Authors: Lis Wiehl
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #General, #Christian, #Suspense, #ebook, #book
Nicole’s last score had been a 97.
She pulled up to the Converses’ house. Now there were four camera crews out front. She parked in the narrow driveway behind Valerie’s red Volvo station wagon—she didn’t see Wayne’s blue BMW sedan—and ignored the shouted questions as she went up the walk.
Nic was here to interview Whitney before Valerie drove her to school. At first she had thought it was strange that the Converses wanted Whitney to continue attending her middle school, even if they were now driving her instead of having her take the bus. In the last day, though, Nic had begun to see the wisdom of it. If she stayed home, Whitney would be reminded of her sister’s absence every second. She would probably over-hear speculation that would crush whatever innocent conceptions she still harbored about the world and the way it worked. These hours spent at school might be her last chance to still be a child.
Valerie answered Nic’s knock. Each day, her face looked more haggard. “Wayne’s out with the searchers,” she said. “He can’t take sitting at home.” She called upstairs. “Whitney! The lady from the FBI is here to talk to you.”
Whitney bounced down the stairs. She was in that awkward stage of adolescence, springy and skinny, her limbs like rubber bands. Her hair was as dark as her sister’s was blonde. Wasn’t there a fairy tale about two sisters, one dark and one fair? Snow White and Rose Red, maybe that was it.
Valerie led them into the living room and then left.
Whitney kicked off her flats and curled her legs under her. She was dressed like all girls were these days—skinny jeans, a turquoise camisole long enough to show underneath a striped T-shirt, and a dark green hoodie. It was pretty much what Makayla wore, only because this girl was four years older, she had more of a figure. She looked at Nic with curious dark eyes.
“So tell me about Katie,” Nic said gently.
“She’s three years older than me. We haven’t gone to the same school for a long time. But she’s really smart. Every teacher that had her thinks I’m going to be as smart as her. But I’m not.”
“It sounds like she casts a long shadow.”
Whitney stared at Nic, a little puzzled, and then her brow smoothed out. “You mean is it hard being Katie Converse’s little sister? It’s not. She’s nice to me. She gave me this manicure.” Whitney spread out her pink-tipped fingers, but half of them had been nibbled on. She flushed and slipped her hands under her thighs. “She helps me with my homework, and sometimes she lets me borrow her shoes. We wear the same size.”
Nic thought of the dozens of boxes in Katie’s room.
“Do you think your sister could have run away?”
Whitney’s face scrunched up. “Where would she go? Sometimes we see kids on the streets downtown, but Katie would never live like that. You’d get really dirty. She likes to be clean. Besides, she really wanted to go back to the program. She said that she could go to bed whatever time she wanted, and eat whatever she wanted.” She glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice. “See, our mom’s kind of strict.”
“Did you talk to her that morning?”
Whitney bit her lip. “She was still asleep when I went to school. I didn’t see her at all.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. She exhaled shakily. “That’s what I don’t understand. Why did she have to take Jalapeño for a walk?”
“What do you mean? Because you had already walked him that morning?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I did walk him that morning. But Jalapeño’s my dog, not Katie’s. I’m the one who takes him for walks. She doesn’t even like him that much.”
Nic felt a bolt of electricity race down her spine. The Converses had mentioned earlier that the dog was Whitney’s, she was sure they had, but the meaning of it hadn’t hit her until now.
The day Katie disappeared, she hadn’t been walking the dog to give it some exercise.
She had been walking the dog to give herself an excuse.
But an excuse to do what?
C
assidy sat in the basement of the TV station, logging the tape she and Andy Oken the cameraman had shot this morning.
After the rally last night, they had rushed to the car to get the tape back for the eleven o’clock news. Except there had been a teensy problem. Cassidy’s car was gone.
“I told you not to park here, Cassidy,” said Andy, a weathered man who was really a little too old to be toting around such heavy equipment. He gave her a smug look. “But you said no one would notice. You said they would be too busy trying to find a bad guy to give a rat’s—”
Cassidy cut off his rant with one of her own. “It wasn’t really that close to the fire hydrant. And it’s not like this is the time of year they have to worry about fires anyway.”
“Well, we’re in deep doo-doo. There’s no way we’ll get the tape back to the station in time.”
Cassidy didn’t waste her breath answering. Instead, she ran out into the middle of the street and forced a huge car, so old it had fins, to lurch to a stop. The driver leaned out to yell at her in a foreign language. But through a series of hand gestures in which she repeatedly pointed at the Channel Four logo on the camera and then at her watch, Cassidy managed to impress upon the guy, a fiftyish Russian immigrant—at least she thought he was Russian—that she and Andy needed to get back to the station and that it was an emergency.
“TV?” the driver asked with a grin, pointing at both Cassidy and Andy.
“TV,” agreed Cassidy, pointing at just herself.
After several wrong turns, a hair-raising few minutes going the wrong way on I-405, and an illegal U-turn, he had gotten them back to Channel Four. With five minutes to spare.
This morning they had been out again, first to retrieve Cassidy’s car from the impound lot, then to interview a few of the Boy Scouts who were now canvassing the area near Katie’s house. They had also shot B-roll—footage without a narration sound track that would run while viewers listened to Cassidy or one of her interview subjects. The B-roll added dimension. While Cassidy talked about the Boy Scouts, the B-roll would show them knocking on doors and handing out fliers.
You always shot more footage than you could use. But to be able to decide what part of the tape to use, you had to log it—record exactly what was on the tape and the time it appeared. Logging narrowed things down, weeded out the unusable. It allowed you to save time in the long run, searching for that elusive shot. But in the short run, it was tedious and time-consuming. Just one of the thousand little tedious tasks that put the lie to the “glamour” of being a reporter.
As she took another sip of coffee, Cassidy used the knob to shuttle through some footage she was sure they wouldn’t use. At the upper right was a time code that showed how far into the footage that particular scene started. She took notes about what was in each scene. When someone was speaking, it was impossible to take down every word, so she only wrote down the first and last few.
There was Nicole, clipping the microphone onto her collar. Cassidy turned up the sound and listened to her friend say, “We’ve realized that during our first canvass many renters did not disclose that they had other people visiting or living with them. Sometimes there were two names on the lease, and six people living in the apartment or friends of friends who had been visiting. And some of these people have turned out to be fugitives of one kind or another.”
Nicole went on to explain law enforcement’s version of Cassidy’s grunt work. They now had to identify as many individuals as possible who had been in the area where Katie disappeared, and then either clear them by obtaining a valid alibi or gather enough information to justify a search warrant.
“We also are locating and interviewing every registered sex offender who lives in the area,” Nicole continued. “But that’s going to take time. There are approximately nine hundred registered sex offenders with Northwest Portland addresses.”
That was her next angle, Cassidy realized. She could profile a few of the worst of those nine hundred. With luck, she could track down old victims who might be willing to talk if their faces and voices were altered. That kind of footage was actually more dramatic than filming the actual people, in Cassidy’s opinion, so it was a win-win all the way around.
Next came some shots of Cassidy standing next to a poster of Katie that conveniently looked weather-beaten. It allowed her to pontificate about whether people were already forgetting about the girl. Cassidy watched her on-screen self critically. Had she talked too fast, swallowed consonants, sped past important points? Had she been clear, credible, and comfortable?
After all, this could be her big break. Did she really want to stay in Portland forever? Los Angeles sounded marvelous after months of gray skies. But then again, was she still young enough to make it in LA? Every time she saw her parents, they reminded her that she was, as her dad put it, no spring chicken.
Cassidy was so deep in thought that she didn’t see Jerry, the station manager, until he was close enough to touch.
He cleared his throat.
She jumped and then tried to hide it. “Hey, Jer. What are you doing here on a Saturday?”
“Looking at these. Did you see the overnights?” He waved a printout under her nose.
Ratings haunted Channel Four. Theirs was a “metered market,” which meant Nielsen had put meters in a sample of Portland’s households to automatically measure viewership. But ratings were like getting a report card without any explanation from the teacher. You knew what you had, but you had to guess at the why.
But this time Jerry seemed to think he knew. “It’s the Katie Converse thing. People are eating that up,” he said. “Last night’s program delivered a 9.7 household rating and a 15 percent share in the metered-market overnights. That’s up 45 percent from a year ago. Forty-five!”
Cassidy was stunned. Such a huge jump for a news broadcast was nearly unheard of. More and more, people turned to the Internet for the news. A TV news broadcast was practically an anachronism, filled with “news” that people had already learned about hours earlier. The only way to fight back was with news that was more than just a recitation of dry facts. News that was more like the stories she had been doing about Katie Converse.
This was it, Cassidy realized. Really and truly it. The Katie Converse story could make or break her career.
And right now it was making it.
September 8
I
got lost on my first official day of work. All those long corridors look alike. While I was trying to find Senator Y’s office, I ran into Senator X—my senator. He walked me to the right office & asked me how it was going.
Just before lunch, this other page in the program, R, told me she had seen me talking to Senator X. She said she knew he was my sponsor, but that it seemed like I knew him personally.
Finally I gave in & told her that my parents were supporters of his & that V & I had dinner with him before the program started.
R sniffed. She has all these freckles. I’ve got some, but she looks like someone spattered her with olive-green paint. Then she said something about how a lot of the pages here seem to have some sort of “in” & don’t really need to be qualified.
I couldn’t believe her! I
am
qualified. Straight A’s, debate, mock UN, mock state legislature, etc. How is it that on my first day of work I’ve already been branded a freeloader? I told her I still had to meet the same requirements as everybody else. It wasn’t just a slam dunk.
Sometimes people think they know you, but they really have no idea.
Then the weird thing was that R asked if I wanted to go to lunch together. Like we were friends or something! We all have meal cards so we can eat in the Senate cafeteria. I told her I was meeting someone else. No way was I hanging out with her.
Of course, then I had to make sure we didn’t show up at the cafeteria at the same time, so she wouldn’t see that I was alone.
But guess who was there? Senator X! He asked if I wanted to sit with him. I didn’t care if it looked like I was sucking up. I just said yes.
He wanted to know where I had heard about the program. I told him there was a guy at school a couple of years ago who had been a page. In fact, Senator X sponsored him, although he didn’t seem to remember him that well.
While I was talking to Senator X, R walked by & stared at me. I knew what she was thinking.
But I am not a freeloader.
Y
ou’re taking Makayla to church?” Nic asked her mother.
“If your child is staying in my house, then of course she is going to church with me this morning.” Berenice Hedges put her arm around Makayla’s slender shoulders. She wasn’t going to give up her granddaughter that easily.
“But, Mama, I’d rather she decide that kind of thing for herself when she gets older.”
“‘Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it,’” her mother retorted. Berenice was five inches shorter than Nic, but right now she seemed taller.
“Like that made any difference with me,” Nic began, when her cell phone vibrated on her hip. She looked down. It was from the Converses. With a sigh she said, “I have to take this.” Turning away as she pressed the talk button, she said, “This is Nicole Hedges.”
“Can you come by the house?” Wayne Converse said in a rush. “There’s someone we’d like you to talk to. Someone who might know something about what happened to Katie.”
Nic’s pulse began to race. “Who?”
“I’d rather wait until you get here to explain it to you.”
N
ic had to park four blocks away. Before she got out of the car, she slipped on her sunglasses and picked up a notebook and an empty Starbucks cup for protective camouflage.
The media filled the sidewalk for the length of the block and spilled out into the street. Three satellite trucks, guys with TV cameras on their shoulders or long-lensed cameras around their necks, others toting boom mikes, a couple of dozen people talking on cell phones or tapping away on their BlackBerries. All of them waiting for something to happen.