Sliver Of Truth

“Okay,” he said again, pulling out a chair at the table and motioning me to sit. I sat and put my head in my hands, noticing that Jake’s file was still on the table where I’d left it. I’m not sure why, but I had expected it to be gone when I came home. Agent Grace sat across from me and I slid the file toward him. Mercifully, my tears retreated soon after and I was spared the humiliation of weeping in front of this stranger who’d forced his way into my life and my home.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Jake gave it to me,” I said, looking up to show him I wasn’t crying. “The article on top-that’s how I knew about Nick Smiley, why I went to Detroit. I couldn’t make any sense out of the rest of it.”

He was quiet for a minute as he shuffled through the pages, then he closed the file with a little laugh.

“Your boy has got an ax to grind, huh?”

I nodded.

“You think he wants a job with the FBI?”

I glared at him. “Something in there has meaning to you?”

He took out the New York Times clippings and turned them toward me. “What do these articles all have in common?”

I glanced through them again and nothing popped. I shrugged and looked up at him. He had been watching me as I looked through them and didn’t take his eyes away. There was a strange expression on his face. He reached across and pointed to the byline. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it. What writer reads an article but doesn’t look at the byline? They were all written by the same person: Myra Lyall. The name rang a bell but I couldn’t quite say why.

“Who is she?”

“She’s a career crime writer, short-listed for the Pulitzer twice. Most recently she wrote for the Times.”

“‘Wrote,’ past tense?”

“She and her husband, a photographer, went missing about two weeks ago.”

I flashed on the news story I kept seeing on television and in the papers. Still, I had the feeling I’d heard the name somewhere else.

He went on. “Friends showed up for dinner; Myra and her husband, Allen, weren’t there. After a day of trying to reach them, the police were called. There was a pool of blood on the floor in the apartment, no sign of the couple. The table was set for dinner, a roast in the oven, pots on the stove.”

I started to hear that noise I get in my right ear when I’m really stressed out. “What was she working on?” I asked.

“We don’t know. Both her laptop and her box at work had been wiped clean. Even the Times server had been cleared of all her e-mail exchanges.”

I thought about this. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Finally I asked, “So this is your case? This missing couple?”

He nodded.

“What does it have to do with me?”

“The last story Myra Lyall published was about three Project Rescue babies, how each had been affected by what happened to them. It was a feature for the Magazine, something softer than her usual investigative pieces.”

I remembered now where I’d last heard her name.

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked again, though it was clearer now.

“She had your name and number in a notebook. According to what she’d written there, she’d tried to call you three times for comment but you never returned her calls.”

“The only people I enjoy speaking to less than FBI agents are reporters.”

He gave a little laugh. “Aren’t you a reporter?”

I bristled at this. “I’m a writer,” I said haughtily. “A feature writer. It’s not the same thing.”

“Whatever you say,” he answered.

It wasn’t the same thing. Not at all. But I wasn’t going to get into it with this bozo. Subtleties and nuances were lost on people like Agent Grace.

“So you said they’ve been missing two weeks?” I asked.

He looked at his watch. “Two weeks, three days, and approximately ten hours, according to the time line we created.”

“But those pictures-my pictures-some of them were taken months ago.”

He nodded, looked down at the table. I got it then.

“The FBI has been watching me?”

“For over a year, yes.”

“Why?”

He took the ME’s report out of the file. “There are inconsistencies in this report. Time of death is about ten hours off, according to our experts.” He pointed to something Jake had circled. “This body weighed a hundred and eighty-six pounds. But you know Max was a much bigger man than that-must have been over two-fifty.”

I looked at the document in front of me. “Okay. So this was a small-town medical examiner. He made some mistakes. It happens all the time. What did he say when you interviewed him?”

“He’s dead,” Agent Grace said. “He had a fatal car accident just a few days after he filed the report, right around the time this body was cremated.”

I noticed how he kept saying “this body.”

“What do you mean accident?” I asked, mimicking his inflection.

“I mean someone accidentally cut his brake lines.”

I scanned the report, feeling desperate and afraid. “Esme Gray identified the body,” I said weakly. “They were lovers once. She would have known it wasn’t Max if it wasn’t.”

Agent Grace looked at me with something like pity on his face. “Esme Gray is not exactly unimpeachable.”