Anonymous Sources Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy. He would not have gone without a struggle. I knew—the yellow cardigan story—that he had landed faceup, eyes open. But what if his skull was already shattered when he hit the ground?

    
9
    Â Â Â Â 
    THURSDAY, JUNE 24
    BY NINE THE NEXT MORNING, I was back at my desk. My byline was front page again in the morning paper. I had the details about Thom Carlyle falling from the bell tower instead of a fifth-floor bedroom. And I’d been the only one to report the fingerprints, or lack thereof.
    I picked up the phone and dialed Lieutenant Galloni. I’d already bugged him twice yesterday to check facts, and I knew he would soon stop taking my calls.
    But the Carlyles weren’t talking. There was nothing more to see at Eliot House. The funeral wasn’t scheduled yet, and the autopsy report might still be a day or two from completion. Meanwhile another Chronicle deadline was looming tonight, and right now I had no leads.
    â€œGalloni,” he answered.
    â€œHi. Alex James here again. Just a quick question.”
    â€œLook, I really can’t—”
    â€œI know. I don’t want to get you in trouble. But I thought of something. The key. Didn’t you say nobody had checked it out? From the janitor’s office? I’m still trying to figure out what he was doing up there. You know, how he got up there.”
    â€œYeah. Make that two of us,” Galloni said wearily. “But there’s no story with the key. We’ve got it.”
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œWe do. And if you promise to stop calling me, I’ll tell you that it was in Carlyle’s jeans pocket the whole time. Okay? Like I said, he must have had a copy from when he was a student there. Maybe he liked to play piano or something. There’s a big old grand piano up there. Anyway, there’s no mystery about how he got up there. He let himself in. Just wish I knew why.”
    I absorbed this. “And the autopsy report? Any news?”
    â€œNope. I told you, it takes a while. They have to do toxicology, tissue testing, all that stuff.”
    â€œRight. When you get it, will you please let me know?”
    â€œAbsolutely not,” he replied, but it sounded like he was smiling. “Somehow I have a feeling you’ll find out about it just the same.”
    I sighed and hung up. I had the itchy feeling I get when I’m onto something but I don’t know yet what it is. I had to admit I was intrigued. It didn’t hurt that Thom Carlyle turned out to have a famous dad. That guaranteed the story would enjoy front-page prominence for at least a couple more news cycles. The latest rumor from the Washington bureau was that the president himself was clearing his schedule to attend the funeral.
    It didn’t hurt either that one possibility was murder. Terrible for Carlyle, of course, but at this point he was dead either way. And murderwould be a much more interesting story to chase than an accident or suicide. Still, the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together yet. An apparently talented and popular young man had been alive and chatting with his mother thirty-six hours ago. Now he wasn’t. So far I couldn’t find a good explanation for why.
    IT WAS AN HOUR LATER, after a walk around the block to buy the espresso now cooling on my desk, that it finally came to me what to do next. Or rather, where to go next: England. Carlyle had stepped off a plane from London just three hours before his death. The people he’d spent the last year with would be there. Perhaps some answers were there. I could try to find the English girlfriend, take a look around his room, track down his professors. Maybe Thom had said something to someone. At the very least I ought to be able to pull together some sort of a profile, a bit of color about what his last days had been like.
    I rifled through the papers on my desk. Where was that statement Harvard had issued the night he died?