The Whole Truth (A. Shaw 1)

“Yeah, right. How about I show you his picture and give you his mailing address while I’m at it?”

“This isn’t a joke! People have died.”

She whirled around. “Don’t throw that crap in my face. I do the journalism thing for a living, okay? Ever heard the phrase ‘source protection’? Journalists invoke it every day. Some even go to prison in defense of it, which I happened to have done in the past. So save the guilt act for somebody else.”

Shaw looked down and Katie realized she had gone too far. She sat across from him and said quietly, “Look, there’s no one in the whole world who wants to find Anna’s killer more than you do. And I want that too. But I’ve got a job to do. I’ve been assigned to write about this story, and I have to go about it as a professional.”

“You tell me what the guy told you, and you expect me to stop there? Why tell me at all if you won’t take me to see him?”

Katie sat back, kneading her fists into her thighs. “I wish I had a stellar answer for that, but I don’t. I just wanted you to know. I guess I just wanted you to say he’s telling the truth.”

“Do you believe him?”

“The details I told you, the copier, the bodies near the front door, the guy named Bill Harris? Can you verify that since you were in there?”

“The copier on the second floor and the bodies near the front door, yes, that’s all accurate. I’ll check to see if the storage in the copier was big enough to hold him. I didn’t get a complete roster of the dead, so I can’t vouch for this Harris guy, but it’ll be easy enough to check that. You said he entered and left through the back?” Katie nodded. “Then that’s why we didn’t see him on the video footage. It only recorded the street entrance.”

“So he seems legit,” she said hopefully.

“He would also know all of those things if he were in on the murders.”

“I thought of that, but he didn’t seem the type. He’s basically a skinny little Polish kid scared out of his mind.”

“Who just happened to walk up to you on the street in front of the murder scene? Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“It would be, but he heard me talking to a cop. Pegged me as a journalist. And it’s not so unusual for a survivor to come back to where it happened. Guilt and all.”

“You sound like you’re trying very hard to convince yourself.”

“Trust me, I’m going to check this guy every way there is.”

“So what do you want from me?” Shaw asked.

Katie let out a breath. “You’ve pretty much confirmed for me that he was in there. I think, well, I keep working on the story.”

Shaw rose and stared down at her. “What the hell are you talking about? What story?”

She looked back at him with equal incredulity. “An eyewitness to the London Massacre? Don’t you think that’s newsworthy?”

“Katie, he said the killers were speaking Russian.”

“Yeah, so?”

Shaw loo

ked very troubled as she eyed him suspiciously.

“Is there something you haven’t told me?” she said.

“I’ll only tell you if you promise not to write the story.”

“I can’t do that, Shaw. I can’t. I won’t! This is news.”

“Even if it might start a world war?”

“What world war!” she exclaimed.

“If I tell you, you can never repeat it, to anyone, anywhere, including in print. Those are my terms. Take ’em or leave ’em.”