lighting was warm and welcoming. Plush cream carpeting stretched beneath an elegantly upholstered seating arrangement that consisted of two full-sized charcoal-gray couches and four pale gray chairs around a bathtub-sized glass-and-brass coffee table, then led on to a pair of navy leather wingback chairs that she could see only the backs of because they faced, as a kind of grand finale, Sid’s desk. It was the size of a pool table, a solid block of gleaming, dark wood that was probably ruinously expensive, and was punctuated by the presence, behind it, of the great man himself.

“Nicky, good to see you,” Sid said heartily, getting to his feet and coming around the desk to shake hands with her, his square, heavy-featured face breaking into a smile. His accent was Upper Midwest urban, and he looked as though the closest to the Mason-Dixon Line he’d ever ventured was Chicago’s South Side. Nicky knew from the office grapevine that he was fifty-four, twice married, and the father of five children ranging from adult to kindergarten age. About five-eleven, average weight, a little stoop-shouldered, and a little flabby around the middle, he had black hair with liberal flecks of gray in it and mild gray eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. His brows were his most arresting feature—thick, black brows as furry as caterpillars that almost met above his nose. For the rest of it, he had jowls, a receding hairline, and a rumpled gray suit, and was pasty-skinned from too much time spent indoors. In other words, he was your basic average-looking office schmo.

Only he wasn’t.

Around Santee Productions, he was king. In the
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
credits, he was listed as Executive Producer. He was also listed as Executive Producer on eleven other shows that Santee Productions owned. That meant that he had the power to hire and fire pretty much everybody in the building. He could axe programs; he could axe personalities. He could also, if he took a personal interest in somebody, ignite a rocket booster under their career. Nicky had met him exactly four times: her first day on the job, when he had personally welcomed her to the team; at the office Christmas party; at Karen’s funeral; and now.

As she and Sid shook hands, Carl rose from one of the wingback chairs. He was smiling at her, which, in Nicky’s experience of him, had never yet meant anything good. She acknowledged him with a curt nod. His smile broadened.

“So, what’s this about?” Her question, which was addressed to Sid, was perhaps a little more abrupt in tone than it would have been if Carl hadn’t been standing there, looking at her like the cat who was getting ready to swallow the canary.

“Sit down, sit down.” Sid waved her toward a chair as he walked back around his desk to take a seat himself. Though she would have preferred to remain standing, Nicky sat in the nearer of the two wingback chairs, perching almost on its edge, while Carl sank back down comfortably into its twin.

Never let them see you sweat.

With that oldie-but-goodie in mind, Nicky took a discreet but deep and calming breath—the place even
smelled
expensive, she noticed as she inhaled—and deliberately relaxed back into her chair, too, letting her hands rest on the chair’s smooth arms as she crossed her legs.

Carl wasn’t going to beat
her
in the body-language department. She could project cool confidence, too.

“So.” Sid clasped his hands in front of him on his desktop and leaned forward as he looked at Nicky.

“First, I want to tell you again how pleased we are with your special. It was excellent work, just excellent, and it’s performed really well for us in the ratings.”

“Thank you.” As hard as she tried to look relaxed, she wasn’t. She was, instead, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was all she could do not to dig her nails into the leather and swing her high-heeled foot.

“Sad as it is to say, there’s also been a lot of interest in Miss Wise’s murder,” Sid continued. “The AP picked up on some local reporter’s coverage and sent it out over the wire, so that the story wound up in dozens of newspapers across the country. The murder got featured on
Entertainment Tonight
and several other entertainment /newsmagazine-type shows, one or two of which we don’t even own.” He grinned briefly, and Nicky, realizing that this was his idea of a joke, managed a weak smile, too. “It’s all over the Internet. The whole tie-in with the earlier murder and disappearances of those teenage girls, the ghost thing with the séance and the psychic—that was your mother, wasn’t it? She’s a real spark plug—the fact that our reporter—you—was also attacked and lived to tell the tale . . . this is a good story. This has legs. This we can build on. Our viewers want to know more.”

He paused, looking at Nicky as if he expected some sort of reply.

I’m sure Karen would be glad to know that she basically took one for the team
was the thought that popped into Nicky’s head, but she had a feeling that it might be a less-than-politic remark. Sid seemed to feel no shame, or even remorse, about considering Karen’s murder sort of like found treasure as far as the ratings were concerned.

“It was a horrible crime” was the best Nicky could come up with. She hoped it was supportive enough.