The Last Scoop Read online

  Also By R. G. Belsky

  The Clare Carlson Mysteries

  Yesterday’s News

  Below the Fold

  The Gil Malloy Series

  Blonde Ice

  Shooting for the Stars

  The Midnight Hour

  The Kennedy Connection

  Other Novels

  Loverboy

  Playing Dead

  Copyright © 2020 by R.G. Belsky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-357-1

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  “Murder is not about lust, and it’s not about violence. It’s about possession. When you feel the last breath of life coming out of the woman, you look into her eyes. At that point, it’s being God.”

  —SERIAL KILLER TED BUNDY

  “I know it’s true … I saw it on TV.”

  —JOHN FOGARTY

  For Laura Morgan

  PROLOGUE

  The young woman on the bed saw only blackness. At first, she thought he must have blindfolded her. She could feel the ropes on her arms and legs that he’d used to restrain her to the bed. But she realized there was no blindfold. As her eyes adjusted to the lack of light in the room, she was able to make out a shadowy figure in there with her.

  It was him.

  He was watching her.

  How long had he been there?

  How long had she been there?

  The figure moved quietly to the side of the bed now, took out a large knife, and placed the knife against the woman’s throat.

  She began to sob.

  He took the knife away from her throat then and—for just a few seconds—it almost seemed like this was part of some kind of sex game. He stroked her hair and the side of her face gently. He leaned down and kissed her.

  Then he raised the knife back in the air—and plunged it into the woman’s chest.

  Again … and again … and again … and again.

  OPENING CREDITS

  THE RULES ACCORDING TO CLARE

  I AM A woman who deals in lies for a living.

  There are all sorts of lies. Big lies. Little lies. The lies that people tell casually every day with little thought or remorse: fibbing about sticking to a diet, calling in sick for work to go to a ballgame, or fudging a few numbers on an income tax return. The bigger lies that politicians and real estate brokers and used car salesmen tell to get us to buy whatever they’re selling. And then there are the lies so breathtaking in their scope and audaciousness that most of us could never fathom resorting to them no matter how desperate we were.

  My job at Channel 10 News—the TV station where I work as the news director—is to catch people in their lies and expose these lies to the world. Of course, I make a lot of enemies that way. But I tell them, “Hey, if you don’t want to see yourself on the evening news, then don’t do it.”

  I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic these days. Lying, that is. It was Adolf Hitler who once famously said that the bigger the lie, the easier it was to tell. “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one,” Hitler boasted. I’m not sure I agree though. I believe it is sometimes the little lie, the insidious lie we might not even be aware of until it’s too late, that can be the most dangerous and damaging and disturbing. Not only because it is so difficult to detect. But because once you find out a person has lied—no matter how small that lie is—you immediately begin to wonder what else they’re not telling you the truth about. I mean, if someone lies about one thing that you know about, the odds are pretty good he or she is also lying about a lot of other stuff that you don’t know. And so—before we even realize it—we find ourselves caught up in an endless cycle of dishonesty and deception.

  A lie is a little bit like murder, I suppose. They say killing someone for the first time is extremely difficult because of all the moral and ethical and religious taboos that have been ingrained in us throughout our lives. The second time you kill is supposed to be easier. And then after that … well, murdering another human being becomes almost as casual as swatting a fly.

  I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make here.

  About lying.

  And about murder.

  They both get easier the more you do them.

  Not that I would have any firsthand knowledge of either one, of course. I’ve never murdered anyone. And I never lie. Maybe that’s a residual effect of my work, being around people who lie so much. Maybe it’s the moral values I grew up with and have held onto all of my life. Or maybe it’s because I’ve seen up close all the damage and heartbreak and tragedy that lies—even the seemingly innocuous ones—can bring about in this world.

  But the bottom line that you need to understand about me is I am all about the truth. I believe in the truth. I tell the truth myself at all times. I expose anyone who doesn’t tell the truth. Yep, it’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for me. That’s the credo I follow in my career as a journalist—and in my life, too—above everything else.

  Clare Carlson has a lot of faults—believe me, you’ll find that out about me soon enough—but lying is not one of them.

  Now see what I just did there. I lied to you.

  Because everyone lies. Including me. Nothing is what it seems to be in this life. And no one is either.

  Well, almost no one.

  There’s only one person I’ve ever met who always told the truth—the hard, cold, absolute truth—no matter what the circumstances.

  As far as I know, the man never told a lie in his entire life.

  And yet, I didn’t believe him the last time we talked.

  Just before he died.

  PART I

  FAKE NEWS

  CHAPTER 1

  I WAS SITTING in my office at Channel 10 News, drinking black coffee and skimming through the morning papers when I saw the article about Marty Barlow.

  It was a brief item about the murder of a man on an East Side New York City street. It identified the victim as Martin Barlow. It also said that Barlow was a retired journalist. It did not say Barlow was the first—and probably the best—newspaper editor I ever had.

  The police reported that he’d died from a blow to the head. Apparently, from a solid object, although the object itself was never found. Cops first assumed it had been a mugging, but later backed off that a bit because his wallet wasn’t taken. Instead, it just seemed—at least on the face of it—to be one of those crazy, senseless crimes that happen too often in New York City.

  The article never mentioned Marty’s age—he refused to ever tell it to anyone—but I figured he must be well up in his sixties by now. He was a frail-looking man. He had disheveled white hair, pasty-looking skin, and he couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds. He always wore the same old wrinkled suit that looked like it had last been cleaned during the Reagan administration.

  But more than twenty years ago, when I was starting out at a newspaper in New Jersey, Marty Barlow had helped me become the journalist that I am today. He was my editor, my mentor, and my friend.

  Barlow was a g
rizzled old veteran even back then, and I soaked up every bit of knowledge and wisdom I could from him. He taught me how to cover police stories, political scandals, and human-interest features. “Never turn down an animal story,” was one of his mantras. “People love animal stories!” But mostly, he taught me what a noble calling it was to be a newspaper reporter—and about all the integrity and responsibility that went with it. His favorite quotation was from an old Humphrey Bogart movie where Bogey played a managing editor talking about the job of being a newspaper reporter: “It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.”

  I moved on eventually to a bigger newspaper job in New York City where I had a career filled with pretty spectacular moments. I won a Pulitzer Prize by the time I was thirty, I scored a lot of other big exclusives and front-page stories for the paper, and became a big media star because of all that. Then the newspaper I worked for went out of business, and I moved into TV. After a few false starts there—mostly finding out that I wasn’t very good as an on-air TV reporter—I wound up on the executive side of the business. First as a segment producer, then as an assignment editor, and now as news director of the whole Channel 10 operation. Along the way, I found the time to get married—and divorced—three different times, too.

  Marty had helped me get through the highs and lows in my life—both professional and personal—over the years. He was always there for me. He always supported me and took my side in everything. Well, almost everything. Everything except the marriage stuff. Marty could never understand why I couldn’t make my marriages work. “Why don’t you find one man, the right man, and settle down with him for the rest of your life?” That’s what Marty said he had done with his wife. “It’s not that easy,” I told him. “Sure it is,” he said. “You make sure your marriage is as important to you as your job in the newsroom. Then the rest will take care of itself.” It was good advice from Marty, even though I didn’t always follow it.

  Marty stayed on as editor of the same New Jersey paper where we’d met, doing the job he loved, until he was pushed into retirement a few years ago. At some point after that his wife died, and he came to live with his daughter in Manhattan. Even after he retired though, Marty became very active in local political and community events. He started a website that skewered local politicians and demanded more accountability/public disclosure in New York City government. Then he became a kind of local gadfly—showing up at town hall and council meetings to demand answers from politicians. That was Marty. Still looking for his next big scoop even after he retired.

  We’d kept in touch and he was always asking me to meet him for coffee, but I hardly ever got around to it. Or to checking out any of the various news tips and leads he kept sending me. I never could find time for Marty Barlow anymore.

  Until that last day when he showed up in my office.

  “Hello, Marty, how are you doing?” I said. “Sorry I never got back to you on your calls and emails before. I’ve been busy covering a bunch of stuff.”

  “Yeah, probably a big, breaking Justin Bieber news story, huh?” Barlow said, without even attempting to hide the contempt in his voice.

  I sighed. Marty Barlow was an old-fashioned journalist who believed the news media should cover serious topics like politics, schools, and government waste the way newspapers had traditionally done in the past. But now newspapers were dying off as people turned to the internet to give them instant news. And TV newscasts, including Channel 10 where I worked, focused even more these days on glitzy celebrity news, viral videos, and all the rest of the gimmicks known online as “traffic bait” in order to increase our all-important ratings and sales. Marty hated that. I wasn’t wild about it either, but I had no choice in the rapidly changing journalistic landscape.

  “This time the big story was Kim Kardashian,” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Good.”

  “Actually, it was Khloe.”

  “My God, what happened to you, Clarissa? The Clarissa Carlson I remember cared passionately about the stories she covered. She wanted to make a difference in the world with her journalism. I miss that woman.”

  Fake news is what Marty called it. Yes, I know that term has a whole different meaning in today’s political world. But Marty had been using it long before that. For Marty, fake news encompassed pretty much everything on TV news or in newspapers or on news websites today. He didn’t just mean the celebrity news, either. He was contemptuous of the constant traffic reports, weather updates, lottery news, and all the rest of the things I did for a living. He complained that there was hardly any real journalism now. He was right. But the journalistic world had changed dramatically in recent years, even if Marty refused to change with it.

  He sat down in a chair in front of my desk.

  “So, Clarissa …”

  “Clare.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Clare, not Clarissa.”

  This was a ritual we had played out many times over the years. Yes, my full name is Clarissa Carlson, but I always use Clare. Have ever since I was a kid and decided how much I hated being called Clarissa. Everyone knew that. Friends, family, coworkers, even my ex-husbands never called me anything but Clare. Except for Marty. He insisted on calling me Clarissa. I never understood exactly why, but it had gone on for so long between us that it didn’t seem worth bothering to ask anymore.

  I figured he wasn’t here for a social visit. That he came because he needed my help. Some big scoop he thought he was going to break, even though his days of breaking big scoops had long past. Marty always got very intense when he was working on a story, and this time he seemed even more intense than usual. I asked him what was going on.

  “I’m working on a big story,” he said. “The biggest story of my life. And it’s all because I started taking a good look at one person.”

  I nodded and tried to think of an appropriate response.

  “Who?” I asked.

  It was the best I could come up with.

  “Terri Hartwell.”

  “Hartwell?”

  “Yes, the Manhattan district attorney.”

  I nodded again. Terri Hartwell was the darling of the New York City media and political world at the moment. She’d been a top-rated radio talk show host in New York for a number of years before she ran for the district attorney’s job—and surprised political experts by unseating the incumbent. Since then, she’d aggressively gone after crime, corruption, and all sorts of entrenched special interests in the city. Which made her a lot of enemies, but also made her popular with the voters. She was even being touted now as a potential candidate for mayor.

  “I started out thinking this was a story about building corruption. Illegal payoffs to politicians and authorities by wealthy New York City landlords. But now it’s bigger than that. Much bigger. There’s murder involved, too.”

  “Murder?”

  “More than one murder. Maybe lots of them.”

  I nodded again. Pretty soon I was going to have to stop nodding and ask more than one-word questions.

  “Who is being murdered? And what does any of this have to do with Terri Hartwell?”

  Now I was rolling.

  “I can’t tell you any more details. Not yet. I’m still trying to figure it all out myself. But this is a sensational story. More sensational than any story I’ve ever covered. And I have to stop whatever is happening before it’s too late!”

  Marty was getting really agitated now, pounding on my desk for emphasis.

  A lock of white hair had fallen over his forehead and his eyes were blazing. He frankly looked insane.

  “Who’s your source on all this, Marty?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you my source, Clarissa. You know that.”

  “Is it a good source?”

  “All of my sources are good!” he thundered at me.

  He was right about that. All of Marty’s sources were good. Or at least they
always had been in the past. But I wasn’t so sure how much I could trust them—or Marty himself—at this point. I didn’t think he was lying. Not intentionally anyway. Marty never lied to anyone, most of all to me. But I did suspect his desperation to get back into journalism in some meaningful way—to prove he wasn’t finished in the news business, no matter how much it had passed him by in recent years—had distorted his judgement and his connections with … well, reality.

  “Will you help me? Give me a few days to get all the details together, and then I’ll tell you everything. You’re the head of a big news operation now. You have resources I don’t at your disposal. Maybe we could work on this story together. You and me, Clarissa. Just like the old days.”

  Mostly because I didn’t know what else to do, I told Marty I’d get back to him about it. I told him we’d get together for coffee—like he’d asked me to do so many times—to go over the details of his story and maybe reminisce a bit about old times, too. I told Marty I’d call him the next week and we’d meet up at the Sunrise Coffee Shop on the Upper East Side, which was his favorite place.

  Except I never did meet Marty Barlow at the Sunrise Coffee Shop the next week.

  Or any time after that.

  I never got around to calling him back.

  I thought about all that again now as I read the article about Marty Barlow’s death. “Maybe we could work on this story together,” Marty had said. “You and me, Clarissa. Just like the old days.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Marty those days were long over.

  My boss was Jack Faron, the executive producer for the Channel 10 News. I went to see him now.

  “Problem?” he asked when I walked in the door of his office.

  “What makes you think I have a problem?”

  “Because you never come to see me this early in the morning unless it’s about a problem.”