This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by Kelly Lange

All rights reserved.

Hachette Book Group, USA

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

First eBook Edition: May 2005

ISBN: 978-0-446-50973-2

Other Books by Kelly Lange

DEAD FILE

THE REPORTER

GOSSIP

TROPHY WIFE

for SARA ANN FREED

my beloved friend, editor, mentor

You left us much too soon.

I will love you always.

1

I don’t get it,” Maxi said, scowling at her boss. “What part of ‘you’re working graveyard starting next week’ don’t you get?” the man asked, scowling right back at her.

The graveyard shift, also known as the nightside, the overnight, or dregs duty, is usually assigned to the lowest of the low in television news. The disgruntled two were Maxi Poole: thirty-two, popular news anchor-reporter, hardworking, reasonable, tall, trim, blond, dedicated; and her boss Pete Capra: pushing fifty, station managing editor, crack journalist, irascible hothead, decent enough guy, grouch. The two sat in his glassed-in office in the newsroom at Channel Six, the Los Angeles flagship station for UGN, the United Global Network.

“I haven’t worked the graveyard since I was a cub reporter, that’s what I don’t get, Pete. And you’ve got a dozen reporters junior to me, that’s what I don’t get. And Kittridge has been working graveyard for the last year, and he’s actually weird enough to like it.”

“Yeah,” Capra mused, leaning forward, dropping both elbows on his desk, resting his chin between his fists. “Kittridge does seem to like it. Never bitches. Think he’s dealing drugs at night?”

“Probably. So why mess with a good situation for him, a good situation for you because he doesn’t complain, and a good situation for me because I have a life?”

“You don’t have a life, Maxi.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not married, you have no kids, you don’t even date anyone. What life?”

“Well . . . I have a dog,” Maxi said indignantly. “And I happen to anchor your multi-award-winning Six O’clock News, remember?”

“And you’ll keep that show, at least for now. You’ll come in at four, recut anything you shoot overnight that’s any good, which will usually be nothing, as we know, anchor the Six, take off for dinner till nine, then go out on the street.”

“For how long?”

“The graveyard is nine to six. You know that. You’re done after you edit your stuff for the Morning News. If you’re needed on the set, you’ll stay a little longer, get some face time. Then you’ll go home and have your life.”

“You mean then I’ll limp home and feed Yukon . . .” Yukon was her big, beautiful, five-year-old Alaskan malamute.

“Whatever.”

She was mentally doing the math. “. . . and then I’ll go out and do my run, come home, shower, fall into bed for a few hours in broad daylight, try to sleep till two in the afternoon, get up, get dressed, and come back in to work by four.”

“That’s right,” Pete said, smiling benevolently.

“And that’s going to be my life?”

Ignoring the question, Pete said, “So you’re reassigned. To the graveyard. Starting Monday. Got it?”

Maxi considered the alternative. On-air talent in any television news market make up a very small club. If she refused the assignment she would have to bring in AFTRA, the television and radio artists’ union, to engage in a fight with the company on her behalf. And thereafter she’d be branded a troublemaker among broadcasters. These nasty industry brawls become juicy gossip topics for everyone in the business, including the execs at other stations whom she just might need to hire her one day. Most general managers won’t hire a “troublemaker”—they’ll just put somebody else on their air, thank you very much. So in the television news business, refusing an assignment is called “eating a death cookie.”

“Hey, I’m gonna let you keep your weekends off,” Capra said then. The graveyard shift traditionally ran from Sunday night through Thursday night, with the reporter filing stories for the Monday through Friday Morning News. “Kittridge will pull the Sunday shift and cover the Monday morning show,” he explained. “You’ll do a package for the Saturday show.”

“And I’m supposed to be grateful for that?”

“Damn straight. I’ve never done that for the graveyard grunt before.”

“Graveyard grunt?”

“S’cuse me, Ms. Politically Correct. I have never done that for the overnight reporter before.” Giving her exasperated.

“Oh, thanks. So you’re not going to screw with my Saturdays, or make me anchor the ‘march of death’?”

Staffers called the Sunday afternoon newscast the “march of death,” because it accordioned to fill the time from the end of whatever national sports event the network was carrying until six o’clock, which meant it would often plod on for two hours or more, dredging up every drug bust, cheap heist, and drive-by shooting that happened during the past week.

“Not unless something big goes down. Earthquake, floods, wildfires, Streisand turns Republican. Or Streisand does a nude scene, even better.” That thought, Streisand nude, caused him to make a face that suggested he’d just inadvertently eaten something sour.

Capra’s attempt at humor was lost on Maxi. She looked hard at him. “Did you give up smoking again, and you want to punish somebody?”

“No, no—but I should,” he said thoughtfully, and so saying, he reached into his upper shirt pocket and pulled out a half-empty soft pack of Marlboros.

“You should give up smoking again?”

“And punish somebody,” he finished, fishing a beat-up plastic lighter out of his middle desk drawer and lighting up.

Closing his eyes, Pete took a long drag. Leaning back comfortably in his ancient wooden desk chair with the scarred leather seat, he slowly let out a stream of smoke. Then he opened his eyes and looked at Maxi like a big, contented pussycat. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

With a you’re-pathetic shake of her head, Maxi got up and walked out of his office.

Out in the teeming Channel Six newsroom she dropped into a chair next to Wendy Harris’s computer terminal, muttering, “Damn. I am not freaking believing this.”

Wendy was thirty, two years younger than Maxi, four foot eleven and rail thin, with an out-of-control mane of curly red hair and tortoiseshell glasses balanced on her freckled nose. She was Maxi’s longtime closest friend at the station, and the producer of the Six O’clock News.

“What?” she asked Maxi, not taking her eyes off the screen or her flying fingers off the keyboard.

“Pete just assigned me to the graveyard shift.”

Wendy stopped typing and turned squarely to Maxi, her brow wrinkled in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Wrong.”

“What about the Six? Is he pulling you off my show? Am I gonna lose my anchor?”

“He says no. Says I can still do it.”

“Whew! That’s good.”

“That’s good if I can survive working fourteen hours a day.”

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely.”

“You can’t. Nobody can.”

“I know that. And he knows that, Wendy. I’m guessing at some point he’ll yank me off the Six.”

“But . . . why?”

“I have no clue.”

“Didn’t you ask him?” Incredulously.

“Of course I asked him. When does Pete ever explain what he does?”

“Good point. You piss him off lately?”

“Who knows? Everything pisses him off.”

“True. But can he do that? What does your contract say?”

“It doesn’t say he can’t reassign me. I never addressed that possibility when I was doing my deal because it never occurred to me that he would demote me to the bottom rung. I mean, I’ve been at Channel Six News for nine years.”

“So now you know. For next time.”

“Oh, great. I’ll be sure to include a clause that says the company can’t bust me back to the 4 A.M. farm report in my next contract. That’ll be only three years and five months from now. If I don’t kill myself first.”

“Suicide’s not you.”

“Well, I won’t have to commit suicide. Some crazy, drugged-out, sleazebag rapist will nail me one night at three in the morning down on lower Third Street.”

“Or South Central.”

“You know, if I actually did get murdered, Pete would be rubbing his hands together congratulating himself on a boffo lead for the early block. Can’t you hear the tease lines? ‘TV news anchor killed in skid row bludgeoning—details at eleven.’ Over a shot of me chatting on the set with a big goony smile. Even better if it happened during sweeps.”

The three all-important “sweepstakes” months in the television news business, February, May, and November, generate the ratings on which stations base their commercial rates to advertisers. That’s when all the stations run the most titillating, most explosive news stories and mini-docs they can come up with. “Lesbian Nun’s Secret Baby!” That kind of thing.

“Yeah. Pete doesn’t give a damn how he treats people,” Wendy spat.

“A world-class sonofabitch.”

“You could take this to Ryan, you know,” Wendy said. “Ryan would be all over Pete’s sorry ass in a minute.”

Ed Ryan was the news director, Pete Capra’s half-his-age boss, and no fan of Capra’s. The two men were polarized on the philosophy of television journalism: Ed Ryan cared only about the ratings; Pete Capra cared only about the news. So even though his troops saw Capra as a heartless curmudgeon who ran his newsroom with a sledgehammer, they respected him as one of the last of a dying breed of news purists.

“Turn him in to Ryan? Jeez, Wen, I wouldn’t do that to Pete,” Maxi said.

“I know,” Wendy agreed. “Pete’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”

2

Tom McCartney hefted his bulging black canvas backpack up the steps to the back door of the Channel Six newsroom and leaned on the bell that was marked VISITORS, then reached into his pocket, fished out a handful of pills, and washed them down with a swig from a bottle of Evian. His lanky frame was clad in worn jeans, a blue work shirt, a faded khaki safari jacket that looked like it had been through wars because it had, and expensive Mephisto Barracuda walking shoes. His dark hair curled over his collar, not because it was a style choice, but because he tended to go too long between haircuts.

Since it had been his experience that only rarely did anyone answer the bell at the seldom-used back entrance to the local newsroom, he pounded on the glass door with the side of his fist.

McCartney didn’t have security clearance at Channel Six, or at any other station. That’s because he was a member of that most oddball of tribes—McCartney was a stringer. A newsie who works for no company, belongs to no unions or guilds, is a member of no professional groups or clubs, and has no loyalty to any news outlet, radio, television, or print. In short, a stringer, for the most part, is a journalist who can’t get a job.

Since stringers don’t have the benefit of a big company’s equipment, they tote their own or rented camera gear around town, looking for news to happen. They might have informers on the street who, for a ten or a twenty, will turn them on to something that’s about to go down, or give them names of potential contacts who know the territory and the players. If they make a fair living they might have a laptop or even a radio scanner in the car.

And they almost always work at night. All night. On the graveyard shift. Stringers can’t compete on dayside stories because broadcast stations and print media have their own reporting staffs out in the trenches all day. No sense shooting a wildfire in daylight when the stations have crews all over it—they certainly don’t need to buy stringer tape of the story. But come the dark of night, media outlets usually have just one reporter—read one poor sucker—out there on the graveyard shift, who cannot possibly cover every sordid middle-of-the-night act of skulduggery, large and small, let alone even find them all. So out from the low-down sludge of the City of Angels emerges this aberrant army of stringers, to prowl the nightside and ply their trade.

Like all TV journalists, stringers forage about, sniffing for a good story, and when they find it, they shoot it. But unlike affiliated reporters who file with their companies, stringers have to peddle their tape from station to station and show to show. If they land a taker, or more than one if the story is hot, it was a worthwhile exercise. If they don’t, it was a losing investment of time and money. Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.

Also unlike affiliated journalists, stringers never get the glory. Any glory. They could track down or stumble upon the second coming of Christ, but when they sell their tape of the story, even should it include a kick-ass interview with J.C. Himself, all clues to the stringer’s identity will be obliterated—no pictures of him in the frames, and no voice, no name, no credit, no awards, no thank-yous, no go-to-hell. In the wide world of television newscasts the stringer does not exist. His story would be grandly teased all day on the station that bought it: “Exclusive interview with Jesus Christ outlining His plans for the world, on the news at four, five, and six!” Then on the shows, the anchors would lead with, “Good evening. Our top story tonight, in a stunning interview with Jesus Christ, here’s what He has to say about . . .” The stringer’s voice will have been edited out. Instead, you would hear the station’s anchor voicing questions that the stringer had asked Jesus, over the footage that the stringer shot. Such is the lot of one of these disenfranchised night-shooters. All he would get would be his thirty pieces of silver.

In general, stringers are regarded in the television news business as a notch below pond scum. However, Tom McCartney was much more highly regarded in the industry because he had a history in legitimate news and a reputation for delivering the goods. Tom McCartney was regarded as a notch above pond scum.

McCartney used to have jobs. Good jobs. His last one was his best. He was a highly esteemed international correspondent for CNN. As such, he covered hot spots around the world, and he did it with distinction. Early on, armed with a broadcast journalism degree from Syracuse and a master’s in business and international politics from NYU, McCartney blazed his way through the industry on hard work, a keen mind, and a fierce dedication to getting the story. Honing his skills, he’d moved up through the ranks of news markets from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Chicago to L.A., until he became one of the rising young stars for CNN on the West Coast.

But McCartney also had a jones, an ongoing love affair with pills and booze. It started during the Gulf war. While rolling tape, he was bucked off the skids of a chopper that was hovering over a land skirmish in Kuwait. When he hit the ground, his heavy camera crashing down on top of him, he’d ripped a shoulder out of its socket, broken what seemed to be most of his bones, and his face looked like he’d gone twelve rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson.

His doctors told him he was lucky to be alive. His accommodating nurses, responding to his charm, his rugged good looks, his quirky sense of humor, and maybe even to his multiple, severe injuries, gave their favorite patient plenty of extra attention, along with unlimited doses of Vicodin to ease his pain. And during months of recuperation at home, he took to washing down the oblong white pills with sizable swigs out of a vodka bottle.

He eventually got back to work, but he never got off the pills. Or the juice. After one too many somewhat slurred on-air deliveries, CNN dumped him, and nobody else would hire him. And now he was forty-two years old and prowling for news in the seamy underbelly of L.A. after midnight, like a vagrant digging for day-old bread in back-alley Dumpsters.

Everyone in the business knew Tom McCartney. Some vilified him for the loser he was, some held him up as an example of what they never wanted to become, and some, mostly seasoned journalists, admired him for the great reporter he had been. That group silently rooted for him, and were pleased when he nailed a significant story, saw it make air, and made himself some bucks into the bargain. And the thing with Tom McCartney that his colleagues had to admire, even if grudgingly, was that he absolutely would not back down. Would not give up. Ever. On a story, or on anything else. That double-dyed perseverance trait was tightly woven into the fabric of his makeup. Psychobabblers, civilian and professional, might call it extreme obsessive compulsion.

Maybe that was why he had never given up the booze and the pills, even now.

And why he stood pounding on the back door to the Channel Six newsroom for a good ten minutes until a newswriter, rushing by with a script in hand, happened to hear his beating on the glass and let him in.

He could have avoided all that hassle if he’d just made a call in advance for a drive-on, or announced himself at the guard desk down in the lobby. Not his style. McCartney always parked on the side street east of the sprawling United Global Network complex, hoofed it onto the midway, and came in through the back loading docks opposite Studio Nine, where they shot a long-running daily soap. From there he would eschew the bank of elevators and take the stairs two at a time up to the back entrance of the newsroom, then wait for someone to heed his banging. It was probably because he was never entirely sure that his calling card would get him in the front door. Anywhere.

“Hi, Tom,” the young writer said. “Got something good?”

“Yup. Capra around?”

“He’s in his office,” the writer said.

McCartney took long strides down the back hall and out into the open newsroom, nodding to a few acquaintances as he passed their computer terminals. McCartney didn’t really have any colleagues that he could call friends. He didn’t cultivate friends. Didn’t drink with newsies. He could have. They’d have welcomed his company; McCartney was nothing if not interesting. But he was a dedicated loner.

He tapped on the glass of Pete Capra’s office door, and walked inside at the managing editor’s bidding.

“What?” Capra blurted from behind his desk, not inviting him to sit.

“The PriceCo fire,” McCartney said.

PriceCo was a giant discount store in South El Monte, an industrial city east of Los Angeles, where a fire of mysterious origin had broken out during the night. Tom McCartney had once again gone far beyond the norm to get the story.

“We were all over it on the morning show,” Capra said. “We’re recutting it for the Noon, and we’ll have a reporter out there live for the early block.”

“Do you have the new top?”

“What new top?”

“They’re calling it arson.”

“Last I checked that was the speculation. We reported that.”

“They have a suspect. I’ve got him on tape.”

This got Capra’s full attention. “The wires didn’t say anything about a suspect.”

“I know.” McCartney rummaged in his backpack. “That’s why this one’s expensive.” He pulled out a small cassette.

“You had it transferred?”

“Just for you,” McCartney said with his crooked grin.

Channel Six was the only L.A. news operation that used the M-2 system, a process that was new and expensive, was installed throughout the building, and was full of bugs, which made staff members crazy trying to make faulty tapes airworthy. Capra groused loud and often that somebody upstairs hadda get big kickbacks when they bought that pig, and he threatened at least ten times a week to take an ax to the machinery.

“You want to see it?” McCartney asked.

“Talk to me first.”

“I rolled on this guy at the scene because he looked squirrelly. Nervous, but enjoying himself. Having way too good a time.”

Capra got out of his chair. “Show me.”

McCartney popped the M-2 into Capra’s playback machine and the two stood back to watch. Establishing wide shots showed flames shooting through the roof of the low, sprawling warehouse, firefighters on the scene dragging hoses and hoisting ladders, and the usual looky-loos hanging around the action, the latter a sparse bunch because it was well after midnight. McCartney fast-

forwarded to a zoom-in on one of the bystanders: a white male, fortyish, medium build, pale thinning hair, wearing a lightweight tan suit and wire-rimmed glasses. He was standing alone, a little apart, watching the flames.

“What time was this?” Capra asked, not taking his eyes off the figure on the screen.

“Three in the morning, around there. Guy looks like he went to a bar right from work, and went to the fire scene right from last call.”

“Doesn’t mean he set it. Coulda stopped on his way home to have a look.”

“Guys in suits don’t stop, park, get out of their cars, hike over to the fire lines, and slouch around watching a fire at 3 A.M.”

The picture cut to a close-up of the man’s face. Sweat beaded his high, bony forehead, his eyes shone in the firelight, and the beginnings of a smile flickered at the corners of his thin, gray mouth.

“A computer programmer for Dinex, a small software company in West Covina. Been there eleven years. Nerd type,” McCartney said. “Name’s Bernard Peltz.”

The footage cut to McCartney voicing a series of man-on-the-street interviews, the standard news MOS technique. Maneuvering a handheld microphone, his camera lens moving from one person to the next in the scant gathering, he fired questions: “Your name, sir? You live around here? Do you work at the store? Ever shop here? Did you notice anything unusual tonight?”

Until he’d worked his way over to his target.

The man gave his name, where he was employed and for how long, said he just happened to be driving by, and no, he didn’t see anything unusual. “Probably an electrical fire. That’s usually what happens with a fire that breaks out when nobody’s around,” the man offered.

“El Monte Fire was on this guy too,” McCartney said.

Capra narrowed his eyes. “How much?”

“Three thousand.”

“You’re insane, McCartney.”

“I’ve been called worse,” the reporter said with a humorless chuckle.

“You are worse. Fifteen hundred. Tops.”

“Twenty-five, bottom.”

“Two thousand. And I must be nuts.”

“Twenty-five,” McCartney reiterated, rewinding the tape. He punched the EJECT button, snatched it out of the machine, walked over to the chair where he’d set his backpack, and tossed the cassette into it.

“Okay, okay, twenty-five. But for Chrissake don’t tell anybody—they’ll commit me. And needless to say, I’ve got an exclusive on it. I’m not shucking out two-and-a-half large for you to peddle this tape all over town.”

“Needless to say,” the stringer echoed dryly.

“So, McCartney,” Capra said then, “what’s going on with the Nodori arrest?”

Gino Nodori was a second-tier actor in a weekly television cop drama who’d been arrested after midnight on a lewd-conduct charge in a public park the week before.

“What’s going on with him? You know what’s going on with him, Pete—it’s on the wires. How come you didn’t air my tape?”

“Nodori didn’t make my lineup.”

“You paid for it. Everyone else aired it. Two, Five, and Nine bought it from me. Seven had Caulley on it.” Steven Caulley was the graveyard reporter for Channel Seven.

“Like I said, Nodori didn’t make the cut.”

“It was a helluva lot better story than six or eight others you aired last Tuesday,” McCartney observed. “Talk radio was all over it.”

“Doing any follow-ups?”

“Why would you want a follow-up when you didn’t even air the bust?”

“Just asking.”

“Nodori’s out on bail. You can cover the court procedures on dayside with your regular staff,” McCartney tossed out with a you-know-that-as-well-as-I-do look.

Capra’s eyes skittered over to the wall for a beat, then back to McCartney. “I’m thinking follow-ups at the scene,” he said.

“Huh? It’s a gay hangout in MacArthur Park. What goes down in the men’s john is the same ol’ same ol’. With an occasional police rout, which nobody gives a damn about, and a one-in-a-million celebrity grab like Nodori.”

“How about shooting some tape out there for me? A couple of cassettes every night for a while.”

McCartney gave him a puzzled look. “What did I shoot at the Nodori bust that I don’t know I shot?”

“So how about it?” Capra asked, ignoring the question. “Five hundred a night for no story, just some long-lens CUs of the dirtbags who hang in that area of the park.”

“Lemme get this straight, Pete. You want two tapes a night shot in MacArthur Park near the men’s can. Weekend nights too?” Stringers rarely gave themselves the luxury of weekends off.

“Yeah,” Capra said. “Weekend nights too. Shoot each tape at different times every night. And get faces.”

“A thousand a night.”

“Get outta town,” Capra snapped back. “Five hundred, take it or leave it. I could get fucking Rosie to do this for me.”

Harvey Rosenberg had the reputation of being the least competent stringer in the business, an eager, bumbling, two-hundred-and-forty-pound, Harley-driving television news wannabe, with top-of-the-line equipment paid for by his indulgent parents, talent yet to be proven in the business, and a predilection for tent-sized T-shirts and knee-length, baggy white shorts printed with gaudy orange flames—the joke went that Rosie must have bought a dozen pairs of those eyesores on sale somewhere.

“I’ll take it,” McCartney said.

His news nose told him that Pete Capra had to be looking for something big in MacArthur Park for that kind of sustained video surveillance. He lifted a hand to give him five on the deal.

“Oh, and in return for the easy bucks, I need you to do another job for me,” Capra said, smacking McCartney’s upraised hand.

“That pays money?”

“No.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” McCartney took the arson tape out of his backpack and laid it on Capra’s desk. “You want me to brief your writer on this?”

“Of course. The other job is to watch Maxi Poole.”

“Nice job,” McCartney said with a droll expression. “I already do.”

“I mean on the street. She’s working the graveyard starting Monday.”

McCartney raised his eyebrows. “No kidding. She on your shit list, Pete?”

“Just show her the ropes on the overnight,” Capra said.

“You’ve got Kittridge for that.”

“I’m bringing Kittridge in on dayside.”

“Good. One less reporter for me to ace on the shift.”

“What, you think Maxi’s no competition?”

“We’ll see. The graveyard’s a whole different scum-pit.”

Capra was writing out a check. Another quirk with McCartney—he wouldn’t wait for UGN payroll to cut him a check and put it in the mail like they did for the rest of the stringers. Tom McCartney ran a strictly COD operation.

Holding up the check, waving it back and forth as if to dry the ink even though he’d used a ballpoint, Capra said, “So you’ll help Maxi get her bearings?”

“Sure,” McCartney said, reaching out and snatching the check. He folded it in two and tucked it into the upper flap pocket of his jacket. “But, Maxi Poole on the graveyard? I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to get it,” Capra said. “What I want you to do is take her into the park with you when you shoot my tape. Hover over her for a couple of weeks. Teach her the nightside. Agreed?”

“Orienting her on the shift is one thing, but what makes you think she’ll put up with hovering?”

“You’ll figure it out. And don’t say anything to Kittridge; he doesn’t know yet.”

McCartney shrugged and turned to leave. Pete Capra knew he didn’t have to tell the guy twice to keep his mouth zipped. Competition was fierce in television news, and for stringers, business could dry up at any given station with a misplaced word or move. And Tom McCartney could be counted on to be particularly discreet. Fact was, the man rarely talked to anyone, about anything.

“One more thing,” Capra said before McCartney got out the door. “Don’t tell Maxi I asked you to help her.”

“Oh, this is gonna be easy—I’ll just use my dazzling charm to get her into MacMurder Park with me at two in the morning.”

“Perfect. She’ll never mistake your brand of charm for help. I’m serious,” he added after a beat, “I want you to watch her back.”

“Fun duty,” McCartney said.

Capra rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you in the morning with my MacArthur Park tapes.”

“You want me to start out there tonight?”

“Jesus, yeah, McCartney, I want you to start out there tonight. It’s money for nothing.”

Tom McCartney smiled. He knew that Pete Capra never paid money for nothing.