Thicker Than Water

She flung open the door and stepped through it. “I don’t know why it took so long,” she said, her voice as firm and strong as it was when she was on the air. “But you’ve finally pushed me too far. It’s finished, Harry. You’re not getting another nickel from me. You can drop this now, or I’m going to go to your brother and tell him everything.”

He sat in the small armchair, right where he’d been when she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom and gather her courage. As if he’d never moved. His back was to her. She could only see the top of his head. The little pink patch where his black hair was starting to thin. He said nothing, probably too surprised. She couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t been expecting this. Did he really think she would let him keep pushing?

“You can do whatever you want with the evidence, I don’t care,” she lied. She did care. “If it goes public, Harry, you’ll go to prison. I’ll see to it, even it means losing everything. Nobody wrongs me like this, much less threatens my daughter, and gets away with it. Nobody.”

She strode straight past him to the nightstand, wondering at the metallic smell in the air. He always brought copies of the damning evidence to these meetings. Always promised they were the last copies in existence as he sold them to her for large amounts of cash. Always insisted on closing the deal with a glass of champagne. And a month later, he always showed up with another set of demands. She looked down at the table. But the envelope was gone.

She turned slowly to face Harry. “All right, what did you do with the…”

Her voice tripped over a heartbeat when she faced him fully. He sat in the chair, just as he had before. Only now he was dead. The white dress shirt he wore was completely soaked in blood. So were his hands, and the chair itself, his shoes and the beige carpet underneath them.

Her gaze slid to his face again. The slightly open mouth. The wide, sightless eyes. The dark, gaping, bloody crescent in his long, skinny neck. Her body began to shake. A tremor formed somewhere down deep and worked its way outward to her hands and knees and even her head, lips, eyes. Fear gripped her heart like an icy fist as her gaze danced around the room. But no one else was there. Not now. She checked the tiny closet just to be sure, but it was empty. She was alone in the room, and Harry Blackwood was dead.

A wave of nausea rose up in her stomach as she lunged toward the door to turn the dead bolt. She barely got it done before she had to run for the bathroom again, and while she leaned over the toilet, she got so dizzy she nearly fell in.

When she could finally stop retching, she braced one hand on the tank to hold herself upright, knocked the lid down, flushed. Then she turned weakly to the sink to rinse her mouth.

It was as she turned the taps off again that she found herself blinking down at her hands on the knobs. And slowly a line of news copy printed itself across her mind.

Respected News Anchor Sole Suspect in Brutal Murder. Fingerprints Found at Scene. Blackmail Plot and Scandalous Past Uncovered.

“Details at eleven,” she whispered softly. She was swimming in motive. And standing in the middle of a visit that spelled opportunity in 30-point type. She closed her eyes. “No. No, goddammit.” Yanking tissues again, she used them to wipe the faucet and valves, the toilet tank, its handle and anything else she had touched in the bathroom. She tossed the used tissues into the wastebasket, and then grabbed a washcloth from the stack, wet it and wiped down the counter, the doorknob, everything. She removed the plastic bag from the wastebasket and carried it with her back into the main part of the hotel room. When she bent to wipe off the nightstand she had touched moments ago, an icy chill whispered along her spine. The envelope. Where was the envelope? What if the killer had taken it?

“Jesus. What is this? How could anyone know what was in that envelope? And why would they take it if they didn’t know, and…”

No time, not now, her mind whispered, and she found herself nodding in agreement. She had to move; she had to be smart, eliminate any hint of her presence and get the hell out of here, all unseen. She could not afford to panic.

Moving silently and quickly, her entire body still trembling, she wiped down the dead bolt, the doorknob, every surface and door frame in the room, anything she had even been close to, just in case she had rested her hand on any surface. She was careful, and she was thorough. She searched as she wiped. Every cupboard and drawer. She found a stack of self-help books by self-proclaimed psychics on the nightstand: John Andrews and Sylvia Brown and Nathan Z. But the envelope wasn’t there. It wasn’t under the bed. It wasn’t in Harry’s coat pockets or his shaving kit, and those were the only things in the entire room that belonged to him.

When she finished her search and her wiping, she dropped the washcloth into the wastepaper bag and looked around the room. There were two glasses on the table.

Her eyes were drawn back to the dead man in the chair. Her shaking intensified, and her breath began to rush in and out too quickly.

“Focus, dammit!” She barked the words aloud, forcing her attention to the job at hand, told herself to hurry before room service brought the champagne. She focused again on the two glasses. One nearly empty, one half full of whiskey. She picked up the fuller one, which had been hers. It had her prints on it, and maybe her lipstick. She downed the whiskey fast, grating her teeth against the burn and welcoming the warmth that spread outward from her belly when it landed. Then she added the glass to her bag of rubbish and backed toward the door. She yanked her tan trenchcoat from the back of the desk chair where she’d left it, hurriedly put it on, and used the sleeve to wipe off the back of the chair, where it had been hanging. Then, on the edge of panic again, she checked the large inside pocket. But the bundle of cash was still there. A sigh of relief tumbled from her lungs. She took the scarf and oversize sunglasses from another of the deep pockets and put them on. No one had recognized her coming in. She’d always done her best not to be noticed or recognized when meeting with her blackmailer to pay him off. She had become adept at that over the last six months. Thanks to Harry.

She took her small handbag, then pulled her coat sleeve over her hand to open the door and close it behind her, wiping the outer knob clean. At the elevator, she used that same coat sleeve to push the button. The car came to a stop. She tucked her little bag of rubbish underneath her coat as the doors slid open.

A short, round woman of Hispanic descent, wearing a teal designer knockoff dress, glanced at her, then looked away. At all, thin man with skin so pale he seemed colorless stood beside her in a cheap suit. He didn’t make eye contact at all. Julie stepped into the elevator, then went stiff from head to toe when a loud rattling sound came along the hall. As the elevator doors slid closed, she saw the young man, pushing the room service cart along the hall. Along for the ride were a champagne bottle in an ice bucket and two glasses. He stopped in front of Harry’s room.

Sickening fear choked Julie as the elevator doors closed and the car began to drop. That man. He would be opening Harry’s door about now. Finding his body. Shouting in horror. Jesus, she had to get out of here—fast.

The couple got off at the lobby. The moment they did, Julie reached out to wipe the button marked 12 clean of any prints she might have left on it on her way up earlier. She kept her back to the security camera, using her body to block her hands from its all-seeing gaze as she worked. She rode the elevator down to the lower level parking garage, and then she got off and hurried to her car. Her heels were loud in the darkness, clicking over the concrete. They sounded like gunshots to her raw senses.

She dipped in her pocket for her keys. Pushed aside the ever-present notebook, the mini-cassette recorder, the pen…Goddammit, where were her keys?

She stood where she was, ten feet from her Mercedes, closed her eyes and prayed as she slowly, methodically, searched every single pocket, without luck. She searched the small handbag, as well, but the keys were not there. God, please, tell me I didn’t leave them in Harry’s room. She couldn’t have. She couldn’t—

“Calm. Slow. Just think.”

Drawing a calming breath, she hit her mental rewind and then tried to replay the events of the last hour.

She knocked once. Harry opened the door and stood there smirking at her as she pushed past him to go inside. “I thought that twenty grand I paid you a month ago bought me the last copies.”

“I know,” he said, having the good sense to look guilty. “I lied. But this time, I swear, I brought the originals.” He turned and pointed toward the nightstand where the envelope rested. “Look for yourself, if you don’t believe me. I mean it, Jewel, this is the last time you’ll ever hear from me.”

She shook her head slowly, not looking at the items in the envelope. She knew well enough what it contained. The photographs of her at the compound. Proof that her daughter’s birth certificate was a fake. “No. No, you’re lying, just like you’ve been lying all along. This is never going to end, is it, Harry? You’ll keep on bleeding me until there’s nothing left, and then you’ll sell the evidence to the highest bidder anyway. Won’t you?”

“Come on, you know I won’t do that. I promise. This is the last time.” He walked away from her, sat in the chair and poured whiskey into two glasses. “Have a drink. You’re so damn tense you’re making me nervous, and the customary champagne isn’t here yet. Damn slow room service.”

She moved forward, slapped her keys onto the coffee table and picked up one of the glasses. After taking a slug, she set the glass down again.

“People trust you, you know. They respect your opinions. They count on you to be practical and levelheaded and reliable. That’s why you’re so good at what you do, Jewel.”

“It’s Julie.”

“Sure. Now. You’re good, and you know it. That’s why the networks have started sniffing around you.”

She looked at him sharply. “How the hell do you know about that?”

He shrugged, drank his whiskey. “I hear things. What, you think I don’t keep track of you? I probably know more about your life than you do. You know your station’s been talking to male news anchors?”

“What do you know about any of that?”

He smiled. “I know your ratings have been falling since your former coanchor retired. I know you prefer to keep the spotlight all to yourself. I know—”

“You just keep your nose out of my career, Harry. None of it has anything to do with you.”

He shook his head as if she were being ridiculous, then faced her squarely. “I need fifty thousand this time. Cash.”

Her throat tried to close, and she felt tears burn her eyes. Angry tears. Outraged tears. “You’re fucked, then, because I only brought twenty.” She yanked a fat wad of cash, bound in a rubber band, from the inside pocket of her coat, showed it to him.

“You’re fucked, then, ‘cause I can start the rag sheets’ bidding at seventy-five, and it’ll only go up from there. Come on, what happened to all that cash you stole from Mordecai?”

“It’s gone, Harry. I bought a house, a new identity, got an education. All I have now is what I earn at the station—”

“Which you’ll lose—if I share your secret with the world.”

“You wouldn’t dare…”

The look on his face told her that he would dare. God, she had to stop him. She held the cash out to him, silently pleading with him to take it and leave her alone. But he only looked at it as if it were something that smelled bad and then looked away. Julie stuffed the money back into her coat pocket and began to shake. She’d already paid him more than two hundred thousand dollars over the last six months. Her 401K was drained, and she’d had to sell stocks at a loss to get this additional twenty thousand for him.

“Well? Can you get another thirty or do I place a call to The Exposer?”

“I…don’t know. I…I don’t know how I can get another thirty. I don’t know.” She got up, paced back and forth. She was hot, sweating with it, so she peeled off her coat and hung it over a chair near the door. She needed to think, to clear her head. “I need to use the rest room,” she told him.

He shrugged. “It’s over there,” he said, nodding toward the door on the far side of the room. “Don’t be long. Time is money, babe.”

So she went into the bathroom….

“And when I came out, he was dead,” she whispered.

Blinking back to the present, she gave her head a firm shake. “The keys were on the coffee table. Dammit, why didn’t I see them when I was cleaning up?”

Because there were a dead man and a pool of blood in the room with you, some cynical voice inside her taunted. You may have been a little distracted.

“No. That’s not it. Maybe they got knocked off the table. Onto the floor. They must have. They were probably right there, on the floor, or maybe under the edge of a chair, or…” She shivered as her mind raced on. Maybe they were under that blood-soaked chair where she’d left Harry. Maybe they were on the blood-soaked carpet. “Oh God, oh Jesus.”

She had to go back.

The idea of walking back into that room sent her heart racing. Her knees felt weak, and she leaned on a support column to keep from falling over. This was idiotic. She didn’t hyperventilate, and she didn’t faint. It wasn’t in her to faint. But she felt goddamn close to it right now.

Just figure out what to do. Think, dammit!

Dawn. She could call Dawn. Have her bring the spare keys from the rack in the kitchen. She shouldn’t really be driving on her own. She only had her learner’s permit. But in an emergency…

Yeah, that’s the answer, Julie. Bring your daughter into this mess.

No. She couldn’t call Dawn. She didn’t want Dawn within a million miles of this nightmare. Dawn needed to be protected at all costs. Dawn was everything to her.

So think of something else, then.

But there was nothing else to think of. If the police found her keys in that room, that put her there. She had to go back. She wanted to argue with the calm, cool voice in her head. The news anchor voice. But she couldn’t. It was right.

She took a steadying breath, straightened her spine and took another. She’d been standing here, fighting panic and racking her brain, for twenty minutes. She could stand here all night, and it wouldn’t change the facts. She had to find a way to get back inside that room and get her keys before the police did. There wasn’t really a choice here. Turning, she walked firmly, steadily, to the elevator, stuffing the small garbage bag from Harry’s room into a large overfilled Dumpster on the way. Once again she used her coat sleeve to hit the elevator button.

The elevator went up, but not far. It stopped on the lobby level. The doors opened, and two men in police uniforms got on. “What floor did he say?” one was asking.

“Twelve. The manager who called it in is up there with the fellow who found him.”

Like a flash, Julie’s hand shot out to hit a button. Any button besides 12, because these two were cops, and they would damn well notice if 12 was the only button lit, and then they’d want to know why she was going there.

The doors slid closed, and one of the cops, a solid looking man with a face like a road map, hit the button marked 12, noticed it was already lit and glanced her way. The other one stood back. He was taller, leaner and younger. But if anything, he looked even meaner than his partner. Neither was familiar to her, and she considered that a lucky break. But the shorter one glanced at her briefly, then, with a frown, looked at her again.

The car stopped on the third floor, and the doors slid open. She left the elevator as if her feet were on fire, acting as if she were looking for her room key as she did.

When the doors closed again, she stopped, braced her hand on a wall and tried to stop shaking. The police were here already. Now what the hell was she going to do?

A door opened somewhere further down the hall, so she moved in the opposite direction, spotted the stair door ahead of her and headed toward it as if it were a haven.

It was cool and dark in the stairwell. Every breath echoed. But at least she was alone. She could think. She had to get back into that room before the cops found her keys. But how?

Sean MacKenzie didn’t like looking at dead people. You never really got used to it, he supposed. According to his police scanner, there was one waiting for him at the Armory Square Hotel. He’d been up. Lately, sleep was not an option. And trying to sleep when he couldn’t was sheer hell. So he spent a lot of time cruising the city, scanner on, looking for stories.

He had no idea how much it had paid off until he stood outside the door to room 1207, staring in at the body in the chair. His throat was slashed, and there was blood everywhere, and it was goddamn creepy the way the eyes stayed open and seemed to stare right at him. And then he recognized the stiff, and his heart skipped a beat.

“Jesus Christ, isn’t that Harry Blackwood?” he whispered to himself.

“My God, I think it is.”

He damn near jumped right out of his skin when that answering whisper came from so close beside him. He jerked his gaze to the side and saw his nemesis standing right beside him. Julie Jones.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Getting a story, just like you,” she told him.

“You don’t get stories. You read them.”

The two police officers had moved from the main room into the bathroom, checking it out. Other cops, homicide detectives, would be arriving any second to help secure the crime scene, and the two journalists would be tossed out on their asses.

“Have they found anything?” she asked him.

“You think I’d tell you if they had?”

She shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try to scoop me on the hard facts, MacKenzie. We both know you make them up as you go along.”

“At least I got my job based on my talent and not on my cleavage.”

She shot him a hate-filled glance. He mirrored it back at her. Then he yanked his camera out of the case that hung from his shoulder and snapped several photos of the dead man. The camera was the quietest one he owned, and he didn’t use the flash. It was a tacky and cheap thing to do, and he would probably be barred from selling the photos, Harry being who he had been, black sheep of a political family that rivaled royalty in New York State. But the photos would be worth some nice cash if he could get away with it.

She said, “You’re a ghoul, MacKenzie.” Then she shouldered him aside. “I’m going in there.” And she walked right into the room.

He reached out to grab her arm, to stop her, but his reaction wasn’t fast enough. She walked right into the crime scene. Granted, there was no yellow tape across the door just yet, but she still knew better. What the hell was she thinking?

She stood near the glass-topped coffee table, her back to him, a notebook in her hand, scribbling rapidly. Only it was odd, because she wasn’t really looking at the notepad as she wrote on it. She was scanning the room, craning her neck, looking at the floor, peering underneath the table. Sean didn’t see all that much of interest besides the body. What was she looking for?

The two cops came from the bathroom, one of them carrying a small zippered plastic evidence bag in his hand. Mac shoved the camera back into the case and backed off just a little, out of the line of fire, but still close enough to see. He was going to relish watching Julie Jones get her ass toasted for this temporary bout of idiocy or whatever had made her walk into that room. He didn’t really think she’d been sitting at the anchor desk long enough to have forgotten the procedure for crime scene reporting. The press did not trample crime scenes. Even he knew that much.

The cops froze in their tracks at the sight of her.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing in here? This is a crime scene!”

She jerked her head up sharply, and Sean saw the moment the cop recognized her. The most famous news anchor in Central NY. “I’m reporting. That’s what I do,” she said. She tucked the pencil behind her ear and started to open the little handbag she carried. “I have ID, if you—”

“Get your fucking ass out of here before I haul you in on an unlawful entry charge!”

It must have startled her, because she dropped the bag. Several items spilled out of it when it hit the floor.

“Jesus, you’re contaminating the hell out of my crime scene,” the second cop said, pushing past the first one toward her. He dropped to his knees on the floor, scooping up her items and shoving them back into her bag, then rising and pushing it into her hands even while shoving her bodily out the door. “You saw her drop that shit, didn’t you, Klein?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. There was nothing on the floor when we came in. It’s fine, just get her the fuck out before we end up explaining to the lieutenant how she got by us, all right? Jax will have us doing paperwork for a freaking month if she hears about this.”

Julie was pawing through the open bag as the cop shoved her out into the hallway. He caught sight of Sean. “You with her?”

“I’m just waiting for a statement.” Sean held up both hands, backing off.

“Stay out here.” The cop glanced at the camera bag. “And no photos.”

“Yes, sir.”

Julie was still digging through the purse. “Hey, hey, wait a minute. Where are my keys?”

Both cops turned. They did not look amused. Probably had visions of that paperwork mountain and an unpleasant session with their superiors dancing in their heads, Sean thought. He knew Lieutenant Jackson, and they were right. She would have them buried in paperwork for this.

Jones went through the items in the purse, taking them out one by one. A cell phone, a pack of gum, a business card case, an earring. “I can’t find my keys,” she said again.

“Jesus, lady, are you saying you lost ‘em in here?”

She searched all of her pockets. Made a big production about it, Sean thought. “I had them. And now I don’t. That’s all I know.”

One cop closed his eyes, sighing and shaking his head.

The other one was talking fast. “What do they look like?”

“The key ring is silver, in the shape of my initials. J. J. It’s got several keys on it. House, office, garage, file cabinet, my car, my daughter’s Jeep.”

As she kept talking, the other cop got back on the floor, looking underneath the chairs, shaking his head in disgust when he found nothing.

The other one said, “Look, if we find your keys, we’ll get ‘em to you, okay? That’s the best we can do for you, lady, and lemme tell you right now, if you breathe a word to anyone about this, I’ll see to it you never get any kind of cooperation from our department again. No tips, no exclusives, no press releases, and we’ll keep you so far away from crime scenes from now on that you’ll have watch someone else’s news show to get the details.” He glanced at Sean. “That goes for both of you. Understand?”

“Yes. Yes, of course I do,” Julie said quickly. “Thank you, Officer. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m so sorry.” She yanked the card case from her purse again, took out a card and handed it to him. “When you find the keys, just call me, all right?”

He muttered something unintelligible.

The other cop came forward. “Look, go wait in the lobby. Homicide and Forensics are on the way. I want you two out of here.”

“Can’t we at least get a statement?” Sean asked. And he couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t asked it first. Was she that rusty when it came to actual reporting? The elevator pinged and opened, and several plainclothes cops got out, including the one Sean thought of as the sexiest cop on the force—and maybe also the scariest—blond-haired, blue-eyed Lieutenant Cassandra Jackson.

“You want a statement?” she asked, honing in on the conversation as she strode toward the room. “Here’s your statement. ‘An unidentified man was found dead in the Armory Hotel. Police suspect foul play and an investigation is underway.’”