As the Wicked Watch(105)

“Joe, have you got a location yet on Terrence and Brent?” I asked.

“Naw, I think they ghosted that office,” he said.

“Is there another tenant in there now?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that. They just haven’t been around. It was under surveillance, but the North Division just pulled off the patrol yesterday.”

The police are pulling back. Meanwhile, three innocent boys are still locked up.

“Why?”

“Resources. They put a squad on the building during the day and one at night. But nothing’s going on, so they pulled them off,” he said.

With Dr. Chan’s absence, it took almost a week to get a copy of the autopsy report on Tania Mosley.

Cause of death: strangulation/asphyxiation.

Was the victim sexually assaulted? Yes.

Condition of the body: partially clothed, second-and third-degree burns. There was no evidence of smoke in the windpipe or lungs, indicating the fire took place postmortem.

A diagram on the report showed the placement of each wound. The brutality was unimaginable. During her final moments on this earth, she was subjected to the cruel and inhumane madness of her killer. The deep slash across her throat detailed in the report nearly decapitated her. The sketch of her wounds did not come close to the words explaining her injuries. The tiny X marks seemed insignificant until I read that they were all stab wounds.

I didn’t take being off the air as being banned from the newsroom. So I dropped by to pick up a few items from my desk and noticed Keith sulking around more than usual. The invigorating feeling he’d experienced on the crime beat during my absence was about to come to an unceremonious “you are not relevant” kind of ending. So Keith did something about it.

Ellen was just emerging from a closed-door meeting with newsroom brass. “It finally happened,” she said.

“What did?” I asked, sitting on the edge of her desk.

“Keith threatened to quit if Nussbaum doesn’t split the beat,” Ellen reported.

“Let him. What did Nussbaum say?”

“He’s thinking about it, Jordan.”

Keith had sucker-punched me once again. I leaned close to Ellen’s face so only she could hear what I was about to say. I got on my soapbox yet again, explaining the obvious misogyny in the industry. It reeked like a rotted skunk. “Let’s all imagine, Ellen, a woman—any woman in this building—pulling that stunt.”

I was shaking, close to tears, I was so mad. But even Ellen, a successful woman who had made it in this business, would hold tears against me.

“I said he was thinking about it. And you’d still be on the beat, you’d just be sharing it. Look, what happened to you, that scared the shit out of Peter.”

I narrowed my gaze at her.

“Don’t look at me like that. I hate myself for letting the words even come out of my mouth. But, Jordan, you have been reckless.”

That was the third time Ellen had used that word to describe me, but this time, something inside me snapped. It was as if the tether that connected us two women, floating in a space dominated by males unconcerned with our job satisfaction or advancement, had suddenly been severed.

She must have felt it, too, because she swung her chair back around and faced her computer, proffering me no chance at a rebuttal. Nussbaum had given her the task of delivering the news. I’d seen this movie before. “Thinking about it” was Nussbaum’s lily-livered precursor to a done deal. He’d exploited my relationship with Ellen, a relationship that, it turned out, was a clumsy two-step, and she’d just stepped on my foot in the middle of a competition.

Nussbaum, the coward, left the office early, his assistant said. It had all been settled with zero input from me.

Reckless, you call it, Ellen. Feckless, I say to both of you.

April Murphy left a voice mail for me a few minutes ago. I owed her a callback and needed an honest-to-goodness distraction to keep me from writing my resignation letter.

“Hello?”

“Hi, April, how are you? It’s Jordan,” I said, noticing right away that I needed to correct my tone.

“Hey, Jordan. What’s wrong?”

Too late.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was in a meeting when you called. What’s going on?”

“I was just calling to see if there was anything I could do to help,” she said.

Funny you’d ask.

Her timing was impeccable. When I’d met with April at the coffee shop, I didn’t tell her about the tissue sample Dr. Chan had taken from beneath Masey’s fingernails to be analyzed. But when I finally received the autopsy report for Tania Mosley, I inquired about the result. The sample had been logged into evidence, but no results could be found.

“Maybe there is something you can do, April. Dr. Chan had taken a tissue sample, I think it was skin or blood or something, from beneath Masey James’s fingernails. Nobody at the medical examiner’s office can track down the results, and Dr. Chan is still out of town. I had a fingernail scrape at the hospital after the attack, but the results didn’t match anything in the crime database. If my results are in, then surely they should have the results on Masey James. Can you see what you can find out?” I asked her.

“I’m on it,” she said.

“Thank you so much. Have you talked to Pamela Alonzo?”