The Ways of the Dead (18 page)

“So we’re about
to say what, exactly?”

Melissa was sitting behind her desk, looking at him as if he had a bad disease. Eddie Winters leaned up against a glass wall of her office, flanked by the deputy executive editor and the assistant managing editor for news. The national editor and the paper’s top attorney were seated in chairs against the back wall. R.J. was sitting next to him, as if he were his attorney and they were in court.

She continued: “That the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. was having a personal if not intimate affair with a wannabe porn star? And that said wannabe is the young woman who turned up dead, buried in the basement of a house immediately adjacent to where the judge’s teenage daughter was murdered a year later? Oh—and he’s white and wealthy and fifty-three. She was black and twenty-five and an exotic dancer. Have I left out anything?”

“She called his personal cellphone eight hours after she was last seen,” Sully said. “I would add that.”

Her forehead wrinkled, her hands splayed out, sarcasm personified. “Thanks, yes. I’d forgotten. Did she write in her datebook how he killed her, too?”

“Let’s wait a minute here,” Eddie said.

His arms were folded across his chest, and the gold and steel Rolex glittered as he shook it loose from a tight grip on his left wrist. He’d been watching Sully while he gave the summation of his findings of the past several days, the missing Michelle Williams, the dead Rebekah Bolin. He had leaned forward and nodded as Sully described how Lorena Bradford had given him access to her dead sister’s files, information that law enforcement had not seen, and that she had spent several hours helping him start a timeline for that information.

“How many sources again? How many put Reese and Pittman together?”

“Four,” Sully said, ticking them off on his fingers.

“One, Doyle Goodwin, who runs the market at the bottom of the street, but I can’t see him going on record. Too scared, too much to lose. Two, the lady across the street, Marilyn Winston. She’s on the record. Three, Pittman’s datebook and her cellphone. Four, an off-the-record source at the dance studio, who confirms Noel and Sarah’s lessons overlapped, and that Reese often dropped his daughter off and picked her up. But the killshot is that the numbers listed as ‘D’ on her cell were his personal line at his office and his cell. He answered the latter this morning when we called it, or at least I would say I recognized his voice. I checked the court directory this morning, called directory assistance, and went online. Neither of those numbers are listed.”

Eddie considered. “Can we get more on the record?”

“I’ll take his picture up and down the street and see what we get.”

“How could they have plausibly met?”

“The dance studio. Pittman’s lessons were ending when Sarah’s were starting on Saturday mornings, and then there was a second class after Sarah’s. He was walking in, she was walking out, something like that.”

“Can we prove that? On the record?”

“I can ask the studio owner if she’ll confirm, but it’s solid. My source taught Noel, knew Sarah. Sarah’s Saturday morning class? Ten o’clock. The time in Pittman’s datebook she was to meet ‘D’ or ‘David’? Ten fifteen.”

“Does Reese have any idea we know what we do?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Lorena called his office and cell from her cell. It wouldn’t trace back to us.”

“Lorena?”

“Her sister. Noel’s.”

There was a pause. Lewis Beale, the paper’s lawyer, heaved into the conversation, his great girth wobbling as he sat forward in his chair. “Tell me again how we came to be in possession of Pittman’s phone and personal effects.”

“The sister, Lorena. There may be more things coming. We’re meeting back at her place tonight, after she gets off work, to keep going through the files. And, Lewis? Technically, we don’t have possession. The sister does.”

“Wait. Isn’t she the one who spit on you at the funeral?” he asked, spreading his hands.

“Yes.”

“Now she loves you.”

“‘Love’ is a little strong.”

“What happened?”

“Myself, I’d put odds that she wants us to put heat on MPD, to stick Noel’s death as a homicide.”

“So she’s using you?”

“Most women do.”

Guffaws around the room, everyone looking down for a minute, doodling on their notebooks, relieved.

“No. I mean, do you trust her?”

“As much as I do or don’t anyone else. I have great faith in documents, though, and cellphones with David Reese’s private numbers on them.”

Lewis sighed and looked over at Eddie, then at Sully, then back to the boss.

“Originals, possession, if at all possible,” Eddie said, taking the cue. “If we print this, it’s going to have to be bulletproof. This will be litigated. With real money on the table.”

“Eddie, you can’t be serious,” Melissa cut in. “If this were from another reporter, maybe. But Sully’s had a vendetta against Reese since the Judge Foy thing. You heard how he went off when I asked him to cover the family statement—like a madman, cursing—and, if we can just name the elephant in the room, he is
drinking
on the
job
.”

Eddie gave her a sharp glance. “You are wading into HR—”

“Everybody knows it! Why is it HR material? We can’t trust it because of who reported it. Besides—look, let’s say all of this is completely true. We still don’t have Reese being guilty of anything other than an extramarital affair, poor judgment, and perhaps the victim of a gruesome coincidence.”

She looked around the room, to the lawyers, the other editors. “It’s bullshit. It’s tabloid. The blowback will be tons of sympathy for Reese and vitriol for us. And what are we going to do
this
time when it’s wrong? We can fire him, but we’ll look like such parasites—”

“When did we get in the popularity business?” R.J. boomed, suddenly leaning forward in his chair, his gruff voice bursting out, people jumping.

“We don’t run stories because we think they will make people
like
us. We run stories, these kinds of stories, because we are in the public accountability business. David Reese is an eminent public figure in Washington. If there is a timely change in the administration at the next election, he will almost certainly be the next Supreme Court justice, at which time he would determine the law for three hundred million Americans. His judgment isn’t one thing about him, it’s the
only
thing about him. Some of us in this room know that he lied to the upper management of this newspaper in an attempt to have Sully fired—don’t look at me like that, I never signed off on the suspension—in the name of saving himself from an embarrassing political gaffe. This is a far more emphatic moral failing. What if, let us say, this affair with Noel Pittman and perhaps others emerge during confirmation hearings? And it becomes public that we knew of this liaison and did not publish? You haven’t said one word about the actual facts of—”

“That’s not—” Melissa started.

“And that isn’t even quite the main focus, to my mind.” He was steamrolling now. “The issue here is not, ‘What does this mean for poor David Reese?’ The issue is, ‘What does this mean for poor Noel Pittman?’ She was a child of this city, a college student, never arrested and never convicted of any crime. She disappeared after work one night. She was murdered, buried in a basement. We know from multiple sources, who have no apparent benefit in lying, that she was romantically involved with one of the most powerful men in this city, who is incidentally married to someone else. We know this man’s own child was murdered less than fifty yards away. And, today, Sullivan tells us that the last call she made, eight hours after she was last seen, was to this man’s cellphone.”

R.J.’s voice had been slowly building, rising in tone and moral indignation. Now he was almost shouting, staring at Melissa through his bifocals. “And you’re telling me that isn’t a
newspaper
story? You’re saying it would not merit the interest of law enforcement agencies investigating her murder?”

“There
is
no murder investigation,” Melissa shot back. “Pittman’s death isn’t labeled as a homicide.”

Sully had been chewing the inside of his lip, and then the anger burst clear of him.

“There’s no murder investigation now because that’s the narrative,” he said, leaning forward. “‘Rich, pretty, white Sarah Reese gets jumped by three bad black guys.’ That’s the story. It’s a cautionary tale about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s the modern scary bedtime story. Now. ‘Poor, maybe not-so-smart, black Noel Pittman gets whacked and stuffed in the floorboards of an abandoned house because crazy-ass shit like that happens in Park View.’ Everybody knows that story line, too, because that’s the story we tell all the time. Us, Brand X, cable television, the talks shows.”

He ignored the rest of the room, glaring at Melissa. “But what if
that
narrative
this
time is inconveniently wrong? What if our first idea wasn’t the right idea? What if the freight train is rolling down the wrong track?”

“Don’t sit here and patronize me, either one—”

Eddie unfolded one of his arms and waved it up and down briefly, a terse cease-and-desist motion.

“Okay,” he said, and all eyes moved to him. “Interesting arguments all the way around. It’s good reporting work, Sullivan. Melissa and R.J. both raise considerations worth thinking about. The good news, for us, is—”

“He’s a drunk with an ax to grind.”

Melissa said it softly, looking at Edward. “No, Eddie. Please, no. We cannot trust him on this. You want somebody else to verify and take—”

“I said I heard you.” Eddie’s tone was ice, cutting her off. He turned to the rest of the room.

“As I said, the good news is that Sullivan has put us way out front on this. We don’t have to do anything right away. It is even possible that Miss Pittman’s sister, Sullivan’s source, might take this information to the police herself. If that happens, and they move on it, then we can report on police activity in an ongoing investigation, and not go out on a limb and report our own findings about a public figure’s indiscretions. That would have us
following
an investigation, not
creating
one. A lesser story, certainly. But it has the merit, as Melissa points out, of us not being perceived as picking on the family of a murder victim.”

He paused. Sully cut in.

“Not to keep moving the goalposts, Eddie, but I would add to R.J.’s thought that we seem to be forgetting our original line of investigation. It was not just Noel Pittman’s death. It was also the deaths of Lana Escobar and, now we know, of Rebekah Bolin and the missing and likely dead Michelle Williams. All this within a three- to four-block radius. Is the Reese murder an outlier or part of some bizarre thread? That’s the story line I was working.”

Eddie nodded, still skeptical, but bending a little now.

“And it may be the one we publish. Now. On another point. Have you gotten anything—anything at all—that suggests a link between Judge Reese and the three young men in the store—the ones charged with killing his daughter? Would they want to, in some way, retaliate against him?”

“No, I haven’t been through his case history, but every reporter in town, and I’m sure law enforcement, has been. Nobody’s made a match. It appears random.”

“Okay. Maybe they’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe it’s a tie between
Pittman
and those young men, and
she’s
the link back to the judge. I don’t know. Just look at that.”

Eddie took two steps forward. “Other than that, dig through everything you can get your hands on about Pittman’s personal history. Do it with an eye toward Reese. We want to document what happened to her, but we absolutely must know how Reese was involved. I don’t see how we can publish a story about her disappearance without mentioning the affair prominently. If it turns out that it’s all too muddy, just a big mess of glop that we can’t put in context, then the answer may be not to publish anything at all. We hold on to lots of secrets about Washington. This may turn out to be another one of them.”

He looked at Melissa, pointedly. She had decided to bide her time, Sully saw; she was sitting back for now.

“But whatever else you find, I want you to go to Reese’s office when you’re finished reporting and confront him with this. We want that interview on the record. We owe him a fair standard of publication and a regard for his privacy. We don’t owe him a free ride.”

Someone opened the door, and Melissa half spun in her chair, back to her desk. The meeting began to break up. Sully was about to lean over and say something to R.J. when Eddie stopped in front of him.

“Sullivan, the suspension. The Judge Foy matter. Reese doesn’t like you, and if what he said to us in a sworn deposition was true I don’t blame him. I also can’t imagine, one way or another, that you hold him dear.”

“You believed him, you didn’t believe me, Eddie. He lied, in my humble opinion.”

“Fair enough. So. I’m not going to pull you off this. You’ve done all the work. But remember that every bit of this reporting has to be above reproach. The interview must be recorded. I would imagine he’ll record it himself. Keep in mind that he’s going to release anything on that recording about you that might not be flattering. So keep your temper. Watch your language. Remember that anything you say might turn up on the evening news, excerpted by other news organizations who would be delighted to have us showing some sort of bias, some sort of personal vendetta. Agreed?”

Sully nodded. “Yeah. Agreed.”

“When do you think you’ll go talk to him?”

“Not for a day or two. I want to hit the neighborhood with his picture. Go to Halo, see if anybody recognizes him from the VIP room or whatever they call it out there, just to check. Go back through Noel’s things. See if I can find a note from him, a picture, anything that would lock that relationship down or spell out more clearly what it was. All the due diligence. Then—then I’d go see him.”

“Good,” Eddie said, patting him on the arm, hard. “But, Sully? If you’re wrong on this? On a fraction, on a day, a date, an hour, on a decimal? If I get one more report of bourbon at your desk? Or of you drinking on assignment? I’ll fire your ass all the way back to Bumfuck, Louisiana.”