Falling Star (34 page)

And this particular cassette, CNN's footage
from the school shootout, she wanted to log least of all. Every
time she thought about having to cover that frigging story, waiting
for hours while that lunatic gun-toting dad held a bunch of kiddies
hostage only to go off and shoot one dead, she got the willies.

But no one had seen her with that flashlight,
not when she'd been shining it at the windows or afterward when
she'd thrown it off Santa Monica Pier. And even if someone had, no
one could prove that she'd had anything to do with what went
down.

A wide shot of the school suddenly filled the
monitor. It looked just as she remembered it: a run-down,
two-story, brick-and-concrete structure, its windows as dark as the
night sky. The CNN cameraman's angle was different from Harry's,
because from this vantage point she could also make out the
school's north side, where lots of cop cars were parked at crazy
angles.

Where she had stood with the flashlight.

Kelly shivered but forced herself to keep
working. She reset the time code to zero, then rolled the tape at
slo-mo. Her eyes bounced among the monitor, the computer screen,
and the digital time-code display, while her fingers typed the log
notes. It required mucho concentration, and she hated it, but she
had no choice: did she want to host
Kids in Danger
or not?
Tony must be pissed at her or something, because he'd told her that
either she did what Ruth said or he'd can the special.

Who said men didn't get PMS?

But maybe he was just irked that
The KXLA
Primetime News
ratings hadn't stayed up. Hey, summer doldrums!
Everybody knew about those. Or maybe the real problem was that
buffoon Ken Oro. If Scoppio got her a stud as coanchor, then he
could watch the ratings fly.

She was 42 minutes into the CNN shootout tape
when she glimpsed herself on screen. Or thought she did, but
couldn't believe it.

She reracked the tape, then set it to super
slo-mo and watched again, focusing on the extreme left, the north
side of the school.

Damn!

Kelly jabbed STOP and reared backward, her
heart pounding. It was unbelievable! But nobody must have noticed
her, not even the CNN cameraman who shot the damn thing, because if
anybody had, the shit would have hit the fan big-time.

Holding her breath, she pressed PLAY and
watched a third time. There was no question about it. If somebody
looked really, really hard, they could see her, shrouded in
darkness, her black skirt and dark aviator jacket tough to make out
but her white tee-shirt kind of obvious, standing on the school's
north side and shining the flashlight up at the windows.

Then, instantly, the shooting started.

She pressed STOP again and held her cold
hands against her face, rocking back and forth, trying to think.
Nobody could see this. Nobody could
ever
see this.

And nobody ever would. She halted her
rocking, reality crashing into her brain. Because
she
had
the tape.

And she'd simply degauss it. Then the footage
would be gone—
poof!
—as if it had never existed.

She didn't have time to think about how CNN
had other copies. All that mattered was getting rid of
this
one, now, before Ruth or anybody else at KXLA saw it.

Kelly let out a breath. That was it. She'd
erase the tape. That was what she had to do.

She rose from the chair, struggling to stop
her legs from shaking. Boy, had she dodged a bullet. If Ruth had
logged this tape and seen her, Kelly would have ended up back in
Fresno making minimum wage at Dairy Queen. Or even worse, pounding
out license plates in the Big House. She pulled open the editing
booth door and stood blinking in the bright hallway light.
Well,
she told herself
,this just goes to show that Kelly
Devlin has what it takes to get to the top. She sees what has to be
done; she does it.

She made her way down the hall past the other
editing bays, crowded with editors and reporters cutting pieces for
The KXLA Primetime News
. She got to Archives and sidled
inside, pulling the heavy metal door shut behind her. Her heart was
racing like during kickboxing. But she had a right to be there, she
told herself. She couldn't take anything out of Archives, although
she sure as hell had more than once, but she had a right to be
inside.

Now for the degaussing machine. It was in the
back, she knew, behind the seven or eight tall, metal, rolling
stacks on which were stored KXLA's archival footage.

Her heels clicked on the concrete floor as
she made her way to the rear of the silent high-ceilinged room. It
was cold and spooky, what with all those dusty tapes, and she
couldn't see behind all the stacks, so it felt as if somebody was
watching. And the stacks kind of groaned. No wonder people didn't
go into Archives more than they had to.

The degausser, a steel machine the size of a
fax, sat on a grimy TV table in the back. It was turned off unless
it was in use, which wasn't often. She flipped the ON switch and
the machine began to hum.

The tape went in. She pressed START, waiting
for the machine to neutralize the tape's magnetic field, basically
erasing it.

Nothing. None of the usual clicky noises.
Damn!

Calm down
, she ordered herself.
Try
it again
. She pressed the button. Again, nothing. Total
silence.

Okay.
She took a deep breath.
It's
not working. But there's more than one way to dispose of a
tape.

She ejected the cassette and pried off its
plastic side, revealing the tape underneath. Her fingers tore at
it, pulling it off its dual spools. Within seconds she had several
yards of the sticky tape in a wadded mess in her hands.

Now what? A garbage can stood beneath the
degausser's TV table. Should she just toss it? But what if somebody
saw it and got curious and . . .

No. There was only one way to be sure it was
trashed. By doing what she had done with the flashlight.

Throwing it off Santa Monica Pier.

She glanced at her watch: 8:15 PM. She
couldn't get all the way from the KXLA lot in Hollywood to the pier
and back before the newscast, and even if she did go now, there'd
be a ton of people on the pier and they'd see her.

So she'd do it after the newscast, when
there'd only be winos there. And it didn't matter if any of them
saw her. None of them counted.

*

Tony entered KXLA through the loading dock,
deathly quiet after hours, lumbering past Archives toward his
office. His muscles ached with every step. He felt like absolute
shit. But who wouldn't after five hours chasing a little white ball
around a golf course? Humiliating himself in front of Rhett
Pemberley by coming off the eighteenth green with what would have
been a respectable bowling score?

At least now he was clean and fed. He'd gone
home to shower and grab dinner, bypassing an open bottle of pinot
grigio. Because tonight he had to be on top of things. Because
tonight Rhett Pemberley, whom Tony was starting to think of as the
Station Owner from Hell, had decided he wanted to watch
The KXLA
Primetime News
live from the control booth. Great.

Tony had to admit it made him nervous and he
had to admit why: Kelly Devlin. It was a month now that she'd been
anchoring and goddamn if she didn't mispronounce something or
stumble over something or let fly some asinine remark every single
night. Like the time she declared that Vienna was the capital of
Australia. Or that Bishop Desmond Tutu was next in line to be pope.
They were ignorant mistakes. And careless.

Tony punched the four-digit code into the
keypad and pulled open the newsroom security door when the buzzer
sounded. Maybe he'd be lucky and there'd be no breaking stories. No
surprises. First time in his career he'd ever wanted that. He
marched inside his office and switched on the overhead fluorescent
lights. Too bad Princess wasn't babe-alicious anymore.
Cheap
and babe-alicious. This having to trade off looks against
experience was a major pain in the ass.

He picked up his phone and punched in Ruth's
newsroom extension. He didn't feel like dealing with her
face-to-face.

"Sperry," she answered.

"Scoppio. Wanted to give you a heads-up that
Pemberley's gonna watch from the booth tonight."

"No shit." Then she chuckled. "So you want me
to call in Natalie to anchor instead?"

He hated how this broad could read his mind.
"Yeah, right," he guffawed, hoping he sounded as if he thought that
was an idiotic idea. Then he made his voice all casual. "So
anything big happening?"

"Nope. It's as quiet as a bar in Salt Lake
City."

Tony let out a breath. "Too bad," he lied. "I
would've liked to put on a big show for the brass."

"Yeah, right," Ruth said, mimicking his tone
exactly. Man, she got on his nerves. "I'll try to get little Miss
Fancy Pants on the set more than thirty seconds before airtime,"
she said, then hung up.

Tony winced, replacing the receiver. He'd
forgotten about that. Kelly had actually missed the newscast open
once and Ken had had to start alone. Lost track of the time, she'd
told him.

Should he warn Kelly that Pemberley would be
watching from the booth? He sat back and pondered. He didn't know
if that would make her perform better or worse. Would it make her
inspired or nervous? Careful or cocksure?

He stared blankly at the monitors across his
office. No, he decided finally, he wouldn't warn her. Better leave
well enough alone. At least, he
hoped
it was better. He
realized, sitting there in his news director's office, that he
could no more predict what Kelly Devlin would do than he could walk
on water.

*

Just home from work, briefcase still in hand,
Natalie bent to retrieve the stiff FedEx envelope propped in the
shadows outside her front door. She held it up to the sconce to
read the sender's name, then froze as the smudged typewritten
letters took clear shape.
T. Scoppio
.

Her heart thumping, she unlocked the door and
let herself in the dark two-story foyer, the security system
beeping insistently. One hand reached out to punch in the alarm
code; the other dropped the FedEx envelope on the side table as if
it were wired to detonate.

The distinctive red, white, and blue FedEx
packaging taunted her.

It's got to be a dismissal
. She stared
at it warily.
What else would Scoppio send? Anchors don't get
reupped by overnight mail
. She forced herself to pick it up,
then pulled the wiry tab that sliced the package open. Out dropped
a manila envelope, labeled with her name and address and two red
stamps: PERSONAL. CONFIDENTIAL.

Briefly she closed her eyes.
It's got to
be a dismissal
. Her hand trembling, she pried open the manila
envelope, then scanned the letter within. Apart from the requisite
legalese, it was surprisingly brief.

This is to inform you that the management of
KXLA-TV (hereinafter to be referred to as "Station") will extend an
offer of employment to Natalie Daniels (hereinafter to be referred
to as "Performer ) for a one-year period commencing on . . .

What?
KXLA was making her an offer?
Stunned, her eyes raced down the first page.

Station offers Performer annual compensation
in the amount of one hundred fifty thousand dollars ...

What?
A
fifth
what she was
making now?

... to serve as general-assignment reporter
for all KXLA-TV news programs ...

A reporter. No anchor job. That was gone, for
good it seemed.

She sagged against the side table. The news
was so unexpected she didn't know what to make of it. A television
offer, definitely good. At the station she'd loved for fourteen
years, wonderful. For a much less prominent job making much less
money? Lousy.

And also for only one year. Every other offer
she'd ever gotten from KXLA had been for three. Scoppio would know
that. Her gaze fell back on the document, homing in on his name.
This one man, rendering judgment on her professional worthiness
like a pasha grown tired of one of the concubines in his harem.

No,
she realized
, that's not right.
It's not just one news director: it's all of them. No one else is
clamoring to hire me. If anyone were, Scoppio couldn't butcher my
salary and hope to keep me.

It was amazing. Eighteen years of experience
and still she served at the whim of whoever happened to be news
director at any given moment. It was exactly the same as when she'd
gotten started.

This exact thing probably happened to
Evie.
The first step in a TV reporter's decline was getting
only one bad offer. The next step was getting no offer at all.

She drooped toward the kitchen, flicking
light switches as she went. Some things were undeniably true. An LA
TV reporter job was highly desirable. A hundred fifty thousand
dollars a year was no joke. But still, both were a comedown for
her.

She leaned against the granite kitchen
counter. And still to be under Scoppio's thumb? Forced to run
around reporting whatever stories he deemed newsworthy? Of course
he would know that she hadn't gotten another offer, because she
certainly would have left if she had. He would be so condescending.
And she so powerless.

She threw back her head and closed her eyes.
Could she even keep up as a reporter? It was so much tougher than
anchoring, so much tougher than when she was 22 years old.

Tony's contemptuous tone rose in her memory.
You don't want to get down in the muck. You don't want to get
your hands dirty.