Heart of Ice (21 page)

T
wenty minutes before she was scheduled to go into the grand jury room, Nic had called Dr. Adler’s office. She knew she was being stupid. The pathology report would take as long as it would take, and trying to hurry it along would accomplish nothing. And he had said he would call her. Still, she wanted to remind Dr. Adler that she was in suspended animation. That she couldn’t move forward until she knew.

“We don’t have results yet.” Dr. Adler sounded as though he had said the same words many times before. “As soon as we do, Nicole, I’ll call you. But at this point I wouldn’t expect to get the report today.”

At 2:12 Nic had been in the middle of a sentence when her phone vibrated on her hip. She kept testifying to the grand jury, but her mind split in two. Her mouth continued to speak, not hesitating over a single word. Her eyes looked at each of the jurors in turn, not at the BlackBerry’s display.

But the other part of her?

It already knew who was calling.

Once she was out of the grand jury room, Nic called her voice mail. As she had known, it was the doctor’s office with the biopsy results. Should she wait to call them back? But she had to know. Now. She couldn’t stand waiting anymore. She pulled back the heavy door and went into the empty stairwell of the federal courthouse.

The last time she had been here, the whole downtown core was being evacuated and the stairwell had been filled with a panicked mob. Just thinking about it made her breath come fast and shallow. But, she reminded herself, even then, when things had looked so dark, the terror had eventually passed and the city had survived.

As she tapped in the number for the doctor’s office, Nic was oddly proud to see that her finger was not shaking. The nurse put her on hold for five minutes, ten. Nic leaned her back against the cool wall while she waited. She thought about the elderly juror she had helped to survive the pandemonium on the stairs. But in the end, Mrs. Lofland had helped Nic just as much.

Finally the music—a never-ending loop of something sprightly— was replaced by Dr. Adler’s voice. “The biopsy report did end up coming back today, and I knew you would want to know right away.”

“And?” Nic said. Knowing he would have led with it if it were good news.

“Unfortunately, cancer cells were found.”

The former English major in Nicole noted how Dr. Adler chose to use the passive voice. How he distanced himself from the bad news. No one was really responsible for finding the cancer cells. The cancer cells had just appeared, all by themselves.

Nic’s thoughts were oddly detached from her.
Yes. I knew it. Does this mean I’m going to die? Is this the beginning of the end?
It was as if they were floating above her head like cartoon speech bubbles.

Shock, Nic diagnosed. She was in shock. That was why everything felt surreal. Her legs were boneless. Only the wall was holding her up, and it wasn’t doing a very good job.

“Is the test always correct?” She knew she was grasping at straws. “Is there any chance it’s a false positive?”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, Nicole. You do have cancer. Invasive ductal carcinoma.”

“Invasive?” Somehow she gathered herself to ask a question. “Does that mean it’s spread?”

“We’ll need to run some more tests. IDC does have the potential to invade your blood and lymph systems. That means it can spread cancer cells to other parts of your body. We need to set up an appointment to discuss what surgical approach you want to take, but you’re going to need at least a lumpectomy.” Dr. Adler’s voice hardened. “I want this out and in a jar.” He was a general, talking about the enemy. “You’ll also need to schedule an appointment with an oncologist. He or she will help you decide on other treatments, but you are probably looking at radiation, and possibly chemotherapy.”

“What are my chances of survival?” If she could just make it until Makayla was in college, Nic thought, not sure whom she was begging. Just live long enough to see her baby turn eighteen. She couldn’t leave Makayla now, not when her daughter was still so young.

“Well, the lump is fairly small, so that’s good, but we don’t know enough to say much more than that. We need to get that lump out and take a look at the nearest lymph nodes to see if it’s spread. You’ll need to speak to my scheduler.”

After promising she would call back when she had her calendar in front of her, Nic said good-bye and then slid down the wall, her jacket rucking up in the back. She sat on the cold concrete, her legs splayed in front of her.

And she bit her hand to keep from crying out.

CHAPTER 37

Channel Four

C
assidy had been drawn to the crime beat because of its guaranteed drama. It offered murders, kidnappings, armed robbery, and the occasional hostage situation.

But predictable it wasn’t. It wasn’t like covering city council meetings, where you got a schedule for the whole year. Sometimes it was feast, others famine. But day after day, Channel Four had the same size news hole to fill.

Today Cassidy was working on a piece about a mom who had embezzled $2,000 from her kid’s Little League team. A sad story to be sure, and a crime, but nothing that made Cassidy’s heart beat faster.

And then she answered her phone late in the day, and everything changed.

“Hey, it’s Nicole. I just heard back from the Portland PD. They sent out a uniformed officer to look at the rooms Jenna had at Barbur Bargain.”

“And?”

“They weren’t able to get a criminalist out until late last night, but they found blood at the scene.”

Cassidy lifted her fingers from the keyboard. “You mean like Jenna cut herself, or was in some kind of fight?”

“The criminalist said it was high-velocity impact splatter. And there’re only two things that make that. Getting a body part caught in high-speed machinery. Or getting shot.”

“What? Do you mean she’s dead?” Cassidy’s stomach did a slow flip. How many bad things had she said and thought about Jenna? Sure, she hadn’t liked her. Hadn’t trusted her. But that didn’t mean she had wanted her to die.

“I honestly don’t know, Cassidy.”

Nicole’s voice sounded tired. Tired to the bone.

“It’s not so much the blood that proves Jenna would have to be dead. But getting shot is obviously not a good thing. Someone wiped the room clear of fingerprints, but they missed the blood. The wallpaper behind the bed has this crazy pattern. The Vancouver PD said you could have Jackson Pollock throw paint on it and never notice the difference. But when their criminalist sprayed it with luminol, the whole wall lit up. Of course, they don’t know if it’s her blood. Now they need something with Jenna’s DNA to see if it’s a match. Does she keep a hairbrush at the office? Or a toothbrush?”

“I’ll see if I can find something,” Cassidy said, squeezing the phone between her ear and her shoulder. She had already opened up a new document and was taking notes.

“Even a water bottle would work. We could probably get a touch of DNA off her purse, but that’s a much harder process than working off saliva or hair. They’re getting a trap and trace on Jenna’s cell, work, and home numbers. An officer will be by Channel Four around five to pick up anything that might give them a DNA sample. And of course he’ll want to ask around to see if anyone at the station knows why Jenna went to the motel in the first place.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

After she hung up, Cassidy slipped into Jenna’s cubicle. Nicole hadn’t told her to keep out of Jenna’s stuff. In fact, she had asked for Cassidy’s help in finding a DNA sample. So Cassidy wasn’t snooping. She was
helping
.

But she knew she could also be helping herself to a story. In her head, it was already taking shape. The story of a beautiful missing girl who had left only her blood behind. Viewers ate that kind of thing up. A few months earlier, Cassidy’s coverage of another missing girl had landed her in the national spotlight.
Someone
was going to own Jenna’s story. Someone had to help find her—alive or dead—and bring closure to her friends and family. And help bring whoever had done it to justice.

And that person should be—would be—Cassidy.

The intern’s cubicle, located at the end of a dimly lit hall next to the bathrooms, was the place where things no one at Channel Four wanted came to die.

Old binders, miscellaneous office supplies, and discarded phone books, some of them dating back a decade, were piled on the far edge of the credenza. Jenna’s cast-off purple desk chair, with its coffee-stained seat and torn armrest, sat next to a battered burnt-orange visitor’s chair. Looking at them, Cassidy was forced to admit that maybe Jenna’s blue exercise ball, which she used in lieu of a chair, made sense.

In addition to the ball, Jenna had tried to add some of her own touches, such as pinning a few photos on the nubby blue head-high wall. Cassidy had never paid attention to them before, but now she studied them.

Jenna with a dark-haired guy sporting a Van Dyke beard. Must be her boyfriend. Jenna with a smiling middle-aged couple. They looked so much like her that they had to be her parents. And there was also, a bit oddly, a photo of just Jenna herself, dressed in a blue bikini and lounging on some tropical beach with a drink in her hand.

Cassidy bet that every man who worked at the station had salivated over that photo.

Yesterday, the photo of a nearly naked Jenna would have been annoying. But now just one phone call from Nicole had made these photos, even the bikini shot, unbelievably sad.

After taking out the thumbtacks, Cassidy slipped the photos into her jacket pocket. The cop would surely want them for any canvass, but before that, Cassidy would scan them.

When Jenna was here in the flesh, flaunting her perfect body and perky enthusiasm, Cassidy had been barely able to hold her jealousy in check. Now she felt a twinge of guilt as she realized that, in her own mind, Jenna was already morphing from a person into a project. Cassidy told herself it was like what Nicole had said over tacos. In order to do their jobs, certain professions couldn’t afford to make emotional connections with the people they dealt with. Cassidy was no different from a surgeon, focusing on the problem, not the patient.

In an odd way, she was the person closest to Jenna at Channel Four. Not because she had bonded with her. Far from it. Cassidy had tried hard not to pay any attention to Jenna. As a result she had always been hyper-aware of the girl, of how she swung her blonde curtain of hair back from her dewy fresh face, of how all conversation stopped when she leaned down in one of her teeny-tiny skirts to pick up a dropped paper clip.

To figure out what had happened to Jenna, Cassidy had to think like her. Well, that shouldn’t be so hard. Jenna was Cassidy minus ten years. Eleven, if you wanted to be picky.

Okay. She made herself think back to her first job, in Medford, where she had been a glorified gofer, minus the glory. She would have done anything to get on camera. To get a story.

So something must have been happening in that motel room that Jenna thought would become a story. But what could the story have been about?

In Jenna’s desk drawer Cassidy found spare change, pens and pencils, a Starbucks card, and a Valentine’s Day card signed
Love, Vince
. But nothing that seemed like it was labeled “clue.” As she sorted through the items, Cassidy noticed the blinking message light on Jenna’s phone.

Channel Four had a default voice mail password: 111111. When you started work at the station you were supposed to change it, but the steps to reprogram it were so complicated that hardly anyone did. Brad Buffet, the anchor, hadn’t. Neither had Jerry Vanek, the station manager. Only Eric Reyna, the assignment editor, had. Cassidy had figured all this out one week when rumors had swept the station that layoffs were looming.

Now she cradled the phone with her shoulder, hit the voice mail button, and pressed the
1
key over and over. When it was time to choose among options, she selected
Play all
.

On Friday afternoon a man had left a message. His voice had the roughness of a smoker’s. “Okay, get a room at the Barbur Bargain Motel and let me know the room number. And I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

A chill went down Cassidy’s back. Was she listening to the voice of Jenna’s killer?

The only other message had been left earlier that very morning. It was a younger guy, his voice sounded strained. “Jen—where are you? Why aren’t you answering your cell? Are you mad? I’m sorry I said that about your story. Of course it’s going to be big.”

A big story, just as Cassidy had suspected. Whom did Jenna confide in? She giggled and flirted with Eric, Jerry, and Brad. But she wouldn’t have gone to any of them to discuss a story, or to ask their advice. Jenna would have feared—with reason—that they would take it from her. It was called bigfooting, and it happened all the time. A junior reporter would get a lead, do all the work, and then before it could go to air, the more senior reporter would take the story and claim it as his own. In this case, probably
her
own. Because Jenna had probably been worried about Cassidy bigfooting her.

Even Cassidy wasn’t immune from bigfooting. When she had wrangled a televised interview with a senator suspected of murdering a senate page, the network had flown out one of their marquee national talents to take over from Cassidy. Only some last-minute maneuvering had allowed Cassidy to continue.

As Cassidy was cogitating, one of the station’s cameramen, Andy Oken, walked by on his way to the bathroom. Andy had no love for the on-air talent—she’d once overheard him referring to them as “blow-dried meat puppets”—but he could be counted on to put the story first.

“Andy, Jenna’s out sick, and I’m playing catch-up. Has she talked to you about any stories she’s been working on lately?”

He pursed his lips. “Last week she was asking about the lipstick cam we gave her for that undercover piece during sweeps month.”

About as big as a tube of lipstick, a lipstick camera was great for undercover videos. And in extreme sports, it could be stuck to a helmet to give viewers a “you are there” feeling.