Zavala assesses the increasingly infuriated Doug, then looks back at me, then back at Doug. He holds up one finger to the officer by the cruiser, signaling.
“Stand by one, Hartwell,” he says.
“Listen, Lieutenant,” I say. He’s giving me one minute, too. I dig into the purse that’s slung over my shoulder, searching for the notebook that’s inside. “I know this is off the wall. But remember the carjacking in the South End? The murder? The blue Mustang? The one where—”
“This is not that car, Miss McNally. That car was destroyed in a fire.”
I swallow hard, nodding. Turning the pages in my spiral notebook. “I know. Exactly. But please, check this car’s VIN again. Not against the stolen-car list. I’m telling you, it’ll come back as the destroyed blue Mustang. And that guy?” I point my notebook toward Doug. “He’s lying. He’s part of the whole operation. And told me it was his car. He even let me inside. He’s got the keys somewhere. He must.”
Zavala looks me up and down, his face the picture of disbelief. “He let you inside this car? When?”
I hold up the notebook, pleading my case.
“See this number? It’s the VIN of the destroyed Mustang. Take this. Compare this Mustang’s VIN to the number I’ve written down.”
“Lieutenant?” The officer calls out again. “Make it fast, sir. Mr. Skith is asking for a lawyer now.”
“H
e’s stashed the keys somewhere. I’m sure of it.” I touch Zavala’s arm with one hand, drawing his attention back to me. “Can you have your officer look for them one more time?”
Franklin’s shooting pictures of me talking with Zavala. Which means he’s got enough of the VIN.
“We patted him down.” Zavala says. “Suspect says it’s not his car. We found no keys. Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe the 911 call was bogus. Happens every day, Charlie.”
This is bad. Switching to my first name, sympathetic and friendly, means he’s about to end our conversation. Plus, of course, I know the 911 call was bogus. My time is running out.
“How about, maybe, look in the wheel well?” It’s a last-ditch idea, but certainly the cloners heard how the cops identified the carjacked Explorer. And now it’s in their heads, like it is in mine. Since Doug doesn’t have the keys on him, he certainly knows where they are. Maybe he hid them, just in case, when he heard the sirens.
“You don’t give up, do you?” Zavala shrugs, the beginnings of a smile appearing for the first time. He cocks his head toward the car. “I’ll give you a shot, Charlie. Let’s take a look.”
“Franklin?” I say. I open my eyes extra wide, signal
ing potential success, and spiral my forefinger.
Roll tape.
We’ve got to get this on camera.
I briefly remember, with regret, I’m still wearing Franklin’s stupid hat.
“Let’s see that notebook now,” Zavala says. He points me toward the windshield as I hand him my notes. “Now. You read me the VIN from the Mustang dashboard.”
I get through all seventeen numbers before Zavala says a word.
“Hartwell?” Zavala looks toward the officer guarding Skith, calling out across the Mustang. “We’ll need another moment here. You’re sure he has no car keys? Check again, Officer.”
I see Officer Hartwell begin another pat down. But since I’m right here anyway, I lean over and run my hand under the left-front wheel well.
Nothing.
And then, something.
I stand, pulling out my empty hand. I look at Franklin, then at Zavala.
“I think you’re both going to want to see this,” I say.
Minutes later, Skith is in handcuffs.
I see Franklin is getting video of the whole arrest. I hope we’re not running out of tape.
“So you found some car keys.” Skith is spitting fire. “Who the frig says they belong to me?”
“Give it up, Skith,” Lieutenant Zavala says. “We’ll find your prints inside the car. Soon as we open it. Hartwell?”
The officer is now carrying a flat black plastic box, size of an anchorwoman’s makeup kit. He puts the case on the garage floor and flips open two latches. The outside of the box is labeled PRINTS.
Another officer is unlocking the passenger-side door with the keys they retrieved from the wheel well.
“Plus, Miss McNally here says you tried to sell her
this car.” Zavala’s voice is mocking, sardonic, as he gestures toward me. “And she tells me you let her get behind the wheel.”
“Miss McWho?” Skith matches the sneer. “I never saw her before.”
I hold back the supreme temptation to whip off my cap and fluff out my hair like the heroine in some romance thriller. “Now do you recognize me?” I’d demand. It would be even more dramatically effective if I used some sort of exotic accent. But I restrain myself. And Skith, or whatever his name really is, already recognized me anyway. I watched his face change when he saw me with the camera. That reaction, even he couldn’t keep secret.
“Your odometer says 21,203 miles,” I say, keeping my voice calm.
“You could have seen that through the window,” he retorts.
“Your radio’s on Wixie,” I say.
“Big deal, so’s everyone’s,” he replies.
“And your car won’t start.” I can’t help smiling.
“What?” Skith says, his voice rising. “How’d—” He stops. Clamps his mouth closed.
“What?” Zavala says.
“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “Try it.”
“Hartwell.” Zavala gestures to the officer who’s sitting in the front seat and dusting for prints. “Turn on the engine.”
“Huh?” the cop replies.
“Do it,” Zavala says.
We hear the hiss as the exiting traffic behind us continues to leave the garage. We hear a few honks from annoyed drivers. We hear the sounds of a too-loud radio blaring through open car windows.
But when Officer Hartwell turns the key, we hear nothing.
Hartwell tries again.
Nothing.
“Pop the hood,” I say. “You’ll find one battery wire’s disconnected.”
I dig into my pocket. And then I bring out a little silver hexagonal nut, offering it in the outstretched palm of my gloved hand.
“You’ll need this to fix it.”
I trot after Lieutenant Zavala as he heads back to his cruiser, stationed in a yellow-striped no-parking corner of the garage. The engine’s running, the blue wig-wags are flashing, there’s a cadet at the wheel.
“Remember, Lieutenant, you wouldn’t have this story without me. You’d have let him go, right? So the least you can do is hold off.”
Zavala stops. Turns around. Crosses his arms. And looks at me.
“What?” I say. I stop, too. I can’t read his expression.
“I’m sure you’re aware, Miss McNally, that a fraudulent 911 call is a misdemeanor, punishable by a two-hundred-dollar fine.”
I actually do know that. And I see where he might be going with this. It’s not a good place. I stall. “So?”
“Anything you’d like to confess?”
“Heavens, no,” I say, doing my best innocent look. My fake phone voice was pretty high-quality. Then I remember the best defense is a good offense. “All I’m saying is, there are no other reporters here. We’re working on a big story. It’ll be on—soon. Really soon. And if you’d keep this to yourself? For, like, a few days?”
Zavala’s expression hasn’t changed.
I slump my shoulders and stare at an oil spot on the garage floor, sensing imminent journalism disaster. Maybe I sacrificed our story to let the cops arrest Skith. But I couldn’t just let him get away. My stupid conscience
wouldn’t let me ignore that catching the bad guy and potentially stopping a deadly scam is more important than our exclusive story. Even though we solved the case, not Boston’s finest.
A car zooms toward us, the last of the rush hour, then cuts its speed in half at the flashing blue lights. I watch it go by, dejected. I solved this. I uncovered a major criminal enterprise, got photos of the entire operation, figured out a pretty clever code and tricked the bad guy into giving himself away. And now, the cops will get all the credit.
Zavala clears this throat. “Miss McNally?”
“What?” I try to keep the petulance from my voice. After all, Zavala is on the side of justice. And I guess that’s what matters. Maybe they can get Doug to rat out the mastermind of this deal. Who that is, I admit, I still don’t have a clue.
“Off the record?” He raises one eyebrow and doesn’t wait for me to agree to the deal. “We’ll need a few days to investigate this. And it would—perhaps—be beneficial to our case to keep the information about Mr. Skith under wraps from the press for, say, a week or so. Maybe more.”
I see light at the end of the parking garage.
Zavala puts a hand to his forehead, shading his eyes, and pretends to look back and forth, as if he’s scouting the area. “I don’t see any of your cohorts around here. Do you? And, I suppose, it’s not in the best interest of law enforcement for us to inform them of what transpired this afternoon.”
I hold out my arms, so delighted my impulse is to hug him. Then I instantly drop them. There’s no hugging in journalism.
“Thanks, Lieutenant,” I say. “I owe you.”
“Nope,” he replies. “We owe you.”
“So then Zavala promised he’d hold off,” I say to Kevin. The last of the Doug Skith arrest video has rolled by on the playback monitor in the news director’s office. I reach across him, push Eject and retrieve our prized cassette. “Great, huh? We have a week. Which is totally doable.”
“We still have to move fast,” Franklin says. “We’ll bang out a draft script tomorrow.”
“We can do it,” I add. “Of course, we still don’t know who’s behind the cloning conspiracy, but—”
“‘Cloning Conspiracy.’ That’s a possible title,” Kevin interrupts. He pauses, looking between me and Franklin, apparently trying to read our expressions. He holds up both palms, admitting defeat. “Okay, fine. Maybe not.”
“I’ll dub the minicam video to a regular tape tonight,” J.T. says, holding out his hand for the videotape. “Gimme that puppy.”
I hand him the little yellow cassette, then plop down on Kevin’s tweed couch, my boots stretched out in front of me. I’m wiped. Josh and Penny will be waiting dinner. My feet hurt. And my brain hurts. I link my fingers on top of my head, thinking.
“The blue Mustang and the red Explorer are both in police custody. So they’re not going anywhere.” I try to organize the elements of our story. “But, you know? There’s one more missing piece. Besides who’s in charge of it all.”
The room is silent for a beat.
“Oh. You’re right,” Franklin finally says.
“As usual,” I say without looking at him.
“What?” Kevin says.
“Well, we know the original red Explorer belongs to us. We also know that’s safely downstairs in the station garage. But someone’s missing a blue Mustang. Right? That car the cops impounded today at Fifty-Five Friend?
The clone of Michael Borum’s car? It’s a stolen car. It belongs to someone. Where did it come from?”
“Listen, Charlotte…” Franklin gets up from his chair and motions toward the door. “Let’s go back upstairs. I’ll see if I can get my cop source to check out the stolen-car reports. I think she’ll do it for me. And she’s on the late shift.”
“And we need to find the owners of Beacon Trust,” I say. “Any news on that?”
Kevin’s phone rings, interrupting Franklin’s response. He checks his watch. “Got to take this, team,” he says, picking up the receiver and swiveling his chair away from us. “Keep me posted.”
“NewYork, I bet,” I whisper to Franklin. We push open the glass office door. And then I remember what happened this morning. And what else is going to happen soon.
“Creep. Quitter. Short-timer.” I poke Franklin in the back as I follow him upstairs to our office.
“You could come, too,” Franklin says over his shoulder.
“Right.”
Even from down the hall, I can see the red message light on my phone is blinking. Probably Josh, wondering where the heck I am. Happily, I’ll be able to tell him I’ll be home in half an hour. And I’ll be able to share the blazingly good news about our story.
Franklin clicks onto his computer, pulling up his enviable compilation of alphabetically indexed phone numbers and e-mails.
I’ll also be able to share the blazingly bad news about Franklin. I sit in my own desk chair, one ankle propped on my knee, staring at Franklin’s back. Wondering who’ll take his place. Some burned-out hotshot from the network, ready to rest on his laurels in local TV? Or a twentysomething up-and-comer, all ego and self-importance, burbling about Edward R. Murrow but clueless
about the real world? I pick at the zipper of my boot, yanking it aimlessly up and down. I’m doomed.
I stare at my leg. A white thing is sticking out of my left boot.
Oh. Right. My paycheck from WWXI. I pull the now almost-damp folded white envelope from inside my boot. It’s been there for the last four hours or so and it’s somewhat the worse for wear. The edges of the little clear window are beginning to fray. But I guess the bank will still cash the check inside.
“Hey. Charlotte.” Franklin swivels around, his eyes shining. “Listen to this.”
“What?” I say, peeling back the envelope’s flap. It sticks, so I get just a corner. Yanking open my desk drawer, I search through the salt-and-pepper packets, pennies and dimes, and loose Advils for a letter opener. Do I even have a letter opener?
“Here,” Franklin says. He hands me a thin silver point set into a leather handle.
Of course. “Thanks.”
“But wait, before you open that. Look here. It’s major.” He points to his monitor. He’s got an e-mail open. “My guy at the AG’s office is tracking down the real owner of Beacon Trust. He tells me all the legal documents are carefully set up to hide who it is. But for grins, he decides to look up what else the trust owns besides the valet company. Check it out, my little Emmy winner.”
He points to the screen. “See? Beacon Trust also owns…?”
I squint at the screen, scooting my chair closer. Then my eyes widen. I turn to Franklin. The blue-and-white e-mail is reflected in his glasses. His smile is unending.
“The Garage at Fifty-Five Friend Street?” I say. “Whoa.”
“Yup,” he says. “They own the valet company. They own the garage.”
“Fantastic.” I nod. “Two for two. And that’s no coincidence, Franko. That’s a link in the chain.”
“They swipe the cars through the valet service. They clone them in the Newtonville garage,” he says. “And then they stash ’em in their own parking lot while they wait to sell them.”
“No pesky traceable tickets from Bubble-Gum Girl’s machine, no parking fees, just stolen cars hidden in plain sight.” I think back over what I discovered today, the phone numbers as directions.
“And giving that fake phone number on the radio,” Franklin adds, reading my mind. “Everything they did was boring, ordinary and mundane.”
“Until they got sloppy. And got nailed by a leftover parking pass.”
“Poetic justice,” Franklin says, nodding.
“Karma.” I smile at my lame joke. “You know, with a
C.
Bad car-ma.”
I slide the point of the letter opener under a little gap in the WWXI envelope. With a flourish, I slit open my paycheck and wave the pale blue paper in Franklin’s direction. “At least we know our last story will be a memorable one. You can come back for the Emmys. And hey, this paycheck from Wixie will buy your farewell dinner.”
“You rich?” Franklin asks. “Lots of money in radio? We finally going to splurge at Rialto?”
“Not the way Maysie tells it,” I say. “This’ll probably be enough for Burger City.”