ERICA IS IN A LOUSY mood on the long ride back to Midtown. The trip was a bust. As the car makes its way down the West Side highway, she looks out at the Hudson and thinks. Whoever Fiona was working with on Barrish’s murder wouldn’t go anywhere near that wake. She replays the scene in her head, searching for anything she may have missed.
“What she put up with . . . that boy.”
“I hear she has millions stashed away in the Caymans.”
“Eddie Spellman never comes back to the old neighborhood.”
Eddie Spellman? Can’t hurt to google him. When she gets back to her office, that’s the first thing she does. A bunch of Edward Spellmans come up—she quickly winnows them by adding Woodlawn to the search. There’s only one match, but it piques her interest. Apparently this Ed Spellman is a well-known figure around New York—a consultant with wide-ranging contacts. New York magazine ran an article on him several years ago titled “The Insider’s Insider.”
Erica clicks on the link and reads:
When a senator wants to know if his wife is cheating, he turns to Ed Spellman. When an Upper East Side heiress wants to make sure the Italian count she’s dating didn’t buy his title on the Internet, she turns to Spellman. When a male movie star wants to hush up a coke-fueled weekend of S&M at the Gansevoort that landed him in the ER, he turns to Spellman. With connections from Buckingham Palace to the White House, from the Catholic Church to the Mafia, from the Clintons to the Kochs, from the art world to the netherworld, Ed Spellman is man who can get things done without leaving fingerprints—and who knows how to keep a secret.
Erica races through the article—which mentions Spellman’s working-class Woodlawn childhood—and then stops dead when she reads:
Spellman got his start when he founded a consultancy with business executive Fred Wilmot, who is currently Nylan Hastings’s second-in-command at Universe Entertainment.
Erica gets up and closes her office door. She goes back to her desk and sits there. She pieces it together—the trail from the lowly caterer’s assistant to the LA gangs to the Russian Mafia to Fiona Connor to Spellman and then . . .
“Isn’t it great how you guys are always one step ahead of the news? Like with that ferry crash—you just happened to be there. Then Kay Barrish, bless her heart, buys the farm in the middle of your interview. Awful coincidinky, if you ask me.”
But it’s not “you guys” who are always there. It’s her. Erica. Is she being manipulated? Is she part of their web? Their plan? She remembers frantically blowing her breath into Kay Barrish’s lungs, holding her as she died, the fear in her eyes.
And what followed? Her fame, her contract, her show, her apartment, the prospect of getting Jenny back.
Think it through, Erica.
She’s getting ahead of herself. She has no proof that Nylan or Wilmot was involved. Journalism—and justice—demand the truth. Yes, the trail leads in their direction, but she has to keep investigating until she has proof. The closer she gets, the greater the danger, but she can’t stop now, she can’t.
There’s a knock on her door. She clicks away from the Spellman article. “Come in.”
Greg enters. “Are you okay, Erica? You look spooked.”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just feeling a little swamped.”
“I know that feeling. Listen, are we still on for tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow night?”
Greg walks over to her desk and sits opposite her. He lowers his voice. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m hanging in.”
“Dinner at your place? Don’t you remember, you invited me last week? After we’d . . . well, made out like a couple of teenagers.”
Erica does remember their make-out session—it was giddy and . . . passionate. “Oh yes, of course, dinner. I’ve been so busy, I forget what day it is.”
“Does tomorrow still work for you?”
Maybe she should tell Greg what she’s learned. They could become allies in nailing down the final piece of the investigation, no matter where it might lead. Yes, she’ll do that. She’ll tell him tomorrow before dinner, slowly, with no detail left out. He’ll be able to help her make the right decisions.
“Yes, it works fine. I have been known to make a halfway decent omelet.”
“Sounds perfect.” He reaches across the table and gently strokes her hand. His hand feels so warm—the warmth spreads through her body. But another feeling flares up, for the first time with Greg—wariness. She can trust him. Can’t she?
“I better get cracking. I’m doing a promotional interview for the show in twenty minutes.”
Erica sits in the makeup chair, and as Rosario works on her face, she goes over the key points she wants to get across in her interview. She puts the troubling information about Ed Spellman—and all its implications—out of her mind for the moment. As the makeup goes on, so does her game face.
“Nylan Hastings was in the chair today,” Rosario says.
“Oh, why?”
“He was doing an interview on the business show.”
“How was he?”
“He was okay at first and then he got a text that upset him. He became agitated and angry.”
“I wonder what it could have been.”
“I read it over his shoulder,” Rosario says. “I read everyone’s texts. How else can I gossip?”
“Well, what did it say?”
“It said ‘she knows’—Erica, please try not to flinch when I’m spraying your face.”
“Just ‘she knows’?”
“Yes. Maybe Nylan’s girlfriend found out he’s been sleeping with Claire Wilcox.”
“Yes, yes, that must be it,” Erica says, looking at herself in the mirror—can anyone else see the terror in her eyes?