Tom Blomberg of the Washington Sentinel sat across from Abbey and poured sriracha ketchup over his scrambled eggs. He was a heavyset man in his early fifties, but he looked older. He kept his stringy dark hair long enough to cover his ears, where it began to curl upward in small ringlets. Dark crescent moons hung in pouches under his sunken eyes, and his face had the bloodshot look of someone who’d spent too much time drinking scotch and smoking cigarettes. In other words, he joked, he was a newspaperman.
“Where’s my piece on the mayor?” he asked between bites of eggs, which he washed down with a Bloody Mary. “You owe me three thousand words, Abigail, and that was two weeks ago.”
He always called her Abigail. Abbey wasn’t short for anything other than Abbey, but Tom had started calling her Abigail shortly after they met. After correcting him a few times, she’d given up and let him keep doing it.
“Well, about that,” she said.
She took a spoonful of her Greek yogurt bowl. They sat at an outdoor table at Bistro Bis, a restaurant at the George Hotel on E Street. The location was within a couple blocks of the Capitol, and Tom always wanted to sit outside to see which politicians passed by so he could take note of who was talking to whom.
“The mayor won’t return my calls,” Abbey went on. “The word must have gone out to his staff, too, because they’re freezing me out.”
Tom chewed on a piece of crisp bacon. It was early, and as the morning sun came from behind the clouds, he whipped out a pair of sunglasses and put them on. “Naturally. He’s still pissed about that piece you did for Politico on the council’s push to give the vote to sixteen-year-olds.”
“It was a funny piece.”
“You made them look like idiots,” Tom said.
“Well, that doesn’t take much work,” Abbey replied. “Anyway, I don’t need an interview with him to do the piece, but what’s the point if I can’t get one? This thing needs his voice. I hate to give it up, but I think you should hand it off to someone else.”
“You mean, start over on a project that’s already late? I don’t like that.”
“I know, but I can give a new writer all of my other research to get them up to speed.”
Tom tapped a thick finger thoughtfully on the table. He knew Abbey well enough to know there was more to her request than she’d admitted. They’d met years earlier when she was a journalism student at McGill. Tom had guest-lectured in Walden Thatcher’s senior symposium shortly after winning his first Pulitzer, and Walden had insisted on introducing Tom to his star student. They’d clicked as friends, the chain-smoking senior reporter and the college writer bent on exposing political corruption. Tom was the kind of reporter Abbey wanted to be, and he’d served as a mentor to her more than once during her career. When she’d left the online magazine The Fort two years earlier, Tom had given her freelance assignments that helped build her name in the closed world of Washington media.
“What is this really about, Abigail?” he asked.
Abbey glanced at the other outside tables, which were all full. She recognized most of the people; this was a Capitol Hill power place. There were other reporters nearby, too, so she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I want to pursue a different story.”
“Ah. And what is that?”
“The Deborah Mueller murder.”
Tom took off his sunglasses. His heavy eyelids narrowed. “Deborah Mueller? The woman in West Potomac Park?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see any interesting feature angle there. Urban crime has been done to death.”
“It’s not about that.”
Abbey took a breath. Either she believed in this story or she didn’t, but she knew she was crossing a line that could make or break her career. It was one thing to play around with conspiracy theories on her laptop in the middle of the night. It was another to pitch the story to a senior editor at one of the country’s leading newspapers. But she did it anyway. In five minutes, she sketched out the story for him. The missing witness, the suppressed video, the interviews with two German women who didn’t even seem to be real people, and the enigma of Deborah Mueller herself.
“I don’t have all the answers yet,” Abbey told him, “but I have a lot of questions. What do you think?”
Tom went back to his spicy eggs without saying anything. She waited impatiently for his reply, but he took his time. A couple of minutes later, he finally put down his fork and took another long drink of his Bloody Mary. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he did, his eyes drifted over her shoulder.
“Senator,” he suddenly announced in a loud voice. “Good morning.”
Abbey glanced at the sidewalk. She recognized Sadie Adamson, the junior senator from Georgia, who’d won a special election the previous year. She was a former mayor of Atlanta, which put her to the far left of just about everyone in an increasingly purple state. But her opponent, a moderate Republican cop, had self-destructed during the race. Since the election, Adamson had established a reputation as a progressive powerhouse in a closely divided Senate.
Adamson was in deep conversation with an aide, but she stopped outside the restaurant when she heard Tom calling to her. She was a petite Black woman with short, curly hair, and she wore a burgundy dress with navy blue stripes.
“Tom,” she said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. Nice piece on modular nuclear reactors this morning. Wrong, totally misguided, and deeply irresponsible, but very nice.”
A smile creased Tom’s face. “I do what I can.”
Then the editor gestured at Abbey. “Senator, do you know Abbey Laurent? She’s one of the top feature writers in the city.”
Abbey noted that Tom used her correct name. He’d always known what it was; he just liked tweaking her by calling her Abigail.
The senator studied her with smart dark eyes. “A pleasure, Ms. Laurent. If Tom says you’re good, I consider that high praise, despite his tendency to print warmed-over puff pieces that I’m saving for the next toilet paper shortage.”
She winked at Blomberg, who chuckled.
“Do you happen to have a card?” Adamson asked Abbey. “I like to keep a close eye on writers in DC. Sooner or later, they all seem to write about me.”
“I do,” Abbey replied, digging in her purse and handing the senator a business card.
“Excellent. Well, Tom, I’m sure I’ll see you later.”
“Goodbye, Senator.”
Adamson disappeared toward Capitol Street with her aide in tow. When she was gone, Abbey lifted her glass of orange juice toward Tom in a toast. “Thank you for the introduction. And the kind words.”
“I meant what I said. You’re one of the best. Walden told me about your potential all the way back at McGill, and he was right.” Then Tom leaned back in his chair, and his eyes turned unhappy. “That’s why I don’t like to see you wasting my time and yours chasing bullshit stories.”
“Tom, this isn’t—”
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Hang on. Listen to me. Sadie Adamson is smart and tough, whether you agree with her politics. You know why she’s in the Senate? Because reporters in Georgia didn’t take her opponent at face value. Because they dug into his background and realized he was a hard-core white supremacist. They found people who’d seen how he treated suspects as a cop. The story exploded all over the state, and he was forced out of the race.”
“He was forced out because a fire broke out during the protests,” Abbey pointed out. “Nine people died.”
“Yes, I’m aware of the tragedy. The point is, that story began with reporters doing their job. Pursuing the truth. Asking hard questions. Not running after fringe conspiracy theories.”
“Tom, all my instincts tell me there’s more to this murder than what’s come out in the press so far.”
He shook his head. “Who’s your source? Where did you get this?”
“A woman approached me,” Abbey replied, hesitating because she knew how it sounded. “She’s part of an online group—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Abigail,” he interrupted her. “An online fringe group? Conspiracy nuts? Are you kidding?”
“Everything she told me checks out,” Abbey protested. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I’ve got a source at ICE who can’t even confirm that this woman Deborah Mueller exists. So who the hell got killed in that park?”
Tom pushed away his plate. “I’m disappointed in you. You know the old saying, right? When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. If you get a reputation for going after too many zebras as a reporter, you lose your credibility. I don’t want to see that happen to you, Abbey. You’re too good for that. If you respect me and respect my advice, you’ll drop this. Do the piece I gave you. Get the mayor to talk to you, even if he hates your guts. That’s what it means to be a journalist.”
Abbey felt as if she’d walked into the crosscurrents of a hurricane. She’d never heard Tom talk to her like that, and she felt a sting of humiliation and embarrassment. “Look, I understand what you’re saying. It’s just that—”
Tom didn’t listen. He took out his wallet and slapped a bill on the table. “Finish your breakfast. I have to go. I’ll give you one more week to get me the profile. Get it done, or I can’t send anything else your way in the future.”
He got up from his chair and walked away, leaving Abbey alone.
When Tom Blomberg reached the park across from the Capitol’s white dome, he saw Sadie Adamson sitting by herself on a bench underneath the trees. Her aide was gone. None of the handful of tourists in the park seemed to realize they were sharing the space with a United States senator. Adamson had her phone in one hand, and she sipped a cup of coffee with the other. She didn’t look up as Tom sat down next to her, but she spoke to him under her breath.
“So she’s the one?” Adamson asked.
“Yes.”
“Pretty. And you’re right, she’s obviously smart. You can tell by the eyes.”
“She’s very smart.”
“Did she mention the Mueller incident?”
“Yes, she did. She’s already gone pretty far in her research. Abbey doesn’t miss much. She knows that Deborah Mueller was a false identity. She even figured out that the Germans we used to establish Mueller’s background were both plants.”
“Does she know who Louisa really was?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, did you shut her down?”
Tom hesitated. “I’m not sure. I made it clear that if she pursued it, her work for me would dry up. That’s an incentive, because she doesn’t have a lot of money. But I’ve known her a long time. She’s stubborn. When someone tells her there’s no story, she works even harder to find it.”
“Her original source has been dealt with,” the Senator told him. “There won’t be any more leaks there.”
“And Abbey?”
“I’ll call Varak,” Adamson said. “He’ll take the appropriate steps.”
Tom stood up from the bench. His face was pained. “Is that absolutely necessary?”
The senator gave him an exasperated look from over the rim of her coffee cup. “Would you rather she find out about the Pyramid? Or about the bot farm in Frankfurt?” Adamson paused. “Or the truth about the fire?”
“Of course not. God, of course not!”
“Then don’t worry about things above your pay grade, Tom. Varak will deal with Abbey Laurent.”