Scandalized(28)

My stomach drops when my phone rings.

“Hey, Billy,” I say, leaning back in my desk chair and squeezing my eyes closed.

“How’s it coming?”

“It’s done,” I admit. “Just working on edits.”

“With the new info from this morning?” he asks, his words distracted and clipped. I imagine him at his desk, two-day-stubbled, sipping cold coffee, reading something else while he checks in with me.

I pause, letting out a long, slow breath. I could disclose my relationship with Alec. I should, probably. But I know what would happen: Billy’d pull me from the story, pass it to someone else. I’m too close to give this up, and it’s not like Alec told me anything, anyway.

“His source backed out,” I say. “He didn’t have permission to discuss it once I got there.”

“Shit.” Billy growls. “What happened? Did you push?”

I close my eyes. Guilt twists through my gut. “Yeah, of course I pushed.”

“Maybe we’ll go with what you have. Let’s go through it real quick.”

I sit up, adjusting my laptop screen. “Okay, well, we start with women being assaulted in the VIP rooms at an exclusive club and powerful men using their influence to cover it up. Then we’ll give the backstory. No one in the US has probably heard about any of this, so I have some background on the club. Jupiter opened nine months ago, yadda yadda, jointly held by a pop star and a group of successful businessmen who have owned several popular clubs in London. Established in the heart of Brixton, it boasts a guest capacity of over eight hundred, with several VIP lounges. And, it turned out, private rooms equipped with video cameras.” I stare at the article on my screen, wondering what level of detail Billy wants included. “You want me to withhold the bouncer’s name, right? Even though his Twitter account was public before he deleted?”

“Right,” he says. “Just to be careful. Keep everything top-level, something like: a few weeks ago, a bouncer told his boss women were being harassed in the club. The bouncer was beat up, claims it was in retaliation. He complained to his boss’s boss—got fired.”

“Then his Twitter account vanished,” I say, nodding.

“Right. Bouncer fired, he shares his story on Twitter, and then posts screen caps he says someone sent him of these private chat rooms where it’s clear the club owners are sharing sexually explicit content being recorded in the private VIP lounges.”

He takes a bite of something and continues talking around it. “Then what.”

“Then his account vanishes. By the time I found him in London, the bouncer—Jamil Allen—wouldn’t talk to us. Dead ends everywhere. We don’t know who is hosting the online chat rooms, or who sent him the screen caps. Then a couple days later, Ian and I were in a pub, going through our notes, and he got a call from a woman who got his contact information through Jamil. She had been approached by execs from Jupiter who asked out of the blue if she would take a financial settlement.”

I wait for Billy to react to this. It takes a second and then, “Wait. For what?”

“Exactly, for what,” I say. “Turns out, she had been ID’d by police in one of the videos linked in the chat forums, but no one had notified her. She’d been assaulted—on video—but had no recollection of it.”

“Holy shit. So, the cops were looking into it after all but then giving information back to the club?”

“It sounds like it. Hers is the only face that’s visible. It’s possible all of these videos are like that. I mean, what are the odds that out of all these videos the police have she’s the only one who was drugged? Slim, right? And I swear it goes down to the owners, Billy. Four of them—their names kept popping up in every conversation we had. Gabriel McMaster. Josef Anders. David Suno. Charles Woo. With waiters, hostesses—everything off the record—everyone saw them all the time in the VIP areas, with different women all the time. Even a few construction guys told me that Anders and McMaster were both super hands-on during construction. They had the rooms built with cameras. And not just one for surveillance, but several pretty high-tech ones. Suno’s dad owns the company that does the club security. I’m not sure how exactly Woo fits in yet but I wouldn’t be surprised if his name starts popping up more, too.”

Billy shouts, and I hear the sound of his fist slamming down on a table.

“We’ll push with this,” he says. “Club background, bouncer’s story, screen caps of the videos being shared on the online forum, cameras in VIP rooms. Anonymous source’s story about being offered a settlement for an assault she didn’t even remember. Keep digging about these four owners. We don’t want to report high-profile names until we’re absolutely sure and we get the info on the record. And whatever else you can get while this new source is in town, we’ll include in a follow-up. This shit is going to blow up.”

I push aside my unease about the complication of using Alec as a source because inside, scrappy Gigi is beaming. My first big story, and the possibility of a follow-up only a few days later? I work to control my excitement. “Sounds great.”

Billy laughs, reading me like a book. “One thing at a time, kiddo.”

We ring off, and I dive back into edits for a few hours before reading the story through one final time. Holding my breath, I hit send. I think it’s good.