“We want to talk to you.”
My heart is pounding to a beat of why? why? why? I guess everybody reacts that way. I try to keep my game face cool. I’m unshackled in the back seat of the SUV, both the feds up front. The door is unlocked. It can’t be that threatening. I have a small, petty, apprehensive thought: could Rachel have done this? I decide, no.
Eight blocks go by and we’re deep in the anonymous warehouse district east of the port. We pull up to a new red-brick building with no windows, where a heavy gate opens. They pull into a small walled-off parking lot, then wait for a garage door to rise. The SUV slides slowly into an immaculate garage area with two other SUVs and three black Crown Victorias. A camera is mounted from one corner of the ceiling. The garage door closes and we step out into cool artificial light. The floor is spotless. We walk toward a wall with four doorways and a larger entrance with a metal door rolled down. We go to the one that has a rectangular metal box attached to the wall on the left. The box is painted the same gray as the rest of the wall and has a glass cover and beneath the glass LED lights emit a reddish glow. The man in the suit looks into the box and there’s a solid metal click from the door. They lead me through an empty, blank corridor, painted the same gray. The one in the suit holds open a door and we all step inside.
It looks a lot like an interrogation room.
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, relax.”
The first man takes off his leather jacket, revealing a short-sleeved, black polo shirt. He’s buff and proud of the muscles in his arms. His knuckles are raw. But I most notice his light-brown leather shoulder holster and in it, the biggest handgun I have ever seen. It’s a semi-auto, silver with a black grip and the barrel must be eight inches long. The bore is huge. It hardly looks federal issue. The man in the suit tells me to relax again and pulls out a chair. He sits across the table and opens a leather portfolio with a legal pad. The first man stands to my right, just at the edge of my peripheral vision. They still haven’t told me their names.
I look straight ahead at the man in the suit.
The first man leans against the wall and crosses his arms. He says my full name. “You were born in Seattle in 1961. You look younger than you are. Your father died in federal prison. Your sister, Jill, killed herself six years ago. You graduated from the University of Washington and served in the military.”
“What the hell is this?” I sit straight in the chair. My feet feel funny.
“You were part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize eight years ago. As a columnist for the Seattle Free Press you make $108,000 a year and your taxes are in order. But your personal finances are a mess, not something I’d want to advertise if I were a business writer. You were married once and divorced. Now you see Rachel Summers, Pamela Moffat, and Melinda Stewart. At the same time. You get around, brother. You have no close friends.”
The room is as bare as my mind at that moment. Coffee stains dot the tabletop like meteor strikes. “What do you want?”
“How long have you known Troy Hardesty?”
So that’s it. “Seven years,” I say. “I met him when he worked for Lehman back East, then we both ended up in Seattle.” The man in the suit makes notes in a neat hand on the legal pad. He places his left hand in front to conceal what he’s writing.
“What did you talk about yesterday?”
“A column I was working on, among other things. Why are you asking?” I wonder what Troy was into. Securities fraud, insider trading? That’s not the kind of thing that gets a journalist picked up outside his building. It had to be something else. They just stare at me.
“Did Troy kill himself?” I ask. “Or do you suspect foul play?”
They actually say it: “We’ll ask the questions.”
My mind replays those last moments with Troy. He seemed his usual carefree, arrogant self. He let me out the side door, so I didn’t know if he met his next appointment or if he ever had one. They demand to know more about our conversation. I had cooperated with the police. After all, a man had just died. Now I start to wonder about First Amendment issues, about telling the confidences of a news source. I tell them I want to talk to the newspaper’s lawyers. My mouth is so dry it takes me a moment to finish the sentence.
The man in the suit glances at his partner. The partner pulls over a chair and sits close to my right. I can smell his cologne and it reminds me of something I tried in high school. Brut? Old Spice? He starts nervously shaking his leg. The butt of the big handgun jiggles inside the holster.
“We need to know the details,” he says.
“I can’t tell you until I talk to our lawyers.” I say it in a stronger voice and his leg stops shaking.
“So what do you do in your spare time? What kinds of things does a guy in your position have to read?” The man in the suit smiles at me as if we are just having coffee together. He has shifted the dynamic of the interview, from confrontational to friendly. I should know: I’ve done it many times myself.
What do I read? How much time do you have? It sounds like a job interview. I give the short list: eight newspapers in print or online, four magazines, ten Web sites, documents from various federal agencies and dozens of companies, and let’s not forget those sexy reports from the Federal Reserve Banks.
“What else?”
“That’s about it,” I say. “Sometimes a novel or a work of history. My eyes get tired at the end of the day.”
Writing, writing, writing. The man in the suit makes his notes. I try not to let my leg shake, the leg that knows deadline is coming down on me like a runaway train.
I try to take control. “So what kinds of cases do you guys specialize in?” I direct it to the buff one sitting beside me. He just stares.
“What about the Internet? Do you write a Web log?” This, again, from the man in the suit.
This one is easy to answer. It’s public knowledge. I write a short blog entry every day on the newspaper’s Web site, on economic and business topics. I tell them that I was one of the first business columnists to start a Web log, more than a decade ago, and that the Free Press has one of the nation’s busiest newspaper Web sites—something the “you guys are buggy whip makers” critics conveniently overlook. My column and blog are promoted on Twitter, where I have hundreds of followers, and on Facebook. I want to throw them off stride, take some control, find out what they’re after. He ignores me.