Maggie Shayne - Thicker Than Water

“Okay, good, then.” She got to her feet, yanked open a dresser drawer and dug for a pair of jeans, then hopped on one foot while pulling them over the other. “They might have put a cop on Harry’s place, just to watch it. Maybe not, though. But even if they did, that’s okay. I can handle one cop. Maybe two. It’ll be fine. Hell, they’ll probably be sleeping in their car at this hour.”

She pulled on a sweatshirt, white socks and a pair of running shoes from underneath the foot of her bed. Harry’s condo was in one of the renovated old buildings downtown, within walking distance of the War Memorial at the Oncenter and City Hall. She hoped to God the security was as lax as it had been the one time he had insisted she meet him there. Even so, getting into the building would be the hard part. She tied her shoes, her mind racing. You needed a key card, or to have someone inside buzz you in from upstairs. She wouldn’t be likely to catch someone else going in at this time of the night and be able to slip in with them.

She hurried out of her bedroom, into the upstairs hall, and thought of her car, still parked in the hotel’s garage. She was going to have to take Dawn’s Jeep. Not that Dawn would mind, really, although she would pretend to, and probably gripe about her mother’s notoriously poor driving skills being turned loose on an innocent Jeep.

Julie paused at her daughter’s bedroom door and peeked in. Dawn was sound asleep, her back to her mother, nothing visible but the shape of her body underneath the blankets. The radio was playing softly beside the bed. She always fell asleep with her music playing. All the better, Julie thought, and she pulled the door closed and tiptoed to the stairs, down them and out to the garage.

Sean hadn’t gone home at all. He’d driven around for a little while, wondering who, among all the man’s known enemies, would have had the best motive to murder Harry Blackwood. The senator’s brother had a less than stellar reputation. He drank. A lot. He gambled. And it was widely known that he liked his women. In fact, the big scandal of the last election had involved allegations from a prostitute who claimed Harry was one of her best customers. The guy was a lowlife.

But now he was a dead lowlife, and Sean wanted to know why. In fact, he wanted to know a lot more than he already did about Harry Blackwood and his sleazy side. A guy like that must have more than a few skeletons in his closet. And the public would want to know. Within twenty-four hours this was going to be the biggest story in the state. People would be clamoring for inside dirt, and he was just the man to provide it. His value as a reporter, he thought with a slow smile, was about to sail through the roof. And that new job he’d been thinking he didn’t stand a chance of landing might just be in the bag. He could use this.

Meanwhile Channel Four’s ratings were sinking, had been ever since Julie Jones’s former coanchor had retired and she’d begun sitting alone at the evening news desk. She was good, he thought. But he was better. People liked the dynamics of a male-female anchor team. She couldn’t give them that. People also liked dirt, and she wouldn’t give them that, either.

He was about to leave her in the dust.

People’s dirt, he knew from experience, turned up in people’s garbage. So he used his cell phone and directory assistance to get the exact address, minus the apartment number, and he drove to Harry’s building. He parked his car where it seemed relatively safe and took what he needed from the glove compartment. The Dumpster Diving Kit, he called it. He always carried one. He’d thought once or twice that he ought to patent it and sell it to journalists the world over.

Harry had lived in a good neighborhood; he had to give the guy that much, Sean thought as he locked his car and walked casually toward the alley beside the building. The building was a century-old brick structure that had been in pretty decent shape up until the city’s recent downtown restoration efforts. Now it was like new again, sound, clean and safe, even while keeping its original look.

He used a small penlight to guide his feet. No rats scurried out of its beam, and there were no homeless old men to trip over. Yep, a nice neighborhood. Toward the far end of the alley, he found what he needed. The Dumpster. The lid was raised, and the garbage chute angled into it from the side of the building.

Digging through garbage was never a pleasant job but almost always a profitable one. Sean opened the gallon-size zipper-seal freezer bag and took out a pair of yellow rubber gloves. He had found some of his very best material in the garbage. He’d learned of extramarital affairs, celebrity pregnancies, addictions, nose jobs and political corruption from various piles of refuse. Occasionally he found stuff that was too lowbrow even for his radio show. Stuff that would be considered beneath him, though granted, according to most of the respected press, that was a very narrow area. When he found stuff like that, he never used it for his show. He had to preserve what little journalistic integrity he had. So he would simply sell it to the tabloids, which were always more than willing to keep his name out of it. It was a tidy little side business. Hell, it had paid for his Porsche.

At worst, this Dumpster should provide something kinky enough to bring a good price at the tabloids. At best, it would provide a motive for Harry Blackwood’s murder and enough leverage to move him up a few rungs on the journalistic ladder.

He pulled on the yellow rubber gloves, then took out the white surgical face mask and tied it around his head. Then he found a small broken crate lying on the ground, and he flipped it upside down beside the Dumpster to use as a makeshift stepladder. It was dark. He put his penlight in his mouth and peered down into the depths of trash.

Most of the garbage was bagged. People were neater these days than they’d been ten years ago. He reached for a plastic trash bag, picked it up by its knotted top and let it dangle and turn in slow-mo, shining his light and peering through the transparent sides until he spotted a name on a discarded envelope or sheet of paper. He repeated this process over and over, tossing the bags aside when he found any name other than Harold R. Blackwood. Harry had lived alone, as far as Sean knew. He wouldn’t likely have anything addressed to anyone else. There! Harold Blackwood. Apartment 624.

He tossed the bag to the ground to be examined later and kept on digging for more, stopping only when headlights spilled into the alley from the street beyond and he heard a car pulling to a stop out in front of the building. The engine shut off. The lights went out.

He glanced at his watch. 2:00 a.m.

Okay, it was probably nothing, but he had a little nerve at the base of his skull that tingled when there was a story nearby, and it was tingling now. Maybe he’d better check it out, just in case….

He jumped down from the crate and picked up the bag he’d retrieved, peeled off his gloves and face mask, tossing them into the trash, and then he walked back up the alley to the street.

A powder-blue Jeep Wrangler had stopped there, and the woman who got out of it was…He had to blink and look again. There was no mistake. She was none other than Julie Jones.

“Well, I’ll be,” he muttered. Licking his lips, he set his trash bag down and pressed himself closer to the wall so he could peer around it and watch her without being seen. “What the hell is she up to now?”

She walked up the broad stone steps of Harry’s building, then paused at the front door, biting her lip and squinting at the security panel. Finally she pushed a button. She was only three yards away from Sean. She kept her finger on the button until a groggy, angry voice came over the intercom in reply. “Who the hell is this?” it demanded. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”