Chapter Thirty-Four New York City
The photos arrived Tuesday morning.
Caleb Ward was at his desk on the thirteenth floor of a building on Eighth Avenue.
The file was a Dropbox link from a number he did not recognize.
There were multiple photographs. Two men in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in various stages of undress and sexual positions. The pictures were taken by what looked like a private investigator, probably on a surrounding rooftop.
Caleb Ward sat back in his chair. He knew exactly who these two men were, Piper Ashton and Noah Reyes. They hadn’t thought to close the blinds, which was an amateur move if you wanted to take every precaution to not get caught.
He had been through this before and photographs were the match, the story would be the flame.
The story had been building the entire season and hit a fever pitch after the underwear campaign’s behind-the-scenes commercial dropped. The commercial was now yesterday’s news and the vultures were circling and needed more content to feed the biggest story in America.
Caleb pulled a yellow legal pad toward him. He wrote at the top in black pen: Ashton / Reyes.
Then he wrote, underneath it: Who sent these, and why to me? Caleb knew he could break a story wide open at a national level, but this was content usually reserved for a social media leak and these photos were nowhere on social media yet.
He opened his laptop and pulled up Piper Ashton’s individual file he had been building from the Jayson Days investigation.
His editor, Marta, came into his office at noon. “Caleb, you got anything on the sports betting ring we can send to legal?”
“Soon,” Caleb replied.
“I do have something else. I received images that we are not going to run, because legal won’t release this shit.” Caleb pointed to his computer screen as Marta’s eyes widened.
“Oh fuck Caleb,” she said.
“You know this is not a relationship story like everyone is waiting for,” Caleb said as he looked up at Marta.
Marta waited.
“It’s an ownership story,” Caleb continued.
Marta looked at him for a long moment. “Say more.”
“Piper Ashton has been funded since he was twenty-one by Jayson Days. The scale of this thing is massive and there are others. This is not ‘quarterback has secret boyfriend’. This is a ‘quarterback has been purchased by a powerful tech billionaire’ story.”
Marta held still. “Are you certain? You know Jayson owns our parent company. I never authorized you to investigate him.”
“I am aware.”
“So this story is dead unless you feed it to another media outlet, but even that their legal team would kill it. Nobody is willing to go head to head with this guy.”
Caleb had already thought about this. “We have another option.”
Marta nodded. “Leak it to social media, and hope it sticks before it’s scrubbed within minutes,” Caleb said.
“Yup, but we are not going to do that, because we work for Jayson at the end of the day, and I have a mortgage.”
“But I can’t just let this story sit, Marta. It’s too big.” Caleb took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. He had been working on this story for months and it was now a dead end.
“Caleb, leave it alone. You don’t want to end up fired, or worse. Understand?” Marta said as she turned toward the door.
“Understood,” Caleb replied, knowing full well he was not going to leave it alone. He was going to make a call to the one person who needed to know the story could blow at any moment, an old friend, Vivienne Cross.