Murder at The Washington Tribune Read Online Free PDF Page A

warpath. Or will be soon.”
    â€œUntil he puts on war paint and starts carrying a spear, I wouldn’t worry.”
    â€œWhat about poison arrowheads? He has several.”
    â€œThen I suggest you buy yourself a big shield and keep your distance. Look, I can’t walk and talk at the same time. Chew gum either. I’ll catch up with you later—
if
there’s a break in the case.”
    â€œThanks, Edith. Any scrap will do to feed the animals.”
    As Violent Crime Branch Detective Vargas-Swayze, soon to lose her hyphen, picked up her pace again, she couldn’t help but think of the night she and Wilcox had ended up in bed together. Tell someone to not think of pink elephants and . . . A one-night stand, it was called, although they spent little of that night in a standing position. It had just seemed to happen, and it only happened once. Plenty of excuses on her part—the divorce, pressures at work, too much to drink, too long since she’d been in bed with a man. Him? He’d been riddled with guilt, which she’d tried to assuage, successfully, it seemed. “Let’s forget about it,” she’d said. “It was a one-time thing, Joe. Let’s not let it get in the way of the friendship? Okay?”
    â€œOkay,” he’d said.
    They hadn’t mentioned it since.
    Wilcox wasn’t thinking of that night as he logged on to his computer in the
Trib
’s vast, carpeted, smoke-free, peaceful, and virtually silent newsroom, which had all the ambience of an insurance company. Only the barely audible tap dance of keyboards being stroked intruded on his thoughts.
    His meeting earlier that morning with Paul Morehouse had gone poorly.

    â€œLook,” Morehouse had yelled once Wilcox and Rick Jillian, a new reporter assigned to the Kaporis story, had settled in chairs across from him, “they’re eating our lunch. Jesus Christ, she gets killed right here off our own newsroom and we’re last on the MPD food chain. Come on, Joe, you used to be sourced over there, better than anybody on the beat. What’s happened? How come all of a sudden they’re stonewalling you?”
    â€œThey’re not,” Wilcox responded. He resented a need to go on the defensive. As far as he was concerned, he’d been working the case hard. “Nobody’s eating nothing. All the other outlets have is speculation, and they make that sound like inside info. It’s all BS.”
    â€œEven your daughter?” Morehouse asked.
    â€œWhat about her?”
    â€œShe claimed on the tube that an interview she did with Jean’s mother revealed possible suspects and motives. Was she right? What did the mother say?”
    Wilcox didn’t respond.
    â€œYou interviewed the mother. Right?”
    â€œRight, and she didn’t say anything that would point to a suspect or motive.”
    â€œMaybe you didn’t ask the right questions.”
    â€œI asked the right questions. Paul, the decision was made upstairs to not turn Jean’s murder into a tabloid circus, not here at the highly respected, above-the-fray
Washington Tribune.
Remember?”
    The younger reporter turned in his chair to physically look away from Wilcox’s sarcasm. Morehouse pretended to take in something interesting in the airshaft outside the office’s single window before slowly returning his attention to the reporters. “Rick,” he told the younger one, “run another check on visitors who signed in the day Jean died. I know, I know, we’ve been over it a hundred times but do it again.”
    Jillian and Wilcox stood.
    â€œStay a minute, Joe,” Morehouse said.
    The door closed, Morehouse said, “Come on, come on, Joe, lay it out for me.”
    â€œLay what out?”
    â€œWhat’s eating you.”
    Wilcox started to respond but Morehouse pressed on.
    â€œYou know damn well what I’m talking about. You’ve been walking around