Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 5

So Akilah Harris was Windy Byers’s slam muffin. And Windy was Akilah’s baby daddy. And now Windy was missing, Akilah was on the run, and the kids were dead, none of which could possibly be coincidence.

But how, exactly, did it all relate? I gazed at the TV screen, bewildered. Windy Byers stared back at me with his ridiculous pencil mustache and his fat face-but precious few answers. My mind began toying with the possibilities.

Scenario No. 1: Akilah and Windy, the star-crossed lovers, decided to run off together but didn’t feel like dragging the kids along. Hence the fire. But that didn’t work. One, it made them unimaginable monsters. And while Akilah was a liar and Windy was a dimwit, they just didn’t seem like they had that much evil in them. Besides, why would Akilah keep returning to the house if that was the case? And why would she have slept at Sweet Thang’s place if she really just wanted to run off with her boyfriend?

No, Windy and Akilah didn’t seem to be in cahoots on this one. If anything, it was possible they were both being victimized-after all, there was blood in the foyer of Windy’s place, while Akilah’s house had been made to double as a barbecue pit. But by whom? Who would want to hurt both of them?

Of course. Scenario No. 2: Rhonda Byers, the councilman’s churchgoing wife, learned of her husband’s affair, then parted company with her sanity. She torched the love shack with the bastard children still inside, then sliced up her husband. Now she was reporting him missing in the hopes no one would ever suspect a member of the Ladies’ Fellowship Group could go on a homicide spree.

I held up Scenario No. 2 for a moment or two, turned it around a few times so I could look at all sides. And yes, it worked. I thought about her demeanor at that press conference, so self-assured, so preternaturally composed, so unruffled. Shouldn’t she have been a little more distraught? Isn’t that what everyone did for the six o’clock news?

I’m not saying I would put Scenario No. 2 in the newspaper yet-I still had a lot to prove before I reached that point. But the jealous wife was certainly a dangerous animal, capable of all kinds of nasty. Especially if the wife in question was packed in as tight a box as Rhonda Byers, with her proper suits and her toe-pinching shoes. It tended to make the explosion that much more spectacular when it all came unwrapped.

It would also explain why Akilah was making herself such an elusive figure and would lend some sense to her rant on the fire escape. After all, you’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you.

I pulled my attention away from the television and turned toward Bertie Harris and her pile of sodden Kleenex. Bertie didn’t necessarily have all the answers-it didn’t sound like she and her daughter were too close anymore-but she at least had some of them.

“Mrs. Harris, would you mind if I sat down?” I said.

She pointed toward an empty chair. “You can call me Bertie, you know.”

I sat. Sweet Thang smiled at me, like she was proud I was now a member of the Call Me Bertie Club. I took off my jacket and draped it around the chair, then sat down.

“I know this is painful to talk about, but it may help me figure out who killed your grandchildren,” I said. “Can you tell me about Akilah and that man you just saw on the screen, Windy Byers?”

“Byers!” she said. “That’s the fool’s name, Windy Byers. Of course! Lord. You think he had something to do with those poor children?”

“I don’t know what to think right now,” I said. “You have heard he’s missing, yes?”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t come home Sunday night. His wife called the police Monday morning. That’s why his face was on the TV just now. The cops are calling it a suspicious disappearance. A police source told me they found blood in the house. I think he may be in trouble.”

Bertie absorbed this news for a moment.

“And Akilah is in trouble, too?” she asked.

“I’m not real sure,” I said, not wanting to haul out my Rhonda Byers theory just yet. “But I’m hoping I can take what you know about Windy and Akilah and use it to learn a little more.”

“Well, I’m not sure how much I know. Akilah and I weren’t real chitchatty about that sort of thing,” she said, pantomiming “chitchatty” with her hands. “She knew I disapproved of her sneaking around with a married man. She say, ‘But Mama, we in love.’ And I tell her, ‘Akilah, you can’t be saying that about another woman’s husband. He ain’t yours to be in love with.’ But she didn’t listen.”

“How did they meet?” I asked.

“Oh, I was there when it happened,” Bertie said. “He came here campaigning one time-you know, those politicians always come around when they looking for your vote. He was walking around and he took a real interest in Akilah. She couldn’t have been no more than eighteen. Can you imagine that?”

Quite easily, I thought, as I sneaked a glance at Sweet Thang in her formfitting knit dress, her perfect, slender legs crossed beneath her. If there was a straight man who wasn’t attracted to younger women, I had yet to meet him.

“I didn’t think nothing of it at first,” Bertie continued. “I thought he was just helping her, like a mentor. He got her a job over at the hospital”-another area where Akilah didn’t fib-“and he looked after her. I didn’t think there was nothing going on.”

“I heard this part already,” Sweet Thang told me. “I’m going to check on the banana bread.”

She rose from her seat and slid by me, brushing me lightly with her hand as she passed, giving me a little chill down my spine. It made me wonder: if she could do that with a single light touch, what would full-body contact be like?

Bertie Harris brought me back into the conversation before my mind drifted too far.

“Are you going to put this in the newspaper?” she asked.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” I said, which happened to be an honest answer.

“Well, I guess it don’t matter now. You reap what you sow.”

I wasn’t sure who was reaping or who was sowing in this particular farming metaphor. But if it made Bertie more comfortable talking to me, she could plant a whole field for all I cared.

“So when did you realize they were…” I groped for wording that wouldn’t seem crude. “When did you start to think they were getting intimate?”

“Well, I should have known before I did. He was always giving her little presents, jewelry and stuff-a real charmer, he was. I’d see her wearing a necklace and say, ‘Where’d you get that, girl?’ and she wouldn’t say nothing. But I knew,” Bertie said. “Then she went and got herself pregnant.”

I nodded. Yes, that would be a strong indication intimacy had occurred.

“Then he bought her a house,” she added.

“He what?” I asked. Jewelry. Jobs. Even an apartment. I had heard of politicians getting those things for their girlfriends. But never a house.

“Uh-huh. A house. The house that burned down, he bought it for her,” Bertie said, shaking her head. “She came home one day and said, ‘Mama, me and the kids is moving out. My man got me a house.’ ”

It was, I realized, one final lie out of the mouth of Akilah Harris. She wasn’t struggling under the weight of a mortgage, as she told us. She was getting it for free.

Which was just lovely for Akilah, I’m sure. But I could only begin to imagine how Rhonda Byers felt when-as wives inevitably do-she learned about it. Your fifty-something-year-old husband is not only cheating on you with a twenty-something-year-old-woman, but he has two kids with her and bought her a house.

I’m no expert on the mysterious workings of that alien planet known as the female psyche, but I’ll posit that would make any woman pretty damn mad.

Mad enough to kill.

* * *

Sweet Thang returned to the living room, looking pleased with her domesticity.

“It’s done and it’s perfect,” she announced. “But we should give it at least twenty minutes to cool.”

I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. A nice hunk of warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven banana bread sounded delightful. And it was tempting to think that since I was in possession of information no one else had, I didn’t need to be in too much of a rush. But I had learned, mostly the hard way, that nothing stays secret too long. And this story was sensational enough-SOURCE: MISSING POL WAS TWO-TIMING! — the New York tabloids would be swarming across the Hudson River as soon as they learned of it. I had to get as much of a head start on the competition as I could. There was no time to dawdle. Not even for fresh baked goods.

“Unfortunately, I think Bertie will have to enjoy it by herself,” I said to Sweet Thang. “You and I have to be going. We’ve got work to do.”

Bertie turned to Sweet Thang with a conspiratorial smile.

“Well, the boss has spoken!” Bertie said.

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Sweet Thang assured her.

Bertie stood and shuffled toward her new friend.

“I just have to give you a hug,” she said, grabbing her, her voice choking slightly. “Thank you so much for listening to an old lady go on like I did.”

“Oh, my goodness, it was so lovely meeting you,” Sweet Thang said, hugging back. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

I stood up and extended a hand as soon as they broke their embrace. “Bertie, it was very nice talking with you,” I said as she lightly grabbed my hand for one of those nonshake shakes. “If you hear from Akilah, please give us a call.”

“Oh, she don’t come around here no more,” Bertie said. “We always end up fighting because I always tell her what I think. I know I should be more understanding, but I just can’t deal with her and that married man. I just can’t.”

“You mentioned she had brothers and sisters,” I said. “Do any of them have contact with her?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me if they did. They’d know it would just upset me. But if Akilah was going to run to any of them, she would run to Tamikah. That’s her oldest sister. She was like a second mother to that child. They was always close.”

Bertie gave me Tamikah’s phone number.

“That’s her home number,” Bertie said. “She don’t like it when I call her on her cell, so I just call her at home.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind if we call you when we have more questions. And sorry again about last night.”

“You just be good to this young lady, you hear?” she said.

I assured her I would. And with that, we departed. I waited until we were down the stairwell and out into the courtyard, headed for our cars, before I spoke.

“Holy crap,” I said. “That was pretty incredible.”

“Which part?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Uh, the part where Windy Byers, the suddenly absent city councilman, had two children out of wedlock and bought a house for his mistress,” I said. “I thought that was kind of obvious.”

Sweet Thang had this look on her face like the Clue Fairy had not yet visited her.

“I thought we didn’t put people’s personal lives in the paper,” she said.

“We do when they turn up missing under mysterious circumstances,” I assured her. “Heck, in this case, we’d do it even if ol’ Windy was still hanging around. I mean, he’s a public figure. Sure, we might look the other way if a councilman has a quiet little something on the side. But a councilman having two kids with his mistress and buying her a house? That’s not just adultery. That’s practically polygamy. And it certainly raises hard questions about how he’s affording it, which is something a voter has a right to know.”

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment, almost said something, then stopped herself. If she was an NFL lineman, I would have whistled her for a false start.

She paused for another tick, then asked, “So what do we do now?”

“Well, we have one source saying Windy and Akilah were knocking boots, but we need more,” I said. “Then we need a law enforcement source to link Windy and Akilah and tell us Rhonda Byers, the scorned woman, is the primary suspect in the investigation.”

“She is?”

“Sure she is. Think about it. Windy Byers was unfaithful to his wife, and not in a small way. Then his girlfriend’s house gets burned down and he goes missing. Who else but the wife did it? Let’s face it, Windy is probably somewhere off the Jersey shore right now with a weight tied to his leg, slowly sinking to twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Or at least he is if Rhonda has contracted out her work properly.”

“But how…” she began and paused. Still no visit from the Clue Fairy. “But how are the cops going to figure that out?”

“We’re going to tell them.”

“We are?”

I sighed. Didn’t the journalism schools teach anything these days?

“Of course we are. It’s one of the oldest tricks in our bag,” I explained, feeling a bit professorial myself for a moment. “We learn something that we strongly suspect is true, but we can’t prove it with enough certainty to put in the newspaper-not without major investigative resources and subpoena authority. We just don’t have those things. But the cops do. So we tip off the cops, they check it out, and when it comes back that we got it right, they leak us the story as a nice thank-you. We get to run it as a big exclusive. They solve the case. Everybody wins.”

“But how do we attribute it?”

“As ‘law enforcement sources said,’ of course.”

“But it wasn’t law enforcement sources. It was us.”

“Well, yes and no,” I said. “It was us that planted the idea, sure. But by the end, it becomes something the cops really do believe. So it’s quite accurate to say ‘law enforcement sources said.’ ”

“But isn’t that, I don’t know, like, influencing the news or something?” Sweet Thang asked. “Aren’t we making the news instead of just reporting it?”

“Well, technically?” I said, a bit stumped for how to rationalize it. “Technically, a little bit. It’s a gray area, but only slate gray, not charcoal. If our ultimate responsibility is to the public and its right to know important information, and this becomes a way to serve that right? To me it becomes something we’re obligated to do.”

Not that we brag about it, of course. Tipping off the cops is the sort of thing that could get a newspaper sued in half a heartbeat if, God forbid, we turned out to be wrong and the person in question really was innocent. A lawyer could argue the act of tipping shows malice, a key element in libel cases.

Still, this sort of interplay between the authorities and the newspapers happens all the time. Not long ago, one of our best reporters learned an ex-mayor had a warehouse full of smoking-gun documents. We knew we couldn’t get into the warehouse, but the feds could. So our reporter tipped off the feds. They raided the warehouse. We got the scoop the mayor was under investigation. The mayor ultimately went to jail. The feds looked like they were doing their jobs. We stayed well ahead of the competition on the story the whole way because, of course, the feds were feeding it to us. Again, everybody won.

Well, except the mayor.

* * *

We reached the outer limits of Baxter Terrace and I walked Sweet Thang over to Walter the BMW.

“So what’s next? Do we go down to police headquarters and file a report or something?”

“It takes a bit more finesse than that,” I said. “But don’t worry about that. I’ll handle it.”

“Oh,” she replied. “What do you want me to do?”

“Why don’t you go find Akilah’s older sister Tamikah,” I said, tearing off a piece of notepad paper and copying down the number Bertie had given me.

Sweet Thang looked uncertain.

“But what do I dooooo?” she whined.

“The same thing you did with Bertie Harris.”

“Play mah-jongg with her?”

I laughed because I thought she was kidding. But no, Sweet Thang wasn’t smiling. Silly intern. She had all the raw ability in the world but didn’t have the first idea what to do with it. She’d learn.

“No. Not mah-jongg. I meant earn her trust, like you did with Bertie,” I said. “Once she trusts you, let her tell you the story of what happened with her sister and Windy Byers. Hopefully she’ll confirm everything Bertie told us and add a few new bits of information. If we’re lucky, Tamikah is Akilah’s confidante and knows everything.”

“But what if she won’t talk to me?”

Sweet Thang pouted. I smiled and patted her on the shoulder.

“She will. People like talking to you,” I said. “Besides, if Rhonda Byers really is what I think she is, Akilah is in all kinds of trouble right now. And we’re working to get her out of that trouble. Tamikah will see that and she’ll want to help us lock up the woman who is trying to kill her sister.”

She reached out and grabbed my arm.

“I’m so glad we’re working together,” she said. “It’s, like, just amazing. You know so much. I’m learning so much more from you than I ever learned from any of my professors.”

“Well, it’s their job to teach you the rules,” I said. “You have to know what they are before you know which ones you can break.”

She nodded. I pointed down at the goose bumps that were forming on her thighs.

“C’mon, let’s get you and your bare legs out of this cold,” I said. “Call me later.”

“Okay. Bye. Thanks again for everything.”

I gave her a little wave-but not the little wave-and went to my car, pleased that I’d managed to have an interaction with Sweet Thang that didn’t feel sexually charged. Maybe I had just been misreading her intentions all along. Maybe she just flirted because it was how she related to men, and there was nothing behind it. All the incidental contact-the grabbing of the arm, the brushing of the hand-was just because she was a naturally touchy-feely person. She hugged me this morning. She hugged Bertie when we departed. She was just like that with everyone.

And sure, Tina thought Sweet Thang was trying to get me in bed. But just because Tina devoured men like they were Tic Tacs didn’t mean Sweet Thang did. She was a nice young woman who was pleased to have found a mentor, nothing more. I vowed to rinse my mind of the dirty thoughts I kept having about her and treat her with pure professionalism for the rest of our time together.

With that decided, I started driving back toward the office and thinking about the best way to approach the Newark police with my newfound knowledge. I put in a call to Rodney Pritchard, who answered on the fourth ring.

“Pritch, I need a favor,” I said.

“Don’t you always,” he replied.

“Yeah, but this time I might actually have something to offer in return. That fellow who caught the Byers case, you said his name was Raines?”

“Yeah?”

“I need a sit-down with him. The sooner the better.”

“I told you, man, he’s strictly by the book,” Pritch said. “He won’t talk to a reporter.”

“Even if that reporter has a vital piece of information on the disappearance of Councilman Byers?”

There was a brief moment of silence on the line.

“You’re not playing me, are you?” Pritch said.

“No, sir.”

“Because if you’re playing me and you really don’t have anything, I swear to God I’ll throw you in a cell overnight and tell all the fellas in the lockup we found a Klan hood in your car.”

“Pritch, trust me. Detective Raines is going to thank you for introducing me by the time this is over.”

“He better,” Pritch said. “Let me call you back.”

We hung up just as I pulled into the Eagle-Examiner parking garage. Once inside the building, I passed Szanto on his way to the three o’clock story meeting-which was basically like the eleven o’clock story meeting in its overall inefficiency, only by now the editors had eaten lunch. He flashed me a thumbs-up. Obviously, Sweet Thang’s Dad had gotten the message through to Brodie, who had eased off on Szanto.

“Grrjb,” he graveled.

Whatever that meant. I returned his thumbs-up and thought about stopping to inform him of the latest revelation about Windy Byers. But no. That would be a terrific blunder-blunderific, as it were. The last thing you want to do is give your editor a hot piece of information as he heads into a story meeting. Inevitably, he’ll share it with everyone at the meeting. And even though your story is only half-baked and not nearly ready to be put in the newspaper, every editor in the building will start running wild with it.

The next thing you know you’re being pestered by a page designer who wants help with a graphic, a Web-head who would like a voice-over for a podcast, and a copy jock who wants to sneak a peek at the top of your story so she can start working on a headline. And when you try to explain to them the story might not even be true, they look at you like, “But the managing editor told me about this. It must be true.”

So I kept walking. It’s one of the trump cards reporters always have: the editors only know what you choose to tell them.

* * *

My first thought upon walking into the newsroom was to find Tommy Hernandez so I could share the latest. Whereas you need to be careful with what you tell editors, it generally behooves you to speak freely with fellow reporters. They may have already learned something that can help your story. Or they might be able to take what you’ve learned and get it confirmed or denied with independent sources, which can be invaluable.

Alas, Tommy wasn’t around. So I settled in at my desk and did a quick property records check to see who owned Akilah’s house. Sure enough, it wasn’t Akilah. Fairmount Avenue Partners LLC-no doubt a thinly veiled front for Windy Byers, who lived on Fairmount Avenue-had purchased the house from Rio Financial LLC for $360,000.

I searched Rio Financial LLC in our business entity database and it led to a name I didn’t recognize with a P.O. box in Roseland, which was on the leafy side of the county. It sounded like the typical Newark developer-suburban guys dipping into the city to try to make a quick buck.

Then I searched Fairmount Avenue Partners LLC and, sure enough, the registered agent was one Wendell A. Byers Jr. of Fairmount Avenue in Newark. I could now write with impunity that Windy Byers bought his girlfriend a house.

Satisfied, I leaned back for a moment and then, driven by some impulse I could neither name nor explain, found my fingers back on the keyboard, surfing my way toward Sweet Thang’s Twitter page.

The first item was posted at 9:41 A.M., right around the time she and I broke from breakfast. It read: “Update 4 my girlz: CR is still supertasty. I could eat him with a fork. I want to get on him and grind him through the floorboards. LOL!”

It’s amazing what you could accomplish in 140 characters or less. In this case, Sweet Thang had suddenly made my throat feel dry. So much for me having misread her. There was now no doubt: a nuclear-hot twenty-two-year-old wanted to sleep with me.

That was good news, right? What guy wouldn’t welcome that news?

A guy who knew he was past the age to be banging interns, that’s who.

But then I thought: her dad is loaded. And she’s gorgeous. So why not just dive in? There have to be worse fates in life than shacking up with a beautiful woman from a rich family, right?

And then I thought: since when do you care about money? Only jackasses-and future divorcees-marry for money or looks. And besides, she’s way too young and immature. She doesn’t know what she wants. It will end badly.

But then I thought: Did you look at her in that dress today?

And then I thought: but by the time she’s ready to have kids, I’ll be one of those dads hanging around the playground who is so old no one is sure whether he’s a dad, a granddad, or just some pervy guy who likes little boys.

I was somewhere in the midst of countering that argument when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tina Thompson coming toward me.

I furiously began trying to get Twitter off my screen, clicking on that little X in the upper right-hand corner. Why did I feel so guilty, anyway? I hadn’t done anything, had I? I had nothing to hide, right? More pressingly, why was this damn computer taking so long to get the page off my screen? She was getting closer. I clicked the X again. Nothing. I clicked on my e-mail so there would be something different on the screen. Still there. Click. Nothing. The computer was completely frozen. Click. Click-click.

Finally, just as she was sidling up to my desk, I did the next best thing and hit the power button on the front of the monitor. Mercifully, the screen went dark.

“Hey there, handsome,” she said, seeming not to notice my computer issues. “How come you look flushed?”

“I was running stairs,” I said. “Got to keep the blood moving, you know. Deep vein thrombosis can be a killer.”

She looked at me and cocked her head

“I thought that only happened to old ladies on airplanes,” she said.

“Well, you can never be too cautious,” I said, then went full tilt for the topic change. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the three o’clock meeting right now?”

“Oh, I blew it off,” she said. “I’ve got too much to do with this whole Wendell Byers thing to sit around listening to people make decisions that are just going to change by the time we actually have to put the paper out.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “What are we going with right now?”

“Well, we’ve got the blood in the foyer and the stuff from the press conference. That and a bunch of react quotes should be enough to carry the paper for tomorrow. Unless you have something new?”

I weighed whether to share what I had learned. I had confided in Tina in the past with this sort of thing and could trust her to keep quiet. She wasn’t my editor, after all.

But she was still an editor. So I decided to zip it.

“Nah, not really,” I said.

She looked at me and arched an eyebrow.

“You’re lying.”

“Dammit. How do you do that?”

“If I told you, it would ruin the fun,” she said. “Anyhow, you gonna tell me what it is or not?”

“I’ll pass for now,” I said. “It’s just a theory at this point, anyway.”

“Is the theory that Wendell Byers is being moved out of the way so someone else can run for Central Ward council?” she asked.

“No. Why, whose theory is that?”

“Tommy said that’s the buzz going around the streets. He’s out chasing it down right now, seeing if it goes anywhere.”

That explained why he wasn’t in the office.

“You put any stock in that?” I asked.

“It makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard,” she said. “You know they play politics rough in Newark.”

“Yeah, but generally they don’t kill you. They just smear your reputation with anonymous flyers about how you’re really a gay, white, Jewish Republican.”

“Well, it seemed worthwhile for Tommy to look into,” she said. “By the way, don’t think I’ve forgotten about dinner tonight.”

“Never. I’m still picking you up at eight?”

“I changed my mind. You’re not picking me up. I want us to be in separate cars so if you totally blow it, I’ll be able to make a big scene and walk out on you.”

“Oh. Good to know.”

“You’re meeting me here at eight-thirty,” she said, handing me a sticky with the name and address of a restaurant in Hoboken. I knew the place. It was on the Hudson River with commanding views of the Manhattan skyline. The prices on the wine list looked more like airline fares.

“Dress nicely,” she added.

“How nicely?”

“Wear a jacket or they won’t let you in. Wear a tie or I won’t talk to you. Wear a suit and I just might jump you in the coat closet.”

“Got it,” I said.

“And don’t be late.”

“Don’t be late,” I repeated.

“I mean it. If you’re late, I’m going to drag one of the waiters into a supply closet and take out my sexual frustrations on him and you’ll miss out.”

“Got it,” I said again. And she departed.

Just then, cranky old Buster Hays, who sat a few desks away, wheeled his chair around and looked at me scornfully.

“Hey, Ivy,” he said. Buster called me Ivy because he apparently thought Amherst was an Ivy League school. My efforts to educate him that it was a proud member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference had, so far, failed.

“You really going to let a woman boss you around like that?” he asked. “You’re totally whipped.”

Normally I tried to come up with some kind of retort for Buster’s mindless zingers. But I couldn’t this time.

Not when he was right.

* * *

I was about to head back to Twitter-to see what else Sweet Thang had written about that delicious fellow, CR-when my phone rang.

“Carter Ross,” I said.

“Hey, it’s Pritch,” he whispered. “My guy says he’ll meet with you on the condition that you consider yourself a confidential informant, not a reporter.”

“Hey, whatever works for him. When?”

“How soon can you make it down here?”

“How does ‘now’ sound?”

“Sounds good. I’ll meet you in the lobby at Green Street. Try not to look like a reporter. I’ll be the guy who ignores you. But just follow my lead.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, making toward the elevator.

Newark Police Headquarters, located on Green Street in the heart of downtown Newark, was another one of those municipal buildings that had probably been magnificent at some point in time, back when Newark was a manufacturing powerhouse and the home to captains of industry. Now you had to look hard-and charitably-to see the majesty. But it was still there.

I walked into the building and up to the lobby on the third floor. Rodney Pritchard was waiting there. He saw me, made the briefest eye contact, and started back down the stairs. I followed. But not too close.

He went out the door, took a left, then another left on Broad Street, past City Hall. What were we? Russian spies from Montclair? I walked a little faster so he was within earshot.

“The password is ‘Lesbian weasel,’ ” I said. “But I’ll warn you: everything I know you can probably find on Google.”

“Stop playing,” he said, without turning around. “I’m just doing this the way my man Raines said. He doesn’t want to risk being seen with you in the office. I told you, he’s by the book.”

“He also must be getting pretty desperate if he’s meeting with me this quickly,” I said. “He doesn’t have squat, does he?”

“He didn’t tell me either way. But you’re probably right.”

Pritch crossed the street, walked past a sandwich shop, then took a left turn into a pizzeria, where someone’s Italian mama was behind a counter, yelling at the late-lunch stragglers to place their orders. Pritch kept walking into a back room, which at this hour-it was now after three-was empty, except for one man sitting in a corner booth.

“Carter Ross, meet Sergeant Kevin Raines,” Pritch said.

Raines was a short, round black man who stored his extra weight in his ass. He was probably in the neighborhood of fifty and dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. That made him unlike most Newark detectives I met-guys who knew they were going to work long hours and therefore swapped formality for comfort in their clothing choices.

“Nice to meet you,” Raines said crisply, in a way that made it clear he didn’t believe it.

He had a bland, slightly nasal voice and I was willing to bet most people who talked to him over the phone didn’t know he was black. He may have preferred it that way.

I immediately had him pegged. He was the guy who didn’t want to do favors for people and didn’t like to have them done for him. He was a sergeant because he scored higher on the exam than anyone else, not because he politicked better. He didn’t go to the bar after his shift with the fellas. He didn’t backslap. He didn’t bend rules. He was already at the edge of his comfort zone just by meeting with me.

None of which made him a bad person. I was just going to have to work on expanding that comfort zone and making him a little more pliant if he was going to be of any use.

“All right,” Pritch said. “Have a nice time. I got things to do.”

Pritch walked out, leaving Raines and me to stare at each other uncomfortably.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said.

“Detective Pritchard said you had information to offer the Newark Police Department,” Raines said officiously.

Yeah, and if he thought I was just going to dump it on the table and leave, he had another think coming. Whether he wanted to think of me as a reporter or not, I was one. And whether he wanted to think of himself as a source or not, I was going to treat him like one.

“Well, let’s just slow down for a second,” I said. “First of all, I haven’t had lunch yet. I’m going to grab something from up front. You want anything?”

I could have held off. But I needed to start loosening things up a bit. I needed to establish we weren’t a cop and a reporter. We were just two guys. And some guys require diet soda and pizza to get them through the afternoon. Hell, I might even spill the soda, because that’s what guys do.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Some water? Anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.”

I went back into the main room and ordered my slice, which came quickly. Then I went to the refrigerator and selected a Coke Zero for myself and a bottle of water for him. Another important thing to establish: he wasn’t making all the decisions here.

I paid and returned to our table.

“I just felt it would be rude to eat this in front of you and not get you anything,” I said, sliding the water in front of him.

He didn’t touch it. He barely looked at it.

“We are clear that I am not meeting with you because you’re a reporter,” he said. “Officer Pritchard tells me you have information that may be vital to my case and vouches that your information is probably good. That’s all that matters.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So I take it you’ve never dealt with a reporter before?”

“It’s against department policy to comment to the media without approval,” he said.

“Okay, no big deal,” I said as I opened my Coke Zero and took a long pull, making a big show out of savoring its artificially sweetened goodness. Then I picked up my slice and bit off a big hunk, chewing loudly.

Raines looked at the bottle in front of him. It was ice-cold and just starting to get a thin haze of perspiration on it. And to a cop who had probably been going for the last twenty-four hours on excitement and adrenaline-but not much hydration-I bet it was looking pretty good.

He cracked it open and took a sip. I was already starting to wear him down.

* * *

I put my pizza back down on the table.

“Okay. Well, just a quick user’s guide to dealing with reporters, or at least this reporter,” I said, wiping pizza sauce from my chin with a napkin. “First key phrase is, ‘off the record.’ That means you can tell me anything you want, but I won’t put it in the newspaper-unless I get it from somewhere else, of course. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation and every other one we have is off the record unless we explicitly agree otherwise. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Second key phrase is ‘not for attribution.’ That means I can use the information you give me in the newspaper, but I can’t attach it to your name as a source. And when I say you’re an unnamed source, I mean that in the most sincere way possible. Reporters have gone to jail to protect the identity of their sources and I would do the same.”

I had never been tested on that front. And I hoped I never would be. But I also hoped, if some judge ordered me to reveal my source, I’d have the stones to tell him to shove it, then take the contempt-of-court charge and spend some time as a ward of the state. Short of dying for a story-which I certainly didn’t plan to do-going to prison to protect a source was as balls-out a thing as a reporter could do. And I fancied myself the kind of guy who would do it.

“Finally, I want to make it clear that I’ll tell you everything I can to help your case,” I said. “But information is a two-way street in my town. And so is trust. You have to trust me that I’m not going to put anything in the paper that will get you in trouble with your bosses. And I have to trust you that I’m not going to get blindsided by some press release announcing an arrest-or, worse, by a story in one of the New York papers that we didn’t have first.”

His back straightened a little.

“I’m not here to make deals,” he said.

“Well, in that case I guess I’m wasting my time,” I said, rising from the booth and grabbing my lunch.

I turned to leave like I was going to storm out-though, as storms go, mine was hardly a raging nor’easter. It was more like light, spitting rain on a balmy June day when the sun is still shining and there’s only one stray cloud in the sky. I practically had my hand cupped to my ear so I wouldn’t miss the sound of him asking me to stay. It was, all in all, a pretty horrible bluff.

Thankfully, he didn’t call me on it.

“Hang on,” he said. “Just hang on. All I’m saying is, I don’t have the authority to make any deals on behalf of the department.”

I stopped but remained standing.

“Sergeant Raines,” I said. “I can tell you’re a man of honor and I’m telling you I’m one, too. I don’t need a deal with your department. I just need your word that if I help you now, you’ll remember me down the road. Is that fair?”

He held out his hand. I shook it, then sat back down.

“Damn,” he said, cracking a half-smile for the first time. “You’re tough.”

“Eh, once you get to know me, I’m easy like Sunday morning,” I said, smiling back.

“Oh, now you’re talking Lionel Richie,” he said, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. “Now you’re talking my kind of music.”

Ah, the magic of Lionel: Raines had gone from stony to practically glowing with the mere mention of the former Commodores’ front man. I had finally penetrated the outer defenses of Sergeant Raines. It was just me and ol’ Kev now, gabbing away. Even his voice had changed-you could actually tell you were talking to a black man.

“Well, hello, it’s me you’re looking for,” I said.

He laughed out loud.

“All right, all right,” he said, still chuckling. “You’re pretty good. You’re pretty good.”

We guffawed a little bit more, but I didn’t want to push it too far with my newfound buddy. And before he had us booking tickets to see Lionel’s next tour, I got back to business.

“So, you got yourself a hell of a case with Windy Byers,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head.

“You’ve heard about his girlfriend by now, yes?” I asked.

“I heard some rumors, but nothing I really put stock in. He must have kept it pretty quiet.”

“Well, she’s not a rumor. Her name is Akilah Harris,” I said as he pulled out one of those small cop notepads and wrote down the name. “And she’s not just a girlfriend. She’s practically his second wife. She’s had two kids by him.”

“Whoah!” Raines said.

“That’s not even the best part. Windy bought her a house.”

“A what?”

“A house,” I said. “It was a little more than two years ago.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“But there’s more,” I said. “The house he bought her was the one on Littleton Avenue, the one that burned down with two kids inside.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said.

He nodded and asked, “When did it happen?”

“Sunday night, around nine P.M.”

“Which is also around the last time anyone saw Windy Byers alive,” Raines said, shaking his head. “I’ll be damned.”

“So what do you think,” I said. “Sound like jealous wife gone nuts to you?”

He leaned back and took a swig of his water.

“I certainly haven’t heard a better theory,” he said.

“Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and write that Rhonda Byers is the Newark Police Department’s chief suspect in Windy’s disappearance,” I said, winking.

“Oh, hell no,” he said. “But, strictly, strictly off the record, I like her for this. I really like her. I’ve been going all through Windy Byers’s council career and there’s not a single red flag. And nothing else has jumped out at me. Now maybe there’s a big political conspiracy out there, but I don’t see it.”

“Me, neither,” I said. “What do you make of the blood in his house?”

He flashed a look that was somewhere between chagrined and, well, just a grin.

“You heard about that, huh?”

“I got my sources,” I said, smiling back. “Is the blood his?”

“Don’t know yet. This isn’t CSI. Our lab doesn’t turn stuff around during commercial breaks.”

“Fair enough. So where do we go from here?”

“Let me think about it for a second,” he said.

He leaned back in the booth and finished the rest of his water in one long swallow while I chewed my pizza. He crushed the bottle between his hands, screwed and unscrewed the cap once or twice, keeping his attention focused downward. Then he looked up.

“I think I got something you can do for me,” he said, then added, “if you’re up for it.”

“Shoot,” I said.

And that’s how I found myself heading back to Fairmount Avenue to interview Rhonda Byers.

* * *

My deal with Raines was that I would approach Rhonda Byers with questions about the last few days, so I could assemble a timeline of the hours leading up to her husband’s disappearance. I’d take careful notes, of course-that’s sort of what I do-and then I’d call Raines and we’d compare the story she gave me to the one she had already given Raines, searching for the kind of inconsistencies you usually find when someone is pulling a story off the fiction shelves of their brain.

For Raines, it was a way to grill a suspect without her realizing she was being grilled-or that she was a suspect. It also allowed him to sidestep or at least delay the rather prickly task of accusing a councilman’s wife of a felony.

For me? It was a good way to make sure the lead investigator on the biggest crime of the year kept taking my phone calls. And it might even give me something useful for the paper.

I was glad I didn’t have Sweet Thang in tow, because I didn’t feel like explaining that, once again, I was walking a very fine ethical line. Should I be doing a cop’s work for him? Of course not. But it’s not like he asked me to slap cuffs on Rhonda Byers. He just wanted me to talk to her, which is what I do for a living anyway. So what’s the harm in sharing a little information with my newfound source when it might lead to greater understanding of a story?

Besides, Sweet Thang was a bad fit for this particular task in at least one other way. For as good as she was at getting people to talk, I don’t think Rhonda Byers was going to be in the mood to spill her heart to an attractive younger woman, i.e., the kind of woman who stole her husband. There had been enough bodies dropped in Newark already.

As I drove back toward Fairmount Avenue, I called Tommy. It was mostly a courtesy. This was his beat, after all, and he deserved to know what was happening.

“Hey, what’s up,” he said, without the usual Tommy zip in his tone.

“That’s all you got? ‘What’s up?’ ” I asked. “No snappy rejoinders about how my clothes make you think of Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties? No catty comments about how my family ought to organize a hairstyle intervention?”

“No. I just don’t have the energy to point out the obvious right now,” he said, heaving a melodramatic sigh.

“Oh, come on, what’s wrong? Boy troubles?”

“I wish. I’m going over ELEC documents.”

ELEC was the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Center. Every candidate and political group in the state has to file reports stating where they get their money and what they do with it. Most politicians give the bare minimum of information-you’ll see line items like “$28,350 … Miscellaneous expenses”-while staying (pretty much) within the law. Usually, the only worthwhile thing we get from ELEC reports are donor lists filled with names of individuals and businesses that are getting rich off government contracts. And, this being New Jersey, bribery of this sort is not only prevalent but legal.

Still, wading through the reports takes time, concentration, and the ability to resist butting your head into your computer while you wait for another PDF document to load.

“ELEC reports,” I said. “What’s the matter, you having trouble sleeping?”

“No, I’ve just been looking into everything about big, fat old Windy I could find and I wanted to make sure I was thorough.”

“Tina said you were on the streets, running down some rumor?”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her,” he said. “I just knew if she saw me in the office she’d keep bothering me. So I’m sitting in a coffee shop, doing it on my laptop. Don’t tell her.”

I felt a surge of paternal pride: my little intern Tommy had already learned the virtue of lying to his editor. Sniff. They grow up so fast.

“Oh, your secret is safe,” I assured him. “I was just calling to give you a heads-up. I’m going over to Rhonda Byers’s place.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “What’s happening there?”

I told him what I had learned about Windy’s extracurricular activities and their unintended consequences.

“And you think Rhonda Byers did all that?” Tommy asked when I was all done.

“Yep,” I said.

“Really? Rhonda Byers?”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure you’re right. It’s just … I just-”

“Spit it out!”

“She seems so nice.”

I laughed at him. Apparently, grasshopper still had much to learn.

“No, I’m serious!” he protested. “I met her a bunch of times at council meetings. I think she’s the only one besides me who goes to all of them. She’s not over-the-top friendly or anything, but she’s always very kind to me. She explains things to me all the time when I don’t get them. She probably has a better idea than her husband what’s actually going on in this city.”

“Yeah, I already figured she was hogging most of the IQ allotted to the Byers household,” I said. “But to me that makes it fit even better. A smart, with-it woman like her learns that her idiot husband is two-timing her in the biggest way possible. Can’t you just see her losing it?”

The line was quiet for a moment as Tommy considered it.

“No,” he said at last. “Not really.”

“Well, you got a better idea for what happened?”

Another pause.

“No. Not really.”

“Well, there you go,” I said as I pulled up in front of the Byers residence. “I’m off to the black widow’s web. Wish me luck.”

* * *

The TV trucks had all departed the Byers’s neighborhood-off to find Shocking Things You Might Not Know About Your Deodorant, no doubt-and the crime scene tape that had been stretched across their front gate was now flapping in the late afternoon breeze. It was only four o’clock, but the sun was already getting low. The wind rustled some dead leaves as I opened the gate, which creaked as I swung it shut behind me. I was starting to feel like a character in a slasher flick-and not the wily brunette who survives to the end. I was the bubble-boobed blonde who somehow ended up getting killed in her underwear.

And why shouldn’t I be a bit queasy? If I was right, Rhonda Byers had killed three people. And even though one of them had it coming, two of them were innocent children. I didn’t want to talk to a person like that. I didn’t even want to be breathing the same air.

Still, there was a story to be written. So I rang the doorbell. I heard footsteps, then a woman who was probably Rhonda Byers’s sister-same height, same build, same bearing-answered the door.

“May I help you,” she said without emotion.

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner and-”

“She’s not here,” the woman said immediately, and started closing the door with all due haste.

Under normal circumstances, I’m all for getting a door slammed in my face. It’s the sort of thing that lets a reporter know he’s still alive. But I couldn’t let it happen this time. So I stuck my foot across the threshold before the door could shut.

“I know this is a difficult time for the family,” I said, as the door bounced off my shoe. “But we’re just trying to make our coverage as complete as possible and I was hoping for her help.”

The woman was about to find a new way to tell me to get lost. But then, from an inside room, I heard that authoritarian voice.

“Let him in,” Mrs. Byers said.

I was escorted into a dim living room, where Rhonda Byers was sitting on a Queen Anne-style couch with the shades drawn. Her bare feet were propped on a nearby coffee table. She was no longer dressed in the gray suit and uncomfortable shoes. It was now a sweatshirt and jeans. I surmised a girdle had been removed as well.

The room did not have a television, just a lot of shelves packed with books, all of them spine out. She was a reader, obviously. There were knickknacks, but the room didn’t feel especially cluttered. I sometimes get my decorating styles a little mixed up, but I was fairly certain the room would qualify as Victorian. Except it wasn’t your charming Aunt Beverly’s Victorian, where all the little baubles have stories behind them. It was your stern Aunt Helga’s, where everything had a brittle feeling, like you couldn’t move anything-not even the air-or something would break.

“Mrs. Byers, Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner,” I said.

She offered no greeting, smile, or handshake, which was fine by me. I didn’t particularly feel like returning any of them.

“We’re writing a story about the hours leading up to the councilman’s disappearance,” I continued. “I was hoping you could fill in some blanks for me.”

She looked at me with the same expressionless face her sister wore.

“Mr. Ross, I’ll be honest, I don’t want to talk with you, just like I didn’t want to go on television today,” she said, without much enthusiasm. “But the police tell me that media attention is good, because it will help them find Wendell. So I’ll do what I can.”

Okay, so that’s how she was going to play it: the dutiful wife sacrificing herself to bring her poor husband back home. I could roll with that.

“I’d like to go through the final forty-eight hours before he disappeared,” I said. “It would start Friday evening. What were you and Mr. Byers doing that night?”

During the next hour or so, she went over everything, and I drilled her on every inane detail. It was a long succession of political fund-raisers, pancake breakfasts, civic association meetings, high school basketball games, and so on. It was the sort of thing you expected from a local politician-the hobnobbing with the moneyed set, the glad-handing with the constituents, the seeing and being seen. Windy was a man on the go.

But, strikingly, he wasn’t on the go with Mrs. Byers. At every stop on Windy’s itinerary, I kept asking where she was. And she always seemed to be somewhere else-reading at home, or at a church function, or at her sister’s house. She admitted she had no idea where Windy was at certain times, or that she had only learned where he had been after the fact. She often was uncertain about when events began or ended. She never seemed to be able to offer an exact time when her husband arrived back home.

It gave me the window I felt I needed to see if I could bait her a little.

“You and your husband didn’t seem to spend much time together,” I offered.

“We were both very busy,” she said, trying to dismiss it easily.

I didn’t let her.

“I know this is difficult to talk about,” I pressed. “But I have to ask: Were there problems between you and Mr. Byers?”

Rhonda glanced nervously at her sister, who had been sitting in the room quietly listening.

“I … I wouldn’t say problems…”

She was faltering, if only slightly. This was my chance to see if I could start playing with the dials on her thermostat and add a few degrees to that icy blood of hers.

“Well, what would you say then?”

“Is it … is it really necessary to bring my … my marriage into this? Into your article?”

“At this point, everything is relevant,” I insisted. “I don’t mean to be rude”-actually, I did-“but I have to ask the question: Is it possible your husband was having an affair?”

Finally, the sister exploded.

“How does that matter?” she demanded. “The man’s been kidnapped!”

“It’s-” I began but was drowned out.

“You have a lot of nerve-”

“Jeannette, I’ll handle this,” Rhonda insisted.

Jeannette leaned forward as if she was going to object some more, but Rhonda held up a hand, “I’ll handle this.”

“Young man,” she said, turning toward me, having already cooled herself back down. “Can we talk off the record?”

“Sure,” I said, and put down my pen, which up to this point had been waving furiously.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, Wendell and I have been married for twenty-eight years,” she said. “After a while it gets … well, it’s not like I thought it would be.”

“How so?” I asked, and resisted adding, you mean on your wedding day you never envisioned murdering him in cold blood and making it look like he disappeared?

“I don’t know how it happened, but we drifted apart,” she said. “We were in love when we were younger. I really believe that. But it was always hectic, with me chasing after the children and him in politics. After the kids were out of the house, I thought it would get better because we’d have more time to spend together. But it got worse. He did his thing. I did mine. Separate worlds.”

“So why not divorce him?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sighing and looking away. “I think you have to be angry with someone to go through all the trouble of getting a divorce. And I couldn’t summon enough feeling for him to hate him that much. But to say we had a marriage anymore?”

She shook her head.

“Yet I’m told you always went to the council meetings,” I said. “Why?”

She stopped and thought for a moment.

“I guess I found it interesting,” she said. “That was maybe the one area where we still shared a common interest. We could talk about that. I’d like to think he … I guess I think he valued my opinion on those matters.”

Uh-huh. Probably Windy was like Tommy. He needed Rhonda to explain stuff to him.

“But other than that, you barely saw each other?” I asked.

“That’s true,” she said, shaking her head again. “I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it’s true.”

“So, and again I hate to be rude”-no, really, I didn’t-“but is it possible your husband has met someone else and is off with her somewhere right now? It happens, you know.”

Yes, Mrs. Byers, your husband just ran off. No, Mrs. Byers, I’m sure you didn’t do anything untoward. Wasn’t that the illusion she wanted the world to believe? Isn’t that the story she hoped I would buy? The offer was on the table. All she had to do was take it.

But she didn’t. Maybe she was too smart to be that obvious.

“I … I don’t know,” she said. “I’m so … More than anything, I’m sad for him. I worry he’s gotten himself in trouble. I just hope he’s all right.”

She looked at me and blinked, like she was trying to keep tears from tumbling out her eyeballs. Maybe she was. She was so convincing, I actually believed her for a moment.

God, I felt like a cub reporter. Where was my cynicism? My natural suspicion? That little voice in my head that told me to distrust everything I heard? What was I, going soft?

“Do you think you have enough for your story?” the sister asked, finally taking control of the situation.

“Enough for now,” I said, because we had been at it for an hour and I wanted to leave while I still had my disbelief.

“Then I think it’s time you go,” she said. “My sister has been through too much already.”

And this time Rhonda didn’t object.

Neither did I. Short of a tearful confession-which Rhonda Byers was far too cagey to give me-I had gotten what I came for. Raines and I could go over everything now. It was time to leave.

I bid the Byers sisters farewell and led myself to the door, with Jeanette close on my tail. As I walked through the foyer, I lingered slightly, pretending to fumble with my jacket until I saw what I was looking for: a big, smudgy streak of blood, about two feet long and as obvious as a snake on a sidewalk, on the molding near the floor.

It seemed odd Rhonda Byers hadn’t cleaned it up yet. Perhaps the police had instructed her to leave it undisturbed, in case they needed to do more testing. I was glad they did because it gave me the chance to study it.

I’m no forensics expert, but it looked like the kind of smear you’d get if you were dragging a bloodied body out the door.

Primo cultivated his relationship with Councilman Wendell A. Byers slowly, having learned from other failures not to push too far too fast.

The important thing was to keep the initial favors small: a phone call to the city engineering department to prod them for an approval; or a letter to the water authority to speed up a permit for a sewer hookup; or an introduction to a fellow council member, with a few kind words about Primo as a developer.

All the while, Primo kept the contributions coming. A Newark council campaign was a surprisingly expensive endeavor. Sending out mailings, making local media buys, maintaining campaign offices and staff, printing posters and lawn signs-it all added up. Even a longtime incumbent like Byers had to shell out $250,000 or more to hold his seat. What’s more, keeping a healthy campaign fund in between elections helped fend off the wolves. Would-be candidates weren’t keen to challenge a well-financed opponent.

So the need for cash was constant. And Byers was no different from most politicians in that he hated fund-raising-the glad-handing, the overpromising, the grubbing for money from friends. That’s where Primo came in. The more money Primo gave, the less Byers had to raise himself. It was easy and, above all, it was addictive. Any candidate would enjoy having to spend less time with his hand out.

Once Byers was hooked on the money, the size of the favors steadily grew. And it became more quid pro quo. Do this, I’ll give you that. Influence for sale. And beyond the help in navigating the city bureaucracy-which saved numerous headaches-was the real golden goose. Land.

In a place like Newark, city-owned land was abundant. For many decades, owners who fled to the suburbs-or absentee landlords who decided to cut their losses-simply abandoned their properties rather than continue to pay the taxes on them. After a few years of nonpayment, the city would seize the property. After a few more years, when whatever structure left on the property had been vandalized beyond the point of repair, the city knocked it down.

It all had the effect of making the city of Newark far and away the largest owner of empty, developable land within its own boundaries. For a long time, the land was essentially worthless. But then, as Newark’s building boom began in the late nineties and then picked up momentum after the turn of the millennium, it rapidly began increasing in value. And, under statute, the sale of this land was the purview of the city council, which had to approve all deals.

For Primo, this was the real benefit of having a councilman in his pocket. Generally speaking, if one councilman wanted a land sale approved, his colleagues would stay out of the way and allow it to happen. Professional courtesy ruled.

Again, Primo started small, with a parcel here or there, then built up to larger chunks of contiguous land. With the way Primo had his business set up-in an endless chain of seemingly unconnected LLCs-no one even realized Councilman Byers was always recommending sweetheart land sales to the same person.

It allowed Primo an abundant supply of nearly free land on which to build houses. And in the most densely populated state in America, where land was always at a premium, it gave Primo an enormous edge on the other developers. It was basic economics. Getting one of your chief raw materials for virtually nothing did wonderful things for the bottom line.

Primo paid for the privilege, yes. But the cost was nothing compared to the benefit.