“Describe the perp.”
Thinking back on a grad school lecture by Dr. Chan on the tenets of profiling a serial killer, I walked through the steps in my mind to establish a profile of Masey’s killer.
Was he an (a) loner or (b) socially competent?
I would say b. The killer was streetwise and comfortable in society. He made friends easily and he probably knew his victims. They might even have liked him, trusted him.
And motive? Was it (a) a lust kill, (b) a calculated attack, or (c) a crime of opportunity?
It was hard to say. Maybe all of the above. He was ritualistic, that was for sure, cutting up his victims, burning their bodies postmortem, and wrapping them in heavy-duty plastic that he probably kept at home or picked up at a work site.
Was he an organized or a disorganized killer? I would say organized. He killed his victims in a set location, then transported and disposed of their bodies elsewhere. Although this time, instead of trying to conceal his crime, he left the body out in the open on purpose.
So does that make him psychotic or psychopathic? There was no doubt in my mind he was a psychopath, the same man who’d killed Masey James, only with his latest victim, Tania Mosley, he changed his modus operandi. He wanted her to be found quickly, so he left her body just visible enough to be spotted the next time a restaurant employee took out the garbage.
“When an organized killer changes his pattern, there’s usually a reason,” Dr. Chan taught me. “Either he wants to get caught, he’s playing a game of cat and mouse, or he’s angry.”
“Why would he be angry?” I’d asked him.
“Something didn’t go right for him. He wanted it badly, but he couldn’t get it. Or it could be that his heinous acts haven’t drawn the attention that he’d hoped they would. Maybe somebody or something took the focus off his actions, so he lashed out.”
It all made sense. Masey’s killer didn’t want to get caught, but he watched and thrived off the thunder, and the boys being charged with Masey’s murder had stolen it from him. But was he angry about that or something else? I believed he was angry because of something he wanted and didn’t get, and he satiated himself not just by taking a life, but by mutilating his latest victim even more savagely than before. He was sending a message. He was pissed.
I ran the killer’s profile through my mind over and over again. It felt like I was in one of those infuriating dreams where I would attempt to dial a phone number but for the life of me could neither complete the action nor give up trying. I believed Masey’s and Tania’s killer and the man who attacked me were one in the same. When he was unsuccessful in his attempt to take my life and Bass’s that night on the parking deck, he found another life to take.
After I hung up with Justin, I texted Scott the address of the crime scene and asked him to meet me there. Then I called Ellen.
“Sorry to call so early, but it’s important. I just got a tip that another body was found overnight by a dumpster outside a restaurant . . . It’s Masey’s killer, I know it. He wants to steal his thunder back! I’m headed to the scene now.”
“Jordan, do you think it’s wise that this should be your first story just coming back to work?” she asked.
“Ellen, the kid gloves you and Peter are handling me with have got to come off at some point, so it might as well be now,” I said. “I’m back on the story.”
I showered in record time. To get out the door faster, I threw my makeup must-haves into my already tightly packed in-case-of-emergency cosmetic tote to apply on the way to the scene. The barbecue place floated in the middle of its ample parking lot like an island. A retaining fence in back separated the restaurant from a string of retail stores to the west, but the north and south entrances were accessible from the street, a four-lane boulevard with a wide concrete median. It wasn’t someplace where people hung out.
No witnesses.
It was a sobering thought that I could have ended up like poor Tania Mosley. The nineteen-year-old former high school track star had been one of millions of teenagers who faced homelessness on their own the past five or six months, trafficked by predators and working the streets. For that, her mother kicked her out of the house. Now she was angry and full of regret, insisting that she never stopped loving her daughter, pleading with the community to help find the killer. It was a repeat episode, only this time I scored an exclusive with her mother later that day, solidifying my place in the Chicago media lexicon as the reporter who landed the ratings-boosting tearful interview with the grieving mother.
The similarities between the condition of Masey’s body and Tania’s were too striking to ignore. I made the deduction even without the inside scoop from Dr. Chan. I missed him and wondered when he would return. After the last ill-timed call, I emailed him instead.
“Dr. Chan, how are you? So much has happened here. Another body was found, the MO similar to Masey James. When are you coming back? I was attacked last week. I think I was being watched. I’m fine now. But I think I got too close. Call me.”
I was prepared to deal with the damsel-in-distress treatment in the newsroom, where I had gained a kind of celebrity status that forced me to field the same types of questions over and over from my colleagues, oozing sincerity with their puppy dog expressions and pats on my shoulder. Their concern, I believed, was genuine. I just didn’t like being cast as a victim.
Two days later, Bartlett and Fawcett were still ignoring my calls, emails, and text messages, and I’d reached my limit. I drove over to police headquarters early that morning and stood outside by the employee entrance and waited for Bartlett to arrive at work. He got out of his car, red-faced and perspiring. Any attempt he’d made to appear like he was in control was long gone, the awful magnitude of what was unfolding breaking him into a thousand pieces.
“Jordan, you don’t have an appointment and I don’t have time to talk to you this morning,” he said, walking past me with his head down.
“Bartlett! Bartlett!” I said, walking alongside him. He wouldn’t even look at me. “So let me get this straight. You’re okay with three little boys sitting in jail after seeing that picture of Terrence Bankhead with Masey James?”
Without so much as a word, he swiped his badge to access the secure door. “Can I quote you on that?” I yelled after him facetiously. “What happened to you, Bartlett?”
When I got back to the newsroom, there was a note on my desk from Nussbaum: “Come see me.”
“Yeah, Peter, what’s up?”
“Jordan, you can’t go around harassing the chief of police,” Nussbaum said.
I’d never figured Bartlett to be the type to run and tell my boss on me.
“He called you?” I said, finding it almost comical. “And since when did stalking an authority figure to get a quote become harassment? I’m a reporter. It’s what I do.”
“Ellen should have handled this, so now I’m handling it. You came back to work too soon. Take another week off the air,” he said. “And stay away from Bartlett.”
“I don’t want to take a week off,” I said.
“It’s not a suggestion,” he said.
Off the air? Okay, fine. Off the story? I don’t think so.
* * *
My relationship with Joey was growing and changing. He started to see me as an equal and also as an asset, something of a role reversal for us. And thankfully he’d stopped lecturing me about backing off the case, but not about being careful.
“Morning, Jordan.”
About a week after my interview with Tricia Mosley, Tania’s mom, our two prime suspects appeared to have fallen off the face of the earth.
“Joe, have you got a location yet on Terrence and Brent?” I asked.
“Naw, I think they ghosted that office,” he said.
“Is there another tenant in there now?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that. They just haven’t been around. It was under surveillance, but the North Division just pulled off the patrol yesterday.”
The police are pulling back. Meanwhile, three innocent boys are still locked up.
“Why?”
“Resources. They put a squad on the building during the day and one at night. But nothing’s going on, so they pulled them off,” he said.
With Dr. Chan’s absence, it took almost a week to get a copy of the autopsy report on Tania Mosley.
Cause of death: strangulation/asphyxiation.
Was the victim sexually assaulted? Yes.
Condition of the body: partially clothed, second- and third-degree burns. There was no evidence of smoke in the windpipe or lungs, indicating the fire took place postmortem.
A diagram on the report showed the placement of each wound. The brutality was unimaginable. During her final moments on this earth, she was subjected to the cruel and inhumane madness of her killer. The deep slash across her throat detailed in the report nearly decapitated her. The sketch of her wounds did not come close to the words explaining her injuries. The tiny X marks seemed insignificant until I read that they were all stab wounds.
I didn’t take being off the air as being banned from the newsroom. So I dropped by to pick up a few items from my desk and noticed Keith sulking around more than usual. The invigorating feeling he’d experienced on the crime beat during my absence was about to come to an unceremonious “you are not relevant” kind of ending. So Keith did something about it.
Ellen was just emerging from a closed-door meeting with newsroom brass. “It finally happened,” she said.
“What did?” I asked, sitting on the edge of her desk.
“Keith threatened to quit if Nussbaum doesn’t split the beat,” Ellen reported.
“Let him. What did Nussbaum say?”
“He’s thinking about it, Jordan.”
Keith had sucker-punched me once again. I leaned close to Ellen’s face so only she could hear what I was about to say. I got on my soapbox yet again, explaining the obvious misogyny in the industry. It reeked like a rotted skunk. “Let’s all imagine, Ellen, a woman—any woman in this building—pulling that stunt.”
I was shaking, close to tears, I was so mad. But even Ellen, a successful woman who had made it in this business, would hold tears against me.
“I said he was thinking about it. And you’d still be on the beat, you’d just be sharing it. Look, what happened to you, that scared the shit out of Peter.”
I narrowed my gaze at her.
“Don’t look at me like that. I hate myself for letting the words even come out of my mouth. But, Jordan, you have been reckless.”
That was the third time Ellen had used that word to describe me, but this time, something inside me snapped. It was as if the tether that connected us two women, floating in a space dominated by males unconcerned with our job satisfaction or advancement, had suddenly been severed.
She must have felt it, too, because she swung her chair back around and faced her computer, proffering me no chance at a rebuttal. Nussbaum had given her the task of delivering the news. I’d seen this movie before. “Thinking about it” was Nussbaum’s lily-livered precursor to a done deal. He’d exploited my relationship with Ellen, a relationship that, it turned out, was a clumsy two-step, and she’d just stepped on my foot in the middle of a competition.
Nussbaum, the coward, left the office early, his assistant said. It had all been settled with zero input from me.
Reckless, you call it, Ellen. Feckless, I say to both of you.
April Murphy left a voice mail for me a few minutes ago. I owed her a callback and needed an honest-to-goodness distraction to keep me from writing my resignation letter.
“Hello?”
“Hi, April, how are you? It’s Jordan,” I said, noticing right away that I needed to correct my tone.
“Hey, Jordan. What’s wrong?”
Too late.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was in a meeting when you called. What’s going on?”
“I was just calling to see if there was anything I could do to help,” she said.
Funny you’d ask.
Her timing was impeccable. When I’d met with April at the coffee shop, I didn’t tell her about the tissue sample Dr. Chan had taken from beneath Masey’s fingernails to be analyzed. But when I finally received the autopsy report for Tania Mosley, I inquired about the result. The sample had been logged into evidence, but no results could be found.
“Maybe there is something you can do, April. Dr. Chan had taken a tissue sample, I think it was skin or blood or something, from beneath Masey James’s fingernails. Nobody at the medical examiner’s office can track down the results, and Dr. Chan is still out of town. I had a fingernail scrape at the hospital after the attack, but the results didn’t match anything in the crime database. If my results are in, then surely they should have the results on Masey James. Can you see what you can find out?” I asked her.
“I’m on it,” she said.
“Thank you so much. Have you talked to Pamela Alonzo?”
“Pam and I talk about twice a week,” she said.
After the attack, Pamela sent me a text message to wish me well and had said she hoped I’d feel better soon. But I hadn’t spoken to Pamela since that day at Yvonne’s when Terrence Bankhead’s name first came up.
“Did she mention the name Terrence Bankhead?” I asked.
“No, who’s that?”
“He’s a suspect. You and I need to catch up. Let me know what you can find out about this sample, and let’s try and get together sometime this week,” I said.
“Okay, sounds good.”
I should be relieved that Pamela hadn’t called. That she’d hitched her wagon to April and cut me loose. But I was still bothered by what Yvonne had told me about Pamela’s not wanting to hear anything else about Terrence, her turning away from the truth.
I felt a headache coming on, and I massaged my temples and forehead and closed my eyes. I was furious over what Nussbaum was planning to do and at Keith for talking him into it. But the exchange with Ellen had cut me deep.
“Jordan?”
I looked up, and Grace Ito was standing at my cubicle. I tried to mask my exasperation with her, but the eye roll couldn’t be contained.
“I deserve that, I guess,” she said.
“No, that wasn’t directed at you. It’s just been a long day. What’s going on?”
“First, I’m so sorry about what happened to you,” she said, a single tear rolling down her face. “I never said you put my life in danger. Those were Keith’s words, not mine. I told a few people at the Billy Goat one night that you’d taken me out on a story. But I told them it was exciting. I never said I was scared.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yeah, but I never would’ve admitted it to them. I respect you so much. You are my hero.”
Well, this was just great. For a second time today, I was fighting back tears in the workplace. Grace’s words were not what I’d expected. I’d attended my fair share of mentor programs and “women must stick together” summits. But there was nothing like hearing someone looked up to you because of the work you put in.
“I have something else to tell you,” she said.
“What?”
“That kid I talked to at Carol Crest . . .”
“The one whose name you didn’t get?” I said, unable to resist the dig with the gentle nudge of a big sister.
“I know who he is now,” she said.
My ears perked up. “How?”
“He’s on the football team, right? Sports started covering those games, because they’re now a favorite to go to state. I went out on that shoot. He’s the star running back.”
“What’s his name?”
“Demetrius Turner.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No, I couldn’t get close. But it’s him, I’m sure of it. He has his hair twisted in the front with blond highlights on the tips. He’s number 28.”
I checked the clock above the city desk. It was 2:25. School didn’t let out until 3:30.
“Grace,” I said. “Thank you, and I believe you, and I believe in you.”
* * *
I hailed a cab over to Carol Crest Academy and instructed the driver to drop me off by the football field. I arrived moments before the dismissal bell and took a seat in the bleachers. A coach or team staffer wearing a Crest Academy sports jersey with a whistle around his neck and carrying a clipboard exited the tunnel leading to the locker rooms. Once he was on the field, he spotted me and headed my way. I could tell by his determined stride he was coming to confront me.
“Hello, ma’am. Can I help you?” he said.
“No.”
“Well, are you waiting for someone?”
“Yes, I’m waiting on my ride.”
“Are you a sub?” he asked.
While I thought about how to respond, I pretended not to hear him.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Are you sub?” he said.
I nodded. But he wasn’t satisfied.
“Practices are closed to the public,” he said.
It occurred to me that with the state championship within its grasp, the coaches were on the lookout for spies from other teams stealing plays and assessing the biggest threats on the Crest squad.
“I know you don’t think I’m here to steal secrets, do you?” I feigned a laugh. “See these?” I said, proffering a foot. “I’m wearing four-inch heels, not Adidas.”
He folded his arms and smirked.
“I’ll be out of here before practice starts. I promise.”
He would make a terrible reporter; he gave up way too easily. He strutted back to the field, satisfied with his “investigation.”
Ten minutes passed before the first ballplayers jogged out onto the field. I moved off the bleachers and stood against the wall in the tunnel leading to the locker rooms. Once Demetrius made it out onto the field, it’d be too late.
A group of players finally emerged from the pit, trash-talking, cursing, and smacking one another in the back of the head the way immature boys do. Because they were clustered together, it was hard to make out the numbers on the front of their jerseys. Then I remembered Grace said Demetrius had blond highlights at the end of his twisted hair, and suddenly there he was.
“Demetrius!” I called out, and the kid stopped as if he heard a fan calling out for an autograph.
“Over here.” I waved to him and he turned in my direction.
“Isn’t she a reporter?” I heard one of the boys say.
“Hey, Turner! What’re doing, man? That’s a reporter!”
“Aw! Okay, damn,” Demetrius said, and turned in the other direction.
“Demetrius, wait!” I said, chasing behind him. “I’m not here about football. Demetrius, remember the Asian girl you spoke with a couple weeks back about Masey James?”
He stopped and let his teammates file past him, then stepped toward me. “Yeah. I remember her,” he said, proudly stroking his fully grown-in goatee. “What about it?”
“She told me that you saw Masey James get in the car with a guy after school. Can you describe him?”
“You talking about Terrence?”
My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe how matter-of-factly he just identified the driver who’d been giving Masey rides from school: the man I’d suspected all along.
“You know him?”
“Yeah. I see him at the barbershop sometimes,” he said. “That was her dude.”
“Whose?”
“Masey’s,” he said like there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with a thirty-year-old man being a fifteen-year-old girl’s “dude.”
“You do know that Terrence Bankhead is a grown man?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hey, got nothing to do with me.”
“Why didn’t you tell my colleague his name?”
“I don’t know her,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
You don’t know me, either. Oh, but I’m a Black woman. I get it.
He started to walk away, then turned and asked, “Are you coming to the game?”
“No, I don’t cover sports. But good luck, Demetrius.”
What happened to right and wrong? Had values been canceled? What the hell was wrong with people?
Terrence Bankhead had groomed Masey James in broad daylight. She hid their picture in the bottom of that silly pumpkin, but she might as well have taped it to her bedroom mirror. They were an open secret. Not even a secret, really, just open. And to think that nobody told her mother, nobody told an adult who could have intervened, nobody tried to save her. Vampires walked the streets in the daytime, surrounded by people who could’ve grabbed a stake or a cross to dispatch them but didn’t do a damn thing.
I pulled the Mad Cash Talent Management card from my wallet and walked toward the United Center. It would be easier to hail a cab from there, but I lucked out about a block away. I wasn’t headed back to the newsroom but to Uptown.
“The 4700 block of North Racine,” I told the driver.
I sank down into the too-low back seat of the taxicab, my knees practically in my chest, and texted Joey. JUST GOT CONFIRMATION, TERRENCE IS THE MYSTERY DRIVER.
What I failed to mention was that I was headed to Terrence’s office. Terrence, I now realized, was smart. Smart enough to notice the police surveillance. Smart enough to notice when it stopped.
Uptown wasn’t a neighborhood I’d frequented since moving to Chicago. It was known for its iconic bars and music venues—such as the Green Mill, the Uptown Theatre, and the Aragon Ballroom—that helped to cement Chicago’s reputation as a hotbed of emerging musical talent.
Terrence’s office was located in a run-down building next door to the Riviera, an aged but popular concert venue that primarily booked alternative and acid rock bands. The Uptown area came alive at night, so there weren’t many places open during the day for me to duck into and keep watch from a safe distance. I walked up and down the block until I noticed a woman wiping down the counter of a bar called the Python. The door was open, so I walked in.
What if Terrence and Brent are in here?
I shuddered. I hadn’t really thought this through, had I? My reasoning was sound. They were liable to recognize my car if I was driving around the area. I could be more clandestine moving around on my stilettoed feet.
“Good afternoon. What can I get for you?” asked the tattooed bartender. She had multiple piercings and a nose ring in the shape of a bat with a fake diamond stud on the side. I sat at the bar, which gave me a direct line of sight to Terrence’s office building.
“What kind of wine ya got?” I asked, though my expectations weren’t high in a place with a wall of dart boards.
“Here, take a look at the menu,” she said.
“Thanks.”
I swiveled the barstool around to face the street and held the menu up close to my face, just below my eyes. There was no sign of life in the building.
What a dump.
“Did you find something you like?” the bartender returned.
“You know, um, I’ll have a draft beer,” I said.
“We’ve got Leine’s Red on special,” she said. Leine’s was short for Leinenkugel’s, a local brewery.
“Okay, that sounds good.”
I could have used something stronger, but the ice-cold beer soothed the burning sensation in my belly. Fear.
“Pardon me, but that building next to the Riviera . . . do you know what’s in there?” I asked the bartender.
“Yeah, it’s some sort of artists’ loft,” she said. “Musicians, painters, dancers, jewelry makers . . .”
“Wow, really? All that’s going on over there?” I asked her.
“It looks better on the inside,” she said. “Well, not by much. A friend of mine lives over there.”
“Oh, so people live there? It’s not a commercial building?” I asked.
“It’s kinda both,” she said. “That’s what it’s for. Most artists just starting out can’t afford to pay rent for a studio and an apartment.”
“Oh.”
“Can you excuse me for a minute? I’ve got to get something from the back,” she said.
“Sure.”
Now it made sense why Joey couldn’t find an apartment or house address for Terrence and Brent. They probably lived there, at least part time, and stayed with family or “girlfriends” the rest.
Joey would be furious with me if he knew I was this close.
Just as I began to reconsider the wisdom in coming here, a bluish-purplish car pulled up in front of the building. I hopped down off the barstool and stood by the window to get a better view. Two teenage girls and an older woman got out of the car. The driver, a man, repositioned the vehicle closer to the curb and was just getting out of the car when a CTA bus pulled up and stopped right in front of the Python.
“Damn it!” I said out loud.
“Everything okay?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I just remembered I’m supposed to be somewhere. Let me take care of this,” reaching for my wallet to hand over my credit card.
Laughing at my credit card over cash, she said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s on the house. The fee for the credit card charge is more than the beer.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
By the time I’d turned back around, the bus had pulled away, but the occupants of the car were gone. I left the Python and walked down to the traffic light to cross Racine Avenue. My phone vibrated in my coat pocket.
“Joey.”
“Hey, I got your text. Who confirmed it?”
I had to think for a moment, I was so preoccupied with the reconnaissance.
“The driver. Yes. This kid at Masey’s school, a football player named Demetrius Turner,” I said.
“D-Turn?” he asked.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Yeah, he’s a big deal in high school football right now,” Joey said.
Chicago is a big city, but the degree of separation between its residents made it socially the size of Mayberry.
“How did you—” he started to ask.
“It’s a long story, but check this out. I think Terrence is back.”
“Back where?”
“His office, or should I say his studio. I think they live there part time. A bartender across the street told me it was an artists’ loft.”
“Where are you right now? You sound out of breath.”
“I’m walking up Racine. Can you meet me over here? I think that was him that I just saw pull up in front of the building accompanied by three women. Hold on.”
I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head to conceal my face. “There’s a purplish car sitting out front.” I walked past the car discreetly and gazed down at the tires. “The car’s missing a rim! It’s him! I think it’s him, Joey!”
“All right. Stay put. I’m all the way out in Avondale. It’ll take me a half hour to get there even with my emergency lights on,” Joey said. “Wait for me. I’ll hit up the North Precinct to send a squad car.”
“Okay,” I said.
I was never good at waiting. What was Terrence going to do to me in front of three witnesses? I had to get in that studio. I couldn’t rely on the North Precinct or Joey to make it in time before Terrence left again.
I pulled out my cell phone and drafted a text to Joey, I’M GOING IN, but didn’t send it. I sized up the building. A scaffold snaked up the facade and a two-by-four hung conspicuously over the front entryway. I opened the door and walked into a small lobby with black-and-white-tiled flooring. To my left was a directory with long-ago varnished brass buttons and the names of studios and individuals handwritten on slips of paper crammed to fit into the narrow slats. Not one of them read Mad Cash Talent Management.
Like a lot of old buildings, this one had that putrid sewer stench, a combination of sour drains and rotten eggs. The building was eerily quiet, making my heels sound like firecrackers as I walked across the tiled floor.
Ding!
A narrow elevator opened up at the end of the hall. I put my head down and drew my neck back into the hoodie like a turtle retracting into its shell. Through my periphery I saw that a White man with a scraggly beard and matted dreadlocks that were holding on to his stringy hair for dear life had stepped out of the elevator. He paid me no mind and disappeared down a staircase at the other end of the hall. I turned around and followed him but went up instead. The steps creaked so loudly, they sounded like they were in pain, threatening to prematurely announce my arrival. By the time I got to the second floor and reached into my purse to find my keys to form a weapon, I could hear music and the immature musings of teenage girls, then footsteps that shook the ancient wooden floor like an earthquake. A woman who looked to be around my age emerged from around the corner. I apprehensively kept walking, and when we were about to pass each other, she said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said back.
“You look lost,” she said.
And you look like the woman who just got out of the car out front.
“Can I help you find something?” she said. “This place is a maze.”
I could say no or I could make up a name. I decided to improvise.
“I’m looking fo-o-o-or Mad Cash Talent Management?” I said, sounding intentionally unsure of myself.
“Good news! You made it,” she said. “Is Terrence expecting you?”
Before I answered, I paused to see if she recognized me. “Yes, I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure if he got my message.”
“Okay, well, come on in and have a seat in his office. He’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“What’s your name?”
Damn it, I knew she was going to ask me that.
“J,” I said. “Everybody calls me J.”
“Okay, J.”
“Is there a bathroom?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Just to the left of Terry’s office,” she said.
I walked through the sparsely furnished room Terrence Bankhead called his office and wondered how anyone in their right mind would believe this guy was legit. I’d seen chicken houses in East Texas with more swag. The plaques on the wall looked like they’d been printed off the internet, and crooked photos of celebrities that Terrence in no way had anything to do with decorated the area: Michael Jackson, Mary J. Blige, Johnny Gill, and Toni Braxton.
People believe what they want to believe.
The bathroom was fairly clean but cluttered. The wastebasket needed emptying, and a constant drip-drip-drip of the faucet explained the tea-colored brown stain that encircled the drain. I went in and locked the door behind me, then pressed send on the text to Joey. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I would know it when I found it. The overflowing wastebasket seemed like a good place to start. I reached inside my purse and pulled out a state-certified evidence collection kit complete with swabs, fingerprint lifts, zip-top bags, and most important, gloves. The bin was full of crusty paper towels and balls of toilet paper. Near the bottom, I came upon a used condom, which I gathered up with tongs and placed in a zip-top bag, and a large Band-Aid with a substantial amount of dried blood, which I collected, too.
I heard voices outside the door.
“Who’d she say she was? J? I don’t know no J. Where is she at now?” said a man’s voice.
“She said she was going to the bathroom,” she said.
“All right. Put the girls in the studio so they can work on that verse,” he said.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Hey, Tashena and Robin, come on! Let’s go!”
The next thing I heard was a knock at the bathroom door.
“J?” a man said. “Come on out.”
“Just a minute.” I knew the minute I stepped out of the bathroom, it was on, and I didn’t have the friendly receptionist in the room with me anymore as a witness.
“I don’t do drop-ins, lady. Appointments only,” he said from the other side of the door. “Come on out.”
I took a deep breath and pulled the hoodie off my head. Fear was not a luxury I could afford at this moment. Strength was all I had, and I wasn’t sure about that. I unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out to meet Terrence Bankhead at last. His back was to me, but he turned around when he heard my heels clacking on the floor.
He looked and dressed young, in black jeans and a white T-shirt, with a black, red, and white jacket that resembled a race-car driver’s.
A dope-ass jacket.
It took him a moment to recognize me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I didn’t know if it was what I already knew about him or those thick eyebrows of his practically growing into a unibrow, but he looked sinister, like a snake about to strike.
“You know who I am?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I know you,” he said. “You’re that bitch on TV who got her ass beat.”
Right then, I started praying that the squad car would show up.
“Wow, that was hostile,” I said, struggling to hold my poker face. “How do you know that I’m not here to make you famous?”
“What are you doing dropping my name to the police?” he asked me.
How did he know about that?
“Terrence, I’m here for one reason. To find out what you know about what happened to Masey James,” I said.
“What makes you think I know anything?” he said.
“Are we gonna play this game?”
“Who the fuck are you? A cop?” Terrence rose out of his chair and took three steps in my direction.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said.
“Bitch, this is my house!”
His quickness to anger told me everything I needed to know about how my being there made him feel.
“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” I said, stalling. “I know that you were picking Masey up from school. Somebody saw you and identified you. Oh, and I told the police that, too.”
He stood there silent.
“And another thing,” I said, taunting him, “there’s the matter of a picture of you with the victim with your hand on her ass. How old was she? Fifteen? That’s statutory rape.”
I don’t know where my courage was coming from. Maybe it felt good to be the one launching the surprise attack this time.
“You’re lying,” he said. “But I know one thing,” he said, taking a step closer, “you better keep my name out your mouth.”
“So you have a mole inside the police department?” I asked him.
Terrence was about to take another step toward me when my cell phone rang. I answered it immediately and held out my other palm in a “stop right there” pose.
“Hello?”
“Jordan, where are you? Are you okay?” It was Joey.
“No! I’m not okay,” I said, enunciating my words carefully. “I’m at Mad Cash Talent Management, next door to the Riviera on the second floor. Terrence Bankhead is in the room with me, and I feel threatened. You’re here? Good.”
“You need to go,” Terrence said. “Get out!”
I slipped past him and turned to face him while I was still on the phone with Joey. The creaky steps I had climbed moments earlier announced a new arrival. I held my breath and my heart pounced in my chest.
“Police!”
“In here!” I called out.
Terrence looked panicked. He scanned the room, but there was only one way out and I was standing in the way. He ran toward me, and I screamed and flung myself up against the wall to get out of his way.
“Police! Stop! Put your hands up!”
I heard a body drop to the floor. Terrence’s screams followed. The woman who’d greeted me came flying out of the studio in the back, flanked by the two girls. “Oh my God. Terry!”
She ran into the hallway. “Freeze!”
The next thing I heard was her body drop to the floor and more screams. Police used tasers to subdue them both.
“Angela!”
The girls tried to follow her.
“No! Don’t go out there!” I said, blocking the door so they wouldn’t suffer the same fate. “You’re gonna get hurt. Stay here and put your hands up.”
“We haven’t done anything!” one of the girls pleaded.
“It doesn’t matter! The police are here! Put your hands up and stay still!” I ordered them.
“Police!” said one of the officers who entered the office. “Up against the wall!”
I knew enough about police raids to know that whoever was in their line of sight was guilty until proven innocent. I thought about the cell phone I still held in my hand and dropped it to the floor. A Black woman had already been shot to death by police in this city in a similar situation.
“That’s my phone! I’m Jordan Manning with Channel 8! I called you! I called you!”
“Yeah, that’s her,” said one of the officers.
I reached down to pick up my phone.
“Jordan! Jordan! Talk to me!”
“Joey, I’m okay,” I said. “We got him!”