Grave Apparel, page 26
“Keep going,” Charleston said. “I got a whole book to throw at you, including assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted murder.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Graybill said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. A Miss Cassandra Wentworth, object of your attentions, was attacked on Friday. She’s still in the hospital.”
“I didn’t do that! You think I’d do that? You’re crazy!”
“Get him out of here,” Detective Charleston told the uniformed officers. Two policemen escorted the man from the lobby. The detective nodded to Lacey and Mac.
“Detective,” she said. “Does this mean your Hispanic teenager is no longer a suspect?”
“Ms. Smithsonian, to me everybody is a suspect, all day,
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every day.” He favored her with a weary smile. “We’ll be in touch.” He ambled out the door.
Lacey looked to Mac for an explanation of the scene in the lobby. Peter Johnson answered her. “Cassandra has a stalker, a letter writer. Mac and I set up this entire trap.” Mac looked at him, his eyebrows clenching their fists.
“That guy? He’s the nasty letter writer Mac told me about?”
“And we collared him entirely without your assistance.
You’ve been no use on this story at all, have you?”
She took a step toward him. He backed up. “Oh, wasn’t this your pet story, Johnson? And this guy doesn’t look much like Pickles and Wiedemeyer, does he? What became of your prime suspects, the deadly duo?”
“You’ve just been lucky, Smithsonian, skating on that easy beat of yours.”
“The fashion beat is murder, Johnson, or haven’t you heard?” It really was too early in the morning for this nonsense, Lacey thought. “I suppose you’re saving the world on the red tape and hot air beat.”
“I am an experienced Capitol Hill reporter! I know how this town works—”
“How’s your car working, Peter? Still parking at bus stops?”
“Upstairs, both of you,” Mac ordered. “You just saw what happens when you disturb the peace at The Eye Street Observer.” He marched them to the elevators.
“Hold that elevator!” LaToya leaped in just as the door closed, holding a large sack in her hands. It smelled like hot cinnamon rolls and filled the elevator with a heavenly aroma.
“What did they get that guy for?”
“Writing threatening letters,” Johnson said. “Stalking. Assault. Attempted murder.”
“What? No way!” LaToya’s eyes were wide. “This is all about Cassandra Wentworth, isn’t it?”
“Perception is one of your skills, LaToya,” Johnson replied.
“Ooh, attempted sarcasm, Johnson! You got a learner’s permit for that?”
“Silence!” It was an order from Mac.
LaToya threw a meaningful look at Lacey as the doors opened. “I expect the whole story from you later, girl, with all the dirt.” She shook her bag of hot rolls under Mac’s nose and flounced away to her desk.
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Lacey followed Johnson to Mac’s office. But she slipped in faster and grabbed the only open chair. Johnson leaned against the wall, arms folded over his soft belly like a Buddha. His glasses slid down his nose.
“Okay, the stalker,” Lacey said. “Who, what, where, and when? I already got the how, but I would be curious about the why.” She crossed her legs and leaned forward.
“Cassandra makes a difference,” Peter snapped. “She has an impact. That earns her enemies. Saving the planet is more important than saving a buck on a pair of shoes.”
“Focus here, people,” Mac ordered. “Those letters I told you about, Smithsonian, the ones from the same very nasty source?”
“Big, fat, hateful letters,” Johnson put in.
“They’ve progressed from ‘You can’t write your way out of a paper bag’ to ‘Why aren’t you dead yet?’ ” Mac said. “They were hand delivered, in response to her editorials. The letters were getting increasingly unhinged. Cassandra’s editorials were also getting a little unhinged, you may recall,” Mac sighed.
“There has been some discussion about reining her in. But no one expected this attack.”
“How do you know this guy in the lobby is the letter writer?” Lacey asked.
“It’s him, all right,” Johnson said. “Didn’t you hear him?”
Mac sighed. “The letters have common elements, style markers, physical characteristics. Very few crank letter writers cross the line to assault, of course. But we were making a case.
Quietly. Johnson here helped.”
“I returned to the hospital yesterday,” Johnson obviously meant this as a slap at Lacey, who had not returned to visit her.
“Cassandra told me she was being stalked. I only wish she had confided in me earlier.” Johnson rubbed his eyes. “The letters frightened her, but Cassandra put a brave face on it. She just said it was her job. She got lots of letters, but these were the worst.”
“We put building security on watch for the guy who delivered the worst letters. Signed by ‘Joe Citizen,’ ” Mac continued. “We tightened our procedures. Joe Citizen was required to sign the log when he delivered his letters. That’s how we finally got the name Stephen Graybill. He could have just signed it ‘Joe Citizen.’ Idiot.” Mac opened a drawer in his desk and
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pulled out a pile of papers. “Copies of his letters. Cops have the originals.”
“So when he showed up today,” Johnson added, “we were ready.”
Lacey tried to feel some relief. But there was something about the man’s face when he heard himself charged with Cassandra’s attack. It looked to Lacey like shock, disbelief; not guilt. But perhaps Graybill simply felt self-righteous, not guilty.
“I have to hand it to you, Peter,” she said. “You managed to get a lot of information from Cassandra. All of which Mac could have told me himself.”
“There were threats on her voice mail too,” Johnson went on, ignoring her. “She told me she had the feeling lately she was being followed.”
“Did she tell you, Mac? Or anyone else at the paper?”
“That she was being followed? Not that I know of,” Mac said. “Maybe she didn’t have time to dwell on it until she was in the hospital.”
Lacey needed some air and some coffee. “What about this Graybill guy? What’s his story? Did Cassandra ever see him following her?”
“At a distance, so she didn’t have a detailed description.
This Stephen Graybill character fits the profile, though. His life seems to have fallen apart.” Mac spread the letters out on his desk. “All we got are these, but the cops will get more out of him soon, I hope. He owned some kind of small business that got shut down a few months ago, some environmental impact problem, polluting a water supply. His wife left him, he filed for bankruptcy. Apparently he had nothing to do but sit at home and surf the Web and read the papers. And then Cassandra wrote something about how polluters should be put out of business with regulation and confiscatory taxation and allowed to starve to death like the parasites they are.” Mac shook his head ruefully. “You remember that one? That started the letters.”
That sounded like Cassandra, Lacey thought. So this down-and-out small business owner took the politically correct Cassandra as his personal demon. To the level of stalking and assault? “So he fixated on her? What kind of small business was it?”
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“Something that poisons the atmosphere and pollutes the earth,” Peter quoted Cassandra without irony.
“I don’t remember. It’s in here somewhere. Then there was the chat room incident.” Mac sounded tired and rubbed his face.
Among The Eye’s new outreach efforts to attract readers were the accursed online chats in which reporters were “requested”
to participate. There was no extra pay for this extra duty, but it was considered insubordinate to refuse this particular pain in the neck.
Personally, Lacey hated the chats. The few she had participated in consisted of a nerve-wracking hour answering questions on style trends and sometimes personal self-defense tips. Before she could finish one answer, five more questions would pop up. If she paused for a moment to frame a thoughtful answer the chatters would start chatting with each other and leave Lacey out of it entirely. Other days there would be no one online to talk to her at all, just the sound of crickets. A real ego boost either way. It was nice to hear Cassandra had to suffer through it too. But then, Cassandra never missed a chance to insult someone. Why pass up insulting strangers online?
“Smithsonian, you still with us?” Mac was staring at her.
“Sure, Mac, it’s just that my brain starts to flatline when I hear the words ‘chat room.’ ”
“How typical of you,” Johnson said snottily. “I adore the chat room. My readers are politically sophisticated and unusually well informed, thanks to me.”
“There it went, I flatlined again,” she said. “Back to Chatty Cassie. What happened?”
“Tech ops had to block this guy from the chat room because of his tone and his threats,” Mac said. “Several times. He started logging in with different names.”
“How did you catch him?”
“Same threats, same catch phrases, same clichés. Worse than a brand-new sportswriter,” Mac said. “So he was ejected.”
“More rejection,” Lacey said. “Poor guy could get a complex.”
“He was angry and abusive!” Johnson’s voice rose. “Or didn’t you get that, Smithsonian?”
“Children, knock it off, for pity’s sake.” Mac picked up
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Graybill’s letters and stacked them. “It escalated, apparently, to the point where he was following her.”
“What did he write about Sweatergate?”
“He didn’t. And that term was only going around inside the paper,” Johnson seethed. “Why don’t you pay attention?”
“Why don’t you kiss my—”
“Hey,” Mac said. “If you two want to fight, take it outside.
He didn’t write about the Christmas clothing editorial. Who knows why?”
“But if he didn’t write about the sweaters, then why—”
Lacey said.
“Writing wasn’t enough anymore!” Johnson was in her face.
“He attacked her.”
“I’m glad you’re the smartest man in the room, Peter. Where would the world be without geniuses like you? But where did he get the damned sweater, genius?”
Mac stood up. Johnson retreated from Lacey, breathing hard, his lips a tight line. But Lacey wasn’t thinking about Johnson, she was thinking about the man in the lobby. He was dressed for a day in a Washington office, maybe a little shabbily, but no worse than a typical reporter. Better, in fact. He was mouthy, but not very physical.
“That guy looked to me like a letter writer, not an attacker,”
she said.
“Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been him. He could have snapped,” Mac pointed out. “The police think he’s probably the assailant in the alley.” Lacey picked up some of the threatening letters from Mac’s desk and looked at them.
“ ‘Joe Citizen’? He’s just a blowhard. Why on earth would he wrap her up in a Christmas sweater? He didn’t even complain about the Christmas sweater thing. It’s not one of his hot-button issues, is it? And if he did do it, how was he able to grab Felicity’s sweater, which he somehow stole without anyone at The Eye noticing? Did he sneak upstairs, past the guards, and grab it right off the chair in her cubicle? How would he even know where to find it?”
“Sometimes these guys escalate,” Mac said. “Nuts can be very clever. As for the rest, Smithsonian, let the cops figure it out.” Lacey was shocked that Mac was taking the easy way out on this, just like Johnson, jumping to the simple conclusion.
She threw the letters down on Mac’s desk.
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“The cops!” she said. “Oh, I feel much safer now! And if this guy whacked Cassandra, what the heck is he even doing here today? Has anyone even peeked in today’s envelope? Is he gloating over putting her in the hospital? Might be good to find out. Maybe he’s got a complaint about Peter Johnson now, maybe he thinks people shouldn’t park at bus stops! I think you bagged the wrong guy, Mac. He may be a letter-writing nutcase, but he’s not the guy in the alley with the Santa cap.”
Mac and Johnson were dead silent. Lacey opened the office door and then stopped.
“Good work, Peter,” she said. “Now that you’ve nailed the nonassailant, at least Pickles and Wiedemeyer are off your list of suspects.” She let the door slam behind her.
Word traveled fast in the newsroom. Word that a suspect in Cassandra’s attack was in custody and that he wasn’t from The Eye elicited sighs of relief. Even if Cassandra wasn’t well loved, she was a fellow journalist. Assaulting her was like attacking their newspaper.
Lacey didn’t feel the same relief. It bothered her that the assailant, whoever it was, had apparently also threatened her little shepherd. It bothered her that someone had been nosing around the girl’s neighborhood asking questions. It bothered her that the cops and even Mac were stuck in what looked to her like a dead end. It even bothered her that Johnson was an arrogant idiot, though she told herself she should be used to that by now. But if the attacker wasn’t Stephen Graybill, who was the Santa Dude?
She was way behind on everything she could actually call work. Today was her deadline for her weekly “Crimes of Fashion” column. Felicity and Wiedemeyer weren’t around. It was quiet in her corner, but there was a persistent buzz in the newsroom about the man in the lobby. Lacey worked the morning away.
Finally at noon she gave up trying to make sense of her end-of-the-year fashion piece. She picked up her coat and purse and headed out to take a walk and pick up some lunch. She needed to walk, to think, to pray the phone would ring. She didn’t even care who was on the other end of the line, she thought, she was in no mood to talk to anyone. And then she corrected herself.
Except Jasmine.
Chapter 28
Lacey saw the man’s reflection in the window of Filene’s Basement and tried not to react. She could tell he was watching her and waiting for a moment to catch her eye. She wasn’t going to let him until she was ready. This close, she saw his sharp nose and his ears sticking out through the thin hair, his breath coming out in short puffs.
Either Stephen Graybill hadn’t been arrested, or he’d escaped. She doubted this thin, weedy man would have the strength to break the hold of two burly cops. Graybill hadn’t been charged, she concluded. But she had just enough doubt about him to make her feel a sharp pang of fear.
She wondered if he’d done this with Cassandra, lurking in the background while she was window-shopping. No way, she decided, Cassandra would never window-shop. And could Graybill surreptitiously pull some hidden holiday weapon on Lacey, say a giant candy cane? Not here on busy Connecticut Avenue in broad daylight, with his reflection very clear in the glass.
There was no sense letting her tension build any longer.
She turned around quickly and looked right at him. Graybill backed away and met her eyes pleadingly. He had that eager confessional look she recognized so well as a reporter. This was a man who wanted to tell her his story. She relaxed. The only danger, she thought, was that he might try to talk her to death.
“You’re Lacey Smithsonian?” His voice was more controlled now.
“You’re Stephen Graybill.”
“I gotta talk to you.” He extended his hand, but she didn’t
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take it. “I’m not dangerous. I wouldn’t hurt you, or anyone.
Really. Swear to God.”
“Not the way I hear it. So they didn’t arrest you?”
“No. They didn’t arrest me because they got no case. They got no case because I didn’t hit her. How crazy is this whole thing? I’ve never attacked anyone in my life. Physically, anyhow. I know my rights. They said they want to question me some more, but I got an alibi. And I got a good lawyer.”
“What’s your alibi?”
“Friday night services. I take my mother. She’s the only person left who talks to me. Call my lawyer. Hell, call my mother.”
Graybill wrapped his oatmeal-colored muffler around his neck. Standing outside in the cold was probably a stalker’s occupational hazard. He looked chilled and his cheeks were chapped.
“Listen, Smithsonian, can I buy you coffee? I’d like to talk to you. Quietly. You have a reputation for listening to people, for finding the truth even if you write about that stupid fashion stuff.”
“Such a compliment. Ten minutes, and I’ll buy my own coffee.” It was her flaw, she knew: She always wanted to know the whole story. Her plans to escape the office for fresh air and freedom evaporated.
“A woman after my own heart,” he cracked. They picked a Starbucks at the end of the block. They bought their beverages and found a small round table in the triangular shop. The midday December sun streamed through the windows.
“I’m not gonna waste your time, Ms. Smithsonian,” Graybill began. “I just want you to know I’m not the one that beat up your friend Wentworth.” He took a gulp of hot coffee. “I’m not saying I didn’t want to sometimes. That woman sure can piss people off. She pissed me off. But I didn’t do it.”
“Why do you care what I think?”
“You’re the one who caught those killers, right? They say you’re like a crime solver or something.”
“Please don’t tell me you have been reading DeadFed dot com.” She breathed in the aroma of her café mocha.
“I don’t know what your beef is with them. They worship you. You’re like their superhero or something.”
She cursed Damon Newhouse’s creeping influence. “You
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know of course that everybody at The Eye Street Observer was pretty relieved to see the cops drag you away this morning.
