Chapter Two – The Find

The Find - Chapter Two

TWO

The American Times building was located in the heart of Rockefeller Plaza. As James rode the elevator to the twelfth floor, he felt Rachel’s presence—again. How many times had it happened since her death? The feeling wasn’t just a faith-induced concept of her. He could swear Rachel was present, hovering near him. Trying to talk to him. Trying to touch him. Reaching out. For a month, he had sat in his apartment trying to reach back, drinking himself numb in the process. He could do it no more.

That morning, James had forced himself to call Murdock Collier back. The managing editor of American Times magazine only reiterated the message he had left on the answering machine: he had a writing job for James regarding an incident in the Grand Canyon. If James was interested, he would have to come to the office. Having traveled much of his life, James knew the therapeutic benefits of getting away. He had never been to the Grand Canyon before, and he thought a trip there might make life more tolerable, maybe, if it came to that. One thing was for sure: if he wasn’t going to off himself, he had to get out of his apartment and interact with people again on some level. He agreed to meet Murdock within the hour.

The elevator door opened with a ping on the American Times floor, and James stepped out. The hallway carpet was wine-colored with endless rows of glittering gold initials woven into it—“AT” for American Times. It was the same color scheme the magazine used in its layout. James plodded the length of the hallway to the door at the end marked Managing Editor, Murdock Collier.

He entered the office and was greeted by a young woman behind the desk.
“Hi, James,” she bid him with a smile.

He did a double take. “Nina Roberts?”

“It’s good to see you.”

Although they had known each other from college, James hadn’t seen Nina in years, not since before he’d met Rachel. Back then he had run into her in a club one night. He had too much to drink. She had too much to drink. They woke up the next morning together. A mistake. Who gives a shit—that was a long time ago.

Her bleached white teeth were blinding, even through the dark glasses James wore. She extended a slender arm. He shook her hand, and she held his a tad longer than he would have liked.

“We’ll catch up later,” she whispered. “Mr. Collier's been waiting for you.”

She motioned him to follow her.

They stopped in front of a red mahogany door. She turned to him. “You look nice with those sunglasses on, like Tom Cruise.”

“I think I’m taller than he is.”

“I think you should take them off.”

“I scratched my eye. Doctor’s orders,” James lied.

He smiled at her, which was amazingly difficult to do. He didn’t know if she believed him, but she opened the door just the same, and they entered the managing editor’s office. Dozens of gold-framed prints of American Times magazine covers adorned two of the walls. On the third wall there was only one item—a painting of Van Gogh’s Caffe di Notte.

A rail of a man with ashen hair stood behind a desk, gazing out the window with his back to them.

“James Brackin is here to see you, Mr. Collier,” Nina announced.

Murdock Collier spoke without turning to face them. “They say at the end of your life, it’s not the things you did that you will regret, but the things you didn’t do. What do you think, Brackin?”

“It’s a true enough statement, I suppose,” James said.

He had never met Murdock Collier, and when the old man turned to face him, he was surprised. Collier was older than James would have thought. He had a cadaver face with wafer-thin skin stretched over bony cheekbones, and his eyes were gray and clouded, apparently in need of cataract surgery. Just the act of standing seemed painful to him.
The old man extended his arm toward James. “Glad you could make it, kid.”
James shook Murdock’s bony hand.

Then James heard a toilet flush. A door opened on the opposite side of the room, and a man exited the restroom while rubbing his hands on his pants.
“This is my son, Seth Collier,” Murdock said to James.
Seth had a youthful face. Unlike his father, his skin was a perfect tanning booth bronze. But like his father, Seth’s cheekbones rode high on his face, sort of like a shark. Based on the blinding whiteness of his teeth, James guessed he and Nina shared the same dentist. Seth squeezed James’s hand firmly and sat down.

Murdock gestured to James to do so as well. He sank into the burgundy leather chair in front of Murdock's desk, a surface so bright it looked like liquid with mirrors melted into it.
There was a clumsy moment of just looking—the two men at James, James at them.
“He scratched his eye. Doctor’s orders,” Nina informed the Colliers. Then she left the room.

James didn't like being dwarfed by the desk, which was now even with his shoulders. The thing was bigger than his king-sized bed, for Christ’s sake. He became aware of Seth looking him over. James adjusted his six-foot frame in the chair, trying to get comfortable; the friction against the leather sounded like gas expelling.
Seth retrieved a hand exerciser from his silver sports jacket and started squeezing it, bringing the grips together, then releasing them. It squeaked with each compression and release.

“Got an e-mail yesterday morning,” he said. “A team of archeologists were on an expedition in the Grand Canyon, and something went wrong.”
“What?” James asked.

“The e-mail didn't give many details. We know someone was killed. We suspect murder.” Seth's pale brown eyes showed no emotion.

James shrugged. “Murder happens everyday. Why not just let the local papers cover it?”
“The leader of the excavation is a strange bird,” Murdock informed him. “Our source seems to think he was involved in some pretty bizarre activities. His name is Dr. Jensen Reinhardt.”

Murdock shoved a manila folder at James across the desk's vast surface.
James opened it. Inside was a newspaper article written two years earlier from Medill News Service, a Chicago publication of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Jensen Reinhardt, professor of Archeology at Northwestern University, was terminated from his teaching position yesterday morning. Dr. Reinhardt had taken eight students on a “field trip” to Zihuastanejso, Mexico to learn remote viewing (out-of-body seeing) techniques taught by a local shaman named Emilio Mandes. Some archeologists claim to use remote viewers to discover the whereabouts of ancient cities and artifacts. An unnamed mother of one of the students on the field trip claimed her daughter “was forced into cult-related rituals that had nothing to do with education.”

Other parents complained as well.

NU’s Dean of Humanities, Marion Keating, expressed his deepest apologies to the victims of the misguided field trip. He assured everyone concerned that the school did not sanction such activities, and that the severest discipline had been administered. Dr. Reinhardt was immediately relieved of his teaching responsibilities.
When asked about his termination, Dr. Reinhardt's only comment was, “Witch hunts are alive and well in northern Illinois.”

There was a photograph of Dr. Reinhardt. He had a thick black beard with a small patch of gray below his right cheek. His black eyes were sharp and deep, with a hypnotic effect that drew you in. James lowered the paper to see Murdock’s clouded eyes staring at him from across the desk.

“There will be a press conference at the Grand Canyon Park Headquarters tonight,” Murdock said. “We don't want to be left out of the loop if it's a national piece. Our source tells us the FBI is involved.”

“The FBI?” James asked uneasily. “I don't get it. Why me?”

“I have a gut feeling about this. Normally I'd send Joshua Quint or Madeline Nelan, but they're both in Washington. All my other freelancers are tied up with projects. To be honest, you were the last on my list. If the story turns out to be major, I'll pull Madeline and send her in behind you.”

James slid forward in the leather chair. “Maybe I should rephrase my question, Mr. Collier. How come you’re talking to me? You're the managing editor of the country’s leading news magazine. I'm a nobody. A beginner. I've only done a handful of magazine articles in my life, and only one for American Times.”

“Yes. That little human interest story you did for us,” Murdock said.
“Our E-Society,” James reminded him.

It was a piece he wrote one day after sitting in Starbucks with his laptop, jacked up on java and trying to get some work done. He’d described how such businesses were trying to lure people in by offering Internet access so they could sit there all day, downing one latte after another. Although he didn’t get much work done with the woman next to him talking about her hysterectomy on a cell phone and a group of college students on the other side reading erotic poetry, he did write a humorous article about the event that he’d sent to the American Times.

“You can make a lot more money writing advertising copy than magazine copy,” Murdock said, his tone condescending. “You do know that, don't you?”

It suddenly became clear why James was there. Murdock was on a mission. His main interest in James wasn’t as a freelance journalist, but as an advertising copywriter.

Squeak . . . Squeak . . . Squeak . . .

James glanced from Murdock to the annoying exerciser in Seth’s hand, which Seth continued to compulsively squeeze.

Acid was churning in James’s gut. He tired to ignore it as Murdock rambled on about how valuable James had been to the Chapman/Wallace Advertising Agency—a place he had worked for six years.

“Confidentially, Chapman told me the Ford campaign was your idea,” Murdock told him.
“You mean the campaign everyone made a fortune on but me?”
“I understand there are some bad feelings. But now that you've left, you're holding the cards. I think if you went back, they'd make you an offer you couldn’t refuse, so to speak.”

Yeah. Right, James thought. He yawned.

The capillaries on Murdock's pale cheeks turned bright red. “Do I have to spell out for you what’s going on here?”

James took some sick pleasure in watching Murdock Collier suck up to him. Maybe this alone was worth living for. For years he had toiled at Chapman/Wallace. Although his official title was copywriter, he did whatever it had taken to develop successful advertising campaigns, including the final one he’d created for Ford Motor Company. A Full Year of Gas, Yours FREE with the Purchase of any New Ford, was the theme of the campaign. In less than two years, the campaign boosted the company's market share of mid-sized family cars by 2.5 percent, an unprecedented jump in the automotive industry. It was the most successful advertising campaign ever done by an automobile manufacturer. At first, people laughed at the idea. But James persisted and finally persuaded Chapman and Wallace, then Shell Oil and Ford, how they would all profit from the venture.

After the success of the campaign, James’s name rose to celebrity status within the advertising community. But Chapman and Wallace reacted in typical executive fashion: they took all the credit for the campaign's success, despite the fact James had had to talk them into doing it. It was a matter of company policy, they told James, to prevent any employee's name from outshining the agency’s.

So James responded in typical advertising employee fashion: he quit the agency.
It was clear why Murdock was talking to him, all right. James had been the star copywriter at Chapman and Wallace. When he quit, they lost business, which meant American Times lost business. Murdock saw James as a means to increase the magazine’s advertising sales—if he went back to the agency.

“Chapman will do just about anything to get you back,” Murdock said.

“Things have changed in my life, Mr. Collier. I'm not interested in advertising anymore.”
“Now you're doing freelance magazine work. That doesn't pay for shit.”
James shrugged. Advertising had offered a way for Rachel and him to work together. With her gone, it just didn’t matter.

“Does this conversation have anything to do with the Grand Canyon, Mr. Collier?”
James sensed Murdock Collier wasn’t used to the people sitting in this chair doing anything but agreeing with him. Yet the old man relented.

“Have it your way, son. The gig pays sixty dollars a day, plus ten cents a word. You in?”
“Why not?”

Seth leaned over and stabbed the intercom button on his father’s desk. “Nina, bring in Mr. Brackin’s itinerary.”

The office door opened and James felt a weighty female gaze upon him—a gaze he made certain he didn’t return. Nina seemed to model her ringless finger as she held out an envelope to him.

“Corporate charge card, cash, hotel information, and plane tickets,” she said softly.
Seth snatched the envelope. “Thank you, Nina. That will be all.”

The receptionist turned on her heel and left the room.

Seth stood up, towering over James as he stuffed the envelope in James's front pocket.
“Since you're not a real investigative reporter, I will guide you, as needed. e-mail me a rough draft by tomorrow morning, and call me at two o'clock, EST. Any questions?”
James gazed up at Seth, noting the biceps flexing beneath the sleeve of his silver jacket as he pumped the hand exerciser. James decided right there he didn’t like Seth Collier. Wasn’t sure why. But being depressed and suicidal, he figured he had a right to make such a snap judgment.

“No questions.” James rose to his feet.

He bid them farewell and left through the large office doors.

Nina caught up with him at the elevator. She reached out and touched his arm with a warm palm.

“Don’t let Seth bother you. He resents many decisions his father makes. Hiring you just happened to be the latest.”

She smiled and gazed shyly down at her gold, open-toed high heels accented by ruby-red toenails. Both the shoes and toes matched the color of the carpet.

“So,” she said, her eyes dreamy. “What have you been up to?”

James put some distance between them and gazed up at the elevator dial. To his relief, it was swiftly approaching the twelfth floor.

“If you need anything at all,” she started to say and handed him a business card.
“What I need is for you to stop flirting with me.”

Nina’s jaw dropped as the elevator door opened.

James squeezed into the crowed space. Nina’s parting shot slid in just as the door closed behind him.

“Asshole!”

Laughter bubbled up from the other passengers, as tears welled under James’s dark glasses.

He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and caressed the pint of Jack, which immediately made him feel better.