Glass Lane

Chapter 3: Mel

The week after the gala was a blur to Mel Halloway. The Manworth Journal had never been so busy. Cover after cover, scoop after scoop, was about Hampton Cross and the brutal details of his execution-style murder.

Mel and Joe had been one of only a handful of press inside, making their insight some of the best available on the newsstand.

"Lucky us Midtown News and the United Post were already back outside huh?" Joe hadn't stopped beaming since the night. "Serves them right. They were jostling for a front seat to the final show and they missed the main event. Heh."

Mel, for herself, couldn't get visions from the gala out of her head. They played over and over again like a bad movie.

She saw the chandeliers swinging and saw everyone running for cover. Then she saw the men in black and Hampton Cross's eyes as he was swept behind the curtain.

"Do you think they were hired hitmen? Some kind of paid hands who slipped into his security detail?"

It was a question Mel had asked herself, and their readers, a thousand times. There could be no denying that Hampton Cross was targeted, but for all Mel could tell there was not so much as a clue as to who. Try as they did to dig up leads, or press the cops, no answers were obvious. By all accounts, Hampton was both a successful and well-liked man.

In the midst of it all, Cross's death threatened to overshadow the bombs. 

Three bombs had been set off that evening, one in the ancient exhibits room and two more in the amphitheater adjacent to the museum's great hall. 

The first bomb had been too far away, causing little more than a tremble in the lighting. The other two had been a different matter. Activated back to back, they had ripped holes in the walls and the floors of the newly renovated room, leaving it little more than a charred and blackened husk. Two other exhibits had been damaged in the explosions, but somehow the museum's great hall had remained unharmed and intact. Even the lights stayed on.

"We could have been killed," Mel realized with a sickening lurch a day or two after all the details were leaked to reporters like her.

Joe was unbothered in the aftermath of it all. Phased by years of living and working the bowels of the city, the assassination of politicians and the ultra-rich was nothing new to him.

"They didn't mean to kill us, they meant to create a diversion. And it worked."

"But why so big?" None of it added up to Mel, but it smelled like some kind of conspiracy.

"Just wait and let it all play," Joe told her. That was the advice he always had. Let it play. She rolled her eyes and turned back to her desk. The monitor on her computer blinked bright and blank.

***

When she wasn't at work, Mel had a hard time putting the case down. It all fascinated her. Billionaire family, founders of the city, wrecked by an assassination on the biggest night of the social calendar. Stories like that came along once in a lifetime and Mel was sure that this was a lifetime story.

What she was particularly curious about were the rumors circling the city.

In bars, hotels, bordellos, brothels, and clubs, they were all saying the same thing. Charlie Cross had something to do with her father's death. None of the stories could seem to agree. Some claimed that Charlie herself had pulled the trigger that split her father's head and ended his life. Others insisted it was a part of a bigger plot. A sort of revenge, perhaps. Or some kind of story of a lover denied.