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  Copyright © 2010 by Rosemary Herbert

  Cover photograph © iStockphoto.com/4971695

  ISBN: 978-0-89272-852-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Herbert, Rosemary.

  Front page teaser : a Liz Higgins mystery / by Rosemary Herbert.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-89272-852-7 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Women journalists--Fiction. 2. Boston (Mass.)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E7296F76 2010

  813’.6--dc22

  2010012133

  Designed by Lynda Chilton

  Printed at Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois

  5 4 3 2 1

  Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

  This book is a work of fiction. While some of the landscapes, businesses, and other venues may be recognized as actual places—or may be seen to be based on actual places—all of the action that occurs in them is entirely a work of the imagination. The author does not recommend that readers assume they may have access to any properties shown herein, especially including university libraries or private landscapes. Similarly, with the exception of the cat Prudence and mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, the characters portrayed within the pages of this book are entirely fictional, although a few friends and family members have graciously allowed the author to borrow their names or create variations upon them. While a former mayor of the City of Newton reportedly gave Fig Newton cookies to visitors, the Newton mayor depicted here is not that man. The author would also like to emphasize that the names of the fictional characters in these pages who are shown as associated with terrorism are chosen randomly. The author neither possesses knowledge of terrorist networks nor of individuals who are involved in such activities, nor does anyone who advised her about any aspect of this book. While sometimes the characters in this book refer to the Beantown Banner simply as “the Banner,” this is not to be confused with the Bay State Banner newspaper, of which this author has no experience.

  Books by Rosemary Herbert

  A New Omnibus of Crime, co–edited with Tony Hillerman

  Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime & Mystery Writing

  The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing

  Murder on Deck! Shipboard & Shoreline Mystery Stories (Oxford University Press)

  Twelve American Crime Stories

  The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, co-edited with Tony Hillerman

  The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers

  For Bill Wyman

  —who truly knows how to celebrate Christmas—

  with love and gratitude

  And to the worlds of the newsroom

  and public and academic libraries.

  May newspaper journalism find its way and thrive again

  even as technology changes, because a free press

  staffed by professional reporters and editors

  is nothing short of fundamental to a democratic society.

  Similarly, another foundation of democracy

  may be found in libraries, where staff members

  protect patron privacy while they also dedicate their

  efforts to ensuring freedom of access

  to information.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to extend my thanks to the following people who provided everything from professional expertise and practical help to friendship and encouragement: Pamela Ackerknecht, Catherine Aird, Alfred Alcorn, Tony Alcorn, Cindy Atoji, Peter Alden, Father Joseph Bagetta and the DYS crocheting group, Jean and Jim Behnke, Dana Bisbee, Paula Blanchard, Henri Bourneuf, Gerry Boyle, Margaret Byer, Mark Chapman, Rochelle Cohen, Neil Cote, Guy Darst, Nancy Day, Renée DeKona, Dick Donahue, Paul Doiron, Jane Gelfman, Dr. Herbert Gross, Bonni Hamilton, Jeremiah Healy, Barbara Herbert, Janice Herbert, P.D. James, Sande Kent, Linda Kincaid, Cara Nissman Kraft, Jeffrey Levine, Tom Libby, Reuben Mahar, Kevin McNamara, Janet Mendelsohn, Jenny Miller, Susan and Steve Moody, Elaine M. Ober, Diana O’Neill, Richard Olken, Eliza Partington, Juliet Partington, Mike Pingree, Arthur Pollock, Jeanne and Darrell Ray, John M. (Tim) Reilly, Chris Rippen, Eileen Tomaney Robinson, Tenley Rooney, Daisy and Jeremy Ruggiero, Todd Sawyer, Stephanie Schorow, Michael Seamans, John Sgammato, Al Silverstein, Clara Silverstein, Peter Skagestad, Barbara Sloane, Curtis C. Smith, JP Smith, Katy Snow, Richard Stomberg, Brian Sylvester, Sonya Turek, Cathy Weider, Karin Womer, Wayne Woodlief, and Bill Wyman. I also would like to remember the following people who always believed in me: my father, Robert D. Herbert; my grandparents, Mary and Harry Fransen; my creative writing teacher, Alfred E. Haulenbeek; and to these masters of mystery—Tony Hillerman, John Mortimer, Robert B. Parker, and Julian Symons.

  With special thanks to Mary Higgins Clark, for her encouragement,

  and for consenting to be a character in my mystery.

  And with profound appreciation to Dick Sloane,

  for his generosity and belief in me as a writer,

  and to his mother, the late Vera Sloane, simply for being herself.

  New York City, December 16, 2000

  “Let nothing you dismay.”

  Christmas Muzak was playing over the loudspeakers in Penn Station as Ellen Johansson strode to the escalator leading from the AMTRAK train waiting area to the taxi stand. So eager was she to make her date that she walked up the escalator steps even as they rose.

  There was little to burden her. She carried only a purse and a small briefcase filled with correspondence, much of it written on onion-skin paper, postmarked from one of the world’s hotspots.

  In the briefcase, she carried something else. A surprise she longed to present to her foreign correspondent.

  Pushing through the glass doors with the crowd, Ellen buttoned up her dressy winter coat and arranged the scarf she chose especially for the occasion. It would help the person she planned to meet to recognize her. She only hoped that person would also remember to wear something similarly recognizable.

  If there had been room to do it, Ellen would have paced with impatience as she waited with passengers from Boston and elsewhere who swelled the snaking line of people seeking taxis. Instead, she found herself wringing her hands, a gesture that was quite uncharacteristic.

  When, at last, it was her turn for a taxi, Ellen leaned forward toward the driver’s rolled-down window and said, “Can you take me to the World Trade Center?” As she made her request, a gust of wind tossed her strawberry-blonde hair across her freckled face.

  She brushed it out of her eyes as the driver barked, “Get in, lady,” in a heavily accented voice.

  Ellen unbuttoned her coat in the overheated cab as it made its way out of the station and turned a corner. At the tail end of the Christmas rush, the area was thronged with shoppers. Ellen knew she looked like the out-of-towner she was, and wondered if the cabbie would try to take a circuitous route all the way to the Twin Towers. Then she would have to deal with the unpleasantness of telling him she knew better

  “Mind if I smoke, lady?” the cabbie said, lighting up a cigarette before she could reply.

  “Yes, I do,” she wanted to say, but decided to pick her battle instead, asking, “Are you heading for Seventh Avenue?”

  “Of course, lady,” he said, assessing her through the rearview mirror. “You think I take you for a ride?” he added, chuckling at his own joke.

  But his eyes seemed mirthless in the small rectangle of reflective glass.

  “Alhamdulillah,” he mumbled in Ara
bic. By the grace of Allah.

  “By the grace of any god, I’ll get to my destination,” Ellen mused inwardly while matching the man’s face, as reflected in the mirror, with his identification picture posted on the seatback in front of her. “Same man, all right,” she thought. “Samir Hasan,” his card read.

  The traffic remained jammed, but Hasan demonstrated skill in crawling through it, sometimes squeezing so close to other cabs that Ellen was sure their sides would scrape or the mirrors jutting out would slam together. Looking at her watch, Ellen’s anxiety grew, but she had to admit, no driver could have improved upon Hasan’s effort. And while he wove among other vehicles, around double-parked delivery vans, and stopped on a dime to let a man push a rack of garments across the taxi’s path, he kept up an animated conversation in Arabic with another male voice on his two-way radio.

  Animated, yes. But also very earnest.

  Once, Ellen caught him casting his eyes back at her through the rear-view mirror with a kind of intense scrutiny. But then he shook his head as if laughing at himself.

  The radio conversation might have been about anything unpleasant. Marital problems. A nasty cab dispatcher. A business deal gone bad.

  Then it took on a new tone. Might they be discussing a woman in intimate detail?

  As, at last, the cab turned onto Seventh Avenue, Ellen found Hasan’s eyes on her again. Paired with the tone of the conversation, his gaze instilled in her a sense of real dismay. Was he describing Ellen herself to his radio pal? But no, it must be someone else, she realized, as she heard him mention more than once a woman named Tina. Ellen indulged in a good-natured mental shrug, and asked herself if she would have been similarly uneasy if the driver were of something other than Middle Eastern extraction. Silently, she scolded herself for almost entertaining the prejudice that so many embraced after the towers she was about to visit were the targets of terrorist truck bombers in 1993. And, after all, wasn’t she on her way to make contact with a Palestinian who held major importance in her life?

  The Twin Towers loomed ahead. She was almost there.

  The cabbie pulled the taxi to a stop. “Here you are, lady,” he said, and collected his fare.

  Ellen stepped out of the cab. “Shukran,” she said, on impulse, thanking the cabbie in his own language.

  Looking over her shoulder to gauge his reaction, Ellen had to wonder if she was imagining what she saw.

  The color seemed to drain completely out of the man’s swarthy complexion.

  Chapter 1

  Boston, December 18, 2000

  Liz Higgins sat on the city editor’s desk and surveyed the sea of desks extending around her in the Beantown Banner newsroom. Unlike the tabloid’s competitor, the broadsheet Boston World—whose newsroom packed with cubicles was rumored to have all the ambience of an insurance office—the Banner’s digs were like something out of an old-time movie, minus the cigarette smoke and clatter of typewriters. There were no dividers between the many desks where reporters worked on outdated word processors. To maintain their trains of thought, newsroom hacks had to tune out their co-workers’ telephone conversations, ignore the voices of announcers on radios constantly monitored by lowly editorial assistants, resist listening to the engaging banter between editors at the city and photo desks, and overcome the urge to strangle political columnist Fred Constanzo, who read his work-in-progress aloud to himself, so as to better appreciate the flow of his golden words.

  This was a place of bold headlines—in typeface and attitude. The Banner took pride in calling a spade a spade—or any term that took a dig at its subject. When a toymaker killed his wife and buried her in his backyard at Christmas, the headline read, “HOE, HOE, HOE!”

  In short, the home of the Beantown Banner was a red-blooded, American newsroom.

  And it was the place where Liz Higgins wanted to be taken as seriously as the breaking news she wished to cover. To that end, she spun around on her city desk perch and looked city editor Dermott McCann straight in the eye. That movement represented a calculated risk. The U-shaped desktop was littered with coffee cups damp with dregs of caffeine fixes past, a cardboard Chinese take-out box exuding a greasy odor, and waxy red china marking pencils, which the editors used to mark up copy. Since none of this detritus landed in McCann’s lap, he appeared to tolerate Liz’s in-your-face eye contact.

  “What now?” he said, returning her gaze.

  “Look, Dermott,” she said forcefully while running her hand through her wavy mane of auburn hair. “You know I’m a good sport about these soft news stories, but do I have to go to the mall again? Can’t you send the traffic reporter to write about the aggressive SUV drivers in the parking lot there? I’d say that’s his beat, not mine.”

  “We’ve got him covering guys who don’t dig out the snow around their fire hydrants, Liz. You’ve gotta agree, his story’s got priority after that kid was killed in the house fire because firemen couldn’t get to the hydrants quick enough.”

  “I agree the hydrant piece is more important, of course,” Liz said. “But I don’t agree that I should always get the assignment that’s bound to get less play in the paper.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Dermott demanded. “Didn’t you get a front-pager on that piece you wrote about the cute kid who rated the Santas? ‘Best white beard. Most jolly ho, ho, ho. Most believable.’ There’s a mall story that made waves.”

  “That was only a front-page teaser, Dermott, and you know you only put that minuscule photo on Page One because the Santa she rated ‘Best’ worked for one of our major advertisers. The story itself ran on page thirty. You buried it as deep as a fire hydrant in a blizzard.”

  “Bah, humbug!” Dermott said. “Now who’s the cynic? I seem to recall running the teaser because the Santa looked classic and the kid in his lap had a strawberry-blonde mop and the face of an angel.”

  “If you could make out their features,” Liz interjected. “The photo was so small, the U.S. Postal Service should consider it for next year’s Christmas stamp.”

  “Don’t give me attitude,” Dermott warned. “It might take the edge off your success. That story was a heart-warmer; I gotta hand it to you. You picked the perfect kid: polite, funny, cute as a button, and full of amusing requests for the seven Santas.”

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “That was a bonus. We knew she was just at the age where it was safe to let her know a department store Santa is not the one who comes down your chimney. But she believed just enough to hedge her bets and ask for a different gift from each one.”

  “Just in case they brought it on The Big Day,” Dermott said, warming to the subject. “What a hoot she was, asking the last Kris Kringle to bring her new wallpaper for her bedroom!”

  “I guess she’d run out of big toy ideas after sitting in the laps of six Saint Nicks. I was impressed when she was hesitant to diss the skinny Santa at the South Shore Plaza.”

  “Come to think of it, she did go easy on him. Considering she said the Bargain Bin’s Santa ‘didn’t have a clue about Ho, Ho, Ho-ing,’ and the Chestnut Hill guy was ‘as snobby as that mall.’ I’d have expected her to say more about a Santa with no gut.”

  “She did have something to say, but she asked me to keep it off the record.”

  “That kid has observed too many politicians.”

  “Actually, it was more a question of political correctness. Or, I should say, some pretty great sensitivity for a young kid. She said he was ‘totally unbelievable,’ but added, ‘That isn’t nice to say because he comes from another country and his feelings would be hurt.’ She even said, ‘If they have Santas in Palestine, kids there might think he was real.’”

  “That would have been a great quote,” Dermott said. “Too bad you didn’t use it.”

  “Yes, and no,” Liz said.

  The city editor chose to ignore that remark. “That ki
d’s a deep one,” he said. “What was the kid’s name again? How old is she?” Dermott asked.

  “Veronica Johansson,” Liz said. “She’s eight years old. No nickname. Just Veronica.”

  “Great kid. Like I said, great feature.”

  Liz pressed her advantage. Leaning forward and crossing her legs she inquired, “Since I proved myself there, how about giving me a more exciting assignment this time around?”

  “Shapely,” Dermott mused aloud. “Now that’s a word you don’t hear often these days.”

  “What?” Liz asked, perplexed. Then she noticed Dermott ogling her legs.

  “Maybe I’ll take pity on you and have you do a hosiery feature,” he laughed. “In a mall, of course.”

  Before Liz could make a retort, editorial assistant Jared Conneely sidled over to Dermott. Simpering and oddly prim for his twenty-some years, Jared possessed an air of being up to no good. Behind his back he was known as the Uriah Heep of the newsroom.

  “It seems there might be a bit of a to-do at Newton City Hall’s Hanukkah fête this afternoon,” Jared said, using the old-fashioned vocabulary of which he was so fond. “The Italian-American mayor thinks he’ll win Jewish voters if he dances the hora with them on the frozen lawn there. But I fear the poor fellow just might meet his Waterloo,” Jared added, pausing for effect.

  “You mean he’ll slip on the skating pond there? For Chrissake, spit it out, Conneely,” the city editor said, looking pointedly at the clock. “I’ve got a paper to get out.”

  “Someone has set up a crèche on the lawn there, complete with holy infant, wise men, and shepherds. Mayor Ficarelli will have to step smartly to dance around that one,” Jared opined.

  “OK, kiddo,” Dermott said to Liz. “Thanks to that hot tip, you’ve won your reprieve. Forget the SUV parkers at the mall and get yourself out to Newton. Grab a photographer and make sure he gets the crèche in the shot. Put on your dancing shoes. And step lively,” he said with a glance at Jared.