Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

Turning the pages backward one week, then two, three, four, five. The same “D,” at the same hour.

He reached to Lorena. “Let me see that, please,” he said, taking the phone. She had already turned it on, and he tapped around on it until he found the contacts folder. There were a lot of names. And right there, plain as day, in its place alphabetically, was a single letter “D.”

There was a tension in his gut as he clicked on it. Two numbers came up. One was a 202 area code with a 354 exchange, which he immediately recognized as that of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The other was a 703 area code.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked.

He pointed it out to her. “‘D.’ That first number? Beginning 354? That’s the courthouse. I’m giving eight to five it’s David Reese. Want to make a call for me?”

She nodded.

“Wait, not the house phone. Do you have a company cell?”

“Of course. I’m on call all the time.”

“Is it in your name?”

“What do you mean?”

“The phone. Would caller ID show your name, or the name of the firm?”

“The firm. It shows a switchboard number.”

“Fabulous. May I?”

She got it out of her purse and he punched in the courthouse number from Noel’s contact list. “Just say you’ve got the wrong number if there’s an answer,” handing the phone back to her.

She put it on speaker. After four rings, David Reese’s answering machine came on. His chambers, not that of the secretary out front. Sully reached over and disconnected the call. He then rapidly dialed the 703 number, before he could change his mind. He held it up between them. Lorena leaned over, putting her ear above the phone, looking over at him as she did so.

The phone rang three, four, five times. Then it picked up. A man’s voice, low, guarded, said, “Yes? Who is this?”

Sully pointed at Lorena. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Wrong number.” She clicked it off and looked at him.

He leaned back against the couch and blinked. “That was David Reese.”

Lorena punched buttons on Noel’s cell, going into the list of recent calls.

She looked, then turned it to him. The glowing screen showed that the last call that Noel Pittman had ever made was to the 703 number they had just dialed.

It was placed on April 25, at 10:47 a.m., more than eight hours after she drove away from Halo and into the ether.

“So we’re about to say what, exactly?”

Melissa was sitting behind her desk, looking at him as if he had a bad disease. Eddie Winters leaned up against a glass wall of her office, flanked by the deputy executive editor and the assistant managing editor for news. The national editor and the paper’s top attorney were seated in chairs against the back wall. R.J. was sitting next to him, as if he were his attorney and they were in court.

She continued: “That the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. was having a personal if not intimate affair with a wannabe porn star? And that said wannabe is the young woman who turned up dead, buried in the basement of a house immediately adjacent to where the judge’s teenage daughter was murdered a year later? Oh-and he’s white and wealthy and fifty-three. She was black and twenty-five and an exotic dancer. Have I left out anything?”

“She called his personal cellphone eight hours after she was last seen,” Sully said. “I would add that.”

Her forehead wrinkled, her hands splayed out, sarcasm personified. “Thanks, yes. I’d forgotten. Did she write in her datebook how he killed her, too?”

“Let’s wait a minute here,” Eddie said.

His arms were folded across his chest, and the gold and steel Rolex glittered as he shook it loose from a tight grip on his left wrist. He’d been watching Sully while he gave the summation of his findings of the past several days, the missing Michelle Williams, the dead Rebekah Bolin. He had leaned forward and nodded as Sully described how Lorena Bradford had given him access to her dead sister’s files, information that law enforcement had not seen, and that she had spent several hours helping him start a timeline for that information.

“How many sources again? How many put Reese and Pittman together?”

“Four,” Sully said, ticking them off on his fingers.

“One, Doyle Goodwin, who runs the market at the bottom of the street, but I can’t see him going on record. Too scared, too much to lose. Two, the lady across the street, Marilyn Winston. She’s on the record. Three, Pittman’s datebook and her cellphone. Four, an off-the-record source at the dance studio, who confirms Noel and Sarah’s lessons overlapped, and that Reese often dropped his daughter off and picked her up. But the killshot is that the numbers listed as ‘D’ on her cell were his personal line at his office and his cell. He answered the latter this morning when we called it, or at least I would say I recognized his voice. I checked the court directory this morning, called directory assistance, and went online. Neither of those numbers are listed.”

Eddie considered. “Can we get more on the record?”

“I’ll take his picture up and down the street and see what we get.”

“How could they have plausibly met?”

“The dance studio. Pittman’s lessons were ending when Sarah’s were starting on Saturday mornings, and then there was a second class after Sarah’s. He was walking in, she was walking out, something like that.”

“Can we prove that? On the record?”

“I can ask the studio owner if she’ll confirm, but it’s solid. My source taught Noel, knew Sarah. Sarah’s Saturday morning class? Ten o’clock. The time in Pittman’s datebook she was to meet ‘D’ or ‘David’? Ten fifteen.”

“Does Reese have any idea we know what we do?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Lorena called his office and cell from her cell. It wouldn’t trace back to us.”

“Lorena?”

“Her sister. Noel’s.”

There was a pause. Lewis Beale, the paper’s lawyer, heaved into the conversation, his great girth wobbling as he sat forward in his chair. “Tell me again how we came to be in possession of Pittman’s phone and personal effects.”

“The sister, Lorena. There may be more things coming. We’re meeting back at her place tonight, after she gets off work, to keep going through the files. And, Lewis? Technically, we don’t have possession. The sister does.”

“Wait. Isn’t she the one who spit on you at the funeral?” he asked, spreading his hands.

“Yes.”

“Now she loves you.”

“‘Love’ is a little strong.”

“What happened?”

“Myself, I’d put odds that she wants us to put heat on MPD, to stick Noel’s death as a homicide.”

“So she’s using you?”

“Most women do.”

Guffaws around the room, everyone looking down for a minute, doodling on their notebooks, relieved.

“No. I mean, do you trust her?”

“As much as I do or don’t anyone else. I have great faith in documents, though, and cellphones with David Reese’s private numbers on them.”

Lewis sighed and looked over at Eddie, then at Sully, then back to the boss.

“Originals, possession, if at all possible,” Eddie said, taking the cue. “If we print this, it’s going to have to be bulletproof. This will be litigated. With real money on the table.”

“Eddie, you can’t be serious,” Melissa cut in. “If this were from another reporter, maybe. But Sully’s had a vendetta against Reese since the Judge Foy thing. You heard how he went off when I asked him to cover the family statement-like a madman, cursing-and, if we can just name the elephant in the room, he is drinking on the job .”