Barrie gave up on retrieving any coins from the bottom of her bag, deciding that a diet drink was hardly worth the effort of the search.
She wove her way through the television station’s newsroom, working the maze of cubicles until she reached her own. One look at the surface of her desk would have made an obsessive-compulsive take a razor to his wrists. Barrie slung her satchel onto the desk, knocking three magazines to the floor in the process.
“Do you ever read any of those?”
The familiar voice caused Barrie to groan. Howie Fripp was the news department’s assignments editor, her immediate supervisor, and an all-around pain in the butt.
“Of course I read them,” she lied. “Cover to cover.”
She subscribed to a number of periodicals. The magazines arrived regularly, creating skyscrapers on her desk until she was forced to throw them away, more often than not unread. She faithfully read her monthly horoscope in Cosmopolitan. That was about the extent of the time she spent with the magazines, but on principle alone she wouldn’t let her subscriptions lapse. All good broadcast journalists were news junkies, reading everything they could get their hands on.
And she was a good broadcast journalist.
She was.
“Doesn’t it bother your conscience to know that thousands of trees give up their lives just to keep you in reading matter that you don’t read?”
“Howie, you’re what bothers me. Besides, you’re one to preach environmental awareness when the smoke from your four packs a day pollutes the atmosphere.”
“Not to mention my farts.”
She despised that evil little grin of his almost as much as she despised the small minds that managed WVUE, a low-budget, substandard, independent television station struggling to survive among the monolithic news operations in Washington, D.C. She’d had to beg for the budget to produce the feature stories that had won the First Lady’s praise. She had ideas for many others. But the station’s management, including Howie, weren’t of a similar mind. Her ideas were blocked by men who lacked vision, talent, and energy. She didn’t belong here.
Isn’t that the belief clung to by prison inmates?
“Thank you, Howie, for not mentioning your farts.”
She plopped down in her desk chair and dug tunnels through her hair with her fingers, holding it off her face. Her coiffure hadn’t been much to brag about, but the damp wind on the restaurant terrace had played havoc with it.
Strange choice of meeting places.
Even stranger was the meeting itself.
What purpose did it serve?
On the drive back to the station, Barrie had reviewed each word that was said during her visit with the First Lady. She’d analyzed every inflection in Vanessa Merritt’s voice, gauged each hand gesture, assessed her body language, reviewed that disturbing final question that had served as her goodbye, but she still couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had happened. Or exactly what hadn’t.
“Checked your e-mail?” Howie asked, interrupting her thoughts.
“Not yet.”
“That tiger that escaped from the traveling carnival? They found him. He hadn’t escaped after all. Ergo, no story.”
“Oh nooo!” she said dramatically. “And I was so looking forward to covering that.”
“Hey, it could’ve been big news. The cat could’ve eaten a kid or something.” He looked genuinely forlorn over the missed opportunity.
“It was a crap assignment, Howie. You always stick me with the crap assignments. Is it because you don’t like me, or because I’m a woman?”
“Jeez, not
that feminist routine again. You PMS, or what?”
She sighed. “Howie, you’re hopeless.”
Hopeless. That was it. Vanessa Merritt had seemed hopeless.
Impatient to explore that avenue of thought, Barrie said, “Look, Howie, unless there’s something specific that’s brought you by, I’ve got a lot to do here, as you can see.”