She looked pleased with herself for figuring this out. “We dug up some unbelievable archive photos to run with that story. Totally gruesome. But it does help answer your question. The cops were probably overwhelmed. They would have had a massive backlog of cases, and the child murders were making national headlines. Investigators would have been focused on the kids. Maybe your parents got a little lost in the shuffle.”
“Maybe.” I thought about this. “You think the reporters covering crime might have been overwhelmed, too? That would explain why there aren’t many stories.”
“I guess. Who was it that covered your parents?” She reached for the articles. “Huh! Funny I didn’t notice. I don’t know her.” She pointed at the byline on the first story, someone named Janice Fleming. “But this one. Leland Brett. He’s one of our managing editors.”
“What, you mean still?”
“He’s worked here forever. Leland’s probably upstairs on the sixth floor right now.”
? ? ?
THE NEWSROOM WAS disconcertingly bright and modern.
I wanted it to look the way the Washington Post does in All the President’s Men: a warren of chipped desks, drowning under piles of paper and clattering typewriters and flasks of whiskey. A place where unshaven reporters plied their trade, weaseling news tips out of shady sources. The way newspapers are supposed to look. But the Journal--Constitution newsroom could have passed for a travel agency. Or a suburban bank. Cheerful blue-and-orange color scheme, glass internal walls, Aeron chairs. Everything looked sleek and sterile and anatomically correct.
Everything, except Leland Brett’s office.
He seemed to have missed the memo. His desk was parked in a ratty, stale-smelling corner. Ancient, pink While You Were Out . . . phone messages scrawled in fading ink were taped two and three deep on the windows and glass walls, blocking out most natural light. Jessica had knocked and shoved me through his door with only the briefest of introductions (“She’s a professor up at Georgetown; you wrote about her family ages ago”) and then disappeared. I was left clutching the sheaf of papers and wondering where to begin. What exactly did I want to know from this man?
Fortunately, he made a great show of politeness, ushering me in and pulling up a chair across from me. I resisted the urge to brush off the upholstery before taking a seat.
“So, what do we have here, pretty lady?” Brett was short and puffy, with blond hair that had thinned to just a few pale tuffets, dotted across his scalp. He looked about sixty. He adjusted reading glasses on his nose and reached for the articles, brushing his hand along my leg as he took them from me. Pretty lady? And touching my thigh? Surely they didn’t still do things that way down in Georgia. Or maybe they did. I frowned and explained as succinctly as I could that my birth parents had been killed in Atlanta in 1979, that I had been adopted and had only just found out about the murders, and that he had written the original stories for the Journal-Constitution.
“I would have written them for the Journal,” he corrected me. “We didn’t merge newsrooms until a few years after that. The Journal was the evening paper; the Constitution came out every morning. But let’s see what you’ve got.”
He scanned the first two articles with an air of concentration, then glanced up. “I can’t say I remember this. I’ve written a lot of murder stories over the years, sorry to say. You say these people were your folks?”
“Yes.”
“Awful shame. What a pity.”
He turned back to reading. When he got to the third story—the one with the photograph—something sparked in his eyes. “You know, I think maybe I do remember them. Good-looking kids. They never caught the guy, did they?”
He ran his finger down the pages. “That’s right. That’s right. They had a baby girl. I’m guessing that must have been you, am I right?” His gaze met mine and then wandered down appreciatively.
Oh, dear. So the thigh brush had not been accidental. “It was me. Mr. Brett, would you have any idea how to reach these people you quoted? It looks like you interviewed a couple of neighbors, and also someone you identify as a close friend of Sadie Rawson Smith’s. I’d love to talk to them.”
“No idea.” He scratched his head, puffing up the blond tufts until a clump of them stood on end. “You could certainly check if the neighbors are still living in their same houses. And as for the friend . . . what was her name?”
I pointed to a quote in the third article, attributed to a woman named Cheral Rooney.
“Cheral Rooney . . . Nope, no, ma’am, doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Might you still have old notes that you’ve kept? I suppose they would be on paper, not computer, from back then.”
He looked over at a cardboard box dumped in a corner, overflowing with small, spiral-bound notebooks. “I do keep them. But not as far back as that. We moved headquarters three years ago. I threw most every-thing out.”
I was impressed, despite myself, that he’d managed to accumulate so much clutter in a mere three years. “What about the investigation itself? I’d love to get some insight into why the Smiths were killed. There’s a cop quoted who suggests it might have been a burglary gone wrong.”
“Sounds likely. I don’t recollect any whiff of their being mixed up in any trouble. Nothing that might have got them killed.”
“You talked to a cop who told you they brought a suspect in for questioning—”
“Did I?”
I showed Brett the relevant paragraph. “See, right here. But they let him go.”
“Well, they probably brought in lots of people for questioning. I honestly don’t remember. And let me level with you. I was a kid then. I must have been—let’s see—twenty-four, twenty-five years old. Covering general-assignment stories, whatever the editors decided to throw at me that morning. I didn’t have police sources. I swallowed whatever they told me and wrote it up.”