Show Game by Steve Anderson

Author:Steve Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Monday–Saturday, November 13–18

Owen

He turned his Portland hotel room into his office. Holed up. He sometimes used his favorite of the seven surrounding coffee shops to get away from his tiny desk. Plus housekeeping needed to come in. But he didn’t go out too much and didn’t cross West Burnside into the compact downtown area because he didn’t want to run into Lucy Holden by accident. Anything was possible. She would wonder why he was still here. She would figure out that he might still be on to her. Before he made his next move involving her, his plan was to get more on Mason Snead. This was his show now.

Owen used the investigative reporter’s trusted resources for getting at the truth: consulting the online databases; public and private records; checking sources and rechecking interviews; analyzing, comparing, and visualizing data—spreadsheets, PDF extraction tools, mapping software. And when those didn’t work, he started emailing, texting, and even calling trusty contacts, old friends, all using his personal accounts. He couldn’t use his team back in NYC for this since that inevitably meant using the team’s supposedly secure new chat tool. To cover himself, he occasionally did use his FreeChain News accounts and their new chat. Most of the team, he saw, appeared to be using it as just their own personal Twitter, that or TikTok, but one was on the ball: Gina. She had checked with experts and reported back to him that “analysis of human speech altered by a voice changer could not detect the person’s true voice.” It was possible, however, to reverse-engineer vocals if the perpetrator’s voice was known. But the Show Game voice was not known. All the more reason for Owen to confirm it.

He finally got hold of Anne Blade, his former editor. This was on his third day in his hotel room. She had indeed been in Mexico, helping to care for her ill father. They talked on the phone in his room at four a.m. PST, before her new job back east began for the day.

“I was hoping you’d get in touch,” she said. Owen could hear the subway station behind her, yet she still spoke in hushed tones. “You want something on Snead? Good. Fuck that guy.”

Anne Blade had a good tip for him. He pursued it immediately, not even bothering to get out of bed, just grabbing his tablet and laptop and notepads off the floor and plopping them onto the sheets. Before he knew it, it was ten a.m. and he hadn’t eaten yet.

He got a text from Molly: It is a she, isn’t it? Mum’s the word!

If she only knew. He tried stalling, but finally texted back: Hold on to your hat. Plus a grimace face emoji.

That afternoon (it took Owen a second to recall which day), after a quick shower, a few stretches, and making sure the Do Not Disturb sign was on the door, he started calling in a few favors, screw it. This led him to a couple fellow investigative reporters, including some in the business world that Owen didn’t know.

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