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CHAPTER ONE

IT BEGAN WITH someone else’s story. In the beginning, a woman went out to meet a man, and on her long walk, she disappeared. I didn’t know the woman. I’d never met her. But I could see her clearly in my mind, walking the streets of Georgetown, her heels striking the sidewalk to the percussive music booming out of city bars. That same path I’d traveled many times myself.

Her married name was Evelyn Carney. She’d been born a Sutton, small-town country club people hailing from the cold north. I didn’t discover much about her people, except they seemed to have no time for her or to care very much about what she did, and when she disappeared, gave a collective shrug. Had she fled them, or was she like so many other young women, women like me, who’d come to DC with dreams of making herself anew? She had none of the typical means to success in the District, no powerful sponsor or academic prowess or massive wealth. She had no family connections, either. But she had ambition and a powerful appeal to men, and she wasn’t afraid to use either.

I never figured out how that captured my sympathy, but somehow I got hooked by that first glimpse of her. My mind is devilishly quick to fasten itself to an image, and I should’ve been more careful. I’d certainly been warned. When I was a young and reverent girl making those gestures that good girls must make, my parish priest had told me: “Be careful what your eyes take in. What you see becomes a part of you.”

It might have been advice worth heeding, but I didn’t, not when I was a child or a cub reporter, or much later, a too-young executive producer playing with the power of pictures. By then, I was hip deep in my quest for Evelyn Carney, and it was too late.

__________

On an early Wednesday morning, her story arrived in a stack of press releases left on my desk. I’d been flipping through the papers when the big, bold letters—MISSING—caught my attention, and then the text:

The Metropolitan Police Department is seeking the public’s assistance in locating a missing person identified as Evelyn Marie Carney. She was last seen at approximately 9:48 p.m., on Sunday, March 8, in the twelve hundred block of Wisconsin Avenue, NW.

The MPD lingo description—thirty-year-old white female, five four, 115 pounds—could have fit any woman. It almost fit me.

Maybe thirty seconds of airtime, no more, but then I thought: Georgetown? No one went missing from Georgetown. Not with police officers standing sentinel every couple of blocks, protecting the expensive houses and trendy restaurants and upscale shops.

Beneath the text was the missing woman’s photograph, blurred by a bad copy job. Her face was grainy and gray with two white spots for eyes—like a mask, creepy as hell—and I thought she was probably dead. It happened with sickening frequency: a woman killed by someone said to have loved her, or less often, by a stranger preying on her. Throughout the decade I’d been in the District, I’d worked different variations of this same story with sickening frequency.

There was a tap on my office door as Isaiah came in. He was the managing editor, my right-hand man, and he knew everything—changing technology in broadcasting, history of the city, local politics and crime stats, who’s who, and what’s what. Nearly forty years ago, he was one of the first black journalists to break into television. He was a great newsman.

“You’re late for your own meeting,” he said, looking at me over the top of his black horn-rims. “What happened to your Virginia Knightly early-for-everything rule?”

It was a rule he’d taught me, along with everything I knew about reporting. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see he was right. “Let’s go,” I said.

As we cut through the newsroom, I got that rush of joy that comes at the oddest times—in the quiet moments before an editorial meeting, in the midst of my shows if there was a beautiful shot of video. Sometimes it came at the end of the day after everyone had gone home and only I was left to turn out the lights.

In the conference room, Nelson Yang, our best young photographer, stood with his shoulders pressed against the glass wall and his Dodgers cap pulled low, covering his mop of dark hair. He had a careless disposition and a penchant for gossip. Now he was telling a lewd tale of a competing news director caught with a female employee on the floor of the Graphics Department. “Talk about graphic,” he muttered.

“No news director would risk his job in such a way,” Isaiah said, taking his seat next to me.

I lifted my hand, ever the traffic cop. “True or not, it’s unprofessional to talk about our colleagues’ personal lives.”

“But, Virginia,” Nelson whined, “it’s what we do.”

Moira swept into the meeting. Swept is the only way to describe how Moira moved. She was built like a runway model, and her loose bohemian clothes trailed behind her as if she were caught in a constant headwind. She was the perfect female anchor, defying demographics of gender and age and race. She had the androgynous beauty of a Greek statue and the warm toast-colored skin of newly baked bread.

“They’re laying off people at Channel 5,” she said in her perfectly articulated voice.

“Coming soon to a theater near you,” Isaiah said.

Here we go again. Every week there was some new anecdote about the demise of broadcast television. Now it’s true that awhile back when the sponsors were losing money and pulling their ads, I panicked a little. Our fate was tied with theirs. But you didn’t cry disaster in the face of disaster. You put on your game face and dug in harder.

“They’re offering early retirement,” I said. “Not layoffs.”

“Same thing.” Moira shrugged one of her shoulders, as if she didn’t care enough to exert both. “The experienced people lose their jobs.”

“Not nearly the same,” I argued. “Early retirement comes with a big, fat paycheck that no one would take if they didn’t want to.”

“I’d love to get money for nothing,” Nelson said, and then he leaned across the table toward me. “What are you huddled over?”

“It’s called a press release. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”

“A press release of what? A Rorschach test?”

I studied the eerie eyes of Evelyn Carney again. “It’s supposed to be a picture of a woman missing from Georgetown.”

“It’s the picture that’s missing,” Nelson said with disdain. “That ink stain could be anybody. You, Moira, anybody.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “Yeah,” I said, and then to Isaiah, “Get the police to email a color photo, will you?”

When he opened the glass door to go, I asked Isaiah to find Ben. “Ask him to call his cop buddies. See what they think of the case.”

He gestured to the digital clock above the bank of televisions, meaning Ben was late, as usual. “I’ll try to find him, but you know how it is with the beautiful people,” Isaiah said. “No offense, Moira.”

She did her one-shoulder shrug.

__________

Later, when the evening news was under way, I left the control room and climbed the stairs to my office, where I turned off the overhead lights. The soft yellow desk lamp threw shadows over shelves holding my mother’s antique tea set and my books, waiting like old friends. There were shadows, too, on the awards hung on the walls—some from stories with Ben, some all my own—and on the framed articles I wrote during my early days at the Washington Post.

I kicked off my shoes, and lifting the remotes from my desk, turned on the monitors showing newscasts from each competing station, leaving them on mute. At the end of the hour, the color photograph of the missing woman flashed across the row of monitors simultaneously.

Evelyn Carney was young and pretty, with shoulder-length brown hair, thick and wavy, wilder than my own. Her skin was rosier, too, and her face rounder, and her green eyes tilted up in the corners like a Disney princess.

I’d seen her before, but not in person. She’d been in a video, although I couldn’t place the clip. It’d been brief, maybe two seconds long, three at most. Probably a cutaway shot, one of those quick flashes of video used to show a reaction, but I couldn’t be certain.

I went to my desk and clicked on the database for archived video on my computer and ran a search for Evelyn Carney. Her name brought up no hits. I was expanding the search when Ben knocked on my door.

He must’ve come directly from the anchor desk. His face was still covered in makeup, and his dark hair had that perfect gelatinous sheen he’d mess up as soon as he hit the street. He was giving me that look of his, his smile slow and dark eyes direct, as if I were the only woman in the world. I was pretty sure he looked at all women that way.

“I’m in the mood for some Russian lit,” he said, and I waved him in. He bent his big body to the bookshelf, pulling out the hardbound copies of Anna Karenina and War and Peace and grabbing the bottle of vodka they hid. He poured a hefty shot into the teacup from my mother’s set. His hand eclipsed the cup as he swirled it. “I always wondered what you kept behind your Ulysses.”

“Stay away from my Irish,” I said. “The alcohol isn’t a good idea anyway.”

He lifted his cup. “To all the bad ideas that make life worth living,” he said and tossed back the shot, a momentary grimace on his handsome face.

I rotated the monitor with its picture of Evelyn to face him. “Where have we seen her before?”

One eyebrow shot up. “We have?”

“On video,” I said. “Somewhere.”

He dragged a chair stuttering across the carpet, flipped it backward, and sat with his elbows on my desk. He angled the monitor for better viewing.

My nails drummed across the top of the desk.

“Shhh,” he said without looking away from the monitor, pressing the tips of his fingers against mine, stilling them. He had thick-veined, red-knuckled hands marred by a half-moon scar; strong, capable hands. When I pulled mine away, a corner of his mouth lifted. He continued to study the photo.

Finally, he said, “I’ve never seen this woman in my life.”

“And you’d remember because she’s beautiful.” I’d meant to tease him, but it came out like a complaint.

He looked up. “But you remember?”

“I’ve seen her in a short clip. I can’t place it.”

“What goes on in there?” he said, tapping his forehead. “How does that work?”

As I concentrated, my eyes grew heavy, and the memory isolated, sharpened: “It’s two seconds of video. A crowd-reaction shot to a main story that I can’t see. She’s clear, though, dead center in an audience of some sort, seated. The rest of the room, or any identifying feature, is beyond the frame.”

My forehead scrunched up. “But the woman, this Evelyn Carney—she’s got the photographer’s attention. It’s the way she leans forward, some intense emotion …” My voice drifted off.

“You can’t read the emotion?” he asked softly. “Or you can’t see it clearly?”

“I don’t understand it. Whatever it is, she’s alone in it. No one around her acts as she does.” I blew out a breath of frustration. “All I got.”

He eased back in the chair. “You think she’s going to be a big story?”

“Not sure. I need more information.”

“That’s why you had Isaiah hunt me down, nagging me to make calls.”

“Isaiah asked you to do your job. You used to love reporting.” I paused. “That was before the anchor desk ruined you.”

He laughed. “Poke at me all you please. I know about your soft underbelly. Besides, men like mean women. Mean or crazy, not both at the same time. Not even I could handle that.”

“Not true.”

“You’re right. I probably could handle that.”

“About what men like, I mean.”

“Truest thing I can tell you, Virginia.”

I lifted my hands impatiently. “Did you get information on Evelyn Carney or not?” If I let him, he’d draw the whole damn thing out all night. He had to be the slowest newsman I’d ever met.

He had discovered that Evelyn was a recent law school graduate.

She worked at a prestigious firm. On the night she disappeared, she had dinner at a restaurant in Georgetown. His source didn’t know the name of her dinner date, but she left alone. Police recovered her car, abandoned not fifty yards from the restaurant. I asked if we could get a shot of the car.

“It’s in the garage at Mobile Crime,” he said.

“So investigators think something bad happened. What does your guy think?”

“My guy always thinks something bad happened. He says the chief took the case out of the district today. She assigned it to detectives up at CID.”

Criminal Investigations wouldn’t normally handle a missing persons case so soon, not unless there were special circumstances. I wondered what those might be.

“How about we grab some dinner?” Ben said.

I gazed up, still lost in my what-ifs about Evelyn Carney.

“Someplace quiet,” he went on. “You could expense it, we both get a free meal, and we could talk. We need to talk.”

“About the case?”

He stretched his shoulders, pushing outward, as if fighting some terrible constriction, before he hefted himself from the chair and made his way to the door.

I waved helplessly at the spread of papers over my desk. “It’s only that, you know, there’s so much—”

“Work, yeah, I know.”

After Ben left, I searched again for that video of Evelyn. It was maddening. I began to question what I’d remembered. Maybe the video hadn’t even been on our news. Maybe it was video from a competing station. That was especially worrisome.

By the time I looked up from the computer, bleary-eyed, it was late. So I sorted my work into piles of what I’d done and what I’d yet to do and made a note about assigning someone to resume the video search tomorrow, knowing in the end, that someone would probably be me.

It was a five-minute drive to my neighborhood in Cleveland Park. I parked a half block from my house, the closest spot I could find. The night was cool and clear and the street was cast in blue. A full moon was over the National Cathedral tower.

From beneath the seat of my car, I pulled out my three-cell flashlight, heavy with a patterned grip that felt good in my hand. It was the kind beat cops carried not for illumination but as yet another weapon, the same reason I carried it up the brick walkway and onto my porch. I went inside and locked the door. The click of the security bolt echoed through my empty house.

CHAPTER TWO

MY MEMORY ISN’T exactly photographic. For instance, my mind doesn’t collect reams of newsprint or prose, and numbers are a completely foreign language. Only pictures burn a permanent place in my memory, a terrific gift at deadline. I can remember the angle of every frame I’ve used, where it was shot, what time of year, if there were leaves on the trees or snow on the ground, tourists mingling in the foreground, that sort of thing. But here’s the flip side of that shiny coin: you can’t get rid of a picture, either. Not even when it hurts you.

That’s how I got into trouble about five years back. During what would become my final stint as an on-air reporter, I’d been working the story of a mother and daughter gone missing from a DC suburb. Turns out, the husband had refused to pay back a debt to some really bad guys. I don’t remember all those details. Only what happened to the mother and her girl. The police requested help from the FBI, and one of the agents assigned was a guy I often used as a source, so I pretty much owned the story. But soon the story owned me, too: long days and sleepless nights, the meals I went without—nothing mattered except finding that mother and her daughter.

One morning, my source tipped me to a search in a remote park north of the city. It was large and densely wooded and leaves covered tangled paths that merged into one another. In my hurry, I got lost. When I found the crime scene tape, I was no longer certain which side I was on, so I followed the tape until I heard the growl of an engine.

About a dozen searchers circled a crane, which was lowering a steel drum to the sand. The drum was wet with pond water. One of the searchers struggled with a crowbar to break the seal. Finally, there was a loud crunch as the drum opened and a thud as the heavy lid fell on the sand. The crane operator cut the engine, and everything went silent as the searchers clustered.

I moved closer. The top of a woman’s head was visible, the white line of her scalp glowed against shiny black hair. Her body was curled inside, chin tucked to one shoulder and arms held outward, protectively it seemed. And then I saw what—or rather whom—she’d been trying to protect.

A child cradled in her arms.

It came to me at once: the last moments inside that drum, the mother trying to soothe her little girl, both trapped inside that black, cramped, airless space with the water sloshing outside. And then I heard another thing, too. It was soft as the breeze through the tops of the trees, an echo of a woman’s whisper: It’s okay. Mama loves you. Someone will come for us.

And no one had come.

Well, I couldn’t do that live shot. I couldn’t even lift myself from the path. My limbs felt heavy, waterlogged, and my heart thumped in my ears, competing with the huh-huh-huh of my choppy breath. When someone tried to help me up, I had to sit back down again. That’s really all I remember.

Isaiah covered for me. He sent the new guy at the station, a reporter named Ben Pearce, to take over my story. When the live shot was over, Ben drove me back to the station, where Isaiah lectured me on my susceptibility to certain stories, on letting myself get all run down. You don’t take care of yourself, he’d said. You can’t do field work if you don’t take care of yourself, simple as that.

That story marked my fall from the highest of highs, and yet I learned to love producing. For me, it has always been about telling stories, no matter where you do it—in front of the camera or behind it—and it’s the best gig going. You hold on to it for as long as you can, knowing that one morning you can wake up at the pinnacle, and by nightfall, you’re clinging to your career by your fingertips. In a snap, just like that.

__________

The next morning, I cut across the cathedral grounds on my walk to work. At Wisconsin Avenue, someone had taped Evelyn’s missing persons poster onto a bus-stop enclosure. The edges of the poster were already curled in the cool, moist air. Another poster hung in the window of my favorite coffee shop. I opened its door, assaulted by the strong coffee smell. You could get a buzz just standing there.

The barista, Alonzo, was a tall guy with dreadlocks. I’d been coming to his coffee shop for years. When he greeted me from behind the espresso machine, I ordered my usual—a black coffee, the biggest cup they had.

“That poster in the window,” I said. “Do you know her? Evelyn Carney?”

“Yeah, actually, I do. She’s a customer.” He talked as he worked the espresso machine. The line behind me began to swell. “Her friend handed out posters yesterday and asked us to hang one up. I said, sure, I’m happy to help.”

“So Evelyn lives in the neighborhood?”

“Probably works in an office around here,” he said. “She and her friend come in for a coffee from time to time, always with a stack of files they’re going through. They’re all about the work. Her friend Paige”—intoning her name so you could tell what he was thinking—“she can wear a suit, believe me.”

I laughed. “You got a number for your Paige?”

“She gave me her business card. Give me a minute to clear the line. I’ll get it for you.”

I moved over to the bar and sat, my heel resting on the rung of the stool, and warmed my hands on the cup. The coffee was deliciously hot and bitter as always. A well-thumbed City Paper was spread across the bar. I flipped through it while waiting for Alonzo’s break. Finally it came. He strutted out of the back room, waving a little card.

“You don’t think something bad happened to her?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’d like to find out.”

He hesitated, saying, “Paige didn’t say I could give her number out. But you’d be helping, right? Put her picture on the news, do a story or something, then she comes home?”

“That’s the idea.”

I copied the phone number onto my notepad, double-checking the spelling of the law firm, then handed the card back.

“You get the story and find the girl, be sure to make me the hero,” he said, smiling. “Paige gives me her digits, and I get my just desserts.”

__________

Our newsroom and studios were housed on the top floors of a square building erected during the ugly era of American architecture. It sat atop the highest point in Washington, a hill shared by other news stations to the south of us.

A delivery cart blocked the building entrance. Some boxes had fallen from the cart and into the automatic door, jamming it. The delivery guy was struggling and people behind him complaining, but no one stepped forward to help the guy. I didn’t, either, distracted as I was by my expanding list of priorities for the morning: the video search for Evelyn, follow-up calls to police for the latest in the investigation, and now this contact number for Evelyn’s friend Paige Linden. I’d assign my best reporter, Alexa Lopez, to call her. Alexa had a softness that disguised her tenacity and a wonderful way of making people talk.

Once the deliveryman cleared out, the guard waved me through, saying, “Good morning, Ms. Knightly.” His attention went to someone behind me.

A woman stood in the entrance. She wore boots the way a cat arches its back, her face was something you’d see touched up in a magazine—big eyes, small nose, cheeks curved like a Ming vase—and her blond hair swung in the light. She had TV written all over her.

The elevator doors opened, and inside, Isaiah stood slack-jawed. I got in and pushed the button. “You might want to close your mouth before the drool runs out,” I joked.

He looked at me over his horn-rims. “Do they get younger every year? It’s a terrible thing to grow old in a young person’s business.”

“You are not old. You are experienced, respected, and skilled. You are necessary.”

He gave me a gentle smile. “Your affection blinds you.”

The elevator arrived at our floor. We stepped into the cold air made for machines, not men. Across the newsroom, Alexa Lopez was rapid-fire cursing in a way that sounded like beautiful Spanish poetry, if you didn’t know what she was saying. I didn’t habla, but in a Washington newsroom, you picked up gutter words in many different languages. I moved quickly for damage control. Alexa was waving a camera media card beneath Nelson’s chin. “He shot me fat,” she said.

Nelson leaned into her, his mop of black hair falling over unshaven cheeks. His checkered scarf wafted against her. It looked like the beginning of an embrace except for those two sharp chins pointing at each other and the card she used to slash at the scarf.

“I shot her,” he said, “She’s—”

“Don’t you say it.” Her face was flushed, her dark eyes wild.

“I was going to say—”

“Don’t even think it,” she said, and then to me: “This is how he gets back at me.”

“I’m an artist,” he sneered. “Not a plastic surgeon.”

“Chinga tu madre.” We all understood that one. The newsroom went silent, except for the chirping police scanners and ringing phones, which no one answered.

“No arguing in the newsroom,” I said, trying to push Alexa along. She wouldn’t budge. I said, “Show me your stand-up in my office. I’m sure you look great. If you need a retake, we’ll get someone to do that, but it has to be fast. I have a more important story for you.”

“It’s killing him,” she said. “He still hasn’t gotten over me.”

Great red splotches colored Nelson’s cheeks. “Gotten over you? You dumped me last night.”

They were shouting now. My efforts to come between them had failed miserably. Several writers lifted their heads from their desks, and there was a grin or two but no help. At the far side of the newsroom, Ben came out of the elevator, pushing his mountain bike. I walked as quickly as I could without appearing to run to him.

“Alexa and Nelson are fighting,” I said. “Get your buddy out of here before I haul them both up to personnel.”

“No kidding.” He pulled off his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. “Look at this newsroom. They look like prairie dogs poking their heads out of the ground.” He pushed his bike leisurely past the cubicles. “On Sundays my grandma used to get all gussied up in her church hat and grab her favorite rifle and go prairie dog hunting. Hell of a shot, my grandma. Too bad we had to take away her gun.”

We crossed the newsroom. Ben leaned his bike against his hip as he pulled off his gloves. “You guys fighting?” he asked Alexa.

“He’s trying to kill my career.”

“No one can kill your career,” he told her. “You’re a great reporter.”

She gave Ben a disbelieving look. “Don’t let him shoot you. He’d turn you into a hunchback. The great Emmy Award–winning Nelson Yang who shoots women—”

“Lower your voice,” I warned her.

“—and turns them into pigs.”

Nelson gasped. “She thinks she can wear white,” he told Ben. “How can she not know it makes her wide as a billboard?”

Ben whispered into Alexa’s ear. She blinked up at him from beneath thick lashes and sucked in her cheeks, biting the folds. It was a wicked, knowing look that had Nelson kneading his scarf. She walked away with a pronounced swivel in her hips.

“Nelson,” I said in warning.

He ignored me.

“Nelson,” I repeated. “Let her go.”

He chased after her.

“It’ll blow over now,” Ben said. He pointed across the room where Nelson had caught up with Alexa. Soon they were huddled in a corner.

As we strolled down the corridor toward my office, I told Ben about the phone number in my notepad, how I’d planned to assign the story to Alexa and Nelson.

“You could ask me to report,” he said. “I’m still pretty good in the field.”

“Try not to be absurd. You’re the anchor now.” A superanchor, if truth be told, as damn near celebrity as you could get in Washington, and it embarrassed the hell out of him.

“I’d take a field assignment if you ask nicely,” he teased. “You could produce for me, like back in the day. Write all the boring stuff I’m no good at writing.”

“You mean, like your script? Do your work?”

“Why not?” He grinned. “But I’d need you in the field with me, not stuck here. I may not be the deepest-thinking man on the planet, but even I understand you shouldn’t hole yourself up here day and night.”

“I can’t go out in the field,” I said in a cool voice. And I couldn’t. There was too much to do here at the station.

“Lost your nerve, didja?”

“My—nerve?”

“Settle down now. It happens.” He gave me his Anchor Ben look, his smile wry and dark eyes crinkled in the corners. “You used to be great in the field, but that was years ago, and now you’re not so sure of yourself. You’re afraid you’re rusty.”

“I am not—” And then I stopped. Hell, I probably would be rusty, now that I thought about it.

“We can shake off the rust together. All I’m saying.”

“I have responsibilities to the shows,” I said, hesitating. “And there’s the video of Evelyn I have to find.”

“Isaiah can cover the shows. He’s more than capable. Assign the video search to a couple of editors. Let them do what they do best.” His voice went low and slightly mocking, but of whom I wasn’t sure. “Come out and play. We can bust the story wide open. You know you want to.”

The idea was tantalizing.

I thought about the press release of Evelyn with those strange white spots for eyes, Evelyn who might need someone to help her, and this feeling crept up on me, catching me by surprise. It made no sense, and yet I couldn’t shake it. It was the loneliest damn feeling.

CHAPTER THREE

IN MY OFFICE, I pulled out my reporter notebook and Googled Paige Linden’s name with that of her firm, and bingo, her portrait was staring back at me. Bright smile. Direct gaze. Ash blond hair and darker blond eyebrows that slanted upward, giving her a shrewd look.

Her bio was impressive. Extensive bar and court admissions, good-sized list of memberships and boards, half page of representative experience. She’d graduated magna cum laude from law school and clerked for a federal appellate judge. Midthirties, I guessed, and already a partner at a firm that billed itself as one of the most experienced and respected practices in Washington, providing counsel to political candidates and elected officials, nonprofit and ideological groups, as well as major corporations.

Paige Linden was listed as Lawyer of the Year by Best Lawyers magazine. She was an up-and-comer, the one to watch.

I expanded the search with Paige’s name and found several blogs mentioning her. A snarky posting referred to Ms. Linden by her courtroom nickname, “Ana,” as in anaconda. Lovely and charming she may be, the blogger wrote, but stealthy. You don’t realize she’s crushing you until the air leaves your lungs. Jocular comments followed, many in the vein of: Sour grapes? and Paige trounce your sorry ass in court again, did she?

A City Paper blog described Paige as a whisper candidate to replace the retiring delegate to Congress. Other blogs went further, shaking the Magic 8 Ball: Would she run or wouldn’t she? And more seriously, who might back her? Whether she wanted to be the DC delegate was immaterial if she didn’t have the money to run.

From a news search of the Post’s archives: DC lawyer saves drowning boy, with a dateline from several years ago. A young boy from the Midwest had wandered off from his tour group near the Jefferson Memorial. He had been playing along the granite ledge when he slipped and fell into the Potomac. Bystanders wrung their hands. Paige Linden had been jogging on a nearby path and heard the commotion. She jumped in after the boy.

Our coverage of the rescue included a taped interview with Paige, her hair slicked back with river water and a gray blanket tossed like a cape over her shoulders. When asked if she’d been afraid to jump into the Potomac, a treacherous river known to claim lives every year, she shrugged. “I didn’t want the boy to be swept away,” she said, her modest words at odds with her defiant stare.

I dialed the number written in my reporter pad. Paige’s secretary put me on hold. After a short wait, Paige picked up. I told her I was producing a story about her friend’s disappearance. She didn’t say anything. I explained how the story could assist searchers by broadening the reach for potential witnesses. She didn’t want to talk.

“The police said I shouldn’t.” Her voice was like a tuning fork, resonant and pure pitched, and what she said perplexed me. She had to know how important it was to find a good witness. She was a lawyer after all. And then she explained, “The investigators said the media would turn it into a circus.”

My news ping went off. A circus to police equaled Big Story to us.

“But you understand the police are talking, right?” I paused for effect. “What they’re saying makes little sense. How does a woman go out to dinner in the heart of Georgetown on a Sunday night—” I flipped as noisily as I could through the blank pages of my notebook. “I’m sorry, who was she dining with?”

Her lovely voice became defensive. “Her husband, of course.”

“The police said she left the restaurant alone. Why would she leave without her husband?”

“You’re not going to report he did something wrong?” she said in a hard voice.

“Why don’t you tell me so I get it right?”

There was a long pause I didn’t fill. Most people were uncomfortable with silence, but not Paige. Finally, I prodded gently: “If Evelyn were my friend, I wouldn’t be concerned with helping some detective avoid a circus. I’d do whatever it took to bring my friend home.”

“Let me think about it.”

I told her about confidentiality and off-the-record sourcing. She could tell me anything, even what she didn’t want me to report, all to get a clear picture. “The clearer the picture, the more we can help Evelyn and her husband. What’s his name?”

“Peter. Peter Carney.”

“How can I get in touch with him?”

“I could give him your number. Maybe he’ll call. He might be too upset.”

“Lots of upset people talk,” I told her. “It’s the best way to find their loved ones.”

She wanted to check with detectives. I knew where that would leave me, but I let her go. I hadn’t been so long from the field that I forgot you couldn’t push. You had to let the game come to you. Before she hung up, she took my phone numbers and agreed to let me check in with her.

But I was puzzled. For one thing, investigators seemed to be acting against their best interests. Paige Linden seemed the perfect spokes-person for her friend Evelyn, so why hold her back? How could this become a circus?

Alexa hurried into my office without knocking. She had the media card in her hand again. “Need to chat,” she singsonged, coming around my desk and handing it over to me. “Listen, I adore Nelson, I do.”

“Less I know about that, the better,” I said dryly.

“His talent is amazing,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Same time, he’s too emotional, and all those emotions get in the way of my work. Now, I don’t want to upset him more than he already is.”

“Meaning, you want me to separate the two of you.”

“Yes.”

“Reassign him without looking like you’re behind it.”

She huffed out a breath. “Take a look at what he’s put together. You’ll see.”

It was an audition reel of Alexa’s stand-ups. These kinds of reels were usually sent with an accompanying résumé to prospective employers, people other than me, maybe my competitors. She was prowling for another job. I tried not to feel betrayed.

As she sped through the images, one clip caught my eye.

“Stop,” I told her.

The frame froze on Alexa talking into a microphone in front of a historic stone building now used as a community center. Police cruisers were parked in the background. “What’s the story here?” I asked.

It was from her report of last summer’s Big Story, a serial rapist stalking the jogging paths of Rock Creek Park. One of the victims had died from her injuries, and the police set up a task force with undercover female police officers jogging the paths. No one had been arrested. The attacks had stopped with the cold weather.

“Where’s the rest of the video?”

“I don’t know,” she said, dismissive. “This is the stand-up reel Nelson put together for me. But it’s the perfect example of how great he makes me look when he’s not trying to sabotage me. Wait until you see the next one.”

My phone rang. I was being cordially summoned to a meeting with my boss, the news director. I tried to buck it—pressing issue with a reporter, I said—but his secretary said he wasn’t having excuses. Mellay was in a mood, she warned.

__________

Nick Mellay’s office had swallowed the sun-filled side of the newsroom. He’d had a wall removed, cutting into our conference room, and filled his cavernous space with extravagant furniture, a ridiculous expense for a station struggling to stay on budget and for a news director who probably wouldn’t last.

He was a small man behind a big desk, his chair raised to its highest notch. He always seemed to be bursting with something. With Mellay, you never really knew what that something was. He was often brilliant, sometimes lacking judgment, but most of the time he wasn’t around, which was fine by me. In my eight years at the station, I’d survived five news directors. One had been very good. Naturally, he’d gotten fired. The rest had neither helped nor hurt anything. They’d gotten fired, too. Two months ago, we got Mellay.

He was blathering on about his glory days in network news, and I tuned out, having heard it all before. Instead, I was thinking of Evelyn Carney. I had to get her address. Maybe I could get an interview with her husband. If he wasn’t home, I’d check out the neighborhood, ask around about her.

Mellay had stopped talking and was staring at me.

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you think?” he said. “You help me get the ratings up, and when I go back to network, you get all this.” He spread his arms wide. “I can make it yours.”

I kept my expression blank.

“You don’t like my offer?”

“Of course I want the ratings up,” I said carefully. “I’ll work as hard as I can, whatever it takes.”

His head tilted to the side, and the overhead lights glinted off his glasses. “You want something else?”

I wanted what I had. Editorial control. Not only what stories to cover but how to cover them. A news director had the business of news, the endless chess match of ratings and demographics, lead-ins and audience share, courtship with advertisers. That wasn’t for me. I loved stories for their human foibles, their pulse and their heat, and in the best stories, their mystery. It was the unknowable that hooked me.

But I wouldn’t tell him what I loved. That’s when it was always taken away.

“I wouldn’t presume to know your job,” I said carefully.

“Then I really can’t understand your announcement in yesterday’s meeting.”

“What announcement?” I didn’t remember making one.

“You promised no layoffs.” He shook his head, mugging disbelief. “In this difficult economy? Particularly with the ratings your shows have been posting?”

“Oh, well, I did tell my staff—”

“Not your staff.”

“There’s word all over town about newspapers folding and television stations laying off employees, but I told them—your staff—that our shows are still number one. The budget’s in good shape, all things considered, but they worry about competition from nontraditional content providers.”

“By whose authority were you speaking?”

The authority I’d always spoken with. I was executive producer, second in command who oversaw day-to-day operations, the afternoon and evening newscasts, the person who made the shows happen. But I held my tongue.

“There’s going to be some reshuffling,” he said. “Some contracts won’t be renewed. Others might lose their jobs.”

My mind automatically went to the names and faces of the most vulnerable among my staff. And they were my staff. He didn’t love them. Not like I did.

But I said nothing. Showing emotion would get me nowhere.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” he said, “what have you got for tonight? What’s the lead?”

For a moment I considered showing him Evelyn’s missing persons poster, and then I stopped. I had this vague feeling I should protect Evelyn or my idea of what Evelyn’s story might be. Instead, I rattled off a handful of news stories probably every other newscast would have, and in the midst of it, mentioned the woman who hadn’t been seen since Sunday night. “Police aren’t saying much, certainly nothing to indicate foul play. If they don’t find her today, we can run her picture again.”

None of that was a lie, I reasoned.

“That’s the problem.” He stood up and leaned over his desk, his palms on the blotter. “None of those stories have any chance of increasing the number of viewers, which our survival depends on. Now I like you. I admire your work ethic. But I just don’t see the vision.”

And then he gave me a cool smile and his dimple appeared. That dimple gave me a bad feeling.

“Meantime, there’s inefficiency in upper management I’ve got to rectify,” he went on. “We don’t need two people overseeing content and production of the shows, right?”

“We don’t have two people,” I said warily. “We have me.”

“Starting today, the shows have me.” He came around the desk to me. “I need to get in there and see what’s going on. You’d only be in the way.”

He was demoting me, firing me—I wasn’t sure which—but certainly he was stealing my shows. I concentrated on my breath, my smile, how the act of smiling was supposed to change your inner chemistry. It didn’t change a damn thing. Still, I held on to that stupid smile.

He sighed. “I’m not firing you, okay?” He lifted his jacket sleeve and checked his watch, not even bothering to hide it. “Once I get us on the right track, maybe you get your shows back. Meantime, you won’t lose face. Keep your parking spot and your memberships we pay for. And at the correspondents dinner next week, I’ll seat you at the big boy table with me.”

“But if my shows are gone, what do I do?” It was my beggar’s voice, and I could’ve kicked myself, except he’d already done it for me.

He wasn’t listening. He was gazing over my shoulder. The blond beauty queen from the downstairs lobby was now posing in his doorway, her shiny black boots crossed at the ankle and one knee bent out provocatively. A yellow umbrella was swinging from her wrist. It was quite the look, all for him.

“Later,” he said, as he brushed past me to get to the girl.

__________

I held on to my anger for as long as I could. It was my easiest emotion, all wrapped up as it was in virtue or maybe self-righteousness. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I sat hunched over my desk, forehead resting on clenched fists, telling myself I’d find my way back to my shows. There was always a way. For now, what I could do was the work.

I called the Metropolitan Police Public Information Office, better known as the Lack of Information Office. The officer who picked up the phone asked if I’d gotten the press release about Evelyn.

“Did you send one today?”

“No. Yesterday.”

“I got yesterday’s,” I said. “What’s new today?”

“That’s all we got.”

“But investigators must be doing something. I want to report it.”

He didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure he was still on the line, and then I heard a yawn.

“Let’s start with the basics,” I said. “Who’s Evelyn Carney? What was she doing when she disappeared? Where was she going?”

“I don’t have that kind of information.”

“All right, put me on the phone with someone who does.”

“This office is handling all inquiries.”

Now I remembered the other reason I’d come in from the field. “You don’t know the answers,” I said. “Or you’re not doing anything to get answers? Maybe you have no one investigating the case?”

He hung up on me. I called back.

“Did we get disconnected?” he said.

“Very cute. May I speak with your boss? Captain Andrews?”

“He’s not in.”

“Then I’ll leave a message,” I said. “Please tell him I need concrete answers to specific questions directed to his office in time for my newscast.” I listed them, all simple and easy, the basic who-what-where type, and told him if I didn’t get a response by my deadline, I’d be asking the next logical question: why wasn’t the investigation moving forward? Or, as he seemed to suggest, was there no investigation? And I’d be asking those questions on air.

He cursed. “Give me a break, will you? We get at least ten thousand reports a year for missing people, almost all of them runaways. Tell me how this woman rates.”

“If she doesn’t rate,” I said, keeping my temper on a leash, “why’d your office put out the press release? You guys asked us to help you, remember?”

“Upstairs wanted it out, so it gets out. I don’t ask why. I just do what I’m told.”

Upstairs—now that piqued my curiosity. Upstairs meant the top floor of police headquarters, which housed the offices of the command staff, the chief, and all of her deputies. If it had been atypical for Criminal Investigations detectives to lead the investigation of a missing persons case, it was much more so for the command staff to get involved.

After I hung up, my fingertips clacked across my computer keyboard as I ran more searches, this time for anything linking Evelyn Carney to the Metropolitan Police before her disappearance, particularly to its chief, command staff, or to any of the District’s community or neighborhood crime watch groups whose meetings police officials frequent. Nothing. If she had a footprint on social media, I couldn’t find that, either.

My fingertips tapped the desk as I thought it through: how did a young lawyer at a prestigious law firm that dealt in business and politics make an impression on a city police official? I’d covered political stories and crime stories, even the occasional political that became a crime story (usually over sex or money), but generally speaking, the two were worlds apart. So how had Evelyn Carney encountered a police official? Had she reported or witnessed a crime? A search on the databases for the DC courts came up blank. I left a message with a friend in the Clerk’s Office at DC Superior Court.

Through one of the pricey databases linked to public records, I typed Evelyn’s name with her age and came up with an address on the southeast side of Capitol Hill. A man named Peter Carney also lived there. I printed the information and tossed it into my satchel, along with a notepad and my phone.

And then I thought Mellay? Should I tell him? Or … ask him? I’d always found it more palatable to seek a man’s forgiveness than his permission. Then again, Mellay was a pretty unforgiving guy.

I went back and forth, worrying my lip with my teeth, until I decided: the answer was always the story. I’d help Evelyn and Evelyn’s story would help me, and by extension, my station. That was the calculation, anyway.

The hell with Mellay.