The Last Journalist (An Alex Vane Media Thriller Book 5) Read online

  The second murder was a woman. A bitch! She brought down a great man and she did so with more lies. She lied about sexual assault. She lied about money. She lied about greed and power and she did so to destroy a man who should have been exalted by this country. She saw a strong man, a successful man, a man who refused to bend a knee to the femi-Nazis that have come to dominate our culture.

  So she destroyed him with lies, and she deserved to die. You will see that she and I also exchanged three calls from the same number. The second of those calls was 47 seconds long. Look it up, because accuracy matters.

  Don't bother trying to reach the number associated with those calls. It was a disposable phone currently located deep in the North Transfer Station in Seattle.

  Why do I offer you these details of the killings? To prove I killed the second two. Because I did not kill Holden Burnside. The reports over the last 24 hours that all three murders are related are false. And accuracy matters.

  Believe me, I wish I had killed Holden Burnside. It brought such great joy to my heart to realize he was dead. When I woke up that morning and read of his death, read that he had splattered on the sidewalk of this once-great city, that his blood had dripped into the Seattle street and been washed away by the rain, I felt a warmth wash over me. Like my mother was holding me close to her breast. Like the first drag of a morning cigarette. I felt in that moment as though everything was right with the world, because a liar and a weakling had been taken out of it. I wish I had killed him, but I didn't. Accuracy matters.

  Maybe his death taught me something. Maybe it taught me what I was meant to do all along. I don't know who killed Holden Burnside, but I'd like to think he killed himself. I'd like to believe that he realized what I have realized: That journalists deserve to die. All of them. Maybe he was consumed by a guilt that is equal to my hatred.

  It's good he's dead. But one more time, for the record, let me state unequivocally: I did not kill Holden Burnside. And that's the greatest lie you all have been telling. In a hurry to spin a sensational story, Holden Burnside was lumped in with the other killings incorrectly. He was not my first killing. And Takasago will not be the last.

  What are my demands? That you all die. Other than that, I have none.

  The damage done by journalist after journalist after journalist, news anchor after news anchor after news anchor, lie after lie after lie—that damage can't be undone. The entire world has been brainwashed. A handful of elite media members, whose sole aim is to destroy America, destroy freedom, destroy the family, destroy the Christian religion, have brainwashed all of us.

  The brainwashing is over. Journalism will die. Journalists will die.

  You've been warned.

  As shocked as I was by the content—the casual threat of violence—my mind stuck on the claim he hadn't killed Burnside. The question that had been hovering in the back of my mind now filled it. If I'd interrogated the cops about their claim that it was a suicide, instead of 'checking it out', would things have played out differently? For the last couple days, I'd felt trepidation about how fast we'd moved on the story, about the direction it had taken. Now I knew why.

  Shannon and I had botched it. Completely. We'd been wrong from the beginning.

  The letter was unsigned, but I had no doubt it was from the real killer. It confirmed what I knew to be true, but hadn't wanted to see. Burnside had killed himself.

  Then it hit me. The way Shannon had looked away from me at the office yesterday was guilt. She'd been pressing forward on this story even harder than I had. A sickening feeling landed in my gut.

  I swigged my coffee. "I gotta get dressed."

  "Why?"

  "To go. I have to—"

  "What?"

  "Office, I'm worried about Shannon, I need—"

  "You need to stay home until they catch this guy. You're one of the highest-profile journalists in the city. Did you not just read the note?"

  "I read it three times." I stepped in and hugged Greta. "I'm so sorry. I know this is bad. It's scary. I'll call you later. I love you."

  Chapter 18

  Shannon lived in an illegal rear-basement apartment in a rundown house in South Seattle. From the street, it looked as though no one was home. I walked around back and saw a light was on. I rapped the glass of the small window in the door.

  On the ride over, I'd checked Public Occurrences and my worst fears had been assuaged. She hadn't published anything about Burnside. Another thing people don't understand about journalists is that, not only do we rarely lie, we live in constant fear of getting something wrong. Sometimes we publish things based on sources that are shakier than we'd like. Sometimes the pressure gets to us, or we get ahead of a story and run with something that turns out wrong, or incomplete. More often, we'll get a detail wrong, spell a name wrong, or emphasize one thing when we should have emphasized something else. We live in constant fear of these errors. We watch our phones and email accounts like paranoid hawks in the hours after a story goes live, praying no one calls with a correction or a valid complaint.

  Someone always calls.

  Over the last few days I'd grown fond of Shannon. I wanted to see her do well. If she'd run with a story on Burnside late last night, before the letter, her reputation would have taken a major hit. One from which she might not have been able to recover.

  I'd called her three times on the ride over. She hadn't answered. Then I texted, telling her I was on my way over.

  She hadn't replied.

  As I reached to knock on the window a second time, I heard Shannon's voice. "Go away!"

  The day was even grayer than usual. One of those Seattle days that makes you believe the sun will never come out again, that you'll never again be warm. A day so gray you forget other colors exist.

  A day so gray that, standing at her door, I thought about giving up, following her directions and leaving. I could head home and crawl into bed. I could take it as a win that we hadn't published anything based on our research into Burnside, then lock myself away and avoid the story.

  The wind whipped the leafless branches on the trees above me. I didn't experience making a decision, but the next thing I knew, I was knocking on her door loudly and saying, "Shannon, we need to talk."

  "Not now, Alex."

  "It's not the end of the world, Shannon. There's still work to do. We can still make something out of the story, out of all the work we've done."

  "Alex, just leave me alone. I need some time." Her voice was weak. Almost weak enough to make me turn around and leave. I felt for her, I really did. She'd stolen the notebook, seen the references to the CIA, and arranged all her thinking around a nefarious plot that didn't exist. My guess was that it was the biggest screw-up of her career. And I'd fallen for the story almost as hard.

  "Shannon, can we talk about it? It's my fault. I should have slowed us down, gone back to the scene, the beginning."

  I waited about a minute, then turned to leave. I couldn't make her talk to me. The door swung open behind me and I spun around.

  Shannon wore plaid pajama bottoms and a white University of Washington sweatshirt with a gold and purple logo. She had tears in her eyes and her hair was a tangled mess. "Alex, you idiot! I'm not upset because we blew the story. Well, I am. But I'm more upset that Burnside killed himself."

  My head fell back and my eyes rolled up to the sky. This was the kind of gray people move out of Seattle to get away from. "Can I come in?"

  She stepped aside and waved me into the apartment. "Sorry it's a shithole. Someday I hope to move my corporate headquarters to a real office."

  I followed her in, ducking my head to avoid the low ceilings. I went straight for a chair next to a round table in a kitchenette. She poured coffee for each of us, then sat across from me.

  "Thanks for the coffee," I said.

  Shannon nodded. The tears had slowed, but she looked devastated. As we drank our coffee, her sadness made me realize something about her and about me. About why we screwed up
the story to begin with.

  We both loved Burnside. We respected him. We didn't want to believe he could have killed himself. Maybe that's something the survivors of suicide victims always face. I don't know. Sitting at Shannon's table, watching her tears, I realized that her pain and mine, and our desperate desire to find another reason for his death, had been caused by the fact that we didn't want to believe he'd leapt from the balcony himself.

  If Holden Burnside couldn't hack it in this world, what did that mean for us?

  Worse, we'd done exactly what we shouldn't have. We'd chased a story we wanted to be true just because we wanted it. Shannon had come damn close to calling it murder on the record because we didn't want to believe Burnside could have killed himself. He'd have been disappointed by our blind faith in him.

  A flicker of light crossed the table, which led my eyes to a small television in the corner. It was tuned to CNN and the sound was off. They were talking about the note. It gave me an eerie feeling knowing that right then millions of people around the country were talking about Burnside's death and the deaths of the other two journalists. On the TV, the conversation moved to a discussion of the serial killer, a discussion of who was next.

  Another conversation was taking place as well, I knew. A conversation about the media itself, about journalists, about reporters. About who they were, what they did, and how everything changed in the last ten or fifteen years. I imagined message boards across the internet exploding with comments. People were undoubtedly debating the merits of the killer's arguments. Many people, while not condoning the murders, agreed with him in principle. Others had an innocent view of the media, a view likely formed by watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President's Men. Both views were wrong. Reality was a lot more complicated.

  "Can I tell you a story about him?" I heard myself saying.

  Shannon shrugged.

  "You know how college is so intense, and part of you thinks you're going to remember everything? Like you have no idea at that point how long life is, how little you know. Then you get to ten years later or twenty years later, and you only remember a few things. Snippets. The thing I remember most is Burnside's class. Quotes he would write on the board for us to think about. Guest speakers he brought in. But most of all I remember that he seemed to lack passion in a way that, at first, unnerved me. We always hear about how you have to have passion to succeed at anything? I expected a gung-ho advocate for journalism—and he was, but in a different way than I expected. He didn't give any ra-ra speeches. He…"

  I trailed off.

  "You said you had a story about him?"

  "Right. Right." I closed my eyes, thinking back. I didn't know why this story had crept into my mind, but I let it out. "It's about Burnside and this kid named Gregory Beckman. We took Burnside's class together. One of our first assignments was to draw a New York City location out of a hat—Burnside had chosen a bunch of them—and to go out and write a five-hundred-word description of that location. We had to be back in two hours with the words completed. I still remember, I got a Turkish restaurant on 105th Street. Gregory got an apartment building on 72nd Street called The Dakota. It's famous in New York City. John Lennon and other celebrities lived there and it's where Lennon was shot. We were young and eager to do well. We went out to our locations, wrote our stories, and came back. As was his habit, Burnside invited people to give their work up for public critique. Gregory and I both volunteered." I chuckled softly. "You probably won't be shocked by this, but I was a little full of myself back then. Gregory even more so. Burnside put our two pieces of writing on the projector in front of the class so a couple hundred people could see what we had written.

  "First he read mine. While he read, he marked it up with various edits. That was what we did for part of the class every day. Sometimes he asked the class for comments as well. They were usually respectful. And that day I had done a decent job, so most of the edits were minor. When he asked for general input about my writing after going at it line by line, no one said anything. Burnside looked across the room and said something like, 'Well done, Mr. Vane. You played it safe, you didn't offend anyone, and you wrote something we will all forget in the next five seconds.'

  "I was devastated, of course, but before I could spiral too far downward, he turned to Gregory's work. When he put it up on the projector, the class laughed. I knew Gregory personally, so I suppressed my laughter. But it was clear he'd botched the assignment terribly. He had done something else entirely. He'd written a sort of man-on-the-street piece about a guy he'd met in front of The Dakota. The guy was laying a rose on the sidewalk where Lennon was shot. Gregory had struck up a conversation with this guy and he claimed to know who Lennon's real killer was. So instead of describing the physical location, which was the assignment, Gregory tried to solve the murder of John Lennon. He took what the random guy said, then talked to some other people about it and even made a call to the NYPD, asking if they could re-open the case. It was insane. I don't remember who the killer was supposed to have been, maybe the FBI, maybe Yoko or Paul, I don't know."

  I opened my eyes, aware again that Shannon was in the room. When I stopped speaking she opened her eyes as well. She'd been listening closely.

  "How did it end?" she asked.

  "After a couple minutes, we all finished reading his work. As he'd done with my assignment, Burnside had marked up the writing. A comma here, a call for stronger language there, crossing out an adverb in another spot. Then he turned to the class and asked what they thought."

  "I think I know where this is going," Shannon said. "You're still making this about the story, the CIA angle. Burnside is dead and he killed himself."

  "I'm making it about both. Let me finish. After Burnside asked the class what they thought—and they rightfully ripped the work to shreds—he said something like this, 'Nothing the class said is wrong. This story is a debacle. But in your journalism careers, you are all going to face choices. Alex made the safe choice, took the safe course. Nothing wrong with that. Gregory took a big swing, and he failed. He failed miserably. But it's a class. A good time for failure. If he'd had another hour, maybe he would've solved John Lennon's murder. Probably not. But you never know.' Then Burnside said something I'll never forget. He said, 'If I could design the perfect journalist in a lab, it would be a combination of the Alex represented by the work we just read, and the Gregory represented by the work we just read.' He didn't say anything else, he didn't explain what he meant. But I think for the last twenty-five years I've been trying to be that journalist. I've never told anyone that. Not even Greta. I don't think I knew it until right now."

  I braced myself for a snarky comment from Shannon.

  "There are a couple ways to look at that story," she said. "First, there's the interpretation I think you wanted me to have, which is that the perfect journalist is a combination of a diligent, by-the-book dude, as you were in your assignment, and a free thinker, willing to question any premise, believe any source as far as the evidence will go, as Gregory was."

  When I'd started the story, I hadn't intended any particular meaning, any particular outcome. But as I heard it reflected back to me, I had to admit she was right. That's the message I'd taken from the story, and without even knowing it, I'd spent a career trying to become that journalist.

  "But there's another interpretation," Shannon continued. "One you might have missed."

  "Okay."

  "Because Burnside was your teacher, you took the story and ran with it. You believed the ideal he set up for you that day. But I think the story actually shows his limitations, the limits of his viewpoint, and connects to the notebook we've been poring over the last few days."

  I remembered my coffee and took a long swig.

  Shannon ran a hand through her hair and continued. "I think Burnside revealed his own approach to journalism. Like Gregory, you should be open to anything and temporarily suspend disbelief in order to track down the truth of the claims a sourc
e makes. And then you use that by-the-book diligence you displayed in your assignment to fact-check and write it. If you look at his career, that's what he did. That's the image of him, at least.

  "But the image of the lone journalist chasing down buried truths is—let's just admit it—usually crap. Burnside had powerful sources who fed him information, and even though the information was true, can you really say the stories fought for the little guy?" She paused, choosing her words carefully. "In the end, Burnside was a stenographer for power. He knew it, and that's why he killed himself. He'd become the greatest journalist in American history. But only if you look at journalism from a certain perspective. Only if you divorce yourself from what's behind the stories. His stories were true, they were accurate, and they were huge. If that's the only standard, he was the greatest. But I think his suicide shows us that, at the end of his life, he realized he was anything but. He'd been using the wrong standard all along. He'd been grabbing a story and following it with a diligence and blindness that can lead to true stories that serve people you may not want to serve. Like I said, he was a stenographer for power."

  "'Stenographer for power.' That would be a good title for a book, or an essay or something. You have a way with words." She looked away, as she had the day before at the office. "Shannon, can I ask you something? Yesterday, when you said you were coming back to your place, I was surprised. Something felt off."

  "I felt guilty."

  "Why?"

  "In my mind, I had decided to run the story. Without you. Stayed up all night writing. That's why I look like this."

  "But you didn't publish it?"

  She shook her head. "I went to the YMCA to box at five this morning, saw the letter in the paper when I got home. I was about to proofread the piece and upload it."