In law enforcement circles, it’s got another nickname: the Iron Pipeline. It earns the moniker each year by being the most heavily used gun-running road in America, serving as the quickest conduit from states with lax gun control laws to states with strict ones.
As such, the associates of Red Dot Enterprises—who took turns making the drive south to pick up the latest shipment—knew the road well. Take the New Jersey Turnpike south, through the merge around Exit 8 that always backed up on weekends. Go over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, through that congested stretch of Delaware. There was usually a brief break from traffic through the northeastern part of Maryland, but that ended outside Baltimore. Then it was the Harbor Tunnel, the Capital Beltway, and the hellish run south of the Springfield mixing bowl, which could back up at anytime—not enough road for way too many cars.
Then, after traveling over the Occuquan River, through Prince William County and past Quantico, it was onto what the rest of the state referred to as “the real Virginia.” It’s no accident that you don’t reach the Virginia Welcome Center until you’ve been in the state for more than forty miles. Whoever built it there knew what they were doing.
The Virginia Welcome Center was, at minimum, how far south the associates of Red Dot Enterprises went.
Then the mission became: find the straw buyer. They always set up the rendezvous ahead of time, having found the buyer on Craigslist and given him the usual instructions. But nothing ever felt routine about it. They rotated which area they used, so they were never going to the same place twice. And it was always a bit of a trick finding the buyer’s car in a busy parking lot, even when they knew the make and model.
Next came the wait for the buyer to do his end, which was usually a nice excuse to grab a meal and relax, albeit not for long. Then it was time to swipe the guns and begin the trip back north.
The drive back was what really took forever, especially the way they did it. They kept it exactly five miles above the speed limit, so even when traffic was moving, they still weren’t making great time. They didn’t dare use E-ZPass. Each tollbooth cost ten minutes or more—and if there is anything more frustrating than waiting around just to pay some highway authority money, it hasn’t been invented yet. They took frequent breaks and drank a lot of caffeine lest they nod off or get into an accident while distracted.
The whole goal was not to be noticed in any way, which—on one of the busiest roads in America—wasn’t terribly hard. You just had to be smart about it: drive a bland car, something solid and domestic, without tinted windows or a tricked-out exhaust; wear the kind of clothes that can be bought at an outlet mall, something like Old Navy or Van Heusen; act like every other road-weary traveler at the rest stops; and make sure the trunk stays shut.
There are people who say I-95 is one of the most boring roads in America, and they’re right. But for Red Dot Enterprises, boring was good.
A boring trip was a successful one.
CHAPTER 4
I’ve never been pregnant—just not my thing—but I’ve entered the phase of life where enough of my friends have borne fruit to know how they agonize over how they’ll handle the Big News. Oh, eventually they’ll do the mass Facebook blast. But there are some people who need to know first, and there’s a certain order in which they must be informed: her parents, his parents, the best girlfriend, and so on. The hope is that no one high on the list slips up and tells someone who’s lower on the list, like Aunt Kathy, who then blabs it to everyone else and ruins the precious surprise.
Being a reporter with a big scoop can feel like being pregnant. Eventually, you’re going to tell everyone; in truth, you’re
dying
to tell everyone. Still, you need to be careful about how you dole out your information. You have to play fair with the various parties involved and give them time to properly digest your surprise. But you also have to be discreet lest some other media outlet gets wind of it and blows your big scoop. And until you do the equivalent of the big Facebook blast—in our case, putting it online and in the newspaper—you’re constantly worried about that damn Aunt Kathy.
So I had to move cautiously, do things in the right order, and hope for the best.
My first phone call was to Hakeem Rogers, the Newark Police Department’s public disinformation officer. Or at least that’s what I called him. I have no doubt what he called me was much worse. We were friendly on rare occasions—basically, the occasions when I wrote something he felt reflected well on his department—but otherwise we’re a bit like a small dog and a big raccoon. We fight constantly, scratching, clawing, and squalling the whole time, though no one ever seems to win.
I dialed the number and was just starting to talk to one of his underlings when I heard Rogers shout, “Is that that”—unrepeatable word, one suggesting an incestuous relationship—“Ross? Put that”—another something unrepeatable, this time suggesting homosexuality—“on my line.”
My call was transferred straight into: “You got a lot of nerve calling me after what I read in the paper this morning. I’ve got every media outlet in New York on my ass because of that crap.”
I stifled the urge to reply,
Why, Detective, since when did you learn to read?
Instead I said: “Crap?”
“Some blowhard minister grandstands for the cameras—talking out his big, black ass the whole time—and you guys run with it like it’s real news. Since when did one person making totally unverified statements become something you print? I used to have respect for you, but you guys have totally gone in the toilet.”
This was, perhaps, the fundamental reason Detective Rogers and I didn’t get along: we each had pronounced opinions about how the other handled his professional responsibilities. Rogers thought it was my job to make the Newark Police Department look good to the outside world. I thought it was his job to provide information, not pass judgment on what we did with it.
“Newark Police: blowhard minister talks out his black ass,” I said. “Can I use that as a headline? That was on the record, right?”
“Stop being a dick for once. You know damn well it’s not.”
“Well, I got news for you, Detective, that blowhard minister might actually be right.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
I relished what I had to say next: “The
Eagle-Examiner
has acquired autopsy photos of Darius Kipps that indicate he was tied to a chair shortly before his death—”
“You
what?”
he tried to interrupt.
“—and I’d like to know how that information fits into the Newark Police Department’s finding that Detective Kipps died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” I finished.
For the next five minutes, he peppered me with questions about how I got these photos, what they showed, and what we intended to do with them. For as much as I didn’t like Rogers—and for as much as we might be at cross-purposes on a story like this—I still had to give him and his bosses every opportunity to comment intelligently on this news, perhaps even to contradict it, before we published it. Playing fair can be a real pain that way.
When I finished, Rogers stayed quiet. I thought I heard him grip the phone tighter. He had been around long enough to know a reporter had just lobbed him a stink bomb—and that he better be careful with it.
“Well, I’d like to remind you that ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’ was a
preliminary
finding,” he said. “I’ll have to call you back.”
Then he hung up. He didn’t even lob one last swear word or insult at me, so I knew I had him reeling. And that was fun.
But the fun didn’t stop there. My next call was to Ben Hilfiker, the AG’s spokesman. I went to his cell phone first, which he answered by saying, “Come on, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet. Isn’t there a law that says you’re not allowed to start bugging me until after lunch?”
“Actually, I’ve got something new to bug you with. So I think that resets the clock,” I said, then filled him in on the photos.
“Wow, Carter. Look at you, all grown up, with the big excloo,” he said, shortening the word “exclusive,” as journalists sometimes did.
“You think this is going to make your boss take a swing at this?”
“I don’t know. It still depends on how hard the wind is blowing,” Hilfiker said. “Why don’t you e-mail me those pics and I’ll get back to you.”
My final call was to the spokesman at the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, who was a nice guy—for a political hack. I went through the same rigmarole, asking to interview both the prosecutor and the medical examiner. At the end, I received the same response from him as I had from Rogers: a somewhat worried, “Let me call you back.”
I guess that’s one way having a scoop is unlike being pregnant: not everyone is thrilled to hear your news.
* * *
The final person who needed to be advised of the latest—and be given ample chance to react—was Mimi Kipps. But since this fell into the category of Things You Don’t Do Over the Phone, I knew it would require another visit to the Rutledge Avenue duplex.
I grabbed an umbrella, because a gray morning looked like it was going to turn into a rainy afternoon, and made my way across the street to the parking garage. About halfway there, on the sidewalk, I passed Buster Hays, who was wearing the usual menagerie of wrinkles and stains that he called a wardrobe. He topped it off with a trench coat. With all due respect to the long and honorable history of the trench-coated foreign correspondent, Buster might be the last reporter in the world who still wears one.
I can’t pretend, walking along in my charcoal gray peacoat, that I was living at the zenith of fashion. I was probably closer to the nadir. But at least my coat was younger than the interns we had running around the office. I’m not sure I could say the same about Buster’s.
“Hey, Ivy, you got my Good Neighbors done yet?” he asked.
Good Neighbors? Good grief. I had forgotten.
“Didn’t you read the paper this morning? Things have kind of blown up with the Kipps thing. As a matter of fact, I was hoping you could do me a favor and—”
He immediately cut me off: “Forget it. No Good Neighbors, no IA.”
“You know, I could go to Tina, tell her you’re holding out on me, and she’ll make you give it up.”
It was a bluff—there
is
honor among thieves when it comes to ratting out fellow reporters to editors—and he knew it.
“Go ahead. Run off to your little girlfriend. By the time you get back, I’ll have forgotten I ever knew anyone at Newark IA. I’ll probably have forgotten I know you.”
“Come on, Buster, can’t you just give it to me?” I said, aware that I was now whining. “I’m working on a breaking story here. It led the paper today and it’ll probably lead the paper tomorrow. Brodie’s got a big ol’ boner for this thing, and I need to—”
“And then come tomorrow morning when you still haven’t done my Good Neighbors, what leverage do I got? I got Nuttin’ Honey.”
Only Buster would still be referencing a commercial for a cereal that had probably been out of production for twenty-five years. He was just standing there, not quite grinning at me, knowing he had me between a rock and a Good Neighbors. So I gave up.
“You’re a bad man, Buster.”
“I do what I need to do in order to survive in this cruel world,” he said, strolling onward. As he rounded the corner toward the front entrance, he started whistling.
There was no way that in the midst of chasing a scoop of this magnitude, I was going to have time to dig up a story about how Mrs. Doreen Robertson of Bedminster had been so moved by the suffering of
the children
on her safari trip to Zanzibar that she had convinced her bridge club friends to give money to Tanzanian malaria relief.
But I knew someone who did.
After crossing the street, I surfed through my received calls until I reached a 315 number. As I walked through the garage toward my car, I dialed my new favorite intern, Geoff “Ruthie” Ginsburg.
“This is Geoff,” he answered.
“Geoff!” I said, feigning as much enthusiasm as I could. “How you doing, pal? It’s Carter Ross!”
“Oh, hey! I’m so glad you called! You wouldn’t believe it, but every single pregnancy test has come back negative.”
“Every. Single. One?” I said, now trying for incredulity. Good thing I took a drama class at Amherst. True, I only took it to meet cute girls. But I paid attention. A little.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I need to go to the drugstore and get some more. I’m starting to run low on food coloring, too. You were right, that stuff wasn’t easy to find. I went to three stores before I—”
“Yeah, yeah, Geoff, that’s great, now I…” I tried to interrupt. But Ruthie had been hard at work and wanted to get full credit for it—the interns often act like they’re still in school, still being graded, and don’t want to settle for that B plus. So he kept yammering:
“… found the exact stuff we needed—they have it in Bernardsville, by the way—but it comes in these small bottles. I’ve been squirting it in pretty liberally because I wanted to make sure the tests were accurate. I didn’t want any false negatives. You were right about having people flush their own toilets, by the way. Some of them are a little hesitant about it. The first guy looked at me like I was out of my—”
“Geoff, this is really amazing and you’ve done great w—”
“—mind, but most of them have been really into it. This one lady even had me do it again just because she liked the flushing part so much. It cost me another pregnancy test, but I figured no one would mind too much. I’m going to be expensing all this—”
That
was going to be a sight on an expense report: “24 First Response pregnancy tests … $375.58.” I’m glad it was going on his, not mine.
“—stuff. And I figure the paper won’t mind when they see the article we’re going to get out of this. You should
hear
some of these people’s stories. They’ve been on a waiting list ten, fifteen years to get into these town houses. And now to have them be defective? Can you just—”