Read Never Look Away for Free Online

followed him. The way he made me trail after him, without turning or chatting along the way, made me feel like a puppy being dragged along by an invisible leash. I wasn't even forty yet, but I saw Brian was part of the new breed around here. At twenty-six, he was management, having impressed the bosses not with journalistic credentials but with business savvy. Everything was "marketing" and "trends," "presentation" and "synergy." Every once in a while, he dropped "zeitgeist" into a sentence, which invariably prompted me to say "Bless you." The sports and entertainment editors were both under thirty, and there was this sense, at least among those of us who had been at the paper for ten or more years, that the place was gradually being taken over by children.
    Brian slipped in behind his desk and asked me to close the door before I sat down.
    "So, this prison thing," he said. "What have you really got?"
    "The company gave Reeves an all-expenses-paid vacation in Italy after the UK junket," I said. "Presumably, when Star Spangled's proposal comes up before council, he'll be voting on it."
    "Presumably . So he's not actually in a conflict of interest yet, is he? If it hasn't come up for a vote. If he abstains or something, then what do we really have here?"
    "What are you saying, Brian? If a cop takes a payoff from a holdup gang to look the other way, it's not a conflict until the bank actually gets robbed?"
    "Huh?" said Brian. "We're not talking about a bank holdup here, David."
    Brian wasn't good with metaphors. "I'm trying to make a point."
    Brian shook his head, like he was trying to rid his brain of the last ten seconds of conversation. "Specifically about the hotel bill," he said, "do we have it a hundred percent that Reeves didn't pay for it? Or that he isn't paying back Elmont Sebastian? Because in your story," and now he was looking at his computer screen, tapping the scroll key, "you don't actually have him denying it."
    "He called me a piece of shit instead."
    "Because we really need to give him a chance to explain himself before we run with this," Donnelly said. "If we don't, we could get our asses sued off."
    "I gave him a chance," I said. "Where's this coming from?"
    "What? Where's what coming from?"
    I smiled. "It's okay, I get it. You're getting leaned on by She Who Must Be Obeyed."
    "You shouldn't refer to the publisher that way," Brian said.
    "Because she's your aunt?"
    He had the decency to blush. "That has no bearing on this."
    "But I'm right about where this is coming from. Ms. Plimpton sent the word down," I said.
    While born a Russell, Madeline Plimpton had been married to Geoffrey Plimpton, a well-known Promise Falls realtor who'd died two years ago, at thirty-eight, of an aneurysm.
    Madeline Plimpton, at thirty-nine, was the youngest publisher in the paper's history. Brian was the son of her much older sister Margaret, who'd never had any interest in newspapers, and had instead pursued her dream of having a property worthy of the annual Promise Falls Home and Garden Tour. She managed to be on it every year, which I would never suggest, not for a moment, was because she was tour president.
    Brian had never actually worked as a reporter, so you almost couldn't blame him for not understanding the thrill of nailing a weasel like Reeves to the wall. But Madeline, when she was still a Russell, had worked as a general assignment reporter alongside me more than a decade ago. Not for long, of course. It was part of her crash course in learning the family business, and in no time she was moving up the ranks. Entertainment editor, then assistant managing editor, then M.E., all designed to get her ready to be publisher once her father, Arnett Russell, packed it in, which he had done four years ago. The fact that Madeline had, however briefly, worked in the trenches made her willingness to turn her back on journalism--to tiptoe around the Reeves story--all the more disheartening.
    When Brian didn't deny that his aunt