THREE TIMES A LADY (17 page)

Dana watched the crew walk away, then called out to Price before he could climb up into the passenger compartment of the van.  ‘Hey, Brett?’

Price turned around to face her.  ‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll give you that exclusive on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

Dana held his stare.  ‘I’ll give you the exclusive if you promise to never pull this crap again.  Don’t ambush me at home like this again, OK?  I don’t like it and it isn’t fair.  Is that a deal?’

Price lowered his head.  Even
he
knew that the press could and often did overstep its boundaries.  God knew that
he
wouldn’t have wanted anyone bothering him at home like this.  If they did, he’d probably wind up chasing them off his property with a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands, locked, cocked and loaded for bear.  ‘Yeah, it’s a deal, Agent Whitestone,’ Price said, finally dropping his affected tone and sounding like a real human being for the first time all night.  ‘Sorry about that.’

Dana waved away the apology.  ‘It’s all right.  Just make sure it never happens again, OK?  I’d really hate to have to give that exclusive to Brett Grodin.  I’ve never liked that prick.’

A brief smile flashed across Price’s full lips, followed almost at once by a full-blown grin.  Flashing his pearly whites at Dana once more, the local newsman climbed up into the van’s passenger compartment and said, ‘I’d hate it more, Agent Whitestone.  And believe me, I hate that prick a hell of a lot worse than you do.’

When Brent Price and the rest of the Channel Two news team had safely driven off in their news van, Dana climbed behind the steering wheel of her silver Mazda Protégé and cranked the engine to life.  ‘Jessie’s Girl’ by Rick Springfield came on over the car stereo and Dana found the volume button on the steering wheel with her thumb before turning it all the way up.  She’d always
loved
this song.  It had always reminded her of her high school days, back in the days before her life had been so goddamn complicated all the time.

Dialing up the power on the defroster to clear off the frost from the windshield, Dana hit Interstate 90 for ten minutes or so before taking the West 25
th
Street exit and heading directly into the heart of the city, sighing as the last strains of
Jessie’s Girl
wound down and the radio kicked over to
I Wonder
by Kellie Pickler, the former
American Idol
contestant who’d recorded a Top Ten smash-hit with a song detailing an irretrievably broken relationship between a mother and her daughter.  The song had always made Dana miss her
own
mother that much more.  And why not?  Sara Whitestone had been Dana’s entire
world
during the brief time they’d shared together on Earth, and it would have been really nice to call up her mom now and ask for some advice.  Because the sad truth of the matter was that Dana didn’t know
what
to do any more.  About
anything
.  About her life.  About her career.  About the thrilling but absolutely
soul-freezing
possibility of adopting little Bradley.  About a million other little things that mothers and daughters routinely talked about on a daily basis. 

One thing that Dana
did
know, however, was that as much as she didn’t want to, she’d make good on her promise to Brent Price about sitting down for that exclusive interview.  Still, the thought filled her stomach with dread.  No doubt the national networks would tap into the live feed and broadcast the interview countrywide.  Thankfully, tough, Brent Price still looked a little wet behind his ears to her and that’s
exactly
the kind of reporter Dana wanted to deal with on this matter.  Using the tricks Crawford Bell had taught her, Dana could probably steer the interview with Price in whatever direction she chose, and she was pretty sure Price would be happy enough to have scored the initial Q&A with her that he wouldn’t recognise – or at least wouldn’t
call her out on
– what Dana already knew would be hopelessly evasive answers designed to put the public’s insatiable curiosity about her to rest once and for all.  Hell, people didn’t care
what
Dana said, they just wanted to hear her saying it – preferably in prime time, if at all possible.  Somehow – despite the infinite number of more important issues out there more worthy of obsessing over – Dana’s story had become hot.  One of the hottest in the past decade – if not longer – at least in the world of law-enforcement.  And like it or not, Dana knew that it would remain that way until she could take away at least
some
of the mystery for the curious masses.

Twenty minutes later, having successfully navigated the treacherous road conditions on I-90 as yet
another
heavy snow began to fall from the heavens, Dana swung the Protégé in front of the main station house of the Cleveland Police Department and came to a gentle stop before glancing out her window.  It looked like Brent Price’s weatherman colleague had been spot-on with his gloomy forecast for the night.  It
did
look like it was going to be a cold one out there tonight.  A
viciously
cold one. 

Dana shook her head.  With any luck, Price would have the heart to call up his fellow journalists and save them the misery of camping out in the hospital’s frigid parking lot all night.  Still, she didn’t have very high hopes about that possibility.  Much as she wouldn’t show her hand to a murder suspect during a back-room interview, Price wouldn’t want to tip off his competition as to what
he
was up to either.  The key in both of their jobs was to keep their adversaries off-balance as much as possible.  Another little pointer Dana had learned from the late, great Crawford Bell.

Just as Dana had suspected he would be, Gary Templeton stood waiting for her on the kerb.  Dressed in a long black trench coat over a perfectly creased, navy-blue police uniform, Templeton had shoved his hands deep into his pockets against the inclement weather.  Opening up the passenger-side door, he let an icy blast of freezing air into the car before finally settling down in his seat and pulling the door shut behind him.  ‘Hey, Dana,’ Templeton said, blowing into his large hands for warmth.  ‘Long time, no see.’

Dana leaned forward and turned up the heater inside the car.  ‘You should have waited for me inside the station house, Gary,’ she scolded.  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t catch your death out there.  This weather is
insane
.’

Templeton chuckled.  ‘Tell me about it.’

Peering into the side-view mirror, Dana swung the Protégé back out into the traffic crawling down the ice-covered street – Prospect Avenue, the same busy road on which Christian Manhoff’s naked body had been discovered just a few days earlier.  She turned down the radio and looked sideways at Templeton.  ‘So, what picture of my brother was attached to Christian Manhoff’s nipple ring, anyway?  And do you have any idea of who might have put it there?’

Templeton brushed a light dusting of snow from the sleeve of his trench coat.  Little white crystals melted immediately in the hot blast of air coming from the car heater.  ‘Well, it was the same picture he used with his byline when he worked for the
Plain Dealer
,’ he said, referencing her half-brother’s former job as a newspaper reporter in the city.  ‘The same picture he used back when he was still going by the name of Jeremiah Quigley.  We’re running it for prints and fibres now.  Same thing with the dog bone.  Hopefully we’ll know something more in a day or two.  Nothing yet, though.  Crime scene was pretty clean.  Sound familiar to you?’

Dana grimaced at the mention of her brother’s penchant for never leaving behind any evidence at any one of his many crime scenes – not to mention the unsettling mention of his birth name.  ‘Quigley’ had been Dana’s mother’s maiden name, and in the hundreds of times that Dana had read the horrible account of her parents’ deaths in the newspaper – an account written by none other than her half-brother himself – never once had she bothered to look at the reporter’s name or mug shot.  If she
had
, maybe she could have saved Crawford and Eric and all the others from dying their horrible deaths.  But she hadn’t, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing she could do about it now.

Templeton broke into her thoughts.  ‘And, no, I have no idea who might have put the picture there.  Do you?’

Dana shook her head.  ‘Not a clue.’

Templeton grunted.  ‘So, I guess we’re starting from ground zero then, huh?’

Dana looked over at the Cleveland cop.  Close-cropped silver hair sat atop a rugged face highlighted by a pair of piercing blue eyes.  A dead ringer for Richard Gere if ever there was one, mixed in with more than just a small helping of Clint Eastwood for good measure.  ‘Where
else
do we ever start from, Gary?’

Templeton sighed as Dana took a left onto East 9
th
Street and pointed the car in the direction of Lake Erie, which had very nearly become her permanent home after the plane crash.  ‘Good point,’ he said.  ‘At least we’re not starting from a negative number, though, right?  Who knows?  Maybe we’ll get luckier this time.’

Dana laughed without humour.  ‘Sun shines down on even a dog’s ass every once in a while.’

Templeton cast his gaze out the window and up to the pitch-black skies overhead.  ‘Interesting analogy, Agent Whitestone.’

Dana pursed her lips and stared straight ahead through the windshield.  ‘Wasn’t it just, though?’

Ten minutes later, Dana pulled the Protégé into the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office on Cedar Avenue.  ‘Ready to go do this?’ she asked Templeton.

The Cleveland cop nodded in his seat next her.  ‘Yep, but are you absolutely
sure
you’re feeling up to this, Dana?  You still look a little pale to me.’

Dana dismissed Templeton’s concern with a quick wave of her hand, at the same time sliding her sleek silver vehicle into an empty space before downshifting the Protégé to park mode and switching off the ignition.  Glancing up into the rearview mirror, she checked her appearance.  Not great, but not all that bad either, considering the circumstances.  ‘I’m fine, Gary,’ she said, returning the mirror to its proper position and turning in her seat to face him.   ‘As far as my colouring goes, I
always
look this pale.  Curse of the Irish.  Hell, I get sunburned if I read for too long under anything stronger than a forty-watt bulb.’

Templeton laughed at her joke, and Dana didn’t bother mentioning to him the
other
curse of the Irish that sometimes ruled her life – a little too often for her to simply dismiss as the harmless blowing off of some steam.  The curse of the Irish that sent her running straight for the bottle whenever things got too difficult to deal with.  Still, Dana’s alcohol use had clouded her judgment when she’d been investigating the Cleveland Slasher case – had slowed her down mentally when she’d needed to be clear-headed the most – and she was determined to never make that same mistake again.  Like it not, people’s lives
depended
on her and she couldn’t afford to let them down any more.  Not now and not ever again.

Dana and Templeton exited the Protégé and stepped out into the freezing wind before heading for the entrance to the coroner’s office fifty feet away.  Cold winter air sliced through their jackets like the sharp scalpels no doubt slicing their way through the deceased bodies on the inside of the forbidding building, making Dana wonder briefly if she’d ever feel warm again.

Templeton hustled up the front steps ahead of her.  He held open the door for Dana before stepping inside himself.  When they reached the front desk inside the lobby of the building, Templeton asked the receptionist where they might find the chief coroner.  The woman behind the desk smiled and directed them down a long hallway. 

    Dana and Templeton moved down the hall and toward Dr Philip Johnson’s office without speaking.  As the head coroner for the entire county, Johnson hadn’t been especially pleased with Dana when she’d pressed him into exhuming and re-autopsying the four victims previous to Jacinda Holloway in the Cleveland Slasher case.  And unlike Gary Templeton, Johnson was the kind of guy who
did
hold onto a grudge.  Held onto it like a dog with a bone clamped down hard between its teeth. 

Dana stopped herself mid-thought.  To say the least, an inconvenient way of thinking about things when Christian Manhoff had died in the exact manner he had.

In any event, Dana had very little doubt that Phillip Johnson had gone
apoplectic
when he’d found out that somebody had snuck into his building and attached a picture of Dana’s half-brother to one of Christian Manhoff’s nipple rings.  To his mind, Dana and anything connected with her probably constituted nothing less of a nuisance than a plague of locusts.  A nuisance of
biblical
proportions.

Finally coming to a stop outside Johnson’s door, Dana made a mental note to have background checks run on everyone who’d worked at the coroner’s office over the past three years – much as she’d done with everybody who’d played a part in investigating the Cleveland Slasher murder scenes since it had seemed like whoever had been committing
those
murders had possessed some sort of background in detective work.  Nothing had come of it during that case, but who knew?  Maybe Dana would get luckier this time around.