When Day Breaks (20 page)

T
he windshield wipers flipped from side to side as Eliza stared straight ahead, girding herself for what was coming. Mack was here, sitting beside her in the backseat, but soon he would be flying over the Atlantic Ocean to London.

“What time do you have to be at the airport?” she asked.

“Not till later this afternoon,” said Mack. “I have plenty of time to stop and get lunch.”

“Well, I wish I did,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the office. The service took up the morning, so Paige had to schedule me pretty tightly this afternoon.”

“A cup of coffee, then?” asked Mack.

“Okay,” said Eliza. “A cup of coffee.”

They had the driver drop them off at a coffee shop a few blocks from the Broadcast Center. As Eliza walked down the aisle to a booth at the rear, she felt a few customers look up at her. She knew they recognized her. She deliberately took a seat with her back to the room.

After the waitress had filled their cups and walked away, Mack reached across the table and took Eliza’s hands. “Last night was great,” he said. “I loved being with you, Eliza. I still can’t really believe that we’re together again.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” said Eliza, her eyes glistening.

“I don’t want to go, believe me.” He gently squeezed her hands tighter.

Eliza looked into his eyes and read intensity and sincerity in them. “When will you be back?” she asked.

“That depends on you, Eliza,” Mack answered. “Before yesterday I wasn’t planning to come home again for another six months, but now I’d be happy to fly to New York every weekend.”

Eliza laughed. “You know that’s not going to happen,” she said.

“Who says?”

“It’s not practical, Mack.”

“Screw practical.”

E
liza had been back in her office at the Broadcast Center for only a short time when she got a call from the assignment desk notifying her that Boyd Irons had been taken into police custody. She immediately phoned the KEY News attorney and asked him to look into the matter with the police.

“See what’s going on, will you please, Andrew?” she asked. “Boyd Irons has always seemed to me to be a decent young guy. Maybe he has his own attorney already, but I tend to doubt it.”

As Eliza replaced the phone in the cradle, she looked up to see Annabelle and B.J. standing in the office doorway. Their facial expressions were grim. Eliza beckoned to them to come in and sit down.

“What do you know about Boyd?” she asked. B.J. spoke first. “It was the damnedest thing,” he said, shaking his head. “One minute I’m recording you and all the other big shots coming out the funeral home, and then all of a sudden there was this surge crowding around Boyd.”

“So you, of course, crowded around, too,” said Annabelle. B.J. nodded. “And as I got closer, I heard the guys in the crowd saying that Boyd had the unicorn. The ivory unicorn everybody’s been looking for.”

“
Did
he have it?” asked Eliza. “Did you see it?”

“I saw it, but just for a second,” answered B.J. “The poor guy looked like a deer caught in the headlights. He seemed dumbstruck. I tried to steer him to the car before he could show off the unicorn to every freakin’ cameraman standing there.”

“Then what happened?” asked Eliza.

“Just as we were about to get into the car, a couple of plainclothes cops strong-armed him away.” B.J. slumped down in his chair, stretched out his legs, and groaned. “I was able to catch a shot of the unmarked police car driving away, but, damn it, I didn’t get video of Boyd or the unicorn.”

“That’s not the end of the world, B.J.,” said Annabelle. B.J. looked over at her and rolled his eyes. “Nice try. What are you, kidding me? Every other network and local station will have those pictures, and KEY News won’t. I was assigned to cover that story, and instead I got involved and didn’t get what I needed to get.”

“You helped a colleague, a friend, B.J.,” said Eliza. “No one is going to fault you for that.”

“And you know what?” said Annabelle. “We can probably get the video from our local station. Of course, it won’t be B.J. D’Elia caliber, but then what is?”

B.J. managed a crooked smile.

“All right, gang, let’s look at the bigger picture here,” said Eliza. “If Boyd did have the stolen unicorn, what do we think about that?”

“That he killed Constance Young to get it?” asked Annabelle. “I find that hard to believe. Boyd has always impressed me as such a decent guy. I’ve witnessed Constance beat up on him pretty badly, and he always just stood there and took it. But maybe he reached a breaking point.”

“I wouldn’t blame him if he did off her. That woman was a world-class bitch,” said B.J., sitting up straight again. “I don’t see it, though. If Boyd had killed Constance and stolen the unicorn from her, I don’t think he’d be carrying it around in his pocket.”

“Or forget that he’d put it there and reveal it to a crowd of media people,” said Eliza. “No, this whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, if Boyd didn’t put the unicorn in his pocket, that means somebody else did,” said Annabelle. “Why?”

“To implicate Boyd in Constance’s death,” said Eliza. “To throw suspicion on him and away from the real killer.”

“But why pick Boyd?” asked Annabelle.

“Hey, maybe the killer hates gays,” B.J. suggested.

“Maybe Boyd did something to anger the killer,” Annabelle offered.

“Or maybe the killer thinks Boyd knows something and has effectively silenced him—since anything he says now will be suspect,” said Eliza as she looked at her watch. “Annabelle, why don’t you call your police source and see if you can find out what the cops are thinking.”

I
’m telling you. I have no clue how it got there.” Boyd clasped his hands on top of the table. “But I don’t think it was there when I went into the funeral home. I remember stuffing a credit-card receipt in my pocket, and I didn’t feel anything then.”

On the other side of the table, the detective turned his chair backward and sat down, straddling the seat. “You were Constance Young’s assistant at KEY News, is that right?”

“Yes,” said Boyd.

“How would you characterize your relationship with her?”

Boyd nervously crossed his legs and wiped his clammy palm across his damp forehead. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “Constance could be difficult.”

“She gave you a hard time, huh?” asked the detective.

“Sometimes, yes,”

“Did that make you mad?”

“Look, I can see where you’re going with this,” said Boyd. “But don’t you understand? I’m being framed.”

The detective shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I see a guy who had a boss that really rubbed him the wrong way and gave him a hard time and made him angry, a boss who had lots of celebrity and money and all the things that could make a guy jealous and resentful enough to do something to even the score.”

“I’m telling you,” Boyd pleaded, his voice rising, “I had nothing to do with Constance’s death.”

“And tell me again how you got the unicorn that she was seen wearing?”

Boyd was uncomfortable with what he was about to say, hated that he was going to implicate somebody else to shift the spotlight away from himself. But he was struggling to survive here.

“Look,” he said, trying to sound calm. “There was a man who Constance dated who asked me to see if I could get the unicorn for him. Maybe he was desperate enough to kill her for it. Maybe he planted the unicorn on me.”

“And that man would be who?” asked the detective.

“Stuart Whitaker,” answered Boyd. “You know, the gazillionaire who makes all those creepy video games.”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I know who Stuart Whitaker is. We spoke with him yesterday, and he told us that you’d told him
you
would get the unicorn for
him
—if he paid you for it.”

“Oh, God,” Boyd groaned. “That’s not how it happened. He wanted the unicorn back, and I said I would see what I could do. I just wanted him to leave and not create a scene at the lunch. He’s the one who offered to make it worth my while. I didn’t ask him for anything. And I certainly didn’t get the unicorn for him.”

The detective studied Boyd, saying nothing.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Boyd asked.

The detective stood up. “Well, buddy, all I know is you were caught red-handed with that unicorn—a unicorn last seen around Constance Young’s neck. You’ll have to tell your story to the judge.”

I
talked to my police source,” said Annabelle, plopping down on the leather couch. “Their working hypothesis is that there’s a connection between the unicorn amulet and Constance’s death. They think Constance may have been killed for the unicorn.”

“Okay,” said Eliza, turning away from the computer where she was writing her daily blog for her KEY News Web site. “We had been thinking along those lines, too.”

“But here’s the interesting part,” said Annabelle, taking a bite of a Twizzler and looking at her notes. “It seems that the police now know
how
the unicorn went missing from the Cloisters. I got this part off the record, so we can’t report it yet, but Stuart Whitaker, the video-game magnate, says he
borrowed
the unicorn because he wanted to have a copy made for Constance. He told the police he never got around to making the copy and gave Constance the real thing instead.”

“So he lied to us when we interviewed him up at the Cloisters on Sunday,” Eliza mused. “Whitaker said he
had
made a reproduction for her and didn’t know how to explain that the real unicorn was missing.”

“Well, get this,” said Annabelle. “Whitaker is a major donor, and the museum isn’t going to press charges against him.”

“How nice for him,” said Eliza, turning back to her computer and hitting the SEND button. “I guess promising to donate twenty million dollars to create a Constance Young Memorial Garden wins you a ’Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”

“Are you surprised?” asked Annabelle.

“I guess not,” said Eliza, sighing with resignation. “But getting back to the idea that Constance may have been murdered for the unicorn, who would do that? It wasn’t a case of a robbery gone wrong, because nothing else was taken. The perpetrator was quite specific in what he took and who he killed.”

“What kind of person would kill for a piece of jewelry—or even for a historic artifact?” asked Annabelle.

Eliza shrugged. “I don’t think you and I can figure that one out. But I have an idea about who we should discuss all this with.” Eliza reached for the telephone. “If I can get Dr. Margo Gonzalez to come in so we can pick her brain, will you be available?”

“Name the time and place,” said Annabelle.

“Fine,” said Eliza. “And let’s get B.J. to be there, too.”

Annabelle started to leave and then turned around again. “And how could I forget this? The necropsy results are out. That Great Dane was electrocuted, too.”

B
efore she left for the day, Lauren marched into Linus Nazareth’s office. She tossed a newspaper onto his desk.

“Did you see this?” she demanded.

Linus read the small announcement in the Metro section that Lauren had circled in red ink.

“So?” said Linus.

“So now look at page five in the Arts section,” said Lauren.

Linus opened the newspaper to a full-page ad trumpeting the event. He read aloud the line at the top: “‘American News Royalty Presents the Treasures of King Arthur’s Court.’”

“Why wasn’t I asked to fill in for Constance?” Lauren whined. “Why did they ask Eliza instead of me?”

“I don’t know, baby. Relax, will you?”

“When will you stop calling me ’baby’? I hate that.” Lauren plopped down in a chair. “And I can’t relax. With what’s happened to Constance, everyone will be ultra-interested in this event. It would have been great exposure for me.”

Linus got up and walked around the desk. “How about this?” he asked. “How about we do a show from the Cloisters on Thursday morning?”

Lauren looked at him skeptically. “You mean broadcast from there?”

“Yeah,” said Linus. “A split show. You’ll be up there, Harry will be in the studio.”

“We could set that up so quickly?”

“I don’t think the permissions will be hard to get,” answered Linus. “The museum will want the publicity, and, as for our end, if we can set up within minutes for a live broadcast from the chaos of a major fire or a plane crash, having a couple of days’ notice to broadcast from a quiet museum is a piece of cake.”

“You’d do that for me, Linus?”

“Of course, I would, baby.” He rubbed his hand over her dark hair. “You’re right. Everyone will be interested in that Camelot Exhibit opening. They’ll be tuning in on Thursday morning, millions of them—while Eliza’s audience at the preview and reception will only be a couple hundred muckety-mucks and society wannabes.”

Lauren’s smile expressed her satisfaction with the executive producer’s solution.

“You know, though, Linus,” she said. “I’d like to go to that preview, too. It would be a nice run-through for the next morning’s show, and it would be fun to get all dressed up and mingle with the high rollers. Plus, I have to admit I could probably benefit from watching how Eliza conducts herself.”

“Oh, God,” Linus groaned. “Those things bore me to death.”

Lauren’s face clouded again. “I can go myself,” she said.

“No way,” said Linus. “I’m coming with you. I’m not leaving you alone with all those rich men. But here’s a little suggestion, baby: You might want to lose the gum.”