Warmouth looked stricken. “I couldn’t leave Larry. I love him.”
“Would he accept a child that wasn’t his?”
“No, never! He’d kill me. Being a man, it’s real important to him. If he knew I cheated…and I love him. I don’t want to leave him.” She seemed to be in agony.
Vanessa stood up. “I’m going to call my friend in the morning. Then it’s up to you.” She dropped some money on the table and slipped the tape recorder back into her purse. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Vanessa smiled. “I’ll walk you to your car. Make sure the aliens don’t get you.”
Terri Warmouth didn’t smile back. “I wish they would,” she said.
Vanessa drove from the tavern to the offices of Exposed to finish a story about a giant rat that was stealing slum babies. The rat was supposed to be as big as a German shepherd. Patrick Gorman, Vanessa’s boss, had made up the story at the weekly staff meeting and assigned Vanessa to write it. Vanessa had thought it was disgusting and had protested, finally getting Gorman to agree that she could substitute Terri Warmouth’s alien abduction tale if it panned out. But it hadn’t.
The paper took up two floors of a remodeled warehouse within sight of the Capitol dome in a section of Washington, D.C., that teetered between gentrification and decay. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots-the habitat of junkies and the homeless-could be found within blocks of multicolored, rehabilitated row houses owned by young professionals. Vanessa unlocked the front door, relocked it, and walked past the Personals office. When she had started with the paper, the personals amused her. In recent years they had become bizarre enough to freak her out. She hoped that they were genuinely weirder, because the alternative was that she was getting old.
Vanessa walked up the stairs to the second floor and checked in with the security guard. He told her that no one else was around. That was fine with Vanessa. After her meeting with Terri Warmouth she craved solitude. Warmouth had exhausted her. Needy people always made Vanessa uncomfortable, which was odd considering her line of work. Supermarket tabloids lived off the exotic and psychotic tales told by people who had a tough time fitting into the real world. The people she interviewed talked themselves into believing in another Earth where the strange and wonderful occurred with enough frequency to let them escape from the demands of their drab existence.
Vanessa punched in her security code and used her key to get into the second floor, where the work of creating each edition was carried on. The office seemed bigger than it was because of the vaulted ceiling, which was painted gray like the thick cross beams. Vanessa fixed herself a cup of instant coffee in the staff kitchen before turning on the fluorescent lights that illuminated the cubicles where the reporters worked. Her cubicle was across the floor from a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that held back issues of Exposed and other tabloids. It was filled with two black metal filing cabinets and a desk on which perched her file holder and computer monitor.
Vanessa was one of the lucky few with a window, but it was too dark to see anything outside. She sipped her coffee and toiled on her story to the accompaniment of the night noises that haunted the floor where the minions of Exposed worked for low wages and no prestige. Vanessa’s salary at Exposed was ridiculous, but she didn’t need the money. What she did need was access to press credentials and databases so that she could proceed with her research.
Vanessa lived in a redbrick row house in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. The area off Eighteenth Northwest was funky and crowded with Ethiopian restaurants, jazz nightclubs, bars, and pizza parlors. Most nights, a rowdy college crowd packed the streets. Vanessa enjoyed the chaotic scene, and her apartment was far enough from Eighteenth to muffle the noise. It was well after one when she opened the door to her fourth-floor apartment. She could afford something better, but she had lived in Adams Morgan for years. Her neighbors kept to themselves, and there was plenty of room for her research materials, which were mostly in the spare bedroom but had started to spill out into the living room. They consisted of the Warren Commission Report and books critical of it, tomes on the Roswell cover-up, and magazines with stories about the CIA’s covert operations and the like. If a book or article alleged a government conspiracy, Vanessa had it or had read it.
Vanessa flipped on the lights. The sight of a parcel with a return address from New York made her heart sink. The package was sitting on a small table in the foyer where Sam had stacked the mail. Vanessa carried it into the living room. She switched on the lamp beside the sofa and sat down to the groan of aged springs, placing the package on top of the magazines and days-old newspapers that littered her coffee table. She stared at the package for a minute before ripping off the brown paper wrapper. A letter lay on top of her manuscript, covering the title and her assertion of authorship. Vanessa hesitated before picking up the letter. It was signed by an editor at Parthenon Press who was supposed to be open to new ideas and was not afraid to challenge the establishment. He had published a number of controversial exposes of government cover-ups. A book of his about a Marine who’d blown the whistle on a training maneuver that had left two recruits dead had just fallen off the best-seller list.
Dear Ms. Kohler: I read Phantoms with great interest. Unfortunately, I have decided that your book is not right for Parthenon Press. I wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript. Yours truly, Walter Randolph
Vanessa squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to fling the manuscript across the room and break things. She fought to keep her rage in check and tried to dissipate her hostile energy by pacing the worn carpet that covered her hardwood floor. Something was going on here. It could be as simple as the fact that her press credentials were from Exposed instead of The New York Times. Of course, that level of credibility was closed to her. No reputable paper was going to hire someone with her history. But Vanessa was certain that something darker was at work.
Vanessa was a superb researcher and had ferreted out Walter Randolph’s unlisted home phone number as part of her background check on the editor when she was deciding to whom she would send her book. Vanessa dialed a number in Connecticut and waited while the phone rang several times.
“Hello,” answered a voice groggy with sleep.
“Walter Randolph?”
“Who is this?”
“Vanessa Kohler.”
“Who?”
“Phantoms. You just rejected it.”
“It’s one-thirty in the morning, Ms. Kohler,” Randolph answered, fighting to sound civil. “Would you please call me at work?”
“Who got to you?”
“I will not continue this discussion at this time.”
“Was it my father? Did someone from the government visit you? Did someone threaten you or buy you off?”
“I rejected your book because of insufficient documentation, Ms. Kohler. There was nothing sinister about the decision.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that?”
Vanessa heard a sigh on the other end of the line. “I don’t know how you got this number, but a call at this hour is a violation of my privacy. I am going to end it in a moment, but, since you insist on knowing, not only have you failed to verify your rather dramatic claims, but your past makes it highly unlikely that any publishing house would give them any credence.”
“My past?”
“Your mental history, Ms. Kohler. And now I must hang up. I have a hard day tomorrow and I need my sleep.”
“Who told you I was hospitalized, who told you that?”
But Vanessa found herself talking to a dead line. She slammed down the phone, redialed, and got a busy signal for her efforts. She was about to throw the phone at the wall when the front door opened and Sam Cutler walked in carrying his camera equipment. He was dressed in jeans and wore a tight black T-shirt under a windbreaker.