The Player Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE PLAYER. Copyright © 2014 by Brad Parks. All rights reserved.

  For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover photographs: man © Svetlana Sewell/Arcangel Images; newspaper © Stillfx/Shutterstock.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Parks, Brad, 1974–

  The player: a mystery / Brad Parks. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-250-04408-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-4269-4 (e-book)

  1. Ross, Carter (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Investigative reporting—Fiction. 3. Environmental protection—Fiction. 4. Organized crime—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.A7553P59 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013045900

  eISBN 9781466842694

  First Edition: March 2014

  To Ga,

  ninety-five and still the classiest grandmother ever

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter opener 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter opener 2

  Chapter 2

  Chapter opener 3

  Chapter 3

  Chapter opener 4

  Chapter 4

  Chapter opener 5

  Chapter 5

  Chapter opener 6

  Chapter 6

  Chapter opener 7

  Chapter 7

  Chapter opener 8

  Chapter 8

  Chapter opener 9

  Chapter 9

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Brad Parks

  During seventy-seven years of scrupulous living, Edna Foster had survived whooping cough, encephalitis, breast cancer, one breach pregnancy, and two husbands. She figured she could handle the flu, no problem.

  It struck on a Wednesday, the first day of spring’s warmth had made it to New Jersey and visited her neighborhood in Newark. She had opened up the windows in the morning, tolerating the noise from a nearby construction site because she was ready for some fresh air after a long winter. By afternoon, she had caught a chill and shut the window. By nightfall, the chills had developed into a full-blown fever, with muscle aches and diarrhea to go with it. She called off the Bible study scheduled at her house that evening and consigned herself to bed. Too much fresh air, she supposed. By the next morning, she felt better.

  The flu came back a week later. She hadn’t opened the windows that day, but she had been digging in her garden. She chastised herself for not dressing more warmly as she suffered through another miserable night. But, again, the sickness took only a day to run its course.

  Perhaps a month after that, she broke her tibia. She hadn’t been doing anything more strenuous than walk through her living room when it happened. She had to drag herself to the phone to get an ambulance.

  The doctor in the emergency room set the fracture, put it in a cast, then sent her home with crutches and enough Vicodin to get her through the discomfort. Edna used the painkiller sparingly for a few days, then flushed it down the toilet. She never drank or smoked—she was a good Christian woman, after all—and she didn’t like how the drugs made her head feel fuzzy. Plus, there were too many junkies in her neighborhood. If word got out Mrs. Foster had pills, one of them would get it in his fool head to break into her house for them.

  Without the painkiller, her mobility was even more limited. Her legs and ankles swelled, which she attributed to inactivity. She tried gritting her teeth and forcing herself to move about, if only to get her blood moving.

  That’s when she broke her arm. She had been crutching around her kitchen when her ulna just snapped. She crumpled into a heap on the floor and, unable to reach the phone this time, had to wait six hours until a neighbor came by to check on her.

  The broken arm led to another hospital visit, another splint, and more Vicodin, which she promptly flushed.

  Now fully laid up, the swelling got worse. She also kept coming down with the flu—at least once a week—which only added to her suffering.

  But that wasn’t all. Her skin felt itchy, no matter how much she moisturized it. She had a bad taste in her mouth almost constantly, even when she had just brushed her teeth. She developed back pain that ached nearly as much as the arm and leg fractures. Her lungs sometimes felt like they were on fire.

  Her granddaughter, Jackie, the pride of the family—she was a college girl! she was going to be a doctor someday!—tried to force her to go to a physician. But Edna wouldn’t have it. She was through with doctors. They would just give her more painkillers, and she didn’t want any of that garbage. She would get by with her Bible, prayer, and some old-fashioned mental toughness.

  Then her mind started to go. Edna had always taken her sharpness for granted—she was only seventy-seven, after all—and usually completed the Newark Eagle-Examiner crossword by seven thirty each morning. Yet, suddenly, she found she couldn’t concentrate long enough to do even the simplest word games, the ones meant for children. She started blanking on simple things, like what she had eaten for breakfast or what day of the week it was. She had dizzy spells even when sitting down.

  It was forgetting to flush the toilet that really got her in trouble. She barely urinated anymore, and what came out was often dark with blood and protein. She hadn’t told anyone—her pee was no one else’s business—but then Jackie walked by the unflushed toilet, saw the brownish water, and threw a fit, ordering her grandmother to go to the hospital immediately.

  Once admitted, they quickly diagnosed Edna Foster with advanced-staged renal failure.

  They put her on dialysis immediately but, again, Edna wasn’t having it. She was in so much pain—her leg, her arm, her back—that sitting next to that machine for hours on end was unbearable. Her mental acuity was coming and going, but in her more lucid moments she managed to convince two doctors, a hospital administrator, a social worker, her pastor, and, most important, her granddaughter, that she didn’t want dialysis anymore—and that she understood the consequences of that decision. She had been preparing to meet Jesus her whole life, she told them. If He was ready for her, she was ready for Him.

  Finally convinced, they sent her home and, with help from Jackie, she got her affairs in order. During what turned out to be the final week of her life, she kept her Bible with her at all times. She slept most of the time, but when she was awake she asked Jackie to read some of her favorite passages. Often they were from the Book of Luke. He was a physician, after all. Just like Jackie would be someday.

  The end, when it came, was merciful. She lapsed into a coma one night and slipped away two mornings later, around breakfast time. The ladies from her Bible study group speculated that Edna Foster was walking with the Lord by lunch.

  CHAPTER 1

  Even in an era when American print media has plunged into inexorable and perhaps terminal decline, even at a time when tech moguls are buying up venerated news-gathering organizations with their equivalent of couch change, even with the likelihood of career advancement dimmed by the industry’s collective
implosion, there are benefits to working for a newspaper that cannot be quantified by simple measurements like salary, benefits, or future prospects.

  Kook calls are definitely one of them.

  We get them all the time—from the drunken, the deranged, the demented—and they come in enough different flavors to keep us constantly entertained.

  Some are just mild, low-grade kooks, like the ones who have newspapers confused with talk radio. They’ll call up and start ranting about whatever subject is bothering them—the governor’s latest cabinet appointment, the confusing signage that led them down the wrong exit ramp of the Garden State Parkway, the deplorable slowness of third-class mail—perhaps believing that if they just convince the reporter they’re right, the newspaper will immediately launch a four-part series on the subject, written from the caller’s particular point of view.

  Then there are the conspiracy theorists, the ones who want us to “do some digging” into whatever fantasies they’re harboring at the moment, whether it’s that the local Walmart is importing illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in a garbage truck or that their town’s animal-control officer is more of a dog person than a cat person.

  There are also the old people who just want to talk. To someone. About anything. They’ll call up with a “news tip,” and of course it turns out they are the news, and the tip is that long ago—during, say, the Korean War—they nearly lost three toes to frostbite. And now, particularly on the mornings when they still feel that little tingle in their big toes, they feel the world at large needs to know about it.

  Then there are the other standbys: the prisoners who use their phone time to call us, usually collect, and convince us of the gross miscarriage of justice that led to their incarceration; the paranoid schizophrenics who believe their delusions are worthy of front-page headlines; or the poor confused souls who, thinking newspaper reporters must be omniscient, will call and ask the name of the program they were watching on television last night.

  As a group, they land somewhere between pitiable—particularly when they’re obviously suffering from mental illness—and laughable. Except for the racists. We get a lot of those, too. They’re just despicable.

  Sure, Internet chat rooms and social networking have siphoned off some of our kooks over the years—there are more outlets for people to express their crazy now than ever before—but we at the Newark Eagle-Examiner, New Jersey’s most widely circulated periodical, still get our share. Because the fact is, even with the increasing fragmentation of media, most people, even the nuts, realize a major daily newspaper like ours is still the best way to get serious attention for whatever cause or issue matters most to them.

  Plus, we print our phone number in the paper.

  Some reporters treat kook calls as nuisances. But most of us learn over the years to look forward to them. There’s just nothing like going through an otherwise ordinary day, pecking away at some humdrum story, when suddenly you become aware one of your colleagues is talking to someone who lives off the grid and has found one of the three remaining working pay phones in the state of New Jersey to call and explicate his worldview.

  If the reporter who takes the call is in a certain mood, she’ll stand up in the middle of the newsroom and, for the benefit of those listening, start repeating key lines and questions in a loud voice, such as: “I realize you think Greta Van Susteren is trying to control your mind, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Wolf Blitzer is going to try as well.”

  Or: “So you want to know if we’re going to be writing about the rash of robberies in your neighborhood because someone keeps breaking into your house and moving your broom.”

  Or: “To make sure I understand this right, you’re saying the Battle of Gettysburg didn’t happen the way the history books said it did—and you know, because you were there in a previous life?”

  The fun just never ends. So I have to admit I was mostly just looking for a good kook call on Monday afternoon when one of our news clerks wandered over to my desk and said, “Hey, I got a woman who says she has a big story for our investigative reporter. You want me to get rid of her?”

  “Nah, I’ll take it,” I said.

  I had just been killing time anyway, waiting for edits on my latest piece, a story about cash-strapped municipalities that were considering halting their recycling programs (corrugated waste products have seldom warranted so much attention). So when the forwarded call came through on my desk phone, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation, then answered with my most polite and officious, “Eagle-Examiner, this is Carter Ross.”

  “Hi, Mr. Ross, my name is Jackie Orr,” came the voice on the other end. It was the voice of someone young, black, and determined.

  “Hi, Jackie, what can I do for you?”

  “Do you ever do stories about people getting sick?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Who’s getting sick?”

  “Everyone.”

  “What do you mean ‘everyone’?” I asked. So far, so good: kooks often insisted that whatever troubled them also afflicted others.

  “Well, first it was just my grandmother. Or we thought it was just my grandmother. But then it turned out to be the whole neighborhood.”

  “Sounds like you need a lawyer more than you need a newspaper reporter,” I said.

  “I tried that. I tell them people are sick and they’re interested. But once they hear it’s not some open-and-shut mesothelioma case, they don’t want anything to do with it. I talked to one lawyer who sounded a little interested, but then he wanted a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer. If we had fifty thousand dollars, we wouldn’t be bothering with lawsuits. We’d just move. Our case is a little more complicated than anyone seems to want to take on.”

  I felt myself sitting up in my chair and paying closer attention. There are certain words kooks tend not to use. “Mesothelioma” is one of them. So while that was a little disappointing—no kook call for me today—it was also more promising from a journalistic standpoint. As a newspaper reporter, I have a certain bias toward the disenfranchised, disadvantaged masses that others, not even sleazy lawyers, want to listen to. Maybe it’s because, deep down, I fancy myself a good-hearted human being who wants to help the less fortunate. Or maybe it’s because the Pulitzer committee shares the same bias.

  “You said it’s complicated. How so?”

  “Well, we don’t know what’s making anyone sick.”

  “Okay, so you don’t need a lawyer. You need a doctor.”

  “Everyone is seeing doctors. Or at least the ones who have health insurance are. The doctors just treat the symptoms and send them home. They don’t have any answers.”

  I didn’t either. But I was intrigued enough to have Jackie assemble herself and some of her ill neighbors to chat with me that afternoon. The headline MYSTERY ILLNESS STRIKES NEWARK NEIGHBORHOOD had a lot more promise for interesting journalism than MORRISTOWN WEIGHS COSTS AND BENEFITS OF RECYCLING NO. 6 PLASTIC.

  Besides, as a reporter, I had learned to trust that little assignment editor in my head to tell me when I might be onto a good story. And my assignment editor was telling me, at the very least, that Jackie Orr was no kook.

  * * *

  Having gained a modest amount of seniority at the Eagle-Examiner—eight years counted as senior at a newspaper where most of the older reporters had been forced to take buyouts—I had wrangled myself a prime desk location in the corner of the newsroom.

  It was strategic, inasmuch as it meant editors couldn’t sneak up on me. But more than that, it was panoramic, inasmuch as it afforded me a sweeping view of the magnificent and picturesque vista that was a daily newspaper in action. In a single glance, I could see the anguish of the photo editors who had eleven assignments to shoot and only four photographers to do the shooting; the boredom of the Web site writers who were still repurposing yesterday’s news until today gave them something interesting to do; the torment of the education reporter trying to make a story about teacher-pension reform sound interesti
ng. And, okay, maybe it didn’t fit conventional standards for beauty—unless you found splendor in forty-year-old office furniture and fifteen-year-old computer terminals—but it was my view and I loved it all the same.

  Along the walls were the glass offices, home to the higher editors who sometimes conspired to limit my fun but were otherwise a decent group, albeit sometimes in a cheerless, party-pooping, adjective-hating kind of way.

  In the middle were the desks filled with reporters. There were a few duds among them, too, but by and large they were a magnificently contemptuous set of brilliant, irreverent, fascinating folks, the kind of people who almost always had interesting things to say and entertaining ways of saying it. And in a strange way I could never quite explain to outsiders—who didn’t necessarily understand how the cruciblelike forge of putting out a daily newspaper could bond people—I considered them my extended, mildly dysfunctional family.

  Just beyond them was an area of the room known as the intern pod. If kook calls were one of the immeasurable benefits of life at a newspaper, the joy of working with interns was more quantifiable. Through the years, the newspaper industry had come to rely on an ever-growing collection of young, idealistic, energetic, just-out-of-college flunkies to do much of the news gathering that used to be done by more-hardened souls. And while you had to be careful not to let some of their naïveté get in the paper, they were fun all the same. At the age of thirty-two, I wasn’t exactly Father Time. But I had been in the game just long enough that I knew there was a value to seeing the world through the nonjaded eyes of an intern. It helped keep me young.

  Some of our interns, like Tommy Hernandez, now our city hall reporter and one of my best friends at the paper, started in this lowly post and quickly graduated to more important beats at the paper. Others had come and gone, leaving only their colorful nicknames—Sweet Thang, Lunky, Ruthie—and a smattering of stories in the archives by which we could remember them.