Hard News

cough. “This isn’t funny.”
    “It’s true, Lee.”
    “Come on, Rune. Why would she want him dead?”
    “Somebody took all the Randy Boggs files and tapes out of my desk. Everything was gone.”
    “Who?”
    “Danny Turner, the head electrician on the set, told me it was Piper.”
    Maisel didn’t answer.
    Rune said, “And remember, she didn’t want to do the story in the first place, she tried to get me to stop? She was going to send me to London? That was to get rid of me.”
    Maisel snapped, “What I was asking was
why
she’d want Lance Hopper dead.”
    “Because he was going to fire her. I went through her personnel file—”
    “You what? How?”
    “I just did…. Anyway, you know what I found? That Hopper tried to fire her a year before he died. Piper filed two EEOC complaints against him. They were both dropped but there’s lots of memos—it was this huge war.”
    “Rune, people don’t kill people for jobs.”
    “Maybe not usually—but you know Piper and her temper. You told me that her job was her whole life. And how much does she make? A million a year? That’s enough to kill somebody for.”
    “But how is she going to find professional killers? This is just too—”
    “What were some of her assignments?” She continued, “In Africa, in Nicaragua, the Middle East. She could’ve met some mercenaries. The fat guy—Jack—he looked just like a soldier. And he probably hired Randy to help him.”
    Maisel considered this. He was less skeptical than a moment ago. He said, “Keep going.”
    Rune felt like a juggler. It was tough to keep all the parts of the story in the air at once. “When Mr. Frost, the new witness, died? It wasn’t an accident at all. Piper knew his name. She saw it from my story. She sent that fat guy to kill him. And then what happens? All the cassettes disappear. And she knew where I’d put the duplicate cassette of Frost. And she’d know how to get into the computer and steal the master.”
    She felt the silence from the other end of the line— his concentration as he weighed her words, the shock. But maybe also the excitement reporters must feel when they first sniff a lead to a hot story. When he spoke it was almost as if to himself. “And she was pretty smooth when she ad-libbed the broadcast.”
    Rune said, “Like she’d known all along she was going to have to do it.”
    A long pause. “This is a nuclear bomb we’re playing with, Rune. You’ve got a lot of speculation. There’s no direct evidence linking her to the killing.”
    “I
know
she did it, Lee.”
    “The way you
knew
Boggs was innocent?”
    She said nothing to that. The producer continued. “Just let me ask you one thing. You’re bitter because Piper fired you and ruined your story. If that hadn’t happened, if you were an objective reporter, would you still be coming down against Piper?”
    “Yes, I would. Maybe there’re no eyewitnesses but there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence.”
    Maisel was silent for a moment. “I’ll have to call Dan Semple. I’ll …” His voice was fading. “Semple …”
    Rune asked, “What are you thinking, Lee?” She remembered Semple’s picking Piper up in his limo after she and Rune had dinner at that French restaurant. “Oh, no, you think he’s in on it too?”
    “They had an affair, you know. Piper and him. Around the time Hopper was killed.”
    Rune said, “And after Hopper was killed Semple got his job …! “What are we going to do, Lee?”
    Maisel said, “Okay, stay on the line. I’m going to make some calls.” She heard him use his cell phone to talk to Jim Eustice at home and tell him what Rune suspected. He then called Timothy Krueger, the Network lawyer who’d presided over Rune’s unemployment. Then she heard a conference call as Maisel spoke to Krueger and, apparently, the police. She deduced that they were all going to rendezvous at the Network in a half hour—in Studio E, an old, unused space in the basement of the building where they could meet in private.
    Maisel hung up his mobile phone and came back on the other line. “Rune, you there?”
    “I’m here.”
    “I talked to Jim and our legal department.”
    “I heard.”
    Maisel confirmed that they were meeting two homicide detectives in Studio E.
    “I’ll be there,” Rune said.
    “Lay low until the cops get there. We don’t want Piper to see you.”
    “Sure.”
    “Man, this’s bad,” he muttered. But that was the only emotion he showed.