CHAPTER
8
There were flowers on Parker’s desk. A pot of African violets, a bouquet of yellow tulips, and a bouquet of some fleshy pink flower that Parker would have hated. One of the HR ladies from the third floor had brought that one up.
Neither of the bouquets was in water. They would just sit there and wilt and die and rot. What good that was supposed to do anyone, Susan couldn’t figure. Someone dies, so you kill something beautiful?
The Herald building was downtown. It had been built a hundred years ago and then fallen victim to an unfortunate renovation in the 1970s. The floors were gutted, cubed, and affixed with fluorescent lights and drop ceilings. Susan’s desk was on the fifth floor. The view was impressive, which was about the only nice thing you could say about the place. It was too quiet for Susan’s taste, too corporate, and, no matter what the temperature outside, too cold.
Sundays at the Herald were usually Siberia. Anyone important was at home. The Sunday paper was printed. Monday was light. Things were run by one senior editor who drew the short straw and usually spent the day at his desk playing solitaire or surfing the Internet for gossip sites and blogs. There was a lot of sitting around. No one knows more Internet gossip than newspaper people, whether they admit it or not.
This particular Sunday was an all-in day. A sitting senator was dead. Parker, one of their own, was dead. They had an evening edition to get out, and a Web site that required a breaking story every few minutes to compete with the TV news. Most of the news department had come in, copy editors, features. But there were also the übereditors, the assistant editors, interns, HR people, receptionists, and the TV critic who planned to write a story about how TV was covering the story. Everyone wanted to get in on the action. The worse the tragedy, the more you wanted a piece of it. That’s what separated reporters from regular people.
Susan pulled a hooded sweatshirt she kept in her desk drawer on over her black dress and rested her head in her hands. Molly Palmer had flaked out and wasn’t returning Susan’s calls. She dialed her cell again. Nothing. They were planning coverage of the senator for the next day’s paper. It would be a huge pickup day. Castle’s photo on the front page. A huge, bold headline announcing his death. That was the kind of newspaper that people still bought and Susan wanted her story to be featured.
Susan leaned back in her desk chair to see if Ian was out of his meeting yet. The door to the conference room was still closed. Ian had been in there for an hour with Howard Jenkins and an assembly of Herald bigwigs planning the Castle coverage and deciding the fate of her story. She had thought she’d earned some capital with her series on Archie Sheridan and the After School Strangler. But in the end, it was all newspaper politics. And without Molly to confirm her story to the paper’s fact checkers, the Herald was waffling.
Susan punched in Molly’s number again. Nothing.
Fuck. Molly was not exactly a willing subject. She’d only agreed to meet in person twice. And getting ahold of her was always a pain in the ass. Molly would turn off her phone and forget to turn it on for days.
Susan had already made a three-foot-long paper-clip chain and worked six tiny braids into her blue hair. Now she unhooked the paper clips and put them back in their cardboard box and pulled the braids out and then rebraided them.
She could smell the honey-sweet pollen drifting from the flowers on Parker’s desk.
The bank of TVs that were bolted on the wall above the copy editors were all live with the senator and Parker’s accident. Susan couldn’t look. She wanted out of the office. She wanted to find Molly. She wanted to be doing something.
Susan heard a voice ask, “Are you okay?” She looked up to see Derek Rogers. His sandy eyebrows were knitted in concern. She’d mostly avoided him since she’d broken things off. She’d tried to explain how he wasn’t her type. He was square and responsible. She was chaotic. He drank his coffee with milk and sugar. She drank hers black.
The truth was, he wanted a girlfriend. And she didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend right now.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said, the dimple in his chin deepening. Then he shook his head. “What a stupid thing to say,” he said. “Everyone says that, don’t they?” Both Susan and Derek had scrambled for Parker’s attention. It was one of the few things they had in common.
“I know you really liked him, too,” she said.
“If you want to talk,” Derek said, “you have my number.”
Why did he have to be so nice?
The door to the conference room opened and Susan scooted back in her chair. It rolled too quickly and she nearly buckled backward.