Every Secret Thing

“Another police source,” Nostrildamus said dismissively. “They were playing you, one side against the other.”

Mira hesitated, then plunged ahead: “No. My other source is not with the department.” She had to concentrate fiercely, lest she drop a pronoun or any other clue. “This source is someone in an unusual position, who has complete knowledge of the investigation, but no ties to the department. Is, if anything, somewhat hostile to it.”

“How can that be?” Quasimoto demanded.

“If I tell you more, I’ll end up disclosing my source’s identity. And that’s the one thing I had to promise not to do.”

“When you promise to keep a source’s identity confidential, you’re promising to keep it from the newspaper’s readers, not the editors.” Nostrildamus probably thought his tone warm and persuasive, but it was merely creepy, the tone of a parent trying to reason with an irrational child. “You can tell us.”

“No. My source was adamant that I must not tell anyone.”

“If you don’t tell us your source, we can’t run your story. I want someone on the record-not just a homicide detective saying he won’t deny that the police consider these two girls suspects.”

“She.”

“The source is a woman?” Nostrildamus pounced, proud of himself, thinking he had caught her.

“The detective is a woman. The source-I’m not going to tell you anything about my source.”

“Then you have no story. And given that you’re supposed to be the neighborhood reporter, I can’t really allow you to work on such a…speculative assignment. Why don’t you give your little tip to the county police reporter?”

Mira bit her lip. Cynthia Barnes had convinced her that the price of exposing her would be dire.

“You breathe my name to anyone, I will swear up and down you made this up, that I refused to speak to you. You will not write my name in that notebook, you will not use your little tape recorder. And who do you think will be believed? I have never spoken to a reporter before. Why would I speak to you?”

“Why did you call the news-room if you didn’t want to talk to the press?” Mira had countered.

“Why did I-but I did no such thing. You said yourself you only found me by sitting outside that poor woman’s apartment, seeing me drive away.”

“Someone called. Someone who sounded like you.”

“Black, you mean.” Cynthia had sniffed.

No, Mira thought. Not black, but trying to be someone’s idea of black. She had let it go, agreed to the conditions imposed. What choice did she have? She believed this woman could ruin her. She would say Mira made the story up, and everyone would believe her. Cynthia was the grieving mother, and Mira was the gullible reporter, and would be forever if she couldn’t figure out how to get this story in the paper.

“I can’t tell you my source,” she told Nostrildamus. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I was made to promise explicitly that I wouldn’t tell anyone, even my editors.”

“Just me, then,” Nostrildamus said. “Dominic will leave the room.”

Quasimoto looked startled by the request, but rose to his feet and shuffled out, eyes on his telephone.

“Okay, Mira,” Nostrildamus said, the correct pronunciation of her name always a little threatening in the stingy circle of his mouth. “It’s just you and I now. My door is closed. I can keep a secret, so what’s the harm in telling me?”

“I made a promise,” she said miserably, wondering at a world where a newspaper editor said “just you and I.”

“You don’t have the authority to make such promises.”

“It was the only way to get the story.”

Nostrildamus slammed his body against the back of his chair and glared at her. “Well, you don’t have a story, so your promise was for nothing.”

A question, she had to ask a question. She had to allow him to direct her, to fix her, to find the solution.

“Is there anything I can do-on my own time-that would make it satisfactory?”

He spoke without thinking. But then, Nostrildamus never had to think about what he said because he never listened to what anyone else said.

“You should get the girls.”

“What?”

“Interview the girls. Both of them. Then come back to me, and we’ll talk about whether you have a story.”

Mira left his office, dazed with dread, feeling as if the wizard had asked her to bring back the broomstick of the Witch of the West. She tried to console herself with her usual mantra. Failure is not an option. Failure is not an option. But she was worried that even success was risky in this situation, that the only thing worse than failing to do what was demanded of her was actually doing it.

33.

Infante and Nancy arrived back at the office to find dozens of cardboard boxes stacked around their desks, creating partitions where none had been.

“The M s,” Lenhardt said. “Courtesy of the Department of Juvenile Services. They began arriving about twenty minutes after you left. Naturally. As soon as we decided we could live without them, they found them.”

“That’s a lot of M s,” Infante said, going straight to a box and poking its contents with one finger.

“Best I can tell, it’s about twenty years’ worth of M s. I’m not sure if they just didn’t understand the subpoena, or if they don’t care that they’ve routinely violated the privacy rights of every M and M who spent time with them. The grunt I talked to said they just wanted to help, however they could.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be the scariest sentence in the world?” Infante asked. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.”

Nancy did not speak at all, just stood in the middle of the boxes, clutching the baggie with the earring. She had made sure Ro

“You want me to take that up to eleven?” Infante asked Nancy now.

“Yeah,” Nancy said. “Yeah, that would be great.”

“What was that about?” Lenhardt asked once Infante had left.

“An earring. We found it in the stairwell. Turns out that there was a malfunctioning video camera outside one of the Value City exits. Mall management took it down and pretended it wasn’t there because they thought the mom might sue them.”

“It’s a long shot that the lab will recover anything from that.”

“I know. And it’s so ordinary the mom won’t be able to identify it. But we’re just covering the bases.”

“Good.”

Lenhardt went back into his office. Nancy stood among the boxes for almost a full minute before she followed him in. He looked as if he had been waiting for her.

“You got something you want to say to me, Nancy?”

“A reporter-I don’t know how she got my pager number-she called and she knew stuff. I kept saying ‘no comment,’ but she kept twisting it, saying that if I didn’t say anything I was confirming it, and if I did say anything I was confirming it. I-I-didn’t know what to say.”

“What kind of stuff, Nancy?”

“She knew that we were looking at the girls, the ones who killed Olivia Barnes. She had their names. She said she was going to write that we were talking to them.”

“Well, there’s nothing you can do about that.”

“But if a story comes out, people will think I did it. That I talked.”

“And?”

“And they won’t want to work with me.”

“Does Infante think you talked to the media?”

“No, he knows I didn’t.”

“Well, now I know, too. And I’ll make sure the lieutenant and the major know what happened, so why are you so worried?”

Nancy shook her head, afraid her voice would come out thick if she tried to speak right away. Before she had entered the academy, her uncles had sat her down one night and taught her how not to cry. “You’re a statue, see?” Stan Kolchak had said. “You can’t feel anything. You can’t really hear anything,” Milton Kolchak had said. “You just stare in the middle distance and pretend you’re made out of stone.”