Within hours all those people soundly sleeping in their beds would wake up to find out that one of the most famous women on the planet had been murdered. That the suspect was still at large. That there would be a city-wide manhunt that would put all other investigations-including my own- to shame. Not to mention the resources that Athena's father- Costas Paradis-would likely contribute. Bottom line, if your finger pulled the trigger, you were a marked man. But as soon as the killer fired that round, the reverberations created a news story. It was my job to see all the ripples.
Problem is, New York is a city eight million strong. If you want to disappear-and don't have a pile of mush instead of brains-you could disappear. Hundreds of crimes and dozens of murders went unsolved every year. All this guy did was raise the stakes. Raised them to a level that would scare off pretty much anyone without a death wish, but raised nonetheless.
I saw Wallace, approached him. The editor-in-chief of the
New York Gazette was a tall, slender man. He wore a neatly trimmed brown beard flecked with gray, and though his stature was hardly imposing, his intelligence shone through.
He wore a light jacket, hands tucked into the pockets. Wallace and I acknowledged each other with a brief nod, then turned back to the scene.
A line of police tape had cordoned off a thirty-foot radius around the spot where Athena's body had fallen. Even against the dark red of the carpet, I could make out a darker, more gruesome shade. The body had been removed from the scene, but forensics had taped off the angle at which her body had fallen. Several areas were marked with flags, presumably for ballistics and blood spatter experts. Some of the spatter appeared to be as far as ten feet from where Athena had fallen.
Only a high-caliber slug could cause that much damage. I saw a flag on the carpet, in front of a piece of chipped pavement.
Quite possibly where the bullet had lodged after exiting
Athena's skull.
The other bars in the district had been emptied out by the cops. The music had been turned off. The only sounds were the sirens and the cops, but the fear was louder than all of it.
"Warm out tonight," I said. Wallace nodded, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief as though reminded to.
"Gunman shot Athena from a distance. Goddamn sick coward."
"Just what I was thinking," I said. I looked around. "Guy would have been noticed on the street," I said. Wallace lifted his head, looked at the rooftops, didn't need to say more.
"How do you shoot a woman like that?" Wallace said, to nobody. "Disgusting, that's what it is."
"Athena wasn't just a woman," I said. "You get that famous, you become bigger than yourself. Become an ideologue or something." Wallace looked at me, knew we were both thinking about what happened to me last year. When people thought I'd murdered a cop, I was no longer Henry
Parker. I stood for something evil. And even when I was vindicated, the stench lingered. Athena lived in that spotlight every day of her life.
Police were questioning several young men and women who were sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against an ambulance. They looked visibly shaken. Eyes red, heads down.
Confidence sucked out of them. Several were crying. I wondered whether they were crying due to the horror they'd just witnessed, or because the world had been robbed of
Athena Paradis.
"Cops aren't going to get anything from witnesses who were inside the club," I said. "Figure at least fifty paparazzi outside, all those strobe lights, every single eye was focused on her."
"How can you be so sure?" Wallace asked.
"'Cause mine would be. You tell yourself you could care less about celebrities like Athena Paradis, but it's damn hard to turn away. And this was her scene."
I thought of Mya. Wondered if she was near here when she called. I hoped she'd made it home safe. I debated calling her just to be sure.
"This is page one," I said to Wallace.
"We're too late for the print edition," he said. "I want your copy on the Gazette website in an hour. And I want updates by the time Al Roker is smiling his way through the weather report."
"Awful generous deadline of you."
Wallace looked at me. "We mishandle this story in any way, the Dispatch will cannibalize our circulation rate and spend all winter bragging about its superior reporting."
"They couldn't report their way out of the 6 train," I said, expecting a laugh, but receiving none.
"Doesn't matter," Wallace said softly. "Story like this, it's all about how sensational you can make it. Who runs the cover photo of Athena in the most revealing dress. Gets the best quotes from her exes. Finds the most salacious angle to play up, even if it turns out to be bogus later on. You know Paulina will be all over this."
"So what do you want me to do?"
"You know the sign I keep by the elevators to all our news divisions, right?" I nodded. The sign Wallace was referring to was simply titled The Three Types of Reporters. It was a piece of paper containing four short, handwritten sentences.
Some reporters are always one step behind.
Some reporters always keep pace.
Some reporters are always one step ahead.
What kind of reporter are you?
"Good. Then Evelyn will be expecting your copy in sixty minutes."
"I'm a lucky man."
Evelyn Waterstone was the Gazette' s battle-ax of a Metro desk editor. All stories that focused within the five boroughs were doled out by her, met with her approval, and she had final edit. She was notorious for fighting for front-page space, claiming that New York was the country's central nervous system, and that most relevant stories stemmed from there.
So far she had treated me with kid gloves. Which left me uneasy. She always seemed to be much tougher on the other young journalists, the interns, the people who hadn't paid their dues. The fact that she liked me was fairly disconcerting. Like someone who smiled to your face while they held a Ginsu behind their back.
"Leave out the stuff about slug caliber and shooter vantage points," Wallace said. "Too much conjecture. Let the Dispatch be forced to make retractions. We need to play this clean."
"I'll get it done," I said, trying to convince not only Wallace but myself.
"Don't worry, I spoke to Evelyn before you got here.
She's aware of the time-sensitive nature, and is waiting for your e-mail. I'm asking you to play in the same scuzzy ballpark the Dispatch does, only you bat clean. You have an hour. Find an angle the Dispatch will miss. The entire country is going to be talking about Athena's murder, and we need to give them something nobody else will. I don't want any baseless conjecture. I don't want any name-calling. I don't want to stoop to their level. I want you to report this story the way a Gazette reporter would."
I nodded. Had no intention of doing it any other way. Since
I returned to the Gazette full time, I'd worked my ass off in an effort to prove I could hack it at that level. My first goround had been sidetracked by a slight case of murder. I'd spent the better part of a year trying to live down my own story, and now it was time to return to what I did best. To what
I was born to do. Find the stories nobody else could.
I looked back at the crime scene. Saw where the body had fallen. A ballistics expert used a pencil to trace an invisible line from the top of a brownstone several blocks away to the spot where the bullet had struck Athena. This club had security cameras outside, meaning Athena's death had undoubtedly been captured live and in color.
All those cameras. All those witnesses. No doubt a dozen people or more had taken cell phone photos and videos of her murder. Who knew how many ghouls would post them publicly? Whoever had killed Athena couldn't have picked a more public place. It was as if the killer wanted people to see it, to record it, to spread his mayhem. It didn't make my job any easier, that's for sure. There would be a cacophony of noise tomorrow, and I needed to find a pitch that could rise above it.