Mania Read Online Free PDF Page B

was anything but underage. She was short and squat, wearing tight black pants that failed to hide her lumpy legs, a pink shirt streaked with stains. She bent her head forward as she emerged from the stairwell, covering her face with her hands in shame. Four more women followed, all of them Asian. None of them was attractive, and, like the first one out the door, not one of them was young.
    Three customers stepped outside behind the prostitutes. Nick took a picture of each of the men as they stepped into the street. The first was an awkward young man with a pimply red face. The second, a tall man in a plaid shirt and jeans, looked like a construction worker. Finally, dressed in a cheap dark blue sports jacket and a pair of ill-fitting khaki pants, a stout, mustached man with a thick head of wiry hair was escorted through the doorway by the last cop. His eyes drawn to a flash of gold in the weak light, Nick zoomed in on the heavy wedding band encircling the stout man’s pudgy finger and pressed down on the shutter.
    The lead officer spoke a few words into his radio, and the driver swung the white van around and met them in front of the building. Nick took pictures of the police helping the prostitutes and their johns into the van. The cop had been right. It had been a routine bust. There was nothing spectacular here, but Nick figured he had captured the tawdry color Daly wanted for the spread. The van pulled away to take the offenders to the station to be booked.
    About to return his camera to his shoulder bag, Nick was surprised to see the stout man in the blue sports jacket still engaged in a conversation with the lead officer. Why hadn’t they arrested him like everyone else? Nick snapped a quick picture of the officer unlocking the handcuffs from the man’s wrists, then at last continued down the street toward the Telegraph .
     
    Nick was staring at his computer in the cavernous newsroom. The room was bustling with reporters. The desks were all occupied, and messengers were running down the aisles and corridors. The editors were hunched over copy, laying it out and readying it for the next edition. After turning in his pictures of the raid, Nick had caught the second half of the staff meeting late that morning. Afterward, though, he hadn’t sat down to begin his new assignment. Instead, he Googled Sara Garland on his computer, and he spent the rest of the day sorting through the few images he found.
    “What a beauty,” Laura Daly said over Nick’s shoulder.
    Nick hadn’t heard the senior editor approach over the din of the newsroom, and he swiveled in his chair to look up at the tall, gray-haired woman. Despite the fact that she was large boned and dressed in a predominantly masculine wardrobe, there was something unmistakably feminine about Laura Daly. She ran the paper on a shoestring, and she demanded the respect of the entire staff, from her editors down to the clerks. Nevertheless, she rarely raised her voice. She never tried to dominate at all. Instead, her authority derived from her character. She led because people wanted to follow. Nick tracked her eyes to the screen of his computer. “I met her today.”
    “Did you now?” Daly studied the screen. “There’s something curious about her eyes. She looks like she’s seen a lot.”
    “How much you think someone like her can earn acting?” Nick asked. “Bit parts, I mean, on a few TV shows.” He was thinking of the gold and platinum Rolex on Sara’s wrist.
    Daly considered the question. “I have no idea. They don’t earn all that much, though. A few hundred dollars—a thousand dollars—an episode if they’re lucky. I don’t recognize her. You?”
    “No.” Nick imagined that he would have remembered her if he had ever seen her on the screen, even in a small part. She was that beautiful. “Her name’s Sara,” he said. “Sara Garland.”
    “Garland?” Daly let a quiet whistle sneak out through her teeth.
    “You know her?”
    “Not her,”