Buried (Hush collection)

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.

Tile opened the door and let John Heller inside. He nodded to the two men. Then he strode to the minibar, fixed a vodka and diet Sprite and drank it down fast. He noted the story on the TV. He said to them, “Good job.”

Governor Heller had a problem.

Himself.

Married and a father of two, Heller had a roving eye. When he was on the road, he might spot a young woman at a rally or a hotel bar, buy her drinks — plenty of drinks — and “help” her back to her room, with his bodyguards making certain no one was around to see.

Infidelity and public office were hardly an uncommon occurrence but this politician was running for president. Peter Tile, Heller’s minder and fixer in chief, couldn’t care less about the morality of it all; he was, however, determined to end up in the West Wing, with a real job title and a fat salary; his boss’s bad behavior simply could not make the news and derail their mutual ambitions. He spent a good portion of his time tactically planning these liaisons.

Then, disaster.

Drunk and apparently irritated at her rejection, Heller had snapped and beaten Elly Morgan to death in Maryland.

Full crisis mode.

Eddie Von had staged her death to look like a mugging gone bad and dumped the body elsewhere. He’d pitched the bloody rock into a deep river nearby. This wasn’t enough, however. Not for Tile. The debate was being held in a small and largely crime-free college town outside Baltimore, and Tile knew the press would jump all over the story. It was on the record too that Elly was a guest at the motel where the governor was staying. Also known was the fact that the governor himself had had past “incidents” with women — and a legendary temper.

If the press put those strands together, Heller might end up in a homicide investigation.

How could Tile prevent that?

An idea occurred to him: What if there were a crime in the vicinity that was so sensational that stories about the mugging would be buried in the press?

Tile liked the idea. But what kind of crime? He’d then laughed to himself.

Buried...

So he and Von created the Gravedigger. Von snatched a random victim and hid her in a drainage tunnel, leaving a puzzle as to her whereabouts. They had no intention of letting her die and, if the police hadn’t figured out the clue, Tile would have made an anonymous call reporting her location. The plan worked perfectly. For several days, the media was consumed with the idea of unraveling the Gravedigger’s puzzle. The story dominated the headlines, and the death of the West Virginia woman was hardly reported.

Tile thought they were home free. But then Morgan’s boyfriend — Josh Marcus, a coal-company manager — decided to play fucking detective. He was probably suspicious: Why was his girlfriend mugged around midnight, behind a restaurant at which she hadn’t eaten, miles from her motel?

Typically, at the motels and hotels Heller stayed at, Tile would spread thousands around the staff to downplay the governor’s presence, citing “security concerns.”

But apparently he’d failed to dispense alms to everyone.

Marcus learned from some employee that the night she’d died she’d been in the bar talking to Heller. He’d called the governor’s mansion asking if he could meet with the man himself. Probably Marcus didn’t suspect Heller at that point but legitimately hoped that he could provide some information about her plans that night. No one called Marcus back, and when he learned the governor was in Garner for fundraisers, he drove up there to get answers to his questions. He met with Tile, who sensed that by now, yes, he was a risk.

He’d had to die too.

Von staged the fatal car accident on Route 29. Once again, since the reporting about his death might lead someone to make the connection to his girlfriend Elly’s, and to the fact that the governor was present at both times, the Gravedigger struck again, this time kidnapping Jasper Coyle.

Sure enough the second abduction consumed the media, even more than the first incident; the Gravedigger was now a serial kidnapper — junk food for the media. Marcus’s car accident story, as well as the coverage about the governor’s fundraiser, went to the bottom of the news pile.

But then Edward Fitzhugh showed up. The reporter had actually managed to find out about Tile’s presence at Coyle’s kidnapping, where he’d been acting as lookout for Von. Tile had checked out the old journalist. A Pulitzer winner, the man was known to be a dogged investigative reporter. With some persistence, he could probably connect the dots: Heller’s presence in the towns where Elly Morgan and Josh Marcus had died, and Tile, with a connection to the governor, being at one of the kidnappings.

Now the journalist was gone, his files destroyed.

Crisis averted.

Heller was staring out the window. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t want anybody to die. You do know that, Peter, don’t you?”

“I do, John. But—”

The governor held up a hand. “No, no, you don’t have to worry. It’s over with. I promise. No more women.”

“It has to be,” Tile said.

The governor nodded. “I’m done. What are the next steps?”

“Me? I’ll make some anonymous calls that the Gravedigger has been seen on the West Coast and the story’ll go away. And you? We’ve got a rally tonight. Start working on your speech.”

18

Dottie Wyandotte stared at her computer screen until she could sit no longer.

She had to rise and, working up her courage, she walked into Fitz’s office. It smelled of tobacco — not smoke, just the tobacco. Whiskey too.

She opened desk drawers. Found a pack of cigarettes and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

You drink whiskey?

Does it have wheat in it?...

She replaced them and flipped through some of his notebooks. Set these back on the desk too. In the corner of his office was an old typewriter. She’d never used one. Dottie walked to it now. She hit several keys. The o worked and the m but not the e; she believed he’d told her that that letter was the most used in the English language. She looked at the armatures. Some of the letters, at the end, were clogged with ink from striking the ribbon year after year. Maybe she’d go on eBay and buy one. It would make a nice objet d’art in her tiny apartment.

Dottie walked back to Gerry Bradford’s office. He looked up. Dottie reflected that he was a younger version of her banker father.

“I’m not writing the piece.”

“The animal influencers?” He was frowning.

“There’s another story I want to do.”

“What is it?”

“I see it as a memorial to Fitz. An homage, you could say.”

He hesitated; she knew he would.

“Well, corporate really wants it. And they want it right away.”

“Give it to somebody else.”

“They want you. You’re the best writer on the team.”

Bradford glanced at his phone, as if debating calling corporate for their okay. Or to ask for help. Then his eyes returned, taking in the four studs in her right cheek. They represented the four corners of the earth — to which she intended to travel someday. She’d never told anyone this.

She said nothing but just stared.

Bradford sighed. “We’ll go with the Fitz story.”