Deadline Man

“He does.” I say it as I step from the secretary’s office through the threshold into the inner sanctum of James Forrest Sterling.

His eyes flash and he rushes toward me from behind his desk. I give him a hard check with both hands against his shoulders and he falls backward to the Persian rug that sits between his desk and conference table. His glasses fly toward the far wall and he’s splayed out on the floor. He’s wearing jeans, a white polo shirt and sandals with gray socks.

“Don’t hurt him!” Melinda pushes against me, but I stretch out one arm and firmly but gently move her aside.

“I’m not going to hurt him. I don’t do business the way his friends do.”

He rubs his shoulders, where I shoved him. Then he rubs his beard. His beard. Heather had said Megan went with a man “who looked like me.” I have grown a beard, and that night I found Heather I was wearing a suit, the usual outfit of the publisher, as well. Other things Heather said start to gel, too.

“Megan Nyberg came to you for protection.” I pull over a chair and sit on the edge of it, facing him but above him.

“So she did.” His high voice regains a certain command. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

“What about me?” Melinda demands. “Don’t you owe me an explanation? You said we were going away tomorrow. Was that a lie, too?”

I stare at her. All I can say is her name.

Melinda says mine back, sadness in her voice. Her face is red from crying. “Jim and I have been together for years. What? You have your playmates. You were never going to really love me. What does it matter to you?” Her voice grows fierce as she reaches the end of the last sentence. All I can say is that now she’s implicated in one homicide, maybe more.

I glance at Sterling’s large desk, stacked with files. Beside the high-backed desk chair is a large paper shredder.

I cock my head. “Destroying evidence?”

Melinda drops to her knees and puts a sheltering arm around Sterling. “Leave him alone,” she pleads. “I let you put your story in. Why do you want to hurt him?”

“Why did you let me put the story in?” I speak quietly.

“Because I knew he’d believe it was the right thing to do, too.” She starts sobbing again. “He just isn’t thinking. His family has betrayed him, betrayed the newspaper. Then these people got control of him. He’s a good man. If I could let you hurt them, then they couldn’t hurt him…”

“Shut up, Mel!” Sterling says, grating my ears with his mangling of a lovely name. “What story? What fucking story?”

“The story that’s going to put your buddies at Olympic International and Praetorian in jail.” I relax in the chair and force my voice into a calm, easy shade. This isn’t a confrontation. It’s now an interview.

“Are you insane!” He starts to lift himself up off the floor but I raise a hand. I’m taller, bigger, and stronger than he is and he knows it. He sits back on his hands but commands Melinda to stop the presses. For a long time nobody speaks, and in the silence the walls and floor conduct the rumble of the big machines.

“Mel!” His eyes are wide, desperate.

“No.” She says it quietly. “I can’t. The story is too important. And that you would want to stop it… Oh, Jim, tell me Zimmer didn’t kill that young girl.”

I say, “Sterling killed her himself. Zimmer just brought her body into the building in an oil drum one weekend. There had been a leak in the toilet in the Governor’s office—the plumbing was probably seventy years old, and Zimmer’s crew took it out. But they had to replace a lot of the tile and dig down into the space between the floors. Your boyfriend here had him put Megan’s body in and pour a new slab over it. She was in a tomb that would never be found, even if the newspaper closed and somebody converted the building to condos. Zimmer did it because it felt he owed the Forrest family. But he couldn’t live with it. There’s no use, Jim, Zimmer has told us everything.”

Melinda is strangely silent. She lets her hands drop from him. Sterling stares at me, blinking fast. “I had to…take care of her, or they would have killed me. You don’t understand. If we publish that story, they’ll kill us both.”

“We’re way past that, and I’m surprised your buddy Pete Montgomery didn’t tell you about it. But I guess you’re out of the loop. Not like Troy.”

“Troy.” Sterling looks like he wants to spit. “Troy was the one out of the loop.”

“Out of the loop of eleven/eleven?”

“Yes.” He says it defiantly.

“But you had him killed.”

“Not me. Praetorian,” he says. “Mission security, they called it. Mission security was paramount. Troy became a liability. All we needed from him was help with the money.”

“Hiding it. Laundering it in the capital markets. Making it look copasetic on Wall Street.”

“Why the hell do you think Troy’s fund did so well the past few years? He was no investment genius.”