Thicker Than Water

Julie nodded. “Too sharp for me. It was, but it’s okay. It’s over.”

“Did it have anything to do with him?”

“Who? MacKenzie?”

Dawn nodded. “Was he the one giving you a hard time?”

“No. He’s got the moral values of an earthworm, but he would never do anything like that.” Or she hoped in hell he wouldn’t, Julie thought. Because if he started digging and he found out the truth—but no. He wouldn’t find anything.

“That’s a relief.”

“Why?”

Dawn shrugged. “I like him, Mom.”

“Blech. Honey, you have terrible taste in men.” Julie ate a handful of popcorn and looked at her beautiful, precious daughter. God, how would Dawn feel if that evidence of Harry’s ever went public? She lowered her eyes, pretended to watch TV. It didn’t matter what she had done today. She would do whatever she had to do to protect Dawn from anything that might threaten her happiness. Especially the secrets of their past.

She would do whatever she had to. Always.

Chapter Three

An hour after collapsing in her bed, Julie sat up, her eyes flying open wide and her heart hammering in her chest as the thought that had jolted her awake echoed endlessly in her mind.

“His apartment,” she whispered. “God, the police will go to Harry’s apartment. They’ll search his place for clues, and that damned Detective Jackson won’t miss a thing. She’ll find everything Harry had on me and Dawn. Oh, God.”

She flung back her covers, put her feet on the floor and fought to catch her breath. There had never been any love lost between Julie and Cassandra Jackson. Julie hadn’t worked with the woman often, but whenever she’d been compelled to seek out Lieutenant Jackson for information, she’d hit a brick wall. She didn’t know why “Jax” disliked her. Maybe it was the natural enmity that tended to form between the police and the press, but she didn’t think so. The woman didn’t seem to have the same attitude toward MacKenzie.

She was going to have to stop Jackson from getting her hands on that evidence. It wasn’t too late, she told herself. The cops wouldn’t have gone there tonight, would they? No, not in the middle of the night like this. They would want to clear it with the senator. Discuss it with him, make sure it was handled with finesse. And they would need a search warrant, too. They would want to make sure it was all done legally. Hell, Harry was the victim in this, not the suspect. They had no reason to go charging in like bulls, offending a New York State senator in the process.

“Okay, good, then.” She got to her feet, yanked open a dresser drawer and dug for a pair of jeans, then hopped on one foot while pulling them over the other. “They might have put a cop on Harry’s place, just to watch it. Maybe not, though. But even if they did, that’s okay. I can handle one cop. Maybe two. It’ll be fine. Hell, they’ll probably be sleeping in their car at this hour.”

She pulled on a sweatshirt, white socks and a pair of running shoes from underneath the foot of her bed. Harry’s condo was in one of the renovated old buildings downtown, within walking distance of the War Memorial at the Oncenter and City Hall. She hoped to God the security was as lax as it had been the one time he had insisted she meet him there. Even so, getting into the building would be the hard part. She tied her shoes, her mind racing. You needed a key card, or to have someone inside buzz you in from upstairs. She wouldn’t be likely to catch someone else going in at this time of the night and be able to slip in with them.

She hurried out of her bedroom, into the upstairs hall, and thought of her car, still parked in the hotel’s garage. She was going to have to take Dawn’s Jeep. Not that Dawn would mind, really, although she would pretend to, and probably gripe about her mother’s notoriously poor driving skills being turned loose on an innocent Jeep.

Julie paused at her daughter’s bedroom door and peeked in. Dawn was sound asleep, her back to her mother, nothing visible but the shape of her body underneath the blankets. The radio was playing softly beside the bed. She always fell asleep with her music playing. All the better, Julie thought, and she pulled the door closed and tiptoed to the stairs, down them and out to the garage.

Sean hadn’t gone home at all. He’d driven around for a little while, wondering who, among all the man’s known enemies, would have had the best motive to murder Harry Blackwood. The senator’s brother had a less than stellar reputation. He drank. A lot. He gambled. And it was widely known that he liked his women. In fact, the big scandal of the last election had involved allegations from a prostitute who claimed Harry was one of her best customers. The guy was a lowlife.

But now he was a dead lowlife, and Sean wanted to know why. In fact, he wanted to know a lot more than he already did about Harry Blackwood and his sleazy side. A guy like that must have more than a few skeletons in his closet. And the public would want to know. Within twenty-four hours this was going to be the biggest story in the state. People would be clamoring for inside dirt, and he was just the man to provide it. His value as a reporter, he thought with a slow smile, was about to sail through the roof. And that new job he’d been thinking he didn’t stand a chance of landing might just be in the bag. He could use this.

Meanwhile Channel Four’s ratings were sinking, had been ever since Julie Jones’s former coanchor had retired and she’d begun sitting alone at the evening news desk. She was good, he thought. But he was better. People liked the dynamics of a male-female anchor team. She couldn’t give them that. People also liked dirt, and she wouldn’t give them that, either.

He was about to leave her in the dust.

People’s dirt, he knew from experience, turned up in people’s garbage. So he used his cell phone and directory assistance to get the exact address, minus the apartment number, and he drove to Harry’s building. He parked his car where it seemed relatively safe and took what he needed from the glove compartment. The Dumpster Diving Kit, he called it. He always carried one. He’d thought once or twice that he ought to patent it and sell it to journalists the world over.

Harry had lived in a good neighborhood; he had to give the guy that much, Sean thought as he locked his car and walked casually toward the alley beside the building. The building was a century-old brick structure that had been in pretty decent shape up until the city’s recent downtown restoration efforts. Now it was like new again, sound, clean and safe, even while keeping its original look.

He used a small penlight to guide his feet. No rats scurried out of its beam, and there were no homeless old men to trip over. Yep, a nice neighborhood. Toward the far end of the alley, he found what he needed. The Dumpster. The lid was raised, and the garbage chute angled into it from the side of the building.

Digging through garbage was never a pleasant job but almost always a profitable one. Sean opened the gallon-size zipper-seal freezer bag and took out a pair of yellow rubber gloves. He had found some of his very best material in the garbage. He’d learned of extramarital affairs, celebrity pregnancies, addictions, nose jobs and political corruption from various piles of refuse. Occasionally he found stuff that was too lowbrow even for his radio show. Stuff that would be considered beneath him, though granted, according to most of the respected press, that was a very narrow area. When he found stuff like that, he never used it for his show. He had to preserve what little journalistic integrity he had. So he would simply sell it to the tabloids, which were always more than willing to keep his name out of it. It was a tidy little side business. Hell, it had paid for his Porsche.

At worst, this Dumpster should provide something kinky enough to bring a good price at the tabloids. At best, it would provide a motive for Harry Blackwood’s murder and enough leverage to move him up a few rungs on the journalistic ladder.

He pulled on the yellow rubber gloves, then took out the white surgical face mask and tied it around his head. Then he found a small broken crate lying on the ground, and he flipped it upside down beside the Dumpster to use as a makeshift stepladder. It was dark. He put his penlight in his mouth and peered down into the depths of trash.

Most of the garbage was bagged. People were neater these days than they’d been ten years ago. He reached for a plastic trash bag, picked it up by its knotted top and let it dangle and turn in slow-mo, shining his light and peering through the transparent sides until he spotted a name on a discarded envelope or sheet of paper. He repeated this process over and over, tossing the bags aside when he found any name other than Harold R. Blackwood. Harry had lived alone, as far as Sean knew. He wouldn’t likely have anything addressed to anyone else. There! Harold Blackwood. Apartment 624.

He tossed the bag to the ground to be examined later and kept on digging for more, stopping only when headlights spilled into the alley from the street beyond and he heard a car pulling to a stop out in front of the building. The engine shut off. The lights went out.

He glanced at his watch. 2:00 a.m.

Okay, it was probably nothing, but he had a little nerve at the base of his skull that tingled when there was a story nearby, and it was tingling now. Maybe he’d better check it out, just in case….

He jumped down from the crate and picked up the bag he’d retrieved, peeled off his gloves and face mask, tossing them into the trash, and then he walked back up the alley to the street.

A powder-blue Jeep Wrangler had stopped there, and the woman who got out of it was…He had to blink and look again. There was no mistake. She was none other than Julie Jones.

“Well, I’ll be,” he muttered. Licking his lips, he set his trash bag down and pressed himself closer to the wall so he could peer around it and watch her without being seen. “What the hell is she up to now?”

She walked up the broad stone steps of Harry’s building, then paused at the front door, biting her lip and squinting at the security panel. Finally she pushed a button. She was only three yards away from Sean. She kept her finger on the button until a groggy, angry voice came over the intercom in reply. “Who the hell is this?” it demanded. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“I’m sorry to wake you, but I forgot my key. Could you just buzz me in?”

“Fuck off, lady,” the man said.

She waited a couple seconds, then hit the same button again. The voice returned. “You want me to call a cop?”

“You want me to keep my finger on this button until they get here?”

“All right, all right. Jesus.”

The guy buzzed her in. Sean heard the deep drone of the buzzer and the door lock disengaging, and shook his head in amazement, both at her brass and at the fact that her ploy had actually worked. Jones opened the door and walked through. Swearing under his breath, Sean lunged out of his spot, running in three long strides to the stairs. The door was already swinging closed and Jones was striding toward the elevators, her back to him. He flung himself bodily, landing chest first on the stairs, arms stretching doorward. He just managed to thrust his fingertips into the opening before the door slammed on them.

Clenching his teeth and swearing under his breath, he pulled himself forward, grabbed the door with his free hand and pulled it open. Then he got to his feet and stepped inside. His fingers throbbed. Shit. He rubbed them and shook his hand as the door fell closed behind him. Then he heard the elevator ping and looked ahead to see its doors closing, as well.

Crossing into the lobby, he dug through his memory for the number he’d seen on that envelope—624, that was it. Sixth floor. There was only one elevator, and he didn’t want Jones getting too goddamn far ahead of him. Nor did he relish the thought of being caught there in plain sight should the irate neighbor Jones had bothered with the buzzer decide to call the cops after all.

He looked around, found the stair door and took that way up. Five flights. He hurried, because he didn’t want Jones out of his sight long enough to do anything he would regret not seeing. He figured it took him a minute or so before he made it to the sixth floor landing, opened the stair door and stepped quietly into the hall. Or as quietly as he could manage while panting for breath. His heart was pounding hard enough to wake the residents of the entire floor, and he told himself he was too old for this kind of cloak-and-dagger bullshit.

Then he shook his head. Getting too old, maybe. But he wasn’t there yet—he’d managed to catch up to her. Jones was walking down the hall, peering at the numbers on the doors of the condos on this floor. He walked forward, stepping just as softly as he could manage. She was wearing jeans now. Her hair was a mess, and her sweatshirt was baggy. This was not a Julie Jones too many people would recognize.

Then she stopped suddenly and just stood there, staring at one of the doors. And when he got a little closer, Sean realized why. It was Harry’s apartment door, and it was standing wide-open.

Someone had been there first, and even as he wondered whether they might still be around, Julie Jones walked inside.

Swearing under his breath, Sean rushed ahead and paused momentarily outside the door to look in at Jones as she tiptoed through the apartment like some kind of goddamn cat burglar. He knew it was freaking insane, but he had to find out what she was up to. My God, he didn’t have dreams this good. Oh, he’d fantasized lots of scenarios involving Julie Jones over the years, getting the best of her being his second favorite. But this was better than anything he could have made up. So he crept in after her.