Tess Gerritsen - Vanish

“If you had any questions for me, all you had to do was pick up the phone.” He pinned her with a look. “I would have returned your calls, Dr. Isles.”

They fell silent. At other desks, phones rang and keyboards clacked, but Maura and Lukas just looked at each other, the air between them spiked with both irritation and something else, something she didn’t want to acknowledge. A strong whiff of mutual attraction. Or am I just imagining it?

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’m being a jerk. I mean, you are here. Even if it’s for your own purposes.”

“You have to understand my position, too,” she said. “As a public official, I get calls all the time from reporters. Some of them-many of them-don’t care about victims’ privacy or grieving families or whether investigations are at risk. I’ve learned to be cautious and watch what I say. Because I’ve been burned too many times by reporters who swear that my comments will stay off the record.”

“So that’s what kept you from calling? Professional discretion?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no other reason you didn’t call me back?”

“What other reason would there be?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you didn’t like me.” His gaze was so intent, she had trouble keeping eye contact. He made her that uncomfortable.

“I don’t dislike you, Mr. Lukas.”

“Ouch. Now I fully appreciate what it means to be damned with faint praise.”

“I thought reporters had thicker skin.”

“We all want to be liked, especially by people we admire.” He leaned closer. “And by the way, it’s not Mr. Lukas. It’s Peter.”

Another silence, because she didn’t know if this was flirtation or manipulation. For this man, it might amount to the same thing.

“That went over like a lead balloon,” he said.

“It’s nice to be flattered, but I’d rather you just be straight-forward.”

“I thought I was being straightforward.”

“You want information from me. I want the same from you. I just didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

He gave a nod of understanding. “Okay. So this is just a simple transaction.”

“What I need to know is-”

“We’re getting right to business? I can’t even offer you a cup of coffee first?” He rose from the chair and crossed toward the community coffeepot.

Glancing at the carafe, she saw only tar-black dregs, and said quickly, “None for me, thank you.”

He poured a cup for himself and sat back down. “So what’s with the reluctance to discuss this over the phone?”

“Things have been… happening.”

“Things? Are you telling me you don’t even trust your own telephone?”

“As I told you, the case is complicated.”

“Federal intervention. Confiscated ballistics evidence. FBI in a tug-of-war with the Pentagon. A hostage taker who still remains unidentified.” He laughed. “Yeah, I’d say it’s gotten very complicated.”

“You know all this.”

“That’s why they call us reporters.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Do you really think I’m going to answer that question? Let’s just say I have friends in law enforcement. And I have theories.”

“About what?”

“Joseph Roke and Olena. And what that hostage taking was really all about.”

“No one really knows that answer.”

“But I know what law enforcement is thinking. I know what their theories are.” He set down his coffee cup. “John Barsanti spent about three hours with me, did you know that? Picking and probing, trying to find out why I was the only reporter Joseph Roke wanted to talk to. Funny thing about interrogations. The person being interrogated can glean a lot of information just by the questions they ask you. I know that two months ago, Olena and Joe were together in New Haven, where he killed a cop. Maybe they were lovers, maybe just fellow delusionals, but after an incident like that, they’d want to split up. At least, they would if they were smart, and I don’t think these were dumb people. But they must have had a way to stay in contact. A way to regroup if they needed to. And they chose Boston as the place to meet.”

“Why Boston?”

His gaze was so direct she could not avoid it. “You’re looking at the reason.”

“You?”

“I’m not being egotistical here. I’m just telling you what Barsanti seems to think. That Joe and Olena somehow identified me as their crusading hero. That they came to Boston to see me.”

“And that leads to the question I came here to ask.” She leaned toward him. “Why you? They didn’t pick your name out of a hat. Joe may have been mentally unstable, but he was intelligent. An obsessive reader of newspapers and magazines. Something you wrote must have caught his eye.”

“I know the answer to that one. Barsanti essentially spilled the beans when he asked about a column I wrote back in early June. About the Ballentree Company.”

They both fell silent as another reporter walked past, on her way to the coffeepot. While they waited for her to pour her cup, their gazes remained locked on each other. Only when the woman was once again out of earshot did Maura say: “Show me the column.”

“It’ll be on LexisNexis. Let me call it up.” He swiveled around to his computer and called up the LexisNexis news search engine, typed in his name, and hit search.

The screen filled with entries.

“Let me find the right date,” he said, scrolling down the page.

“This is everything you’ve ever written?”

“Yeah, probably going all the way back to my Bigfoot days.”

“Excuse me?”

“When I got out of journalism school, I had a ton of student loans to pay off. Took every writing gig I could get, including an assignment to cover a Bigfoot convention out in California.” He looked at her. “I admit it, I was a news whore. But I had bills to pay.”

“And now you’re respectable?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far…” He paused, clicked on an entry. “Okay, here’s the column,” he said and rose to his feet, offering her his chair. “That’s what I wrote back in June, about Ballentree.”

She settled into his just-vacated seat and focused on the text now glowing on the screen.

War is Profit: Business Booming for Ballentree

While the US economy sags, there’s one sector that’s still raking in big profits. Mega defense contractor Ballentree is reeling in new deals like fish from their private trout pond…

“Needless to say,” said Lukas, “Ballentree was none too happy about that piece. But I’m not the only one who’s writing these things. The same criticism has been leveled by other reporters.”

“Yet Joe chose you.”

“Maybe it was the timing. Maybe he just happened to pick up a Tribune that day, and there was my column about big bad Ballentree.”

“Can I look at what else you’ve written?”

“Be my guest.”

She returned to the list of his articles on the LexisNexis page. “You’re prolific.”

“I’ve been writing for over twenty years, covering everything from gang warfare to gay marriage.”

“And Bigfoot.”

“Don’t remind me.”

She scrolled down the first and second pages of entries, then moved onto the third page. There she paused. “These articles were filed from Washington.”

“I think I told you. I was the Tribune ’s Washington correspondent. Only lasted for two years there.”

“Why?”

“I hated DC. And I admit, I’m a born Yankee. Call me a masochist, but I missed the winters up here, so I moved back to Boston in February.”

“What was your beat in DC?”