Chapter 7
H ow did you…” Then her eyes turned glaring. “You checked me out, didn’t you?” His shrug of admission ignited her further. “You talked to Max? About me?”
He raised his eyebrows. “It’s not Mr. Longren? It’s Max ?”
Emphasizing each word, she said, “Did you talk to him?”
He’d expected a reaction from her, but not one this extreme. “No, I didn’t. All right? Can we move on?”
“No, no,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “I want to know why you went behind my back to—”
“I didn’t go behind—”
“You absolutely did. You didn’t trust me, so you had me validated.”
“Okay, I did.”
“ Why did you?”
Now, angry in his own right, he shot to his feet. “Self-preservation.”
He rounded the end of the sofa and braced his hands on the back of it. “Yes, I checked you out, because you met me yesterday looking like a coed that I’d have liked to get on when I was in college. Then I learn that you are someone who can fuck up my life more than it already is.
“And since your appearance on the scene, life has already turned rocky. Even if it wasn’t your intention, your repeat calls to the police station sent up Tom Barker’s antennas. When he discovers—and he will—who you represent, he’ll implode.
“This morning when he warned me off giving interviews regarding the Mellin case, I confronted him about his handling of it. He became incensed, red-in-the-face livid. Which is a clear indication of just how badly he fears it will be reexamined.
“His tirade didn’t squelch my interest; it spiked it. I came away from our shouting match with one goal in mind, and that was to hear what you had to say about the Mellin story, even if your source is a crystal ball.”
She didn’t say anything, but he could tell by her demeanor that her anger had cooled. He relaxed his stance and moderated his tone. “Self-preservation, Beth. As much as it sucks, I need the job. Before I got myself into an unholy fix with Barker, I damn well needed to vet you first. If you’re offended, try putting yourself in my place. I think you would have done the same. In fact, you had. You admitted to researching me before setting up our tête-à-tête.”
“You’ve made your point. I overreacted.”
“Thank you.” He returned to his seat on the sofa and took a drink from his bottle of water.
She said, “Who did you talk to?”
“At the network? I went through an endless menu but finally reached a man named Richard.”
“My assistant.”
“So he said. He also told me that you were out of town. I asked to speak to Longren. Richard informed me that Mr. Longren had just left for his lunch date with the mayor. Acting like a hayseed, I said, ‘Wow. The mayor of NYC? Are you kidding?’
“Unable to resist an opening like that, Richard boasted that it’s not unusual for Mr. Longren to lunch with the honorable mayor but he’d almost missed this luncheon date because his right hand, Ms. Collins—who, Richard confided in an undertone, is essentially Mr. Longren’s keeper—wasn’t there to remind him.”
“That was terribly indiscreet of him.”
“He must have realized it, because after that he clammed up. He wouldn’t give me your cell number or tell me where you were staying while on vacation. No amount of wheedling worked.”
“You could have told him you were a police officer.”
“No, I didn’t want to play the cop card because… well, because I didn’t know what I was dealing with yet.”
“You played the cop card with the car rental company.”
“Because they don’t know you, they don’t work with you every day.”
She gave a light laugh. “Let me get this straight. You didn’t trust my integrity, you thought I might be a little wacko, but you wanted to safeguard my reputation among my coworkers?”
The irony had merit, but he didn’t pursue it. “Who’s Longren?”
“The retiring executive producer of—”
“I already know. I just wanted to see if you would admit it. You’re the boss’s right hand.”
“He recently became the former boss,” she said ruefully. “Max is a living legend in the network news industry. After I’d been with Crisis Point for a couple of years, he took me under his wing as an apprentice. I was thrilled because I knew I would be trained by a master. Writing, editing, all aspects of production. We’ve been working side by side for the past five years.”
“Why’s he stepping down?”
“It isn’t by choice. A year ago, the network was acquired by an international media conglomerate. The expected corporate shake-up ensued, but because Crisis Point is so highly rated and one of the network’s cash cows, Max maintained his position as executive producer.
“Then he began experiencing some health issues, minor at first, then one serious health scare. He recovered, but the medical setback was the opportunity that his detractors, led by a smarmy shark named Winston Brady, had been waiting for.”
“He’s been elbowed out?”
“Internally. Publicly, a fanfare has been made of his impending ‘retirement.’ His official departure date isn’t for another three months, but Brady, who was appointed the new EP, is already making all the decisions on Crisis Point content.”
“How does this baton passing affect you?”
“My situation is tenuous. Ruffling Brady’s feathers is one reason Max discouraged me from coming down here. He warned that my ‘obsession’ with the Mellin case could be unhealthy for my career path.”
“It’s certainly been toxic to mine,” he muttered.
“But you haven’t been fired. Max thinks that I’m at risk and that if I want to keep my job, I should leave well enough alone.”
“So you didn’t ask Brady’s permission to take another look at the episode that covered the Mellin case because you were afraid he’d say no.”
“Correct.”
“Hmm. Beyond Brady’s reaction, what were Max’s other reasons for discouraging you from coming down here and poking around?”
She lowered her gaze. “He thinks it’s hooey.”
“The blood moon angle?”
“He called it ‘moon cycle crap.’ In other words, he agrees with you.” She raised her head and looked at him. “Satisfied?”
She was still miffed, and, for some nameless reason, that was a colossal turn-on. He wanted to get up and go to her, lift her face to his, and kiss her. Without timidity or finesse. Kiss her until those lips, now unsmiling and compressed, softened and opened to him. And then take it from there.
He put the brakes on that runaway-train fantasy and came back to the subject at hand. “It’s a long way up the corporate ladder from gofer and fact checker to where you are now.”
“Not all that far. I still do research and fact checking, only now it’s exclusively for Max. I also serve as his personal assistant. I order chocolates for staffers at Christmas and forge his name on the enclosure cards.” She raised a shoulder in a slight shrug. “I’m his go-to person.”
“For what else besides chocolates and fact checking?”
“Like foot rubs and sex?”
“You give him foot rubs?”
“No. And I don’t have sex with him, either.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t have to. The implication was loud and clear. Let’s get this out of the way so we can move past it, all right?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Max isn’t my sugar daddy. He’s eighty-two years old. He’s been married and divorced four times, and none of his exes has a good word to say about him.
“His son by wife number two is his only progeny, but they haven’t spoken to each other in twenty years, even though he also works in the television industry and they often attend the same functions.
“Max isn’t a warm fuzzy. In fact, he’s rather horrible. On a good day, he’s merely irascible. Ordinarily, he’s hot-tempered, mule-headed, dictatorial, rude, often crude, and he views all those traits as assets. Despite all that, he’s my mentor and friend.”
“How does he feel about you?”
She smiled wistfully. “I’d like to think he has a soft spot for me, but he would never acknowledge it, and, if he did, it would feel patronizing. Given the choice, I would far rather have his respect. It’s not easily earned. He would regard that as the greatest honor he could bestow on me.”
John processed everything she’d told him, then asked, “When did your obsession with the Mellin case start?”
“Initially, I took special interest because it happened here, my old stomping grounds. My familiarity with the area made me useful to the production crew while they were down here. I got twenty calls a day, asking for background info on this or that. And then Max and I oversaw the post-production process, as we did for every episode.”
“What does post-production entail?”
“A lot of work,” she said with a light laugh. “As a piece was being constructed, he and I would watch the edited segments and give the producer our notes.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like ‘This interview runs too long. Trim it, but don’t cut the last sentence because it’s a cliffhanger. Go from it straight into a commercial break.’ Things like that. We’d nitpick and suggest edits that could make a big difference, give the story more oomph.”
“No wonder the show is so highly rated.”
“Thanks.” She shot him a smile, but it didn’t last long. “Shortly after Max and I had watched what was to become the broadcast version of the Mellin episode, he had a heart attack that kept him out for six weeks.
“When he returned, it was obvious to everyone that it had taken a toll. He was still a dragon, but he had little fire left in him. It wasn’t long before he was asked to resign. Brady took over. It was he who gave the Mellin episode final approval and put it into the schedule.”
“But that episode didn’t get your approval. If it had, you wouldn’t be down here secretly meeting me in a beer joint.”
“The episode is good, but no, it didn’t win my wholehearted approval.”
“Why not?”
“I felt there was more to that story than we had. We’d skimmed the surface well enough but hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it.” She sat forward, clasped her hands on her knees, and looked directly at him. “I believe you think the same about the investigation. Don’t you?”
The question sank into him like the claws of a lion, holding him inescapably captive like newly caught prey.
He looked away from Beth’s inquiring eyes and noticed how dim the room had become. Today was the start of daylight saving time. Even so, when the sun slipped behind the trees that surrounded his bungalow and formed a thick canopy above its low roof, darkness fell earlier than it did most places.
The encroaching dusk contributed to his feeling of entrapment.
He was about to reach for the lamp on the end table and switch it on. But lamplight would make Beth’s incisiveness all the more evident, all the more compelling, so he left the lamp alone.
“Don’t you?” she repeated.
She wouldn’t spare him from answering, so he gave her the straightforward answer he felt she deserved. “To me, a homicide investigation remains open until the body is found.”
“Crissy’s isn’t shut. It’s classified as a cold case.”
He scoffed. “If her remains are ever discovered, it won’t be by anyone inside the Auclair PD. It’s understood that the lid is on that case and that it’s to be left as is. Dormant.”
“For all the criticizing attributed to you, you’ve never come right out and said that.”
“Only in private.”
“Have I won your trust, then?”
“Working on it. Keep talking.”
She gave a small smile. “Thanks.” After a beat, she said, “Without Max’s knowledge, I continued to probe that story like a sore tooth, looking for the elusive element I felt was missing. I surfed the internet, searching for any articles or YouTube segments that I might have missed. On one of those explorations, I came across an article referring to another missing persons case in Galveston, Texas.”
John held up his hand. “I know all about it. Since it took place only a few months ahead of our case, we looked into it to see if there was a connection. Larissa Whitmore, a sixteen-year-old from Houston, was playing hooky with a group of girlfriends in Galveston.
“They went out clubbing. Larissa got stoned on marijuana and tequila shots and started making out with twenty-two-year-old Patrick Dobbs, whom she’d met on the beach earlier that day. He and Larissa left the nightclub together and went off in his cabin cruiser.”
“That was the last time she was seen.”
“Right. The following morning, the Coast Guard discovered Dobbs’s boat adrift. It had run out of gas. Dobbs was found in the cabin, naked and sleeping like a baby. There was no sign of the girl except for her discarded clothing and her purse, with nothing noticeably missing from it.
“Dobbs swore he’d passed out and didn’t remember what had happened after they’d had sex. Lots of sex, lots of pot and tequila. He theorized that she woke up, went up on deck, and, still wasted, fell overboard.”
Beth picked up there. “Dobbs came from a venerable Galveston family with money and privilege. Larissa’s parents typified him as a spoiled rich kid with a sense of entitlement. They were convinced that Larissa had denied him a sexual favor, that he threw a tantrum, turned violent, and their daughter ended up in the Gulf.”
“That’s what they alleged,” John said, “but there was no forensic evidence to support any allegation of violence. Dobbs didn’t have a scratch or bruise on him. The boat was a mess, but it looked like the scene of an orgy, not an assault or homicide. There were used condoms to support his claims that he’d practiced safe sex.”
“With an underage girl.”
“Yeah. That definitely didn’t help him. While the search was still on for her body, he was held on charges of kidnapping, statutory rape, and a laundry list of other crimes associated with her being a minor.”
“Her body was never found.”
“No. They searched the Gulf for weeks. If there’s an update on that, I haven’t heard about it. Anyway, as it related to the Mellin case, Dobbs was ruled out. He’d been denied bail and was in jail when Crissy Mellin went missing. No connection whatsoever between that case and ours.”
Beth appeared to stop breathing for a moment, then said quietly, “Except that on the night of May fifteenth and sixteenth when Larissa Whitmore went missing, there was a blood moon.”
It took every ounce of willpower John possessed not to recoil. That single tidbit of information had the effect of a wrecking ball. It hit him much harder than Mitch’s slug had yesterday. He’d been braced for that retaliating punch. He hadn’t been prepared for this at all.
Beth was watching him closely with an earnest, almost sympathetic expression, while he was trying his damnedest not to give her any indication of the tumult going on inside him.
Speaking softly, she said, “Earlier, when we were discussing the two blood moons that had occurred in 2022, it didn’t ring a bell that the first one was in May, coinciding with the Whitmore girl’s disappearance?”
“I, uh… I remembered that she’d been abducted sometime that spring. I had no cause to remember the exact date. So, no. It didn’t ring a bell.”
She inched forward in her chair until she was virtually perched on the edge of the seat. “In the article I read about Larissa’s disappearance, it was speculated that the eclipse was one of the lures Dobbs used to get her to go out on the water with him.
“The article writer digressed to explain to his readers what a blood moon was and, as a footnote, said that the next one would occur over the seventh and eighth of November. When I read that, a chill went down my spine, because I knew from working on the Mellin episode that that was the night Crissy had disappeared. That’s when my obsession began, John.
“My immediate thought was in regards to the show. Why hadn’t we mentioned the blood moon in our episode ? It would have had terrific production value. We could have edited in graphics that would have made great visuals, set the mood, added drama and eeriness.
“Then I realized that we hadn’t included it because no one involved had ever referred to the moon on that night, not in any of the interviews, nowhere. If someone had, I wouldn’t have missed it.”
“Wasn’t Crissy’s fate eerie enough for production value without the goddamn moon?”
She was about to speak, but his testiness must have changed her mind. She let the conversation die there and reached down to scratch Mutt beneath his chin. After a few seconds of that, he rolled onto his back. She scratched his belly. His dog had become completely addlepated over her.
He said, “Thanks a lot.”
She looked over at him. “For what?”
“From now on, he’s going to expect me to do that.”
She smiled, gave Mutt one last pat, then sat up straight. After a hesitation, she asked, “What do you think?”
“I think I’ll never start scratching his belly.”
She frowned. “You know what I meant.”
He sighed. “I know what you meant, but there’s no correlation there, Beth. Dobbs couldn’t have taken Crissy. The moon thing is a bizarre coincidence.”
She looked at him with annoyance. “When you’re investigating a crime, and you come across a link to a similar crime, no matter how bizarre that link seems, don’t tell me that you dismiss it out of hand as a coincidence. I know you don’t.”
“Okay, no, I don’t. So let’s say the orange moon was a lure, that Larissa and Dobbs screwed beneath it on the deck of his boat. But bloody or otherwise, the moon had nothing to do with Crissy’s disappearance.”
“How do you know?” she said in a raised voice. “You didn’t even realize there had been a blood moon. You told me that no one was paying attention to it, that no one could even see it. You said—”
“I know what I fucking said!”
Then he drew a breath and tried to stop the rapid unraveling of his conviction that she was wrong. He wanted desperately for her to be wrong. Even as he tried to convince himself, he tried to convince her.
“Look, Beth, you work for a TV show that’s all about drama. You look for elements in a story that have production value. You make edits that add oomph. It’s what you do, and obviously you’re good at it. But now you’ve cooked up this… this…” Failing to find the word he sought, he raked his fingers through his hair. “ Shit! ”
“John, everything you just said, I’ve told myself. Dozens of times I tried to talk myself into forgetting about it. Max tried to talk me into forgetting about it, and I respect his opinion more than anyone’s. I would have dismissed it as a wild and crazy coincidence except for—”
Suddenly two things happened at once. Mutt shot up as though the floor plank had launched him. And John, in one conditioned motion, reached for his holster, slid the pistol out, and hurdled the coffee table.
Beth jumped up from her chair. John planted his left hand in the center of her chest and pushed her back into it. “Stay down.” He extended his gun hand toward the front door.
She gasped, “My God, what’s happened?”
“Mutt growled.”