With that, the editor withdrew back into the semi-darkness and began his stately glide towards the National desk. Will fell back into Walton’s chair and let out what he knew was an audible sigh. The editor thought he was a junkie, about to go off the rails and ready to take the New York Times with him.
And now he was ‘getting some rest’. It sounded like a management euphemism for suspension, while they investigated the veracity of the Macrae and Baxter stories. Was that why the notebook was missing? Had Townsend taken it as evidence?
His fingers were still balled around the Saddam snow-dome, now misted over with clammy hand-moisture. He had held it tight throughout the entire conversation with Townsend. That would have looked great: not only wild-eyed, but his hand a permanent fist. As his fingers uncurled, he saw it again – the plain, thin key that would surely open Walton’s desk drawer. He knew it was madness to try it, having received an all but formal warning from the most senior man in US journalism. But he had no choice. His wife was a hostage and that notebook surely held the clue to getting her back.
Will glanced left and right and back again to see if anyone was nearby. He turned a complete circle, mindful that Townsend had surprised him from behind. Then, in a single rapid movement, he ripped the key from its sticky tape, ducked down and slid it inside the lock. One jiggle and it turned.
Inside were multiple neat, fawn-coloured files. Between them, hardly concealed, was the tell-tale white metal spiral of a reporters’ pad. Will pulled it out and saw the scribble on the thick, front cover.
Brownsville.
Jesus. Woodstein was not kidding: Walton had stolen his notebook. God only knew why. The story had already been published. There was no scoop to be scooped. What possible use could it be to him? Will put it out of his mind: there were enough puzzles to be solved without adding Walton’s bizarre strain of journalistic kleptomania to the pile.
Will wanted to start flicking through it right away, but he knew he had first to close the drawer, lock it, replace the key and return to his own desk – all without being spotted. Exactly what possibility he was guarding against, he was not sure. He had already been caught by the editor; the damage was done.
Even so, Will made sure he was hunched over his own desk before he so much as opened the book. He devised a method. First, a rapid-fire search for something alien: a note stashed inside that he had failed to see, a scrawled message in a hand other than his own. Perhaps, through some sorcery that remained utterly opaque, Yosef Yitzhok had smuggled a message onto these pages. Look to your work.
Will moved through it fast, scanning the lines in search of the unfamiliar. There was nothing, just his own scrawl. The newsroom was so quiet, CNN on Saturday evening mute, he could hear the pages turn. He could hear his own brain.
Briefly, he became excited by a couple of lines that leapt out, clearly written by someone else, but they turned out to be contact details for Rosa, the woman who had found Macrae’s body, scrawled onto the page in her own hand. Will now remembered that he had promised to send her a copy of the piece once it was published.
There was no mystery phone number, no smuggled message – not that there could have been with this notebook stashed in Walton’s filing cabinet since who knew when.
Instead he would have to stare very hard at the one clue he knew this book did contain, the thing that had brought him here. There it was, on one of the last pages, boxed and ringed with asterisks: the quote that had made the piece, from Letitia, the devoted wife who had contemplated prostitution rather than let her husband rot in jail. The man they killed last night may have sinned every day of his God-given life – but he was the most righteous man I have ever known.
In an instant, Will was back in Montana, talking to Beth on the cell phone. It was, he realized, the last conversation they had had before she was taken. He was telling her about his day spent reporting the life and death of Pat Baxter. He could hear his own voice, speaking animatedly, before realizing that Beth was miles away.
‘You know what’s weird. It hit me straight away because no one uses this word, or hardly ever: the surgeon who operated on Baxter used the same word as that Letitia woman. Righteous. They even used it the same way: “the most righteous person,” “the most righteous act.” Isn’t that strange?’
He had not pursued the point. He had rapidly realized Beth was elsewhere, preoccupied with the issue that should have been preoccupying him: their failure to have a baby. He felt his throat go dry: the thought that Beth might die never having known motherhood.
He pushed the notion away, staring down at his own handwriting on the page. The most righteous man I have ever known.
He had flirted with pointing out this uncanny echo when he wrote up the Baxter story but had ruled it out almost immediately. It would seem too self-regarding, noting a similarity between two stories whose only real common link was his own by-line. Baxter and Macrae lived at opposite ends of the country; their deaths were obviously unrelated. To notice a reverberation between one random murder and another only made journalistic sense if both cases were well-known, their details lodged in the public mind. That was emphatically not the case here, so Will had dropped it. He had not thought about it again until that evening, as he and TC stood either side of the homeless preacher in McDonalds. Every verse of Proverbs 10 he had incanted seemed to contain this same word, repeated too often to be a coincidence. Righteous.
But these murders could not possibly be connected. Black pimps in New York and white crazies in the Montana backwoods did not mix in the same circles or have the same enemies. They had lived and died worlds apart.
And yet, there was something oddly similar about these two eccentric tales. Both involved men who seemed suspect and yet had done a good deed. Or rather an extraordinarily good deed. Righteous. And both had been murdered, with no suspect yet arrested in either case.
Will swivelled round to face the computer screen. He logged on to the Times website and found his own story on Macrae. He would read it forensically, looking to see if there was anything else to go on.
‘. . . Police sources spoke of a brutal knife attack, with multiple stab wounds puncturing the victim’s abdomen. Local residents say the style of the killing fits with the latest in gangland fashion, as in the words of one, “knives are the new guns”.’
The method of killing was entirely different. Baxter had been shot; Macrae stabbed. Will opened another window on the screen, allowing him to call up his Baxter story. He scrolled down, looking for the paragraphs with the forensic detail, time and method of death. Finally he came to the line he was looking for.
Initially, Mr Baxter’s militia comrades suspected a macabre act of organ theft lay behind the murder. Unaware of his earlier act of philanthropy, they assumed Mr Baxter lost his kidney on the night of his death. As if to add weight to that theory, there were signs of recent anaesthesia – a needle mark – on the corpse.
Will read on, looking for more, as if he had never read the story before. Now he wanted to curse whoever had written it: there was no more on the mystery injection. It had just been left hanging.
He dug into his bag to retrieve his current notebook, the one he had taken to Seattle. He riffled through the pages to find the interview with Genevieve Huntley, the surgeon who had removed Baxter’s kidney. He remembered the conversation, sitting in the front seat of his rental car, cradling a cell phone to his ear. He had just let her talk, wary of interrupting the flow. According to the scrawl in front of him, he had not even asked about the recent needle mark. Looking back, he knew why. He had dismissed the whole business once the surgeon had told him about Baxter’s kidney op. The story had changed, from organ-snatching gore to righteous man and that inconvenient detail had got forgotten. He had forgotten it. Besides, Huntley had said there had been no more surgery so the recent injection idea did not fit.
Yet, now he flicked a few pages back in the notebook to see his encounter