“You know me, all about the job.”
“Well…I could give you something to work on.”
Mels stared up at him, nice and steady. “Thanks, but I’m busy right now. Doing research on the prevalence of sexual harassment in previously male-dominated industries such as the airlines, sports…newspapers.”
Dick frowned as if his ears hadn’t heard what they’d been hoping for. Which was nuts. Her response to this act had been the same since day one.
Well over two years of shutting him down. God, had it been that long already?
“It’s illuminating.” She reached forward and gave her mouse a push, clearing the screen saver. “Lots of statistics. Could be my first national story. Gender issues in postfeminist America are a hot topic—course, I could just put it on my blog. Maybe you’d give me a quote for it?”
Dick shifted his raincoat around. “I didn’t assign that to you.”
“I’m a self-starter.”
His head lifted as if he were looking for someone else to harass. “I only read what I assign.”
“You might find it valuable.”
The guy went to loosen his tie like he needed some air, but surprise! It was already open. “You’re wasting your time, Carmichael. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As he walked off, he pulled on that Walter Cronkite raincoat of his, the one with the seventies lapels, and the belt that hung loose from loops like part of his intestine was not where it should be. He’d probably had the thing since the decade of Watergate, the work of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring his twenty-year-old self to his own paper chase…that had culminated at the top of a medium city’s masthead.
Not a bad job at all. Just not a bureau chief for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.
That seemed to bother him.
So, yeah, it didn’t take a genius to ascribe his inappropriateness to the ennui of a balding former coxswain, the bitterness from a lifetime of not-quite-there intersecting with the almost-out-of-time of a man about to hump sixty.
Then again, maybe he was just a prick.
What she was clear on was that with a jawline more ham sandwich than Jon Hamm, the man had no objective reason to believe the answer to any woman’s problems was in his pants.
As the double doors clamped shut behind him, she took a deep breath and entertained a fantasy that a Caldwell Transit Authority bus ran tire tracks up the back of that anachronistic coat. Thanks to budget cuts, though, the CTA didn’t run the Trade Street route after nine o’clock at night, and it was now…yup, seventeen minutes after the hour.
Staring at her computer screen, she knew she probably should go home.
Her self-starter article wasn’t actually on leering bosses who made female subordinates think fondly of public transportation as a murder weapon. It was on missing persons. The hundreds of missing persons in the city of Caldwell.
Caldie, home of the twin bridges, was leading the nation in disappearances. Over the previous year, the city of some two million had had three times the number of reported cases in Manhattan’s five boroughs, and Chicago—combined. And the total for the last decade topped the entire Eastern seaboard’s figures. Stranger still, the sheer numbers weren’t the only issue: People weren’t just disappearing temporarily. These folks never came back and were never found. No bodies, no traces, and no relocation to other jurisdictions.
Like they had been sucked into another world.
After all her research, she had the sense that the horrific mass slaughter at a farmhouse the month before had something to do with the glut in get-gones…
All those young men lined up in rows, torn apart.
Preliminary data suggested that many of those identified had been reported missing at one point or another in their lives. A lot of them were juvie cases or had drug records. But none of that mattered to their families—nor should it.
You didn’t have to be a saint in order to be a victim.
The gruesome scene out in Caldwell’s rural edges had made the national news, with every station sending their best men into town, from Brian Williams to Anderson Cooper. The papers had done the same. And yet even with all the attention, and the pressure from politicians, and the exclamations from rightfully distraught communities, the real story had yet to emerge: The CPD was trying to tie the deaths to someone, anyone, but they’d come up with nothing—even though they were working on the case day and night.
There had to be an answer. There was always an answer.
And she was determined to find out the whys—for the victims’ sakes, and their families’.
It was also time to distinguish herself. She’d come here at the age of twenty-seven, transferring out of Manhattan because it was expensive to live in NYC, and she hadn’t been getting anywhere fast enough at the New York Post. The plan had been to transplant for about six months, get some savings under her belt by living with her mother, and focus on the big boys: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, maybe even a network reporting job at CNN.
Not how things had worked out.
Refocusing on her screen, she traced the columns she knew by heart, searching for the pattern she wasn’t seeing…ready to find the key that unlocked the door not just to the story, but her own life.
Time was passing her by, and God knew she wasn’t immortal….
When Mels left the newsroom around nine thirty, those lines of data reappeared every time she blinked, like a video game she’d played for too long.
Her car, Josephine, was a twelve-year-old silver Honda Civic with nearly two hundred thousand miles on it—and Fi-Fi was used to waiting at night in the cold for her. Getting in, she started the sewing machine engine and took off, leaving a dead-end job. To go to her mother’s house. At the age of thirty.
What a player. And she thought she was magically going to wake up tomorrow morning and be all Diane Sawyer without the hair spray?
Taking Trade Street out of downtown, she left the office buildings behind, went past the clubs, and then hit the lock-your-doors stretch of abandoned walk-ups. On the far side of all those boarded-up windows, things got better when she entered the outskirts of residential world, home of the raised ranch and streets named after trees—
“Shiiiiiiit!”
Ripping the wheel to the right, she tried to avoid the man who lurched into the road, but it was too late. She nailed him square on, bouncing him up off the pavement with her front bumper so that he rolled over the hood and plowed right into the windshield, the safety glass shattering in a brilliant burst of light.