Four
The usual two-inch stack of mail was waiting for her when Betsy Young sat down at her desk in the newsroom at the New York Times. She threw her worn brown suede jacket on the back of her chair, popped the top on her can of diet soda, took a long drink and started going through the letters.
She was tall, and her wiry body fit her high-energy personality, but at forty-six she was fighting the years. Her streaked hair was cropped to hang in a flattering curl, hiding her slackening jaw line, and her blue-tinted glasses concealed some of the tired lines around her eyes. There were younger people in the newsroom, but there were also reporters and editors older than she was. These were mostly men.
She left off perusing the mail to watch a breaking news report on the TV monitor next to her desk. A newscaster announced the jury had returned a verdict in a murder case that had been in the headlines for weeks.
“The jury has come back with a vote of guilty for Mary Woods, who, for the last six weeks, has been on trial for the murder of her brother, Daniel Woods. Women are less likely to be convicted of murder…”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Betsy responded, to no one in particular.
Robby, a twenty-something crime reporter new to the Times from Florida, whose desk was next to Betsy’s, looked over at her. She caught his eye and they laughed. He was still looking at her ten seconds later when she slit open the large manila envelope that had been next in the pile of mail. She was used to young reporters watching her, knew they admired her Pulitzers and wanted to soak up whatever they could by observing her. She thought about telling them that much of it wasn’t talent but the sheer luck of having been in the right place at the right time, except she didn’t really believe that. If luck was involved, it was because she made her own.
She didn’t know what it was about her reaction to what she pulled out of the envelope that made him get up out of his chair, walk to her desk and peer over her shoulder. Normally she’d be observant enough to know if a man was sniffing her perfume.
But this time, she didn’t. The eight-by-ten-inch glossy made her forget everything.
The corpse was lying on a simple metal gurney, his skin so white it was almost pale green. A halo effect of shimmering light forced her attention to the man’s black pubic hair and shrunken penis.
Your eyes couldn’t help being drawn there, she thought. And not just because of the lighting. The shot had been designed to emphasize the man’s genitals. You were viewing the cadaver from between his legs, staring up past his crotch so that the perspective was skewed. The man’s head was diminished. His sexual organs exaggerated.
“Oh, God,” Robby whispered.
“There is a famous painting of Christ that shows him from exactly this perspective-his feet to the viewer, the rest of him foreshortened. It was painted by Mantegna.” Betsy held the photograph at arm’s length and squinted at it.
Gingerly, she laid the photo on her desk and picked up the next one.
This photograph had been taken from a more traditional angle, from overhead, looking straight down. The man’s penis was still dead center so her eye went there first, but everything else in this picture was in proportion and she could see the man’s drawn face.
He appeared to be about thirty-five and in excellent physical condition. His naked form showed muscle and sinew but no fat. His hands were crossed on his bare chest, his eyes were closed. He might have been asleep if not for the pallor and pose.
The third shot focused on the soles of the cadaver’s feet, each with the number 1 handwritten in bright red marker.
“I’ve seen awful things but these are just…” Robby shook his head. Although he was a prolific writer he couldn’t find the right words for how these photographs shocked him.
“I know. There’s something about the finality and pathos of a corpse-even in a flat photograph-that you don’t ever get used to.”
Robby looked down at the envelope the photos had come in. Betsy saw him making sure it was addressed to her, and she smiled. She knew if it hadn’t been, he thought he’d have some shot at the story.
But it had been.
“The best you can hope for is that this will be so big that I’ll need some help,” Betsy told him. “Maybe there will be sidebars-”
“Except you’re so tireless, you’ll probably do them all yourself,” he said sadly.
Behind her back, they called her “the pug,” not because she was unattractive but because she was tenacious. In her dozen years at the Times, she’d won two Pulitzers, even if the last one had been more than five years ago.
“Do you think this guy looks familiar?” Betsy finally asked.
Robby stared at the man’s face. “Yes. But not enough to place him.”
Betsy examined the photo with a magnifying glass.
“So, are you going to go to the police?” Robby asked.
“Of course…but not this very minute.”
“Won’t you be an accessory if you got this and they didn’t-”
“Robby, I said I was going to go to the police. But first I am going to do some reporting. Just enough to get a handle on this. Just enough so that no one can take it away from me.”
They both looked back at the photographs on her desk. In death, the man’s features were slack, but his nose was prominent and the mustache that graced his upper lip was still glossy and lush.
“He really does look familiar,” Betsy mused. And then she snapped her fingers. “Got it,” she said, her voice eerily gleeful. “Philip Maur. Chief operating officer of Grimly and Maur. The Wall Street firm. He’s been missing for a week. We ran his picture last Tuesday.”
She picked up the empty envelope, examined the label, then turned it over and investigated the seal. Suddenly, she stuck her hand back inside.
Betsy pulled out an ordinary household sandwich bag containing a two-inch-long, dark substance.
Two seconds went by. Three.
She let out a short breath and dropped the bag on her desk.
“Oh, my God, it’s his hair, isn’t it?” Robby asked in horror.
Betsy nodded.
Five
Detective Noah Jordain sat at the counter in a Japanese restaurant with his partner, Mark Perez. Both had plates of sushi in front of them. Jordain dipped a piece of uni into the soy sauce and then smeared it with wasabi.
“How can you eat so much of that without burning your sinuses?”
“You are a wimp,” Jordain said in his slow New Orleans drawl, and Perez laughed. Since they’d been working together, Jordain had introduced his partner to all kinds of exotic food.
Jordain loved to cook and to explore New York’s endless supply of ethnic cuisines. A Renaissance man, he not only cooked, but played piano, wrote jazz, collected antiques and managed not to get ribbed for any of it by a single cop in the department.
There was just one reason.
In police work, God was in the details.
They all knew it.
Jordain lived it.
And they respected him for it.
Jordain’s cell phone rang. Pulling it out, he looked at it as if it were an insect, put it down next to his green tea, speared another piece of sushi, dipped and smeared it, popped it in his mouth and chewed. The phone rang a second time.
Perez, who was as reactive as Jordain was laid-back, glared at his partner. In the two years they’d been together, Perez hadn’t gained any of Jordain’s patience.
“You want me to get that?”
Jordain swallowed, smiled, shook his head and slowly reached for the cell, answering it on the fourth ring.
As he listened, he ran his hand through his thick silvery hair. And then he did it twice again. Perez noticed and became alert. He’d learned to tell how bad the news was by how many times Jordain brushed the wavy hair off his forehead.