The second message came in at 1:37 am, Robert Graham, urging her to please call him immediately.
“If you don’t call me,” Graham said calmly, “I know you’re going to look back and really wish you had, Casey. Please. I really
need to talk.”
Casey told Jake about the messages. They turned right onto State Street where the hotel was, passing the brick police station
with its white cupola.
“Look at that,” Jake said, “what a clusterfuck.”
TV vans and rental cars spilled out of the parking lot and onto the street, slowing the morning flow of traffic. Men and women,
cameramen, soundmen, and reporters with microphones and notepads stood in a crowded gauntlet leading out of the front doors.
“Don’t you want to join the circus?” Casey asked as they turned the corner.
“I got everything they want, and more. Want me to drop you in front?” Jake asked as they pulled in under the covered drive
outside the lobby doors. “My room’s right by the back door. I’ll load my stuff and pick you up.”
Casey nodded and her cheeks warmed when he leaned over and kissed her cheek.
“Hopefully, I won’t have to see Graham,” she said, peering in through the glass doors at the empty lobby. “Or Ralph.”
“Or his leg,” Jake said. “You want me with you?”
Casey laughed and shook her head. “Didn’t I tell you I was from Texas?”
“How stupid of me,” he said as she got out.
Casey watched the Cadillac turn the corner of the building. The doors rumbled open and she stepped into the lobby, her mind
still on Jake. Casey made eye contact with the young man behind the desk as she reached for the elevator button. She saw his
eyes dart toward the coffee shop and followed them, glad to see two uniformed police instead of Ralph and Robert Graham. She
turned her attention to the elevator, watching the numbers light up as the car made its way down to her.
The bell dinged and the doors clattered. Casey let a man in a suit leave the car before stepping in. Her foot hadn’t hit the
floor before she felt someone grab her arm. Casey spun, ready to yell for help, but gasped when she saw it was one of the
uniformed cops who had her by the elbow. The other stood beside him, stone-faced.
“Casey Jordan?” the cop asked.
“Yes?”
“You’re under arrest.”
T
HIS IS A JOKE,” Casey said.
The first cop turned her gently around and clapped on a pair of handcuffs before Casey could even think to struggle.
“Not a funny one, Ms. Jordan,” the second cop said, leading the way with an expressionless face.
Outside, they escorted her to a patrol car she hadn’t noticed because it was nosed into a space around the corner. She scanned
the lot for a sign of Jake.
“Can I use my phone?” she asked.
“No,” the first cop said, opening the door and tucking her in. “Later.”
“You’re making me ride with my hands behind my back like this?” Casey said. “I can’t wait to depose you people when I file
my civil suit.”
The second cop took the wheel and turned to the first. “Sounds like a movie script.”
“What do you think?” Hank said. “Brad Pitt as me?”
“You know I’m Nick Cage.”
“Yeah, the hairline.”
The second cop backed out and flipped the car’s lights on before he looked at Casey in the mirror and said, “Congrats, you
get the works.”
He then turned the siren on and sped down through the intersection, taking her the block and a half they had to go to get
to the station. As they pulled in, another uniformed officer moved some cones and they came to a stop at the back end of the
gauntlet. Casey saw now that the reporters were held back by sections of steel crowd-control fence. The station’s white double
doors opened and Chief Zarnazzi strode out into the crowd of cameras toward the patrol car, his neck looking thin and chickenlike
beneath the beak of his nose and a broad blue dress hat whose bill gleamed in the sunlight. The shoulders of his crisp blue
uniform were draped in gold braids and a cluster of medals dangled from either side of his breastbone. Black ankle socks shone
beneath the hems of pants cut too short for his bony legs.
As the chief approached, the cameras swung with him until he stopped outside the car door, opening it and gesturing to Casey
with his index finger. She slid out, bewildered, her brain overloaded thinking of pithy things to say or do and gummed up
so badly her mouth formed a series of silent curse words. When the chief took her by the elbow and began to walk her through
the gauntlet with his eyes sparkling behind their wire glasses and his sunken chin as proud as the father of the bride, the
questions rained down on Casey in a torrent of screams.
“Why did you do it?”
“How could you turn a serial killer loose?”
“Who helped you?”
“What if he kills again?”
“Did you do it for the money?”
“Are you working with a movie studio?”
“Do you expect to do jail time?”
“Will you represent yourself?”
“Did you intentionally discredit the Freedom Project?”
“Is it true you got Nelson Rivers’s semen sample personally?”
Casey’s mouth snapped open at that one and her head whipped around in the direction of its source, a tall, tan-faced man with
a brilliant set of perfect teeth and thick helmet of hair sprayed into place. She flashed him a look of disgust and kept going.
When they got to the top of the station steps, the chief turned and gave them all a thumbs-up with a wide yellow-toothed grin
before leading Casey inside.
“How about that?” he said to her. “You wanted media, you got media.”
“Take these stupid things off, you son of a bitch,” Casey said. “And hand me my phone.”
“After we’re done processing you with prints and mug shots, you’ll get all the calls you like,” the chief said, removing his
hat and smoothing the thin strands of hair over the top of his bald head.
The two arresting cops appeared and led Casey into the back. Secretaries at their desks and cops leaning on walls all stopped
to stare. Casey grit her teeth and went through the indignity of having ink smeared across all her fingers and holding up
a thin metal frame full of numbers as her photo was snapped.
As the cop named Hank led her to the holding cage, he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt and said, “I guess your reporter
boyfriend’s out there making all kinds of noise. Won’t be surprised if he makes his way into lockup himself from what they’re
saying.”
Casey said nothing as he handed her into the metal cage where a ragged woman with frizzy orange hair lay snoring on the bench,
with an arm over her eyes and the rest of her face caked with dried blood.
“What the hell is that?” Casey asked.
“Domestic,” Hank said, “got into it with her old man then cauterized his nuts with a clothes iron after he passed out on the
bed.”
“Looks like he deserved it,” Casey said, studying the purple blots across her cheeks and arms.
“They all say that,” the cops said, and slammed shut the cage.
J
AKE LOOKED OUT through his open door and into Dora’s hotel room across the hall. They’d taken the conference call with the
head of the network on their respective cell phones and didn’t want to disrupt the call with any annoying feedback, so they
stayed in their own rooms but left the doors open so they could communicate nonverbally if needed. Quinton Walsh, the network
president, complained about Jake’s personal involvement with Casey.
“Well, he’s very close to it, Mr. Walsh,” Dora said, giving Jake a pleading look, “but that’s the trademark you’ve worked
so hard to establish. We get closer. We don’t make the news, but we’re right there when it happens, watching. The rest of
them report on what they hear secondhand. Jake’s right there on this.”
“With a story that contradicts everything else we’re hearing,” Quinton Walsh said.
“Because we’re breaking this thing,” Jake said, excited, and feeling as if he’d turned a corner in his quest to convince the
network executive that Casey was being framed. “We’ve got the
real
story. Everyone else is chasing some Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float, blown into being by a lot of Madison Avenue windbags
working for the real culprit here.”
“This woman judge, this Rivers?” Walsh said. “You can’t tell me that’s not a story.”
“She’s a story, but page four compared to the real conspiracy,” Jake said, adrenaline flowing. “Graham created the story to
discredit her. He’s got a billion dollars in gas leases that would go belly-up if she got onto that court, and some pretty
shady partners—”
“We
think
,” Dora said, waving both hands downward to keep him from going over the edge.
Jake nodded at her and said, “He tries to buy her off, but that doesn’t work. What’s he do? A snake like Graham, plugged in
like he is—the great philanthropist—he writes a script that exposes her past indiscretions and he does it in a way that gets
everyone’s attention. Brad Pitt, for Christ’s sake, did you see that?”
“This is our
theory
,” Dora said, cutting in again.
“Your theory?” Walsh asked.
“Yes,” Dora said, giving Jake a curt nod across the hallway, “that’s what we’re working on.”
“A very complex conspiracy theory,” Walsh said, his voice flat. “The other networks are having a field day with this crazy
redheaded lawyer, who happens to be gorgeous. She sprung her law professor—a serial killer. Took on a sitting US senator—he
gets murdered a few months after the dust settles. And now this. Lifetime even announced they’re rerunning the movie they
made about her, but we’ve got a conspiracy theory. Are you listening to yourselves?”
“Why let the truth get in the way of good TV, right?” Jake said, scowling big enough for Dora to see.
“Listen, Blond Bomber,” Walsh said, his voice sour. “I was digging into the Bay of Pigs when you were a wet dream, so don’t
get cute.”
“I’m sorry, Quinton,” Jake said, his voice subdued, “but I’m right, goddamn it. You know I don’t just say things like this.”
“I know you don’t.”
“This isn’t about his contacts, is it, Quinton?” Jake asked. “Because I got a mandate from somewhere on high to do this puff
piece on the guy, and I’ve got to tell you, it is
not
what we normally do.”
“You ever take biology, Jake?” Walsh asked after another uncomfortable pause.
“Uh, sure, freshman year at Cornell.”
“Remember the frogs? The ones you cut up?”
“Couldn’t get the smell off my hands for about a week,” Jake said, giving Dora a quizzical look and rotating his index finger
around his ear.
“You make your H cut and peel back that white belly and there it is,” Walsh said, “the perfect machine, but by the time you’re
done taking the pieces out, you’ve got a mess. Something you couldn’t put back together in a million years.”
“You lost me at the H cut,” Jake said.
“Don’t try to dissect this, Jake,” Walsh said. “No one likes a man with stinky hands.”
“So you’re pulling the plug?” Jake said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Walsh sighed in a gust. “I didn’t say that, Jake. I just said let the surgeon be the one to paw around in the guts. Don’t
go poking around about his high-up contacts with the network. Leave that part out of it.”
Walsh paused, then said, “Okay, you two go ahead and I’ll tell the evening news to hold back. If it’s a dead end, then we’ll
have struck out in the top of the first.”
“If not,” Dora said, giving Jake a silent thumbs-up and a wink from across the hall, “grand slam.”
R
IDING THE BACK of the body odor stench and urine was the sharp scent of alcohol. The cage rested in a dusty old storage room
with moldy boxes and papers bowing the wooden shelves on the wall and a single cheap globe light casting meager shadows. Casey
sat in the corner of the cage clasping her knees, sticking her nose out through the bars, as far away from the sleeping woman
as possible. Casey suspected that the woman had peed herself.
When the wooden door swung open, Casey stood.
“Your lawyer,” a woman cop said in a bored tone.
“Marty?” Casey said. “Who sent you?”
Marty held his long arms up in the air, raising his suit coat and making himself look like a living scarecrow. “Nobody. Not
Graham. Not my uncle.”
“Somebody,” Casey said.
“Me.”
Casey considered him. “Can you get me the hell out of here?”
“I think I can,” Marty said. “I might have to eat the cost of the reception hall, but I figure I can take the honeymoon trip
with a buddy of mine from law school.”
“Your fiancée?” Casey said.
Marty shrugged. “She might get over it. Judge Kollar probably won’t.”
“What did you do?”
“He’s not the only judge,” Marty said, sniffing the air.
Casey angled her head over her shoulder and Marty flinched at the sight of the beaten woman.
“He’s got arraignments today, but they finish around eleven. I used a couple favors and got the desk sergeant to hold the
arraignment back, then push it out this afternoon to Judge Hopkins in the city court,” Marty said. “She got in when the Dems
were riding high with Bill Clinton. She doesn’t even like Judge Kollar.”
“No million-dollar bail?” Casey said with a wry smile.
“No,” Marty said, “but this is no joke. They’re charging you with criminal tampering, tampering with public records, and felony
conspiracy. The whole bundle adds up to about ten years if things go against you, and I’ve got to say, you don’t have a lot
of friends around here.”
“Really?” she said. “They gave me one hell of a reception.”
“They’re saying you switched the samples out at the storage facility the hospital uses,” Marty said, frowning as he lowered
his voice. “They’ve got a night watchman who says you paid him off, but when he saw you on the news he had to come forward.
Said he couldn’t live with himself, thinking he’d helped to free a murderer. Claims he had no idea what you were up to.”