Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

Sully had this in the system and heard Melissa hoot from across the room. “Sullivan Carter ! ‘Speculation was not on the menu.’ You’re killing me here!”

“Un-hunh,” he called back, without looking up.

The dwindling clock, the fact that half a dozen editors were looking at his copy as he was writing, that the copy desk was already composing a headline, that any mistake in spelling or a mistyped digit in an address or a failure of memory about facts would result in a credibility-dinging correction and sour faces from the brass…

He stopped to look up a few clips of old crime stories and did a database search for Lana and Noel. That led to a few perfunctory grafs of background about the Honorable Judge Reese and the probability of his future with the Supreme Court. Then onto Regina Blocker’s dance studio, the neighborhood demographics, what the traffic was like in that segment of Georgia on a Friday night. The keyboard strokes came in bursts:

The Park View neighborhood has fast-food chicken places and two liquor stores and a couple of corner stores and a Chinese carryout and a used-car lot. The people who live on Princeton Place and adjacent streets tend to be bus drivers and nurses and Metro mechanics and check-out clerks and employees in the city’s parks and recreation department and secretaries in other city agencies. Some people still own. Most rent. Violence, drug deals and prostitution are not unusual.

Lana Escobar, 25, was found dead in outfield grass at the Park View Recreation Center’s baseball field last July 14. She had been strangled. Her slaying remains unsolved, but police say Escobar was involved in prostitution and believe the killing was related to that trade.

Another young woman, Noel Pittman, a part-time student at Howard University, disappeared April 24 of last year. A call to the telephone number listed on a flier asking for help finding her was not returned yesterday…

Sully looked at the clock: 7:15. A kicker and he was home. Flipping through his notes, he remembered he hadn’t said anything else about the strip club, after mentioning it in the lede. If he came back to it now at the end, it would appear as if he’d intended that all along.

Les Samuels, who runs the strip club, said residents and neighbors were not indifferent to the Reese slaying. He was in his office in the back of the club yesterday afternoon, filling out paperwork for the array of city and law enforcement agencies that license his establishment.

“What people don’t want,” he said, “is trouble they ain’t already got. People got plenty of trouble all by themselves. A rich white girl gets killed up the street? That’s a fresh lot of trouble. That’s something you want to stay about a million miles away from.”

“Sullivan!”

He hit the send button. “Yours!”

The bathroom, a place to walk to. Water ran from the tap in a cold torrent, and lowering his face to the sink, he cupped his hands to catch it, splashing it over his face. A damp hand through the hair and he looked up to the mirror. The scars were there, like bones melted by fire, by electricity. He thought of his house and its silences, awaiting him like an entombing crypt, and he did not want to go there, did not want to be left alone with his thoughts.

Back at the desk, he read through his notes for fact-checking, checked the names to be sure, and then Melissa was waving, beckoning him. She had made a few tightening and clarification changes. She called the story up in layout, so they could see the front page and how it was displayed.

There was no one else nearby, but she lowered her voice anyway, part of that bullshit hey-I’m-doing-you-a-favor air of familiarity she liked to convey. “Fabulous work today, Sullivan. It saved us. Now. Look. Really need you at the Reese house tomorrow. They’re making some sort of statement at one.”

He blinked. She needed to whisper to hand him a lame-ass assignment like that?

“Chris-let’s let him get that,” he said. “Lemme push the investigative side, something related to the manhunt but not precisely on it.”

She looked away from the screen and at him, not pleased with the push-back. “Thanks, but cops are Chris’s beat. Jamie is working the feds. I need a real pro out there with the family. This statement, or whatever it is, isn’t going to be much, but I know you can do something with it. We’ll box it on the front.”

“A statement? You’re serious?” He was whispering back, as if they were trading stock tips. “You’re sending me out to McLean to take dictation ? Send a shooter and an intern.”

“No,” she said firmly, holding his gaze now. “I need a scene setter. It’s a Sunday. Nothing else is going to develop on a Sunday. I need you to do just what you did today: Write the story onto the front page. The family statement, you know, pathos, the eternal grief of parents of murdered children.”

“Reese and I have a certain history-”

“Which nobody cares about,” she said. “You two are both professionals. Surely a tiff several years ago will not affect either of you when it comes to the murder of his child.”

“A tiff ?” It burst out of him, loud and hot, before he could stifle it. “He tried to get me fucking fired . He leaked me intel and then tried to say it-”

“So you always said,” she shot back.

“Screw you,” he said, standing up. “Just fuck that-”

“Sullivan,” Edward Winters cut in, looking like he was pulling the leash on a poorly trained dog. Starched striped shirt, tie, hair swept back in a perfect coif, he seemed to materalize at the right of the copyediting desk, prim lips pursed. Sully walked over, this little summoning to the principal’s office. Copy editors, leaning back in their chairs, trying to glance over without looking like they were glancing over.

“What’s it about?” Edward’s voice a harsh whisper, the blue eyes hard, that whole Princeton and Martha’s Vineyard thing. In his sixties, lifetime of privilege. Twits like this running things, nothing you could do.

“Reese. The Judge Foy thing. You remember. You suspended me a week.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“Melissa wants me to babysit his presser tomorrow in his front yard.”

“So do it.”

“It’s wasting my time,” and here was where he should play his ace. “I’m working something, Eddie. The three suspects? They’re not connected. It’s a wrong turn.”

“How do you know that?”

“From a source. It’s developing. I need-”

“No, what you need? You need to realize you’re not still working in a war zone. You cover that presser at one. This is the next Supreme Court justice we’re talking about. We need to own this story, and you-you need to get over your beef with Reese. You fucked up. There were repercussions. End of story.”

Sully held his gaze for a beat, then two.

“Sure thing, boss.”

He went back over to Melissa, who was running with it now. She was leaning forward, elbows on the desk, eyebrows pulling down and together.

“Let’s get this straight,” she said. “I am. Your boss. I. Am. Your. Boss’s. Boss. You pop off like that to me again? I’ll slap a memo to HR. You’ll be covering high school soccer until you quit. That bit Eddie just told you about the war being over, that’s exactly-”

“What war are we talking about? I remember about six. Depending on your definition of open conflict.”

“Then all of them, Sullivan. You’re back home. Look at a map. The rules are different here.”

He kept his face flat, but felt the fury boiling from his throat into his head, the humiliation. Times like this, since the shell, maybe before, his mental wires crossed. The doctors, they had talked to him about the rage and how to contain it, and all that was washed away in a flood.