A crime story from the Metro Section detailing the burglary and arrest of two teenagers, Sonny Stockwell and Alan Ingrams. Raymond had gone to the library the day before and found it in the newspaper’s archives as he searched for just the right person.

Photos of the two burglars were included. And as Raymond glanced at them, he felt sure that Stockwell was the leader. The kid looked young for his age, even smart, with a huge chip on his shoulder. The article sketched his troubled history in a single paragraph and even mentioned the block number where he lived with his grandmother. Sonny Stockwell would be perfect. And he lived just ten minutes away in a section of Washington that would never wind up on a postcard because only the forgotten lived there. Just like the girl in the river behind all those monuments. No one would ever remember her. No one would ever guess.


 

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

 

The edit suite was completely digital and cost between two and three hundred thousand to put together. The lights were dimmed, the medium-sized space always kept dark but for the radiance of monitors set into the main wall of the room. Below the monitors, a workbench made of solid oak ran the entire length of the wall providing easy access to the computer used for generating text, the video switcher and digital audio mixer. Behind the editing console stood the client’s table with two telephones and two richly padded leather chairs. Off to the side, a short set of steps led to a couch and coffee table overlooking the rest of the room.

Although the suite was state of the art, Frank paid the five-hundred-dollar-an-hour rate to edit here because of Kip, a twenty-eight-year-old sitting at the switcher in jeans and a T-shirt. Kip performed magic as if it were routine. What he brought to the edit session outweighed the value of the technology. Even today.

Frank stood by the title camera in his underwear, adjusting a small piece of blank copy paper that he’d torn into a rough-edged, three-inch square. He studied the monitor as Kip typed Lou Kay takes money from special interest groups onto the screen. When they were done, the words were superimposed over the piece of torn paper and looked exactly like a headline ripped out of a newspaper.

“That’s it,” Frank said. “Bring it in and hold it.”

Making television spots was the point at which everything in a campaign finally came together. Frank had always wondered why most political consultants sat on the couch in the back of the room, talking on the phone and not participating in the process except to say yes or no.

Frank returned to the client’s table, dug into his garment bag and pulled out his tux for the president’s fund-raiser. When he spotted the Thermos pot set beside a bowl of fresh fruit, he realized that he’d forgotten to eat lunch. He poured a cup of coffee and sipped it, but the hot liquid only seemed to draw out his hunger.

They had been at it for an hour. Each line of voice-over copy reduced to key words typed onto the screen over different shape and size variations of that torn piece of blank paper. Once they looked like headlines, they were inserted over different shots. Limousines. Faceless men in dark suits carrying overstuffed briefcases through shadowy halls. Power brokers and big shots and what the people hated most about Washington.

Frank thought it over as he got into his shirt. He’d used this technique with success since the early nineties. Headlines gave his words added credibility whether they were real headlines or not.