Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(10)
Four years ago I had lost everything because of a story. My job and the woman I loved. I had blown it. I had not taken care of the most precious thing I had. I had put myself and the story ahead of everything else. True, I had come through dark waters. I had killed a man once and nearly been killed. I had ended up in jail because of a commitment to my job and its principles, and because deep down I knew the woman would sacrifice herself to save me. When it all fell apart, my self-imposed penance was to leave everything behind and turn myself in a different direction. For a long time before, I had said death was my beat. Now, with Christina Portrero, I knew it still was.
4
Myron was waiting for me when I came into the office the next morning. The newsroom where we worked followed an egalitarian open-floor design—individual cubicles in a cluster. Everybody from editor in chief to most recent hire (me) had the same amount of work space. Up-lighting bounced off the ceiling tiles and came down gently on each of our spaces. Our desktop computers had silent-touch keyboards. Some days the place was as silent as a church on Monday, unless somebody was working the phones, and even then they might move into the conference room at the back of the office so as not to disturb anyone. It was nothing like the newsrooms I had worked in earlier in my career, where the cacophony of clacking keyboards alone could make you lose focus on what you were doing.
The conference room, with a window looking out at the newsroom, was also used for walk-in interviews and employee conferences. That was where Myron took me, closing the door behind him after we entered. We took seats across an oval table from each other. Myron had a printout of what I assumed was my “King of Con Artists” story that he put down on the table. He was old school. He edited with a red pen on paper, then he had our office assistant, Tally Galvin, enter the changes digitally in the story.
“So, you didn’t like my headline,” I said.
“No, the headline has to be about what the story means to the consumer, not the personality—good or bad, tragic or inspirational—that you tell the story through,” Myron said. “But that’s not what I want to talk about here.”
“Then what, you didn’t like the story either?”
“The story’s fine. It’s more than fine. Some of your best work. But what I want to talk about is an email I got last night. A complaint.”
I laughed uneasily. I instinctively knew what this was about but I played innocent.
“A complaint about what?”
“This woman—Lisa Hill—says you misrepresented yourself in an interview about a murder that you are a suspect in. Now normally I would have deleted this or put it up on the wall with the rest of the crazies.”
There was a corkboard in the break room where people posted printouts of the most outrageous and bizarre responses to stories we publish. Often they came from the companies and people who were behind the consumer dangers in our stories. We called the board the wall of shame.
“But then,” Myron said, “I got a call first thing this morning from the LAPD that backs this woman’s email and now we have an LAPD complaint as well.”
“That’s complete bullshit,” I said.
“Well, tell me what’s going on because the cop who called wasn’t friendly.”
“Was his name Mattson?”
Myron looked down at the printout and some of the notations he had made by hand on it. He nodded.
“That’s him.”
“Okay, this whole thing started last night when I drove home from work.”
I proceeded to walk Myron step-by-step through what happened the night before, from Mattson and Sakai following me into the garage at my apartment complex to Lisa Hill’s call in response to my messages and her angry misunderstanding and hang-up. Myron, always the old-school reporter, took notes while I told the story. When I was finished, he reviewed his notes before speaking.
“Okay,” he finally said. “But what I don’t get is why you thought a story about a murder would be something we would put on FairWarning. So—”
“But don’t you—”
“Let me finish. So it makes me think you were using FairWarning and your legitimate standing here as a reporter to investigate something else, the death of this woman you knew. You see what I’m getting at? It doesn’t feel right.”
“Okay, look, whether or not Lisa Hill emailed you or the cops called you, I was going to come in here today and tell you this is my next story.”
“It can’t be your story. You have a conflict of interest.”
“What, because I knew a woman who was murdered a year later?”
“No, because you’re a person of interest in the case.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s pretty clear from what Lisa Hill told me before she hung up and my review of the victim’s social media that she dated a lot of guys. No judgment there, but all of them, including me, are persons of interest. That’s just the cops throwing out a big net. They have DNA from the crime scene because they took a sample from me and—”
“You conveniently left that out of your story just now.”
“I didn’t think it was important because it’s not. The point is I voluntarily gave it because I know that once it gets analyzed I will be in the clear. And free to write this story.”