Майкл Коннелли - Fair Warning

“I’m telling you for the last time to stay away from this,” he said. “Stay away from Lisa Hill and stay away from the case.”

“You don’t have anything, do you?” I said.

I expected Myron’s hand to come up to signal me to silence again. But this time he did nothing. He looked intently at Mattson, awaiting a reply.

“I have your DNA, buddy boy,” Mattson said. “And you better hope it comes back clean.”

“Then that confirms it,” I said. “You’ve got nothing and you’re wasting time trying to intimidate people and make sure nobody finds out.”

Mattson snickered like I was a fool who didn’t know what I was talking about. He then reached out and hit Silent Sakai on the arm.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Mattson turned and led Sakai out. Myron and I watched through the window as they swaggered through the newsroom toward the door. I felt good. I felt supported and protected. It was not a good time to be a journalist. It was the era of fake news and reporters being labeled by those in power as enemies of the people. Newspapers were folding right and left and some said the industry was in a death spiral. Meanwhile, there was a rise in biased and unchecked reporting and media sites, the line increasingly blurring between impartial and agenda-based journalism. But in the way Myron had handled Mattson I saw a throwback to the days when the media was undaunted, unprejudiced, and therefore could not be intimidated. I suddenly knew for the first time in a long time that I was in the right place.

Myron Levin had to raise money and run the website. Those were his priorities and he didn’t get to be a reporter as much as he wanted to be. But when he put on that hat he was as relentless as any I had ever known. There was a famous story about Myron from his days as a consumer reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This was before he took a buyout, left the paper, and used the money to initially fund FairWarning. In reporting circles there is no better feeling than to expose a scoundrel, to write the story that reveals the con man and shuts him down. Most often the charlatan claims innocence and damage. He sues for millions and then quietly slips out of town to start over somewhere else. The legend about Myron is that he exposed a grifter who was running an earthquake-repair con after the Northridge quake in ’94. Once outed on the front page of the Times, the grifter claimed innocence and filed a defamation-and-slander suit seeking $10 million in damages. In the filing documents, the grifter stated that Myron’s story had caused him so much humiliation and anguish that the damages went beyond reputation and earnings to his health. He said that Myron’s article had caused him bleeding from the rectum. And that was what cemented Myron’s legendary status as a reporter. He had written a story that allegedly made a man bleed from the ass. No reporter would ever be able to best that, no matter how many millions they were sued for.

“Thanks, Myron,” I said. “You had my back.”

“Of course,” Myron said. “Now go get the story.”

I nodded as we watched the two detectives go through the office door.

“And you better watch yourself on this,” Myron said. “Those assholes don’t like you.”

“I know,” I replied.

With my editor and publisher’s approval I was officially on the story. And on my very first official move, I got lucky. I went back on Tina Portrero’s social media, used her Facebook tagging history to identify her mother, Regina Portrero, and reached out to her through her own Facebook page. I assumed that if Regina reached back from her home in Chicago we would set up a phone call. Phone calls with the bereaved were safest — I still have a scar on my face from asking the wrong question of a woman grieving the sudden death of her fiancé. But things can get lost or missed in a phone call: nuances of conversation, expressions, emotion.

But that is where the luck came in. Within an hour of sending my private message, Regina contacted me and said she was in town to make arrangements to take her daughter home. She said she was staying at a hotel called the London West Hollywood and expected to leave Los Angeles the next morning, Tina’s body in the cargo hold of the jet. She invited me to come to the hotel to talk about Tina.

I couldn’t make an invitation like that wait, especially when I knew that Mattson and Sakai might take it upon themselves to warn Regina about me. I told her I would be in the lobby of the hotel in an hour. I told Myron where I was going and headed off in the Jeep, taking Coldwater Canyon south over the Santa Monica Mountains and down into Beverly Hills. I then went east on Sunset Boulevard toward the Sunset Strip. The London West Hollywood was located right in the middle of it.

Regina Portrero was a small woman in her mid-sixties, which indicated she had Tina early in her life. I could see the resemblance most in the same dark brown eyes and hair. She met me in the lobby of the hotel, which was just a half block south of Sunset on San Vicente. It was her daughter’s neighborhood. She had lived just a few blocks away.

We sat in an alcove that was probably meant for people waiting for their rooms to be ready. But there was no one there at the moment and we had privacy. I took out my notebook and put it on my thigh so I could write notes and be as inconspicuous about it as possible.

“What is your interest in Tina?” she asked.

Regina’s first question threw me because she had not asked it during the initial communication. Now she wanted to know what I was doing and I knew that if I answered it fully and honestly it would probably end the interview before it got started.

“Well, first of all, I am very sorry for your loss,” I said. “I can’t imagine what you are going through and I hate so much to be an intruder. But what the police on this case told me makes it different and makes what happened to Tina something that the public should possibly know about.”

“I don’t understand. Are you talking about what happened to her neck?”

“Oh, no.”

I was mortified that my clumsy answer to her first question had conjured in her mind the horrible manner in which her daughter had been killed. In many ways I would have preferred a backhand across the face, the diamond of an engagement ring raking across my skin and leaving another scar.

“Uh...,” I stammered. “What I meant was... the police, they told me that she might have been the victim of cyberstalking, and so far, as far as I know, there is no evidence that the two are connected but...”

“They didn’t tell me that,” Regina said. “They said they didn’t have any leads.”

“Well, I don’t want to speak for them and maybe they don’t want to tell you anything until they’re sure. But I understand that she told friends — like Lisa Hill — that she felt she was being stalked. And to be honest, that is what is of interest to me. That is a consumer thing — it’s about privacy — and if there is a... problem then that’s what I’m going to write about.”

“How was she stalked? This is all news to me.”

I knew I was in trouble here. I was telling her things she didn’t know, so the first thing she was going to do after I left was call Mattson about it. Then Mattson would learn that I was still actively pursuing the case, and Regina would in turn learn that my reporter’s interest in Tina and her death was compromised by my having known her briefly but intimately. This meant that this was the one and only time I would get to talk to Tina’s mother. She would be turned against me in the same way Lisa Hill had been.

“I don’t know exactly how she was stalked,” I said. “That is only what the police said. I talked to her friend Lisa and she said Tina apparently met a man in a bar but that it felt like he was there waiting for her or something. That it wasn’t a random encounter.”