the crusader you pretend to be. You’ve got potential. It puts me in a predicament, seeing as, well, obviously I can’t have you running around and poking your nose into my business. I’ve made a decision.”
Nell held her breath. Leda’s voice dropped to a silken whisper.
“I’m going to have to punish you.”
Nell swallowed. Her throat was bone-dry. She tried to inject some bravado into her voice, but she could hear it quaver around the edges.
“That a fancy way of telling me you’re going to have Rime torture me before he puts a bullet in my head? This might shock you, but I’ve been threatened before.”
“Nothing so crude,” Leda replied. “Wait for it. You’ll see what I can do to you.”
“And you’ll see what I can do to you, too,” Nell said.
“My turn first. Please, just remember one thing? I’m doing this for your own good.”
30.
After the phone call with Leda, sleep was a distant memory. The cheap hotel pipes rattled while Nell showered, scrubbing herself awake under the steaming spray, putting herself together. The Brooklyn Standard’s office was a quarter mile away; she hoofed it, stopping in at a bodega on the way and picking up an extra-tall cup of coffee for fuel.
Something was wrong. The air in the newsroom had shifted, curdling like milk left out overnight, and she smelled it the second she walked in the door. Colleagues who usually greeted her found other people to talk to, other parts of the office suddenly demanding their undivided attention. Across the bullpen, Tyler was camped at his desk; Seelie wasn’t with him. He met her gaze and gave a small, grave shake of his head.
The editor-in-chief’s door jangled open before she could bridge the distance. “Bluth? My office. Now.”
Bill wasn’t alone. She didn’t know the names of the three men with him, all crowded around his desk, but she knew their business. They were from the company that owned the company that owned the Brooklyn Standard. Legal department.
“Have you seen?” Bill asked her.
She shook her head. He gestured to the door. She closed it. His blinds were down.
He tilted his monitor so she could watch. A morning news segment had already been ripped and uploaded to YouTube. Harrelson, her old, occasional lover, sat grimly under a splash graphic that read, Rush to Judgment? Bill played the clip.
“Last month,” Harrelson said, “the city was shocked by the violent suicide of Noah Sellers, a defense attorney who specialized in cases of sexual abuse. Sellers himself came under suspicion when a computer containing child pornography was found at his office.”
Stock footage filled the screen, the aftermath of a crime. Police tape, hard-eyed men carrying cardboard boxes in a procession of evidence. Then Nell stared at her own face, eyes bleary and hair wild, an unflattering photograph someone had snapped at a holiday party last year.
“His suicide note maintained his innocence and blamed this woman, Brooklyn Standard reporter Nell Bluth, whose overzealous reporting—allegedly—made it impossible to receive a fair trial. All the same, many considered it an open-and-shut case, until now.”
The scene cut to a wall with fat stone bricks, slathered in institutional eggshell white. A man in an orange jumpsuit, drooping bags under his eyes and gray whiskers on his cheeks, drawled into the camera.
“That there computer? Yuh, that was mine.”
A chyron read: Gill Barlow, Convicted Child Molester.
He rubbed the back of his hand across his nose. “Naw, Mr. Sellers never knew what was on it. Never even had the password. I just asked him to hold it for me, y’know? Didn’t think he’d get in no trouble for it. I didn’t think the cops were even allowed to search a lawyer’s office, figured it was that…whatcha call it, attorney-client privilege.”
“And why are you coming forward now?” Harrelson asked him.
“Just found out. See, I was in ad-seg—that’s protective custody on account of what I, you know, what I did—and you don’t get no television set in ad-seg. Just felt wrong to me. Mr. Sellers was a good man. He didn’t deserve none of what happened to him. Just felt wrong, is all.”
The widow of Noah Sellers stood weeping on a front porch, a rustic little house out on Staten Island. Reporters filled the tiny lawn, held back by a man with leather driving gloves and a designer attaché. A second man, dark-eyed and silent, hung back and watched the scene like a bodyguard hunting for trouble.
“Please, no questions at this time,” said the man in the gloves. “Today we’re simply announcing that