The First Victim

CHAPTER 11

By midnight that Tuesday night Stevie McNeal began to worry. A late-night person, she often didn’t go to bed until after the start of the new day, giving up the reruns and reading herself to sleep. Melissa, by contrast, was a morning person and, as such, went to bed early on all but the rarest occasions. Melissa had not called the night before as promised. She wasn’t answering at the apartment, nor on her cellphone, which led Stevie to believe she was out conducting the surveillance, just the idea of which made Stevie anxious and worried.

She blamed the woman’s silence on her own bossy attitude during the meeting with the state auditor, and the fact that with the two women knowing each other as well as they did, Melissa could easily have interpreted Stevie’s attitude as a signal for her to deliver. For the past three years she had pushed her ‘‘little sister’’ to take the job offer she had arranged with the station, to take a regular paycheck rather than wallowing in misplaced pride and the unpaid bills of a freelancer. But Melissa declined the offered hand, in part because it came from Stevie and in part because of a refusal to compromise her work with a lot of worthless puff pieces ordered by an editor desperate to fill the time between ads. Stevie secretly admired the woman’s nobility-in retrospect she had compromised her own career far too quickly by always taking the first job offered-but it did little to appease her present anxieties.

At one in the morning she called both numbers again, now taking to pacing while she thought this all out. Another aspect of Melissa’s native pride was her professional secrecy; she had once worked on an independent environmental piece for three weeks before finally letting Stevie in on its subject matter-salmon poaching by Native Americans-as if by being let in on it Stevie would have sent a camera crew out on the story. In the week since the auditor had leaked the LSO information, Stevie’s only real knowledge of what Melissa was up to involved the surveillance of Gwen Klein. Beyond that and the financial information they had collected on the couple, she had few other leads to follow if needed.

Stevie finally fell asleep out of the exhaustion of being consumed in worry. When she awakened, she immediately called Melissa’s numbers from bed, but only to hear that awful sound of endless ringing. She skipped the Nordic Trak, skipped the lazy morning routine of four newspaper subscriptions and the audio wallpaper of continuous CNN that typically occupied the first few hours of any day, and headed directly to Melissa’s apartment in Pioneer Square, an apartment for which she had co-signed the lease, an apartment for which she held a spare set of keys warm in her hand.

The apartment offered nothing. She rang the buzzer on the ground floor, then let herself into the building, then knocked on the door to 5B and opened it when Melissa failed to answer. A modest one bedroom with a small living/dining area, it offered a poor view of a side alley and no cross-ventilation had the windows been open, which they weren’t. It was, in fact, the slightly stale scent of the place that told Stevie Melissa hadn’t been there recently. Melissa lived for fresh air; this contradiction spoke volumes. She found fresh food in the refrigerator and a garbage can filled to overflowing.

It felt dangerous all of a sudden, like realizing the noise downstairs is not the dog at all because the dog is lying by the bed. This was not merely an empty apartment, it was an apartment that had not been visited in recent hours. The bed was unmade-Melissa in her usual hurry. A toothbrush stood in the drinking glass on the sink and alarmed Stevie almost more than anything else about the empty apartment. Melissa was obsessed with clean teeth. The discovery of the toothbrush meant she had not taken a planned trip.

Her stomach clenched painfully in a combination of remorse and guilt, she left the apartment in something of a daze, her imagination running wild with possibility. At what point did she react publicly to the woman’s silence? At what point did she go to the police or Brian Coughlie at the INS and seek help? At what point did she simply relax and take a deep breath, trusting that Melissa was on to a hot story and didn’t have the opportunity to call? She left with that sickening feeling still plaguing her.

Stevie climbed back into the saddle, the anchor desk chair bouncing slightly as she sat. She scanned the pink pages of script for the N4@5 news hour, but somehow she couldn’t focus and she kept losing her place.

‘‘Thirty seconds!’’ the floor director called out.

The daily ritual had grown so familiar to her as to be second nature, but on that day it felt entirely unnatural, all because of Melissa’s ensuing silence. She felt simultaneously angry and worried. That call had never come. As independently as they both lived their lives, neither ever broke the promise of such a call. Not ever. Either Melissa was making a statement about her chosen lifestyle-or she was in trouble.

Of immediate concern to Stevie was Melissa’s occasionally impatient ambition. She was competitive with Stevie’s success, always hoping to ignite the spark that would accelerate her own career from occasionally employed to in demand. Stevie blamed herself for both encouraging Melissa to dig for the story, and for handing her that digital camera without a better understanding of what kind of undercover work she had planned. If Melissa was in fact on to the illegals story, Stevie didn’t necessarily want to raise a red flag with authorities after just one undelivered phone call. She attempted to practice her own advice to exercise patience, but it didn’t come naturally to her. She wanted control, and Melissa had taken that away from her.

‘‘Fifteen seconds everyone! Ms. McNeal, you with us?’’

Stevie twisted a professional smile across her face and once again studied the script.

‘‘Ten.. nine.. ’’

Stevie would give Melissa one more night. After that, story or no story, the police had to be told.

‘‘Four.. three..two. .’’

A red light illuminated on top of the camera directly in front of her. Stevie heard herself speak as she read the lines, but she had no idea what she said.