Read Online Front Page Fatality by Lyndee Walker - Free Book Online Page B

there and what they were supposed to be doing?”
    He was silent for so long, I wondered if he had hung up.
    I waited.
    Still nothing.
    “Chief, are you there?” I asked finally.
    “I’m here.” There was something in his tone I couldn’t read. “I’m not in Richmond at the moment, and I’ve mostly been following Channel Four’s coverage on my cell phone, to tell you the truth.”
    My jaw clenched so abruptly my teeth clacked. The deputy chief of police was getting his news about dead officers from Charlie? Ouch.
    “I assumed the orders had been given by Commander Jones,” he said slowly. “I can’t fathom who or what put those boys on the river if they weren’t doing something for Jones.”
    Scooping Charlie looked more improbable with each phone call, but the thought of Bob sending Shelby in as reinforcement was enough to make me nauseous, and I refused to let Parker best me on an accident story. I opened my mouth to thank Lowe and go back to the drawing board, but he spoke again before I could.
    “You know, Miss Clarke, I’ve been meaning to call and tell you how much I appreciated the piece you did on my program,” he said. “That project is very dear to my heart. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to make a couple of calls and see if I can figure out what the hell’s going on up there. If I hit on anything, I’ll give you a call back. What’s the best number to reach you?”
    The heavens might as well have opened to a choir of angels.
    I thanked him and cradled the phone in a daze. My weekend just kept getting more curious. First, it was matching drug dealer slayings that likely had nothing to do with fat stacks of drug money. Then, two dead cops on a boat they’d ostensibly had no reason to have out.
    I threw my pen down and stomped in the direction of the break room, mulling over the scant facts I had.
    “I thought you were out of here until Monday?” Eunice, our grandmotherly features editor, called from behind me.
    I turned, waiting for her to catch up. A helicopter crash in Iraq during the first Bush administration had left our former war correspondent with a bad hip, a new job at the features desk, and plenty of time for cooking.
    “I thought I was, too.” My eyes flicked to the clock between the elevators, which practically chuckled at me that it was five after one.
    “Unfortunately, tragedies don’t care about weekends.” I waved a hand toward the TV, where Charlie clucked about Nate DeLuca’s boat and its maximum speed capability “I was late this morning, and it’s already after one o’clock. I’m never going to make deadline. Especially without caffeine.”
    “You better grab some and get moving.” Eunice patted my shoulder and stepped into the elevator. “Good luck, sugar.”
    Walking back to my desk with a half-empty Coke bottle, I found renewed determination. There was someone, somewhere, who knew what the hell was going on. I just needed to find them. In the next two hours and ten minutes.
    “Damn.” My eyes fell on the pink message slip on my laptop. Of course, I’d missed the call from Lowe. Under it, I found a post-it from which I learned two things: the first was that Parker had God-awful handwriting, which I had to decipher to get to the second: he was back and would email me his story when it was done in case he had info I wanted.
    Well, at least he hadn’t screwed up. The Telegraph would have something on Sunday no one else did, and in the age of digital information, that was damned hard to do. But my ego was getting more bruised by the second.
    I snatched a blue Bic out of my pen cup and dialed Lowe.
    “I’m not sure how much good my gratitude is going to do you today,” he said. “I can’t find anyone who knows diddly about Roberts and Freeman being on that boat last night. But I can tell you I ordered internal affairs to open a file. No one knows that but myself and the captain I spoke to.”
    An internal affairs investigation? I could work with