Deadline Man

“So, the columnist. I read your stuff. I saw tomorrow’s column in the system. That’s a great scoop.”

“Oh, thanks.” Too bad the expression “pshaw” went out with Kerouac. I ask her how long she’s been at the paper.

“Six months. Now I’m afraid I might be one of the first laid off.”

It’s a real risk. But she’s a cheap new hire. They’d get their money’s worth to get rid of me and a few of the old timers. “I hope not,” I say and change the subject. “How do you like Seattle?”

“I love it. Haven’t made it through the winter. But I like rain.”

“Me, too. It’s a nice town. Kind people. Our own pet volcano…”

She has a nice smile. The wide mouth fills her face with happiness. She has great dimples.

We make small talk. She came west from the Washington Post. I mention a couple of friends and ask if she knew them. Only their names, she says—she was out in the Montgomery County bureau and came to the Free Press to “be a real reporter.”

The immediate task is to talk to the former boyfriend of the missing girl, Megan Nyberg.

“The current darling of cable news.”

“You’re a cynic.” She furrows her brow. “I don’t disagree. I also don’t want to be fired because I get beaten on this story,” she says.

“I’m all for beating the Times.”

“Forget the fucking Times. I want to beat the fucking Web.”

There I am, sounding like an old fart.

“Rich, cute teenager from Mercer Island disappears. Even a serious economics columnist has to be a little interested.”

I hold my fingers up to measure half an inch. She laughs. I’m grateful that the paper still assigns reporters to go out and dig on the cops beat. So many others have taken to just having them rewrite the official statements of the law enforcement public information officers. In other words, getting one side of the story, and the one people in authority want put out.

“Where’s the FBI office?”

She looks surprised, then gives me an address on Third Avenue, a good mile from where I had been taken by the two feds. “What about the Secret Service, the DEA?” She names other locations, still different from the low, anonymous building I remember.

The sun breaks up the soft lead in the sky as we reach a street where Capitol Hill meets the Central District. We’re blocks beyond the creeping gentrification. Megan’s boyfriend is named Ryan Meyers and his apartment is one of the old brick four-story buildings the city has in abundance. This one looks as if the bricks are crumbling, although the columns at the entrance attest to better days. Amber parks on the downhill side of the street and sets the parking brake. Three homeboys deal pharmaceuticals on the corner by a shuttered market and I’m so glad to be the only white guy in a suit on the street.

The lobby is spare, small, and smells like dog pee. There’s no elevator, so we climb. Amber tells me that Megan met Ryan at a rave in SoDo and saw him on and off in the months before she disappeared. But while the cops initially suspected him, they never made a case. “Maybe Megan just ran away,” Amber says. “Maybe she didn’t want to be found by her parents and then got into trouble. That stuff happens all the time.”

“Maybe she’s not in trouble at all and still doesn’t want to be found.”

“I just work here, man. Editor says go and I go.”

“I bet.” She laughs again. She has a loud laugh. I say, “She’s how old?”

“Seventeen.”

We huff up the third flight of stairs. I ask what do Megan Nyberg’s parents do.

“Mom works at Microsoft. Dad owns a yacht brokerage.”

“Enough money to raise hell with the cops.”

“Exactly.”

As we climb, the stairwell becomes even cooler than the outside. We arrive on the fourth floor and pass through the fire door out of the stairwell. The small, wire-mesh-glass window at the upper-center of the fire door is covered with a faded Doors decal. Doors, get it? T

he bleak corridor carries a heavy smell of cooked cabbage and stale miscellany best not dwelled on. Ryan’s apartment is the second door in, and it’s partly open. Amber knocks and we listen. Somewhere a Latin tune is playing. A pair of sirens passes outside.