Graveland: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

boxes in the pages of the DSM they’re currently checking off. But when Michelle tries to turn the tables on big sis, Ellen clams up, declaring same old, same old.
    Same apartment, same obsessive workload.
    Same lack of social skills, same monthly subscription to Bad Mood magazine.
    It’s become a routine, but a curiously comforting one.
    After she gets off the phone with Michelle, Ellen orders up Thai food. While she’s waiting, she grabs the remote and surfs around the cable news channels. The only thing giving the Jeff Gale story a run for its money today, in terms of high-end prurience, is the Connie Carillo murder trial. At the moment, some MSNBC talking head is reviewing the week’s evidence. “Look, it’s simple,” he’s saying, “she clearly needs a lifeline, because even though no motive has been established yet, she just, I don’t know, radiates guilt…”
    The she here is Constance “Connie” Carillo, daughter of Senator Eugene Pendleton and ex-wife of mob boss Ricky “Icepick” Carillo. A powerful soprano, Connie was about to make her debut at the Met in Salome when her husband of the time, investment banker Howard Meeker, was found naked on the kitchen floor of their Upper East Side apartment with a carving knife stuck in his chest. Connie was immediately charged with his murder, and since the trial started a couple of weeks ago, the court proceedings have been broadcast live every day, with updates, highlights, commentary, and wall-to-wall analysis. In media terms, it’s been pretty much full-spectrum dominance.
    But this being a Saturday, there’s something of a vacuum to fill.
    So Jeff Gale’s timing couldn’t have been better.
    And although Ellen, like most people, has been following the trial pretty closely, she has no difficulty now in dropping it for this . She presses the mute button and throws the remote onto the sofa. She goes back to her desk and starts digging up anything she can find on the “gunned-down” banker.
    As she reads, she jots down notes on a loose sheet of graph paper.
    Born in Carthage, North Carolina, forty-seven years ago, Jeff Gale majored in psychology and economics at NCSU and then got an MBA at Harvard Business School before going on to do stints at Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. After five years at Citigroup he was appointed vice president of the New York Federal Reserve, and then, just in time to see the company clock up losses of nearly $4.2 billion, he took over as CEO of Northwood Leffingwell. Amid embarrassing lawsuits over the bank’s foreclosure practices, as well as SEC claims that statements he made to Congress may have misrepresented Northwood’s health, Gale’s tenure at the bank was not an easy one. More recently, however, things seemed to have been looking up, with the bank’s share price finally crawling out of the single digits.
    Gale was married and had two teenage daughters. A Forbes profile describes him as obsessive and detail oriented. Standard stuff, then, and fairly tedious, but it’s a brand of tedium that Ellen has grown used to over the years. It’s part of her stock-in-trade—wading through data and looking for patterns, glitches, the one thing no one else sees.
    She goes through some photos of Gale now, on Google Images, but doesn’t see anything of any interest at all. Apart from the fact that he was about five-ten, pale, and balding.
    She looks over at the TV. They keep going back to the crime scene in Central Park, recycling the few precious, banal facts that are known about the case. Ellen finds all of this frustrating. If she were working on the story herself—for a paper, say, like Val Brady is—what would she be doing now? Would she be on the phone to this or that contact? Would she be camped outside Jeff Gale’s house?
    Maybe.
    But if so, wouldn’t she need a little more to work with, a lead, something concrete?
    When the food arrives, Ellen gets a beer from the fridge and sets up at the kitchen table.
    She eats