Dead Wrong (A Cal Murphy Thriller Book 7) by Jack Patterson (ebook reader for pc .txt) 📕

grabbed onto the wall with one hand. With the other hand, he raked water off his face. He blew out the water that had seeped into his mouth before staring agape at his visitor.

“Fred Parker, what in the world do I owe this honor to?” Cal said.

Parker, a former NFL lineman and popular sports radio personality, held out a towel for Cal. “I brought this for you.”

Cal slapped Parker on the leg. “How sweet, but I’ve still got another ten minutes left in my workout.”

Parker didn’t move. “You’re gonna want to get out when I break a little piece of news to you.”

Cal froze. “Oh, what’s that?”

“Kelvin Jameson is dead.”

Cal placed both hands on the starting block in front of him and pulled himself out of the water. He grabbed the towel from Parker and began drying off. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack,” Parker said before he paused. “Maybe that was a poor choice of words.”

“He had a heart attack?”

Parker shook his head. “The police aren’t saying anything officially yet, but I’ve got a source who says it was a heart attack more or less.”

“More or less?”

“More like it was induced from a drug overdose.”

Cal stared slack-jawed at Parker. “This is Len Bias all over again. A drug overdose? Jameson? I never would’ve guessed he was into anything like that. He seemed like a good guy.”

Parker chuckled. “He was. But I’ve seen plenty of good guys ruined by the trappings of fame.”

“That’s just crazy,” Cal said. “I talked to him last night after the game for a story I wrote. That was the happiest I’d seen him after a game in a long time. I even watched him leave with his son and heard them talking about getting ice cream or something like that.”

“The cleaning lady found him with two prostitutes passed out on top of him fully clothed.”

Cal rubbed his head with his towel. “If that doesn’t make the police suspicious, I don’t know what will.”

“I doubt there’s going to be some big investigation. All the evidence points to a simple drug overdose.”

“I assume they’re doing an autopsy, right?”

Parker nodded. “We won’t know anything for a few days, but it sounds pretty cut and dry—at least from the cops’ perspective.”

“What do you think?”

“I knew Kelvin for a long time—and it certainly seems out of character for him. But I’ve also seen plenty of players do uncharacteristic things when the pressure is on.”

“Pressure? He had to know he wasn’t going to get another contract after this one ran out two years from now. What kind of pressure could make him do something like that?”

“It’s not always about the contract, Cal. He had a lot of trouble at home, too.”

“But enough to make him start partying like a crazy man?”

“You never know.”

Cal cocked his head and smiled. “If I didn’t know any better, I think you might be coaxing me to look into this further.”

The corners of Parker’s mouth turned upward. “It’d be a shame for one of the city’s great basketball players to die of a drug overdose yet the sharpest investigative sports journalist on our team takes the police report at face value.”

Cal put his hands on his hips and squinted at Parker. “Now that your motives have been laid bare, wanna help me?”

Parker shook his head. “Not really. But I’d love to have you as a guest on my show again once you write another award-winning piece that identifies exactly what happened.”

Cal offered his right hand and Parker grabbed it. “Deal,” Cal said. He then turned around and jumped back into the water.

“What are you doing?” Parker asked.

Cal positioned himself against the wall and looked back over his shoulder at Parker. “I’ve got ten more minutes to work—and then who knows when I’ll get another chance to do this.”

***

CAL DROVE to the office and contemplated how he should approach Washington Times sports editor Marcus Hale about the story. Cal moved his family to D.C. from Charlotte a year and a half ago. He craved more assignments of an investigative nature—and when offered a job in the nation’s capital, he couldn’t imagine a place more rife with conspiracies. And up until now, it had been a relative disappointment.

Puff pieces on the Nationals and their green stadium initiative, features about senators and their sons and their shared love for baseball, analysis on Stephen Strasburg’s fastball. Nothing that was going to win him awards. Nothing that excited him about getting up in the morning.

But the Wizards’ star basketball player found dead in a hotel room?

This was the stuff he longed for. He doubted it would take much to convince Hale to turn him loose on the story.

He was wrong.

An hour later, Cal sat in Hale’s office pleading his case and regurgitating the sketchy facts Fred Parker had fed him earlier that morning. It was nothing Cal would ever print without verifying and fact checking everything, but this wasn’t a story—this was selling Hale on the idea that a better story might exist. And since Cal was filling in on the Wizards’ beat for the backup beat writer Jared Arbuckle, who was vacationing for a couple of weeks, it seemed like a natural fit for the sports writer with the most investigative writing accolades in the newsroom. At least it seemed that way to Cal.

“I don’t understand why you think we shouldn’t wait on the coroner’s report to verify what we’re already hearing,” Hale said as he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I don’t want to send you on a wild goose chase.”

“By that point, we might be behind in the game,” Cal countered. “That is, if there’s anything else that comes out in the report.”

“And what if nothing else comes out? What then?”

“That’s when I become even more suspicious.”

Hale laughed and picked up a baseball on the edge of his desk. He tossed it in the air and caught it, repeating the motion several times before finally speaking.

“Okay, look into it, but