Exclusive Read online

  Barrie had tuned him out just after the “stars in your eyes” statement. The first time she’d heard this speech was the day he hired her, out of the goodness of his heart, he’d said. Besides, he’d added, management had been after him to hire another “skirt,” and Barrie was “okay-looking.” She’d heard the same speech almost every workday since. Three years of them.

  There were a few messages on her e-mail, but nothing that couldn’t be handled later. She turned off her computer and came to her feet. “It’s too late to do anything for tonight, Howie. But I’ll have a story for you tomorrow. Promise.” Grabbing her satchel, she slung it back onto her shoulder.

  “Hey! Where’re you going?” he shouted after her as she brushed past him.

  “To the library.”

  “What for?”

  “Research, Howie.”

  As she passed the cold drink machine, she banged it with her fist. A Diet Coke rolled out of the chute.

  She took that as a good omen.

  * * *

  Juggling her satchel, an armload of library books, and her keys, Barrie unlocked the back door of her townhouse and stumbled inside. The moment she crossed the threshold, she was subjected to an ardent, wet kiss on the lips.

  “Thanks, Cronkite.” She wiped the slobber from her face. “I love you, too.”

  Cronkite and the rest of his litter had been destined for euthanasia at the pound on the day that Barrie decided she needed a four-legged companion after a two-legged one announced he needed space and walked out of her life forever.

  She’d had a difficult time choosing which pup to spare, but she’d never regretted her choice. Cronkite was large and long-haired, with definite ripples of golden retriever in his gene pool. Big brown eyes adored her worshipfully now, while his tail beat a happy tattoo against her calf.

  “Go do your thing,” she told him, nodding toward her patch of backyard. “Use your doggie door.” He whined. Barrie sighed. “Okay, I’ll wait. But hurry. These books are heavy.”

  He watered several shrubs happily, then dashed inside ahead of Barrie.

  “Let’s see if there’s anything interesting in the mail,” she said as she made her way to the entry where her mail lay in a heap beneath the slot in the front door. “Bill, bill, overdue bill. Invitation to dinner at the White House.” She looked at the dog, who tilted his head inquisitively. “Just checking to see if you were paying attention.”

  Cronkite followed her upstairs to her bedroom, where she exchanged her dress and heels for a Redskins jersey that came almost to her knees and a pair of gym socks. After running a brush through her hair, she pulled it into a ponytail. Regarding her reflection in the mirror, she mumbled, “Stunning,” then put her appearance out of her mind and focused on work.

  Over the years, she had cultivated numerous sources—clerks, secretaries, illicit lovers, chambermaids, cops, a handful of people in key positions—who occasionally provided her with valuable information and reliable leads. One was a young woman named Anna Chen, who worked in the administration office of D.C. General Hospital. The juicy scuttlebutt Anna Chen picked up through the hospital grapevine frequently led to good stories. She was one of Barrie’s most reliable sources.

  Hoping it wasn’t too late to catch her at the office, Barrie looked up her number in her home Rolodex and dialed. The hospital operator put her right through.

  “Hi, Anna. This is Barrie Travis. Glad I caught you.”

  “I was on my way out. What’s up?”

  “What would be my chances of getting a copy of the Merritt baby’s autopsy report?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “That slim?”

  “Nigh to impossible, Barrie. Sorry.”

  “I thought so, but it never hurts to ask.”

  “Why do you want it?”

  She did some verbal acrobatics as to her reason, which seemed to pacify her source. “Thanks anyway, Anna.”

  Disappointed, Barrie hung up. An autopsy report would have been a good starting point, although she was still unclear as to exactly what she was starting.

  “What do you want for dinner, Cronkite?” she asked as she loped downstairs to the kitchen. She opened the pantry and recited the menu selections. “Tonight’s specialties include Kibbles and Bits, Alpo chicken and liver, or Gravy Train.” He whined with disappointment. Taking pity, she said, “Luigi’s?” Out came his long, pink tongue, and he began panting like a pervert at a peep show.

  Her conscience told her to have a Lean Cuisine for dinner, but what the hell? When you spent your evenings at home in a football jersey and gym socks, conversing with a mongrel and having nothing to look forward to except hours of research, what difference did a few hundred fat grams make?

  While she was on the telephone ordering two pizzas, Cronkite began whining to go outside. She covered the telephone mouthpiece. “If it’s that urgent, use your doggie door.” Cronkite glanced disdainfully at the opening cut in the back door. It was large enough to accommodate Cronkite, but not so large that she worried about intruders. As she was reiterating her pizza order, she jabbed her index finger toward the doggie door. Looking humiliated, Cronkite crawled through it. She was off the phone by the time he was ready to come back inside, so she opened the back door for him. “The pizzas are guaranteed in twenty-five minutes or we get them free.”

  While waiting for the delivery, she poured a glass of merlot and carried it up to the third floor, which she had converted into a home office. She had cashed in a trust fund to purchase the townhouse, located in the fashionable Dupont Circle district. The building was quaint and had character and was also convenient to everything in the city.

  Initially she had leased out the top floor, which was a self-contained apartment. But when her renter moved to Europe with six months left on her lease, Barrie used the extra money to convert the three cramped rooms into one large studio/office.

  One entire wall of the room was now devoted to videotape storage. She had shelves upon shelves of them. She saved all her own reports, newscasts of historical significance, and every news magazine show. The tapes were alphabetized according to subject. She went straight to the tape she wanted, loaded it into the VCR, and watched it while slowly sipping her wine.

  The death and funeral of Robert Rushton Merritt had been thoroughly documented. The tragedy seemed doubly unfair since it had happened to the Merritts, whose marriage was considered the epitome of perfection.

  President David Malcomb Merritt could have been a poster boy for any young American male who aspired to hold the office. He was classically handsome, athletic, attractive, and charismatic to men and women alike.

  Vanessa Merritt was the perfect armpiece for her husband. She was gorgeous. Her beauty and southern-bred charm somehow made up for any shortcomings. Such as wit. And wisdom. She wasn’t considered a dynamo in the brains department, but nobody seemed to care. The public had wanted a First Lady with whom to fall in love, and Vanessa Armbruster Merritt had easily fulfilled that need.

  David’s parents were long deceased. He had no living relatives. Vanessa’s father, however, more than compensated for this lack. Cletus Armbruster had been the senior senator from Mississippi for as long as anyone could remember. He’d survived more presidents than most Americans remembered voting for.

  Together they formed a photogenic triumvirate as famous as any royal family. Not since the Kennedy administration had an American president, his wife, and their personal life attracted so much public attention and adoration, nationwide and around the world. Everything they did, everywhere they went, singly or together, created a stir.

  Consequently, America went positively ga-ga when it was announced that the First Lady was pregnant with the couple’s first child. The baby would make perfection even more perfect.

  The baby’s birth was given more press than Desert Storm or the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Barrie remembered watching, from a newsroom monitor, the umpteenth story on the Merritt baby’s arrival at the White House
. Howie had sourly remarked, “Should we be on the lookout for a bright star in the East?”

  The only event to receive as much news coverage was that same baby’s death three months later.

  The world was plunged into shock and grief. No one wanted to believe it. No one could believe it. America mourned.

  Barrie finished her wine, rewound the videotape for the third time, and watched again as the funeral scenes sadly unfolded.

  Looking pale and tragically beautiful in her mourning suit, Vanessa Merritt was unable to stand without assistance. It was obvious to all that her heart was broken. It had taken years for her to conceive a child, another personal aspect of her life that had been explored and exploited in great detail by the media. To lose the child she’d struggled to bear made her a truly tragic heroine.

  The President looked courageously stoic as tears streaked his lean cheeks and ran into the attractive furrows on either side of his mouth. Pundits commented on his attentiveness to his wife. On that day, David Merritt was seen primarily as a husband and father who happened also to be the chief executive.

  Senator Armbruster wept unashamedly into a white handkerchief. His contribution to his grandson’s small coffin was a tiny Mississippi state flag, sticking up among the white roses and baby’s breath.

  Had Barrie been in the First Lady’s situation, she would have wanted to grieve privately. She would have resented the cameras and commentators. Even though she knew her colleagues were only doing their jobs—indeed, Barrie herself had been in the thick of it—the funeral had been a public spectacle, shared via satellite with the entire world. How had Vanessa Merritt held up even as well as she had?

  Barrie’s doorbell rang.

  She glanced at the clock. “Damn! Twenty-four minutes, thirty-nine seconds. You know, Cronkite,” she said as they went down the stairs, “I think they do that on purpose just to build our hopes up.”

  Luigi himself delivered. He was a short, rotund Italian with a rosy sweating face, fleshy cherub lips, and a mop of curly black hair—on his chest. His head was completely bald.

  “Miss Travis,” he said, tsking as he took in her attire. “I was hoping the extra pizza tonight was for a lover.”

  “Nope. The meatball one’s for Cronkite. Hope you didn’t go too heavy on the garlic. It gives him gas. How much?”

  “I put it on your bill.”

  “Thanks.” She reached for the two boxes, whose aroma was causing Cronkite to do an ecstatic do-si-do around her feet. Cronkite’s circles, the merlot, and hunger were making her dizzy.

  Luigi, however, wasn’t going to relinquish the pizzas without the lecture that came as a standing side order. “You’re a movie star—”

  “I’m on TV news.”

  “Same thing,” he argued. “I say to the missus, ‘Miss Travis is a good customer. Two, three nights a week, she calls us. Good for us, but bad for her. She’s alone too much.’ And the missus says—”

  “That maybe Miss Travis prefers being alone.”

  “No. She says that you don’t meet men because all the time you work.”

  “I meet men, Luigi. But all the good ones are taken. The ones I meet are either married, gay, creepy, or otherwise out of the question. But I appreciate your concern.” Again she reached for the pizzas. Again they were withheld.

  “You’re pretty, Miss Travis.”

  “I don’t stop traffic.”

  “You got nice hair. Nice reddish color. Good skin, too. And very unusual green eyes.”

  “Very ordinary hazel.” Not spectacular at all. Not like, say, Vanessa Merritt’s limpid sapphire pools.

  “Kinda small up here.” Luigi’s eyes moved to her breasts. Barrie knew from long experience that if she allowed it, he would now begin an evaluation of her figure.

  “But not too small,” he reassured her hastily. “You’re slim all over.”

  “And getting slimmer.” She snatched the pizza boxes. “Thanks, Luigi. Add a good tip for yourself to my bill, and give my regards to your wife.” She closed the door before he could launch into another lament on her lacking love life.

  Cronkite was whipping himself into a frenzy, so she served him his pizza, box and all. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with her pizza, another glass of wine, and the library books she’d checked out that afternoon. The pizza, as always, was scrumptious. The second glass of wine went down even smoother than the first. The research on SIDS was fascinating.

  Of the three, the research was the one she finished completely, craving more.

  Chapter Three

  Frowning skeptically, Howie Fripp dug into his ear canal with the jagged tip of his car key. “I dunno.”

  Barrie had a primal urge to leap across his desk and tear out his throat with her teeth. No one else unleashed this feral aspect of her personality. Only Howie. It wasn’t only his disgusting personal habits and his flagrant chauvinism that aroused such savage instincts. It was his whining gutlessness and lack of vision.

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “It’s depressing,” he replied, executing a shiver for effect. “Babies dying in their beds. Who wants to watch a series about that?”

  “New parents. Prospective parents. Parents to whom it’s happened. Anyone who wants to be informed and enlightened, which I hope includes at least a portion of our viewing audience.”

  “You live in a dream world, Barrie. Our audience watches because Cheers reruns come on after the news.”

  Barrie tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. If he knew she was getting riled, he would become even more obtuse. “Because of the subject matter, the series won’t be jolly. But it doesn’t have to be maudlin, either. I’ve contacted a couple who lost a child to SIDS two years ago. They’ve since had another baby, and they’re willing to do an on-camera interview about how they’ve coped.”

  Coming to her feet, she tried to close the sale. “The thrust will be light at the end of the tunnel. Victory over adversity. It could be very uplifting.”

  “You already lined up an interview?”

  “Subject to your approval, of course,” she said, giving him a stroke. “I wanted to get my ducks in a row before I came to you, Howie. I’ve been researching this for a week, talking to pediatricians and psychologists. It’s a timely topic, especially since the death of the Merritt baby.”

  “Everybody’s sick of hearing about that.”

  “But I’m approaching it from several unique angles.”

  This wasn’t just part of the sales pitch. The more she’d researched Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the more fascinated she’d become by spin-off subjects that were just as interesting and worthy of exploration as the core. As she’d studied, she’d come to realize that a single, ninety-second piece wouldn’t begin to cover them.

  Only Howie stood in her way. “I dunno,” he repeated. The ignition key was doing a Roto-Rooter on his other ear as he reread her outline. It was detailed but brief. Surely someone of even his limited mental capacity could comprehend it.

  She’d asked for three segments, to air on consecutive nights during the two evening newscasts. Each would focus on a different element of SIDS. She’d proposed that they be heavily promoted well in advance.

  Ultimately—of course, this wasn’t in the proposal—a news producer in the viewing audience would appreciate her work and offer to hire her away from the leper colony of broadcast journalism, otherwise known as the WVUE news department.

  Howie belched. The key had produced a glob of brown wax, which he wiped on the top sheet of her outline. “I’m not convinced—”

  “I’ve got an interview with Mrs. Merritt.”

  He dropped the gooey key. “Huh?”

  It was a lie, of course. But desperate times… “We recently had coffee together.”

  “You and the First Lady?”

  “That’s right. At her invitation. During the course of our conversation, I mentioned doing a series. She endorsed the idea and agreed to share her thoughts.”<
br />
  “On camera?”

  Barrie had a sudden vision of Vanessa Merritt trying to hide behind her Ray Bans, holding a forbidden cigarette with shaking hands—a vision of the woman as an emotional wreck.

  “Of course on camera,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “You don’t say anything about the First Lady in your outline.”

  “I was saving her as a surprise.”

  “Okay, I’m surprised,” he said dryly.

  She’d never been a good liar, but then Howie wasn’t an exceptionally good judge of character, so she thought she was safe.

  He leaned forward across his desk. “If Mrs. Merritt consents to an interview—”

  “She will.”

  “You still gotta turn out one regular story each day.” With that, he sat back and scratched his crotch.

  She weighed the condition, then shook her head firmly. “This deserves my full attention, Howie. I’d really like to devote all my time to it.”

  “And I’d really like to fuck Sharon Stone. But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

  Barrie reconsidered. “Okay. Provision accepted.”

  * * *

  “Barrie Travis.”

  “Who?”

  The First Lady cleared her throat before repeating the name. “Barrie Travis. She’s a reporter for WVUE.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sort of a breathy voice?” David Merritt, President of the United States, affixed a cuff link bearing the presidential seal. “I called on her at a recent press conference. Her reports on the White House are usually favorable, aren’t they?”