Buried (Hush collection) Read online

  But then: What the hell? He dug through two drawers until he found a pack of Marlboros. He tapped one out, lit it and gazed at the chart, then flipped through his notes. He smoked half the cigarette down, amused that he didn’t cough once.

  What’s your motive? What’s your why?

  He thought of the British woman who’d solved the Jasper Coyle kidnapping limerick.

  The trick is to keep an open mind. Don’t start solving the puzzle right away. Let it sit . . .

  Which is exactly what he did.

  Scanning the chart. Publicity as a motive?

  That made no sense.

  Another drag . . .

  Or did it?

  “Oh my God,” he whispered. Then barked a sharp laugh. He believed he had the answer. It would take some work to verify, but that was a reporter’s job, after all. He booted up his computer.

  Pounding the digital pavement.

  A nice turn of phrase. He’d share it with Dottie.

  An hour passed, two hours. Hunched over the computer keyboard, index digits hard at work. Fitz thought of Dottie’s fingers, tipped in ebony nails, flying over the keys. He wished he’d learned to touch-type.

  Around two a.m., he paused, as he felt cool air stirring at his feet. Had a door blown open?

  No, he’d locked them all, he was sure.

  He typed a few more keystrokes, hit return, then logged off and rose, turning.

  Standing in the doorway to his office were two men. One was Peter Tile, from the bar that afternoon. The other he didn’t recognize: a big, swarthy man with a belligerent face. Both were wearing blue latex gloves. Tile held a large plastic gas can. The other man, a pistol, with a silencer.

  Fitz sighed. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and took it from his lips, stubbing it out in a crystal ashtray with a chip in the side. A present from Jen years and years and years ago.

  III

  JUNE 20, THE PRIOR MONTH

  15

  After a long day of negotiating deals and writing memos and revising spreadsheets and wrangling conference calls, all she wanted was a bowl of soup and a chardonnay.

  Crab soup, of course. She was in Maryland. What other kind would you have?

  Elly Morgan made her way through the serpentine path that connected her wing of the motel to the main building. She was lucky to have gotten the room; there’d been a political debate this evening and most of the hotels and motels were booked. She’d probably heard about the debate but had paid no attention. The thirty-year-old brunette thought the constant barrage of cable news totally sucked. She and her boyfriend leaned toward artsy British shows on Netflix and, for dessert, Pixar and superheroes. (Who didn’t just love laser eye beams blowing up buildings?)

  The election was in November. She’d focus around Halloween.

  Now, after a ten-hour day, Morgan wanted a fast, peaceful meal.

  Crab soup.

  She walked into the outdoor bar, done up in a sort of faux New Orleans style. Mardi Gras beads dangled. A mural depicting an eerie papier-mâché masked man with a leering smile covered one wall. The music, however, was Top 40. Very disorienting. The place wasn’t crowded at all. The hour was ten, past regular dinnertime. She saw a couple in the corner, in their thirties. Eyes locked. The world outside their love—or lust—didn’t exist. Two men were at another table, watching a game. The younger, in a suit and tie, resembled an actor she couldn’t place. The other, big and unsmiling, wore jeans and a leather jacket over a T-shirt.

  A table or the bar itself? she debated. One thing she knew from traveling: the emptier the dining room, the slower the service. She walked to the bar and sat. She and the bartender exchanged smiles and nods.

  Morgan had ordered a white wine at lunch, but only to keep her businessmen customers happy. She’d sipped only teaspoonfuls during the meal (they’d had martinis and Manhattans).

  Now, she went for her first real drink of the day. A nice Alexander Valley Chardonnay. It was crisp and oaky. She began to relax, finally. She looked over the menu. Yes! They had the lovely soup. She ordered.

  A man sat down at the bar, to her left, leaving a tactful stool between them. He ordered a vodka and diet Sprite—an odd and wholly unappealing combination—and examined the menu.

  A minute or two later: “So how you doing tonight?”

  She glanced the man’s way. He was in an athletic jacket with the collar turned up. He wore a baseball cap, the logo of the New York Mets. His glasses were tinted. His hair, beneath the hat, boyishly mussed. He seemed familiar. Maybe she’d seen him last night when she arrived after the long drive from West Virginia. No, from somewhere else, though probably he simply fell into that generic good-lookin’-fifty-year-old demographic. Her sister had joked they were the number one male presence on Tinder.

  She sighed. But Southern born and bred, Elly Morgan was polite to her core. “Pretty good.”

  “You here on business?”

  “I am, yes.” Her territory included retail stores from Pennsylvania down to North Carolina. She was on the road every few weeks, and the number one rule she’d learned was never, ever ask anyone—a man especially—a question that might elongate the conversation.

  “Can I ask what line?”

  “Wholesale cosmetics.”

  “Ah.”

  She sipped wine, pulled out her phone, and studied her screen. She wished she could call Josh. But he was on an airplane. Maybe she’d try her sister.

  “I’m just in town for a thing here tonight,” the Mets fan went on. “But I got around during the day. I like college towns. Pretty interesting place. There’s a Civil War memorial. Did you know that Maryland never seceded from the Union but it was the only state that officially had federal and Confederate troops?”

  She didn’t. She didn’t care.

  He ordered another drink.

  Without looking his way, Morgan sensed he was studying her. She regretted not changing from the tight-fitting silk blouse. In the meetings she wore, as she always did, a loose jacket. She had a voluptuous figure, and she knew he was focused on her chest.

  She hit a recent call button.

  “Hi, this is Karen. Please leave a message.”

  So, sis wasn’t going to help her out.

  “Voice mail,” the man said. “Curse of existence.”

  Apparently the volume was high enough so he could hear. Rude to comment. Also, she had no clue what his comment meant.

  He leaned a bit closer and she felt his arm brush her elbow.

  “Excuse me,” she said and turned his way.

  He backed off. “Sorry. Just was going to ask if you wanted a better drink. My treat.”

  Better drink?

  “Wine can be so boring. You don’t look like a boring girl.”

  That’s it.

  “Could I get that soup to go?” she said to the bartender.

  “Sure.”

  The Mets Man apparently got the message. He finished his drink and paid cash. He rose, said, “Have a good night now.”

  Polite Morgan nodded distantly.

  He wandered off.

  Stay?

  No way. Sharks circle back on their prey.

  In five minutes the soup had arrived. She signed the check and stood, ignoring the gaze of the man seated to her right. Was he eyeing her figure too?

  She ignored him. How tiring this all was. She knew it had happened from the beginning of time, men and women, but now, still, in the #MeToo era? Did some men simply not get it?

  Walking back to her wing, over sidewalks surrounded by flowering trees, she smelled the enticing aroma of the soup and she thought: Calm down, girl. You’re tired, you’re stressed from the negotiation, you miss Josh. Don’t overreact. Looking over her body was wrong, it was an assault in a way, but it wasn’t terrible. The incident hadn’t become ugly. It was one of the thousands of incidents just like it that she’d had to endure, being a woman in . . . No, not just in the business world, but anywhere.

  She’d had to en
dure, being a woman. End of story. She should—

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  Morgan gasped.

  Mets Man had been on an intersecting sidewalk. He stepped in front of her.

  She had to stop.

  “I was out of line. And—”

  “You’ll excuse me. I’m going to my room.” She fished her phone from her pocket. He noticed this.

  He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered. He held up a hand. “Look. I’m not dangerous or weird.”

  The jury’s still out on . . .

  “I just find you extremely attractive. You’re my type. And I think I’m not so bad to look at myself. And there are some other things about my life that are . . . appealing.”

  “I’m talking to management.” She turned, her heart pounding hard. When’s the right time to scream?

  “Wait,” he commanded and grabbed her arm.

  “The fuck are you doing?”

  “Just calm down. Let’s have a drink and—”

  “Are you crazy?”

  He gripped her harder.

  She swung a fist at his mouth and collided solidly. She was the daughter of factory workers and had put herself through college doing the same kind of labor.

  “Oh, Jesus, you fucking bitch!”

  Now, time to scream.

  She inhaled deep. But before she could cry out he tackled her hard, driving a shoulder into her solar plexus. She fell to the ground, pain radiating from her gut to the bridge of her nose. Tears streamed.

  Oh, Josh . . . Josh . . .

  She grappled with the phone. Mets Man ripped it from her hand.

  “Why did you do that?” he whispered. “It could have been so good. Why?”

  She tried to crawl away, but the blow had virtually paralyzed her.

  He seemed disgusted, as if this were all her fault. He shook his head and looked around.

  For what?

  No, no . . .

  He was plucking a large rock from a garden beside the sidewalk. He walked slowly to her. Elly Morgan closed her eyes. She was numb. She could think of nothing, she could hear nothing, she could sense nothing . . . except the aroma of the soup, crab soup, lovely soup, spreading in a pink pool only inches from where she lay.

  “What . . . My God. What’ve you done?”

  As he looked down at the body of the young woman, her head bloody and crushed, Peter Tile was aware of a scent: Maryland crab chowder. A dish he would never eat again in his life.

  “It was an accident.” His boss doffed his Mets cap and wiped his brow.

  “It wasn’t an accident. You fucking killed her. And you’re still fucking holding the murder weapon.”

  His boss looked down at the bloody piece of stone. He dropped the hunk of jagged granite, now rich with DNA and fingerprints. He whispered, “She was going to—”

  “Stop you from raping her? The hell did you think she was going to do?”

  “It just got out of hand. She was flirting.”

  “I was in the bar. We both were. We were watching you. You came on too strong.”

  “She hit me.” He pointed to his jaw. “I think I lost a tooth.”

  Tile looked up and down the sidewalk. No one present. And no security cameras. One of the reasons Tile had picked this hotel.

  Tile took a deep breath. He made a phone call.

  “’Lo?”

  “Head to the South Wing. Now. We’ve got a problem.”

  Sixty seconds later, Eddie Von appeared. He was five-ten and stocky, muscle-stocky. His thinning black hair was combed back with sweet-smelling lotion. He was blunt in appearance and blunt in manner. His dangling hands drew naturally up into fists.

  “Shit,” he grumbled. Not horrified, just thinking of how to deal with this inconvenience.

  Tile: “Get her into the bushes.”

  Tile and Von gripped her feet and tugged her out of sight. Tile picked up the bloody rock with an untucked tail of his dress shirt and dropped it beside the body.

  “What are we going to do?” His boss wiped his brow once more. “You have to figure this out. You have to do something.”

  He was furious with the man, but, yes, Peter Tile absolutely did. It was his job to make sure that nothing—even murder—was going to derail the career of the man standing before him: John C. Heller, governor of the state of New York, and the man virtually guaranteed to lead his party to victory in the presidential election in November.

  IV

  JULY 15, PRESENT DAY

  16

  At eight a.m., Dottie Wyandotte walked into the Examiner newsroom and could see something was terribly wrong.

  Police were in Gerry Bradford’s office and the editor in chief’s face was stricken. He’d misbuttoned his shirt. Five staffers were standing together, their arms crossed or dangling at their sides, their faces dismayed. Pam Gibbons, Dottie’s assistant, had been crying.

  Bradford looked toward her and rose, saying something to the police. He stepped outside and walked to her.

  “What?” she blurted. “Tell me.”

  “It’s Fitz. He was killed last night.”

  “Oh, God. No, no!” Dottie’s hands were shaking. She set down her Starbucks tea, sloughed her computer bag, let it slide to the floor. Tears welled.

  Gibbons noticed her boss and made a beeline. They embraced.

  “Pam.”

  The women separated and, lassoing the emotions, Dottie said in a low voice, “What happened?”

  Bradford nodded to the police. “They said it was meth cookers. That story he was working on? They shot him . . . And then burned his house down, destroyed all his files, notes, contacts. They found meth on the front doorknob and stair railing. A fentanyl patch by the curb. I mean, they’ll investigate, but we knew those tweakers were dangerous. He was . . .” Bradford’s thought caught. “Fitz was dead before the fire. You want to sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Fuck. I can’t believe it.”

  The first time the pristine editor in chief had ever used an obscenity, to her knowledge.

  “He has family,” she said.

  “A son. They called him, the police did. He and his wife’re on their way here.”

  Dottie had noted a picture of Fitz, his wife and an athletic-looking teenage boy. It was in the center of the wall behind his desk here. She could turn and look at it now. She didn’t.

  “Dottie?” Bradford asked.

  She looked up from the floor.

  “Did you know that he had cancer?”

  “Fitz?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t. But the coughing. And the lozenges. I should have guessed.”

  “No, that was pollen. He was allergic. It’s pancreatic. It’d spread. I just thought I’d tell you. Not that it makes any difference.”

  “Not a bit of difference,” Dottie said angrily.

  Bradford nodded. “I better go back. They have some more questions. They’ll want to talk to you too, the police.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “I’ll come up with an obit. We don’t have anything in the morgue on him.”

  The “morgue”—the file cabinet, or digital folder, containing obituaries written about individuals while they were still alive. Upon their deaths, the articles would be updated and dropped into the paper.

  She nodded, numb, and started back to her cubicle.

  Bradford said, “Oh, Dottie?”

  After a moment, she looked up.

  “Corporate wants a piece on influencer animals.”

  “Animals?” she asked, not comprehending.

  “They liked your last piece, on the body painting. You know Christiana, the supermodel, LA?”

  Fitz was dead. A man she’d just been talking to last night. Sipping chamomile and whiskey.

  Just not together . . .

  “Dottie?”

  Her attention returned. “Animals?”

  “She’s got a cat. He’s got his own blog and YouTube channel. Christiana
does the voice-overs but the cat’s in the video with the products and people she’s promoting. Millions of hits. And millions of dollars. There’ll be others out there.”

  “Influencer animals?”

  “Right. Chet Grant wants you to do a series.”

  Head of OOMC at the company. Not the boss of bosses but close.

  “And they need the first piece ASAP. Chet’s worried about losing the exclusive. Apparently the subject’s trending.”

  “All right,” Dottie said. “I’ll get on it.” Numb, she turned toward her computer.

  Bradford started back to his office. He paused. “It’s not trivial.”

  She gazed at him quizzically.

  “What we do,” he continued. “The pieces aren’t trivial. They make people smile. Millions of people. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “No. Nothing wrong at all.”

  17

  In his Albany hotel room, Peter Tile poured a drink for himself and for Eddie Von, the swarthy, blunt triggerman who had shot Edward Fitzhugh to death last night.

  The hour was early but they were sipping scotches. Because why the fuck not?

  The two men, collectively, were the Gravedigger. The bigger of the two, the stronger, an ex-soldier, Von was the actual kidnapper. Tile was the tactician, had come up with the clues about where the victims were held, and, as the anonymous witness, convinced the world that the Gravedigger was over six feet tall, pale, a full head of blond hair, and left-handed—virtually the opposite of Von.

  The man now asked, “You going to need me for any more of these jobs?”

  “No. Nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”

  “Oh” was Von’s disappointed response. His accent was flat, midwestern. Tile recalled he’d been in the National Guard in Indiana or Illinois. He’d been dishonorably discharged.

  The television news was on. The big story on the local station was last night’s raging fire in a suburban neighborhood of Garner. It had been at the home of a veteran reporter with the Fairview Daily Examiner, Edward Fitzhugh, whose body had been discovered inside. No one knew at this point what the cause was.

  A knock sounded on the door. Tile and Von eyed each other. Von’s hand went to his back waistband, where his gun resided. Tile looked out the peephole and shook his head. Von stood down.