THREE TIMES A LADY (16 page)

And now it was time for her to pay up.

After finally discarding the silly white lab coat in favour of her worn brown leather bomber jacket, a fuzzy green scarf and a pair of faded blue jeans – tucking her Glock 17 into her shoulder holster to complete the hastily thrown-together outfit – Dana exited the elevator on the ground floor of her apartment complex and rushed out the front door of the lobby to go meet up with Templeton at the station house downtown.  Her heartbeat hadn’t slowed down one bit since she’d first hung up with the Cleveland cop, and judging from the incessant thumping still banging away against her ribcage, she highly doubted that it would anytime soon. 

Preoccupied with thoughts of her brother and how he might tie into Christian Manhoff’s brutal murder, Dana didn’t notice the television news crew that had been lying in wait for her just outside the main doors until it was already too late.  Clever as the sleight of hand might have been with the doctor’s outfit at the hospital, apparently the press hadn’t been fooled for long.  Still, Dana was happy the misdirection had worked for as long as it had.  After all, she certainly hadn’t expected the press to stay in the dark for ever on the subject of her whereabouts.  They were just too good at what they did; too hungry; too goddamn
relentless
.

As was usual with television journalists, everything happened very quickly from there.  Before Dana knew what was going on, lights from three different cameras blinded her and a microphone was shoved into her face.  A second boom mike was lowered just above her head while a young man with perfect hair stepped forward in the middle of the pack and smiled his perfect teeth at her, each one of his dental veneers every bit as bright and dazzling as the lights blazing forth from the cameras.  The powerful lights sliced through the foggy winter air with all the efficiency of a paper cut, stabbing Dana’s thoroughly shocked brain via her woefully unprepared eyeballs. 

Dana blinked rapidly against the blinding lights and counted the number of figures huddled in a rough semi-circle around Colgate’s poster boy. 
Four.
  The lead reporter had come with a full crew in tow, and why not?  This story could be his ticket out of Cleveland and onto bigger and better things.  Los Angeles, perhaps.  Maybe even New York City itself – the holy grail of TV news.

‘Agent Whitestone,’ the man said with a melodramatic flair that he’d no doubt been practicing in front of his bathroom mirror each and every night for the past five years now, refining it and redefining it until it sounded as smooth as processed honey, both to his own ears and to the ears of his viewers.  ‘Brent Price, Channel Four News.  You walked right past us at the hospital, didn’t you?’ 

The reporter narrowed his bright blue eyes beneath his carefully coiffed brown hair to let Dana know she’d been caught red-handed and there was nowhere left for her to hide.  ‘
Didn’t
you?’ he repeated.

Dana forced back a swell of anger in her chest.  Wasn’t easy.  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr Price,’ she said, putting her head down and hustling past the journalists, making a beeline for her car parked forty-five feet away.  She
really
didn’t have time for this crap right now.  Having never been anything less than a total gentleman a day in his entire life, Gary Templeton would no doubt be waiting for her on the kerb downtown, and Dana didn’t want to keep the Cleveland cop standing out there in the cold any longer than she absolutely needed to.

Not that she was going to get off the hook
that
easily, of course.

The newsman laughed and shuffled his feet to block Dana’s path, slipping momentarily on a patch of black ice beneath his brown dress shoes and temporarily losing his balance.  Flinging out his arms wildly to his sides, Price regained his equilibrium quickly, but otherwise looked like an adult who was attempting to ride a skateboard for the first time in his life.  Still, once he’d regained his balance, Price acted as though nothing had happened at all.  Not even a single
flicker
of acknowledgement on his handsome face that he’d come perilously close to smashing out all his pretty veneers against the hard ground. 

Dana watched all this unfold in amazement.  Not a single hair on Price’s head had moved out of place despite his near-fall and the fact that the healthy wind swirling around the parking lot called to mind a certain famous fictional tornado that had once dropped an entire
house
on a wicked witch sporting ruby-red slippers.

Dana shook her head in bewilderment.  No matter how long she lived, she knew she’d never understand where TV folks got all their confidence from.  Still, she highly doubted it came from industrial-strength hairspray or ten pounds of pancake make-up.  No, it was something else.  Maybe a complete lack of self-awareness, an utter inability to step outside your own body and view yourself through the eyes of others.  A complete lack of the self-consciousness Dana seemed to have been
born
with.  Whatever it was, though, Dana knew that she could probably use some more of it herself. 
A
lot
more of it.  She hated knowing that she didn’t even trust herself any more.  How in the hell could she expect
other
people to trust her? 

And in her job, trust was
everything
. 

Still – much like a cat’s love – trust was something that needed to be earned.  Or, in her case, earned
back
.  Starting with Gary Templeton and Christian Manhoff’s grieving family.  No matter how hard it might seem to accomplish, Dana knew she needed to regroup mentally, to show everybody she hadn’t cracked, that she was still capable of doing her job properly.  And maybe, just
maybe
, even
excelling
at it every once in a while.

‘Sure you don’t know what I’m talking about, Agent Whitestone,’ Price persisted, turning down the corners of his mouth to indicate that he wasn’t buying her story.  ‘Nice try, though.  I guess you
really
didn’t want to talk to us, huh?  Anyway, it’s a good thing for me that my source on the inside finally coughed up the information.  The rest of those idiots are still waiting for you outside Fairview General.’ 

Price cast his gaze up into the menacing winter skies above and clucked his tongue with false concern.  ‘The poor bastards.  It’s going to get dark pretty soon and our weather guy says that it’s supposed to get viciously cold out here tonight.  Can you believe that?  Helluva way to describe the weather, huh?  But that’s what he said. 
Viciously
cold.  I’ve never heard it described that way before, have you?’

Dana ignored Price’s question and forced herself not to glare, even though the sneaky newsman had taken all of about three seconds to get underneath her skin.  Still, Dana knew that she looked like a stark raving lunatic whenever she glared at somebody on television and that was the last impression on Earth she wanted to create right now.  Or
reinforce
.  Everybody out there probably thought she was crazy already.  Accurate as the impression might be, though, she didn’t want to help it along by appearing the part.

Dana concentrated on keeping her voice completely even and entirely devoid of any emotion, a little trick she’d learned during a media-relations course taught by her former mentor and partner, Crawford Bell.  ‘Good to see you, Brett,’ Dana said, purposely getting Brent Price’s first name wrong.  ‘How are your wife and kids doing?’ 

Dana studied Price’s reaction.  Personal questions like the one she’d just asked him put the media on the defensive, made it more likely that the footage they’d just shot wouldn’t wind up on the ten o’clock news.  It was a simple trick, but an effective one nonetheless.  Not even the fanciest editing job could cover up when a picture jumped wildly to and fro with no natural segue.  And in the news business – much like in the FBI – trust was
everything
.  Even the slightest
hint
that you were trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes and trying to make them believe anything less than the absolute truth meant you were dead in the water.

Sure enough, Price looked confused for a moment, casting a sideways glance at one of his cameramen before returning his gaze to Dana.  ‘What are you talking about, Agent Whitestone?  My name’s
Brent
and I don’t have a wife and kids.  I’m single.’

Dana crinkled up her face and affected an embarrassed look, as though she’d just been caught in a mortifying social
faux pas
and could just
die
right there on the spot.  ‘Ah, right,’ she said.  She sucked in a lungful of cold air over her teeth to show him just how
stupid
she felt about the whole thing.  ‘Sorry about that.  I guess I must have been thinking about Brett Grodin over at Channel Two.’

Price’s face reddened, but in his case the mortification was completely genuine.  Brett Grodin and the rest of the cast over at Channel Two had been kicking the crap out of Channel Four every ratings period for the past five years now and Brent Price – much like all newsmen –
hated
to be outdone by his contemporaries, despised knowing that somebody out there was doing a better job than he was and would probably get out of Cleveland a hell of a lot sooner than he did.

Dana allowed herself a small smile at Price’s obvious discomfort.  She just couldn’t help herself.  It served the inconsiderate jerk right.  Maybe now he’d know how
she
felt.  How it felt to be ambushed at home like this.  The shoe was on the other foot now, and the best part of it all was that Price hadn’t even realised that the transition was taking place.  Dana had turned the situation around on her questioner with two simple sentences, just like Crawford Bell had taught her to do. 
God, she missed that man.

‘No problem,’ Price said after a moment.  Still, he looked pissed off that they’d probably have to trash the entire opening sequence, waving four fingers across his throat to let his cameramen know they could stop taping.

Despite his pushiness, Dana almost felt sorry for Price as she watched him try to recover his composure in front of his co-workers.  Much like Dana, looking like a complete jackass on television didn’t do a damn thing to further
his
career, either. 

Price cleared his throat and gathered himself before nodding to his cameramen to start taping again.  ‘Do you have a minute to give us a quick interview, Agent Whitestone?’ he asked, slipping back into his smooth newsman’s persona now that the all-seeing electronic eyes were capturing his slick performance once more.  ‘Maybe we could go inside where it’s warm and have a little sit-down, if that’s agreeable with you.  We’ll make it nice.  No pressure.  Everyone’s dying to know what went on in your recent cases and you’re a very hard target to catch up with.’

Dana shook her head but continued smiling at Price.  At twenty-five or twenty-six, the guy couldn’t have been more than three or four years removed from J-school, and local Cleveland news obviously hadn’t been his first choice.  Then again, whose first choice
had
Cleveland been?  Sure,
Dana
had chosen to return to her native city after graduating from Cleveland State University in 1994 with a degree in criminal psychology and beginning her career in Washington, DC three years later, but she marked the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.  Cleveland had always been considered to be the place where promising careers went to
die
.  Probably always would be.  Still, in this economy, you took jobs wherever you could find them.

‘Sorry, Brett,’ Dana said, getting the erstwhile reporter’s name right this time and trying her best to look disappointed about the refusal.  No use rubbing salt in his open wounds.  He looked plenty wounded enough as it was already.  ‘I can’t do it right now because I’ve got a very important appointment I need to keep.  But I’ll tell you what: how about I give you an exclusive in a couple of days or so?  I could call you at the station to set it up, if that’s all right with you.’

Price brightened at the suggestion.  At least the trip out to Lakewood hadn’t been a
complete
waste of his time. ‘Hell, yeah,’ he said, perking up at the notion that
he
might be the one to finally nail down the elusive first interview with Dana Whitestone following the most bizarre serial-killer stories the country had ever seen – an interview that not even Barbara Walters and the rest of those clucking hens over on
The View
had managed to get up to this point.  ‘How about next Monday or Tuesday?  We’ll be in winter sweeps week then and it would really help me out.  Make me look like a big shot to the boys upstairs if I could get the scoop on the rest of the vultures.’

Dana pulled back the left sleeve on her jacket and checked her watch to remind Price of the fact that he was making her late.  ‘No problem.  I’ll call you at the news station in a day or two.  What’s your extension?’

‘Four-five-four-three.’

‘Fine.  I’ll give you a call at that number.’

‘Awesome,’ Price said.  ‘Thanks a million.’ 

Price jerked his head toward the far end of the parking lot to let his camera and soundmen know they could follow him toward their news van.  To Dana, he said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just wrap things up here for now then.  Talk to you soon, Agent Whitestone.’