The Violence Beat Read online

  Also by JoAnna Carl writing as Eve K. Sandstrom

  Nell Matthews Mysteries

  The Violence Beat

  The Homicide Report

  The Smoking Gun

  Also by JoAnna Carl

  Chocoholic Mysteries

  The Chocolate Cat Caper

  The Chocolate Bear Burglary

  The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up

  The Chocolate Puppy Puzzle

  The Chocolate Mouse Trap

  Crime de Cocoa (anthology)

  The Chocolate Bridal Bash

  The Chocolate Jewel Case

  The Chocolate Snowman Murders

  The Chocolate Cupid Killings

  Chocolate to Die For (omnibus edition)

  The Chocolate Pirate Plot

  The Chocolate Castle Clue

  The Chocolate Moose Motive

  The Chocolate Book Bandit

  The Violence Beat

  JoAnna Carl writing as Eve K. Sandstrom

  INTERMIX BOOKS, NEW YORK

  INTERMIX BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE VIOLENCE BEAT

  An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Onyx trade edition / November 1997

  InterMix eBook edition / March 2014

  Copyright © 1997 by Eve K. Sandstrom.

  Excerpt from The Homicide Report © 1998 by Eve K. Sandstrom.

  Excerpt from The Chocolate Book Bandit © 2013 by Eve Sandstrom.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14809-3

  INTERMIX

  InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by JoAnna Carl writing as Eve K. Sandstrom

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Special Excerpt from THE HOMICIDE REPORT

  Special Excerpt from THE CHOCOLATE BOOK BANDIT

  About the Author

  In memory of the late Louise B. Moore,

  sponsor of the University of Oklahoma student paper,

  who gave a generation of journalists

  high standards and a love for their profession.

  And to Paul McClung,

  former executive editor of the Lawton Constitution,

  who demostrated that good reporting and

  good writing are the same thing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Grantham Gazette is not based on any newspaper that ever existed—certainly no paper I ever worked for. From parking garage to personnel policies, it represents my own ideas on how a newspaper should operate, rather than picturing any news-gathering institution which exists in the real world.

  In committing fiction, however, I shamelessly exploited friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers to make sure my phony newspaper and fake police department had authentic backgrounds. Special thanks go to Inspector Jim Avance of the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation; to Lieutenant Beverlee Hill of the Lawton, Oklahoma, Police Department; and to Commander Hugh Holton of the Chicago Police Department. Thanks also to Luci Zahray, who knows about poisons; to Joe Worley, executive editor of the Tulsa World; to the World’s editorial staffers, who are kind to visiting researchers even when their work is interrupted; and to Tom Jackson, designated hitter for the editorial staff of the Lawton Constitution and a good, true friend. I also owe much to a dozen or more police reporters I’ve worked with in a lot of years in the news business. Most of them showed me how crime reporting should be done. A few of them showed me how it shouldn’t.

  Chapter 1

  Just after sunset, in the fourteenth hour of the hostage situation at Grantham Central Police Headquarters, Coy-the-Cop Blakely called me out of the knot of reporters and photographers.

  Coy glared as he yelled my name. “Nell! Nell Matthews! We need you inside!”

  Coy was the press spokesman for the Grantham PD, and I was the dayside reporter on the violence beat—police, sheriff, and fire departments—for the only local daily in our midsized city. I saw Coy five days a week—seven if we were working a big story. Our relationship was a delicate balance of trust and distrust. I didn’t think he would actually lie to me, and I don’t lie to anybody. But either of us was ready to omit a few facts in a New York minute.

  Coy never did me any favors, and I wouldn’t have accepted any. For one thing, it would have made every other reporter in town mad at us, and Coy and I both knew we needed to get along with those folks. So why was Coy calling to me, singling me out from the other reporters?

  I ducked under the yellow tape the cops had strung up to keep the press in its place, squinting in the floodlights, and climbed over the bumpers of a couple of the patrol cars that lined the street. Coy stood waiting for me, breeze ruffling his well-barbered brown hair, hands on his skinny hips. He ignored the catcalls from the dozen or so people behind the tape—the three TV crews, the two radio types, the housewife who worked part-rime for the neighborhood weekly, our photographer, the hotshot from the Associated Press, and the usual hanger-on, Guy Unitas, steward of the Grantham Amalgamated Police Brotherhood.

  Our photog, the cuddly looking Bear Be
nnington, pushed the button which makes his camera whir.

  Guy Unitas opened his wide, thin-lipped mouth—I always thought he looked like a fish—and yelled out, “Watch out, Nell! He’ll have your eyeteeth out before you get in the building!” Guy began as a police reporter, sold out to public relations—he held Coy’s job before Coy had it—then sold out even further by becoming steward of the local police union. But he still likes to hang around with reporters, and we tolerate him because he knows where every single body in the Grantham PD is buried and doesn’t mind telling the locations.

  The AP hotshot, Ace Anderson, put his little fingers in his mouth and whistled as if I were a taxicab. His dark slacks were drooping over his flat fanny as usual. “Wish I had your pull, Nell! But I guess I don’t have the build for it!”

  I ignored him. All real reporters ignored Ace. His nickname was as big a joke as he was.

  Coy-the-Cop waited impatiently for me to run the obstacle course.

  “Come on.” He put his hand under my elbow and tried to push me in front of him, toward the stairs that led to the terraced yard, toward the pillared portico of the big, old-fashioned brick building that had housed Grantham’s first high school for a lot of years before it was remodeled into the central cop shop.

  I yanked my arm away. Not that there was anything sexual in his touch. For several years Coy had been separated from his second wife, but apparently neither of them had made a move toward a divorce. The station house gossip was that he lived an angrily celibate life. He’d certainly never as much as flickered an eyelash in my direction.

  No, there was no man-woman meaning in Coy’s touch. I simply made it a rule that no cop ever touched me. We weren’t buddies; we just worked together. The worst thing a reporter can do is get too close, too friendly with any news source. Unless it’s not being friendly enough.

  When it came to Coy specifically, I didn’t like some public-relations type shoving me around. And I definitely didn’t like the appearance of getting any special attention, being pulled out from the other reporters. If Coy had some tip for my ears only—it happens sometimes—he could call me at the office or take me aside privately.

  So I stood there on the Central Police Station lawn, facing Coy. “Just what is going on? All day you’ve made us cool our heels out in the sun and the wind—me, along with all the other reporters in Grantham and surrounding parts. And now you’re shoving me inside.”

  “Bo Jenkins wants to talk to you, Nell,” Coy said. “Svenson said to bring you in.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Mike Svenson wants me to talk to Bo Jenkins?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Coy tried to grab my arm again, and I dodged once more. I saw that five cameras were filming my little dance with Coy, and I felt a perverse pride as I avoided his grip.

  “Mike wants to talk to you himself,” Coy said.

  “I’ll be glad to talk to Officer Svenson. You don’t need to shove me around over it.”

  Coy stepped back, held both his hands at shoulder height in an open-palmed “hands off” gesture, then used one of them to motion me ahead of him. I walked into headquarters with all the dignity I could gather on a Saturday when I’d been hauled out of bed at seven a.m. to cover a hostage situation. I was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a dirty sweatshirt which bagged halfway to my knees. My makeup had been applied in the back of the photographer’s van, and my semi-red and totally straight hair had not had its morning wash and blow-dry. I was fueled by fast food and caffeine. So I might not have looked very classy on television, but at least I wasn’t being hustled into the cop shop by some PR flack who thought he could manage the news.

  Officer Mike Svenson had set up his command post in a downstairs waiting room. It was only a few feet from the central hall under the rotunda, the rotunda where Coy-the-Cop had told us Bo Jenkins was barricaded, along with a pistol, an eight-inch hunting knife, and his eighteen-month-old son.

  Coy had already told the press that Bo had repeatedly dangled the kid over the railing, saying he’d better get what he wanted or he’d toss the baby down three stories onto the terrazzo floor, splat into the center of the city seal.

  As we passed through the wide entrance hall, I could hear the kid whimper. The sound made me gulp. When you’re outside covering a story, joking to convince the other reporters you’re tough, it’s easy to forget that a real baby is in danger inside. In fact, you have to forget it. You can’t do your job if you’re crying.

  All day long Coy’s communiques had hinted that the negotiating team headed by Mike Svenson wasn’t sure just how to deal with Bo. This was largely because Bo wasn’t too clear about just what he wanted, or so I’d deduced.

  The command post for the negotiations had been set up in what usually served as a public waiting room adjoining the main desk. When I came through the door, Mike Svenson was staring out the window at the crowd gathered in front of the cop shop. I realized he must have been watching my little go-round with Coy. He immediately turned toward me.

  Mike Svenson was a big, rugged-looking guy, around six-two, with heavy muscles, a crooked nose, and remarkably red hair. I knew the nose came from a high school football injury, because I’d asked him. In appearance, he was the ideal “bad cop.” But gossip had it that he starred at playing the “good cop” role. He was a smooth talker.

  But when Mike Svenson turned around, he didn’t waste time on smooth talk.

  “What do you know about Bo Jenkins?” he said.

  “I never heard of him until this morning,” I said.

  Mike Svenson and I stared warily at each other, just the way we had every other time we had met for the past eighteen months.

  Then he sighed. He dropped into a vinyl-covered chair, the kind that masquerades as comfortable seating in a city office. A red telephone sat beside him on the seat of a straight metal office chair he seemed to be using as an end table. He rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand and pointed toward another easy chair with his right.

  “Please sit down, Nell. I’m sorry if I sounded abrupt.” He gave me the grin that had the hormones of every secretary at city hall in an uproar. “I can only handle one set of negotiations at a time, so I don’t want to get crosswise with you, as well as Bo Jenkins. I’ll try to level with you.”

  Which means you’re about to tell me a lie, I thought. But I sat down on the edge of the chair.

  “I’m listening,” I said. “I know you’ve got a bad situation here, Mike. I’ll help any way I can, of course. But I do not know one thing about Bo Jenkins. I never heard of him until this morning. Captain Blakely says he’s asked to speak to me. I can’t imagine why.”

  “He says it’s because you’re the only honest reporter in Grantham.”

  I thought Svenson was kidding me, but he looked perfectly serious. “That’s a dumb thing to say,” I said. “But I suppose Bo isn’t making a lot of sense or he wouldn’t be in this pickle.”

  Mike Svenson gave me long look. “I saw you talking to his wife out there. What did you find out?”

  “She’s too hysterical to make much of an interview. She’s mainly mad at the judge who said Bo was entitled to visitation with the kid, even after she told him Bo was on the verge of something desperate. I’m sure she told your team the same thing. I wrote it up on the laptop and one of photogs ran the disk over to the office. It should be in print in a couple of hours, when the state edition rolls. Or I can ask the city editor to make you a printout if you need it more quickly.”

  “Did the other Gazette reporters find out anything?”

  “With the interviews of Jenkins’s neighbors? That’ll be in the state edition, too. I think it was the usual stuff. Bo never had the reputation for being any too bright, but he was a good guy, a steady worker—you know that, since he was a mechanic for the city-county garage. About a year ago he went off the deep end. Beat the wife up. She left him. He began
to drink heavily. Left town, then came back. No job. Had to stay at the Salvation Army shelter. He’s been all messed up over the divorce.

  “Maybe he was a secret boozer all along. Maybe he’s on drugs, hooked. Could be a brain tumor. But a year ago he apparently underwent a complete personality change. Nobody understands what happened to him.”

  Svenson nodded. “You could be the one who finds out the secret.”

  “Because he wants to talk to me? I doubt it. He’ll just want to tell me some crazy story he’s going to claim will be a major expose. That’s what every nut claims. But they never really know anything important.”

  “Are you willing to listen to his crazy story?”

  “You mean talk to him?”

  Mike Svenson nodded.

  “Sure,” I said, “if you guys have the knife and the gun. You’re the certified hero, Officer Svenson. The guy with the medals. I’m just a cowardly reporter.”

  “Sorry, Bo still has the weaponry. Plus the kid. But we have rigged a phone line. You can sit in here and talk to him.”

  “That I could handle. But”—I stared at my notebook, formulating my question before I spoke—“you’re the expert on negotiations, but this situation confuses me. I always thought one of the main points in negotiating was never to bring in any person that the hostage taker demanded to talk to.”

  “You’re absolutely right. Nine times out of ten, the guy claims to want to talk to a family member or somebody else, but what he really has in mind is getting the right audience for his own suicide. Or else bringing some particular person into his rifle sights.”

  “So what’s different about this time?”

  “Bo asked for you, not for Channel Four.”

  I thought about that. “You mean, if he really wanted an audience, he’d want cameras?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. I see that. But I thought another part of the negotiating process was to limit the hostage taker to one or two contacts, to make him dependent on those people.”