Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

Eddie gave her a sharp glance. “You are wading into HR-”

“Everybody knows it! Why is it HR material? We can’t trust it because of who reported it. Besides-look, let’s say all of this is completely true. We still don’t have Reese being guilty of anything other than an extramarital affair, poor judgment, and perhaps the victim of a gruesome coincidence.”

She looked around the room, to the lawyers, the other editors. “It’s bullshit. It’s tabloid. The blowback will be tons of sympathy for Reese and vitriol for us. And what are we going to do this time when it’s wrong? We can fire him, but we’ll look like such parasites-”

“When did we get in the popularity business?” R.J. boomed, suddenly leaning forward in his chair, his gruff voice bursting out, people jumping.

“We don’t run stories because we think they will make people like us. We run stories, these kinds of stories, because we are in the public accountability business. David Reese is an eminent public figure in Washington. If there is a timely change in the administration at the next election, he will almost certainly be the next Supreme Court justice, at which time he would determine the law for three hundred million Americans. His judgment isn’t one thing about him, it’s the only thing about him. Some of us in this room know that he lied to the upper management of this newspaper in an attempt to have Sully fired-don’t look at me like that, I never signed off on the suspension-in the name of saving himself from an embarrassing political gaffe. This is a far more emphatic moral failing. What if, let us say, this affair with Noel Pittman and perhaps others emerge during confirmation hearings? And it becomes public that we knew of this liaison and did not publish? You haven’t said one word about the actual facts of-”

“That’s not-” Melissa started.

“And that isn’t even quite the main focus, to my mind.” He was steamrolling now. “The issue here is not, ‘What does this mean for poor David Reese?’ The issue is, ‘What does this mean for poor Noel Pittman?’ She was a child of this city, a college student, never arrested and never convicted of any crime. She disappeared after work one night. She was murdered, buried in a basement. We know from multiple sources, who have no apparent benefit in lying, that she was romantically involved with one of the most powerful men in this city, who is incidentally married to someone else. We know this man’s own child was murdered less than fifty yards away. And, today, Sullivan tells us that the last call she made, eight hours after she was last seen, was to this man’s cellphone.”

R.J.’s voice had been slowly building, rising in tone and moral indignation. Now he was almost shouting, staring at Melissa through his bifocals. “And you’re telling me that isn’t a newspaper story? You’re saying it would not merit the interest of law enforcement agencies investigating her murder?”

“There is no murder investigation,” Melissa shot back. “Pittman’s death isn’t labeled as a homicide.”

Sully had been chewing the inside of his lip, and then the anger burst clear of him.

“There’s no murder investigation now because that’s the narrative,” he said, leaning forward. “‘Rich, pretty, white Sarah Reese gets jumped by three bad black guys.’ That’s the story. It’s a cautionary tale about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s the modern scary bedtime story. Now. ‘Poor, maybe not-so-smart, black Noel Pittman gets whacked and stuffed in the floorboards of an abandoned house because crazy-ass shit like that happens in Park View.’ Everybody knows that story line, too, because that’s the story we tell all the time. Us, Brand X, cable television, the talks shows.”

He ignored the rest of the room, glaring at Melissa. “But what if that narrative this time is inconveniently wrong? What if our first idea wasn’t the right idea? What if the freight train is rolling down the wrong track?”

“Don’t sit here and patronize me, either one-”

Eddie unfolded one of his arms and waved it up and down briefly, a terse cease-and-desist motion.

“Okay,” he said, and all eyes moved to him. “Interesting arguments all the way around. It’s good reporting work, Sullivan. Melissa and R.J. both raise considerations worth thinking about. The good news, for us, is-”

“He’s a drunk with an ax to grind.”

Melissa said it softly, looking at Edward. “No, Eddie. Please, no. We cannot trust him on this. You want somebody else to verify and take-”

“I said I heard you.” Eddie’s tone was ice, cutting her off. He turned to the rest of the room.

“As I said, the good news is that Sullivan has put us way out front on this. We don’t have to do anything right away. It is even possible that Miss Pittman’s sister, Sullivan’s source, might take this information to the police herself. If that happens, and they move on it, then we can report on police activity in an ongoing investigation, and not go out on a limb and report our own findings about a public figure’s indiscretions. That would have us following an investigation, not creating one. A lesser story, certainly. But it has the merit, as Melissa points out, of us not being perceived as picking on the family of a murder victim.”

He paused. Sully cut in.

“Not to keep moving the goalposts, Eddie, but I would add to R.J.’s thought that we seem to be forgetting our original line of investigation. It was not just Noel Pittman’s death. It was also the deaths of Lana Escobar and, now we know, of Rebekah Bolin and the missing and likely dead Michelle Williams. All this within a three- to four-block radius. Is the Reese murder an outlier or part of some bizarre thread? That’s the story line I was working.”

Eddie nodded, still skeptical, but bending a little now.

“And it may be the one we publish. Now. On another point. Have you gotten anything-anything at all-that suggests a link between Judge Reese and the three young men in the store-the ones charged with killing his daughter? Would they want to, in some way, retaliate against him?”

“No, I haven’t been through his case history, but every reporter in town, and I’m sure law enforcement, has been. Nobody’s made a match. It appears random.”

“Okay. Maybe they’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe it’s a tie between Pittman and those young men, and she’s the link back to the judge. I don’t know. Just look at that.”

Eddie took two steps forward. “Other than that, dig through everything you can get your hands on about Pittman’s personal history. Do it with an eye toward Reese. We want to document what happened to her, but we absolutely must know how Reese was involved. I don’t see how we can publish a story about her disappearance without mentioning the affair prominently. If it turns out that it’s all too muddy, just a big mess of glop that we can’t put in context, then the answer may be not to publish anything at all. We hold on to lots of secrets about Washington. This may turn out to be another one of them.”

He looked at Melissa, pointedly. She had decided to bide her time, Sully saw; she was sitting back for now.

“But whatever else you find, I want you to go to Reese’s office when you’re finished reporting and confront him with this. We want that interview on the record. We owe him a fair standard of publication and a regard for his privacy. We don’t owe him a free ride.”

Someone opened the door, and Melissa half spun in her chair, back to her desk. The meeting began to break up. Sully was about to lean over and say something to R.J. when Eddie stopped in front of him.