I Saw Your Profile Read online

  Michael Singleton was fifteen years older than Arianna when they met in the produce section of a grocery store. Green, seedless grapes were on her list, peaches on his.

  They exchanged smiles.

  He caught up with her later in the canned vegetable aisle. “I don’t mean to bother you, but you are a very attractive woman. Can I have a moment of your time?”

  He got thirty.

  Michael was a recruiter for the Navy. He was the color of midnight with teeth that sparkled in the dark. A career Navy man, he left Alabama after high school and signed up with Uncle Sam to escape the South and see the world. He spoke with a charming accent, not one of those slow, Southern drawls, and was a deacon at a Baptist church.

  Since the Navy had been his life, there had been no room for a wife and kids. When he met Arianna, he was ready for both. A new career was also calling his name. Uncle Sam got the heave-ho when he opened a management-consulting firm.

  They were married a year later. Michael treated her like a queen and, his stepson, Amir, like a prince. Akilah came shortly after they jumped the broom and he doted on her.

  When he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer, Arianna thought her world was over. When he died, she nearly went with him, but she couldn’t. She had two kids to take care of.

  Michael left her with enough money to be comfortable, but she hated being a single parent again.

  She started dating two years later, but no man she met ever measured up to Michael. Akilah was a constant reminder of what Arianna had lost. The little girl didn’t remember her father. For Arianna, that was a blessing and a curse. Her daughter wouldn’t have to grieve for the father she never knew, but she also wouldn’t have him to protect her or prepare her for life; to be her role model. To show her how men should treat women and take care of their family. To let Akilah know how she should be loved.

  A loving father was something Arianna never had. She always felt she got lucky with Michael. Her choices before him left much to be desired. So had her options since.

  Akilah wasn’t ready for lectures about boys, though. At ten, she was a diva with prissy ways she certainly didn’t inherit from her mother.

  Dolls, make-up, fake nails and singers with great bodies but no talent captivated her attention. Arianna never owned a doll and played football with her brothers when she was Akilah’s age. She was a basketball fanatic and would out scream any man in front of a TV set during a game. She got season tickets for the Seventy-Sixers as soon as she moved to the City of Brotherly Love.

  Akilah handed her mother the math test. “Here. See. I got ‘em all right. My teacher drew a star next to the hundred.”

  “That’s great, princess. I am very proud of you.” She hugged and kissed her.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Chicken and rice for you. Veggies and rice for me.”

  “When can we eat?”

  “When I finish cooking.”

  Akilah whined. “Maaaa. I know that. How long?”

  “As long as it takes. Did you do your homework?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All of it? You didn’t need help with anything?”

  “Nope. It was easy.”

  “Okay. I’m going to cook.”

  “Oh yeah. A man called for you.”

  “Who?”

  “I forgot his name, but he was a cop.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He said he was a detective. He called a little while ago. Amir was upstairs with his friends blasting his music. He didn’t hear the phone, so I answered it.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She looked at the envelope in her hands.

  “All right, baby. Good job on your math test. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

  Arianna walked to the end of the hall to her room. She plopped on her four-poster bed, grabbing the cordless phone from the nightstand. She stared at the writing on the envelope as she dialed Kenny Washington’s cell phone, hoping to hear his comforting voice on the other line. His voice mail picked up, instead.

  “Damn, I forgot he had a gig tonight.”

  She called Nicole. Voicemail again.

  She threw the envelope on the nightstand and dragged herself downstairs to the living room. She put a CD in the surround sound system that sat among several electronic devices hosted by a large maple entertainment center.

  She grabbed her mail from the coffee table in the middle of the room and eased onto a long sofa that sat along the wall across from the entertainment center.

  The sofa matched the loveseat and was decorated with plush plum and gold pillows. She pressed her back into one as she ripped open the bills, tossing them into a wicker basket at the side of the couch.

  Arianna wanted to lie down and enjoy the music, but she could almost hear Akilah’s stomach growling upstairs. She forced herself from the couch and went back to the stereo, turning up the volume so the music could traverse the walls that separated the living room from the kitchen.

  The living room was connected to a formal dining room on one side and a den that served as her office on the other. Both rooms offered entry to an eat-in kitchen painted the color of cornmeal. A border of red and yellow flowers graced the top of the walls. The brightly decorated space helped put Arianna in the mood to cook, an activity for which she had great talent, yet considered a thankless chore.

  She was jamming to Remy Shand’s “Take a Message” and pouring sautéed vegetables over a plate of brown rice when the phone rang. She checked the caller ID. She didn’t recognize the number, but California showed on the display. She returned it to the charger without answering it.

  Before she could holler for the kids not to pick it up, Akilah came in the kitchen holding a phone. “Mommy, it’s that detective again.”

  She took the phone and put her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I would go get you.”

  “Well, I’m cooking dinner now, honey. Can you tell him that I’m busy and take a message?”

  “Okay.”

  Akilah took the phone and repeated her mother’s words.

  “He said for you to call him.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She handed her daughter a plate.

  “Go tell your brother dinner’s ready.”

  “Okay.”

  The CD had started from the beginning and “Way I Feel” was playing when Arianna went to her office with her plate. She sat at the computer desk and checked her email.

  There were nine new messages in her inbox. One was from Janelle Carter. She clicked on it.

  Hi!

  You should be hearing from the Los Angeles police soon. Remember what you told me? You reap what you sow. Now it’s your turn.

  Janelle.

  Arianna’s legs began to shake underneath the desk. She clicked delete.

  Chapter Three

  The newsroom at the Philadelphia Press Herald was buzzing when Arianna walked into the office. The wires were reporting that two suspects had been arrested in the sniper shootings that had left ten people dead and three wounded during a twenty-one day rampage across Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.

  Almost as important was the news they were black.

  “Singleton. I need you over here!” Larry Parsons was barking orders from the city desk, the engine that ran the newsroom. “We need a reaction story to the sniper arrests. I want you to take the race angle. A lot of people are going to question these arrests because the suspects are black. No one has ever heard of black serial killers. I need you to talk to people in the black community and see what they are saying.”

  Arianna hated it when her white editors made references to the black community as if they all lived in the same neighborhood and shared the same thoughts.

  Especially Larry. She and the other black reporters called him Vanilla Ice. He grew up near the Richard Allen housing project in North Philadelphia and had a few black friends so he thought he was a homeboy.
Never mind that he lived in a four hundred thousand dollar house in Chestnut Hill and hadn’t had a black friend since high school.

  And the fact that he screwed half the female staff didn’t endear him to her.

  She’d been at the Press Herald for a year and learned all his dirt in her first month. There are no secrets in newsrooms.

  “Do you have any specific questions you’d like me to ask the Negroes, Larry? Or is this the garden-variety man-on-the-street where we just ask them how they feel that one of their own has been accused of committing these heinous crimes?”

  “For Christ sakes Singleton, you’re a veteran. I shouldn’t have to tell you what to ask.”

  That’s never stopped an editor before.

  She was thinking about her days at the Hartford Sentinel in Connecticut. She’d written award-winning investigative pieces, but her editors still treated her like an intern. Arianna couldn’t get out of New England fast enough. She was drawn to the Mid-Atlantic by the prospect of practicing quality journalism and the lure of life in a big city.

  The Sentinel had been like a plantation. The Press Herald wasn’t much different, but at least her masters gave her respect and had high expectations - and she lived up to them.

  Larry was loud, surly and had the social skills of a barstool drunk. He got on her nerves, but she respected his news judgment and the fact that he trusted hers.

  “Are we talking A1 or inside?”

  She wanted A1. She didn’t want her byline buried inside with international stories nobody read.

  “Not sure yet, but you’ve got twenty inches. Take a photographer with you.”

  Though she gave him a hard time, Larry was right. This story was going to be the talking news of the day in black barbershops, hair salons and soul food restaurants.

  She walked to the photo department and asked a photographer to meet her at Big George’s Stop-n-Dine. She was sure to find people there talking about the snipers over their grits and eggs.

  On her way outside, she ran into Joyce Daniels, the sister who covered city hall.

  “Do you believe this shit? The snipers are bruthas. I just left city hall and it’s all everybody is talking about.”

  “The alleged snipers are bruthas, Joyce. Alleged.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not writing a story here, Ari. Do you think they did it?”

  “How do I know? I only know that AP is reporting they’ve been arrested. But I gotta admit, I never would’ve thought that whoever did it would be black.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Big George’s. I gotta go find people who look like you and me, but who don’t write for newspapers to say they can’t believe it either.”

  Joyce smirked. “The black reax story, huh? I should’ve known. It’s too bad you can’t just quote me and the rest of the black staff here and save yourself a trip.”

  “Remember. We don’t all think alike.”

  “You know you’re preaching to the choir on that one, but I dare you to find one black person who says, ‘Yeah, I knew it was a brutha all along.’”

  It was Arianna’s turn to laugh. “Girl you are a trip. I gotta go. I’ve got a photog meeting me over there and I need to grab a cup of java first. We wouldn’t want to leave the white boy alone in a room full of colored folks. You know how they are. It’s okay for us to be the fly in the buttermilk, but let one of them be the lone marshmallow in the hot chocolate and they’ll find any excuse to escape.”

  They laughed together.

  Arianna was still smiling as she walked to Baltimore Avenue where her car was parked.

  The Press Herald was in West Philadelphia in the University City district, home to the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges, galleries and museums. When she could, Arianna liked to take her lunch breaks at the museums. Sometimes, she hopped on a trolley and went to Center City, Philadelphia’s downtown business district, and ate lunch there.

  She knew that day would be like many others when an assignment meant she’d be eating lunch on the run, if at all.

  Jill Scott was singing about collard greens, black-eyed peas and biscuits when Arianna started the engine of her gold Toyota Camry. She popped out the CD and turned the radio to WHAT and listened to callers sound off about the weird black man and his Jamaican teenage sidekick accused of killing innocent people for sport.

  “I was sure it was going to be some crazy, red-neck white guy. Black people don’t go around shooting total strangers for no reason,” said a man with a Southern accent.

  She drove to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Walnut Street and got her usual, a large hazelnut coffee. When she got back in the car, she turned to WURD, the other AM station with black talk shows, and listened to more of the same as she made her way towards South Fifty-Second Street to Big George’s.

  She planned to use the information from the radio shows in her story. She started writing the lead in her head based on what she expected she’d find during her reporting the rest of the day.

  On the airwaves, in cyberspace, restaurants, barbershops, and gyms, black Philadelphians expressed shock yesterday that the two men arrested in the sniper shootings look like them.

  She spent all morning and most of the afternoon reporting before going back to the office. Despite the circumstances, spending the day surrounded by black people was a refreshing change from her usual workday.

  As she drove around the city, Arianna kept thinking about how much it reminded her of New York, except on a smaller scale. New York was only a two-hour drive from where she lived in Connecticut and she spent a lot of weekends there hanging out with friends who had made their escape to the big city.

  Philadelphia even had its own version of Greenwich Village on South Street, one of her favorite hang outs with its craft shops, coffee bars and ethnic restaurants.

  Since making an escape of her own, she had less reason to venture to the Big Apple.

  When she got back to her office, Larry had an answer about where her story was going to play.

  “Singleton. I’m pitching your story for A1,” he barked as she passed the city desk on the way to her cubicle.

  “Great. I’ll send you a budget.”

  She logged on to her computer, wrote the lead she created in her head, and sent it electronically to Larry’s queue along with an estimated filing time of five. That gave her two and half hours to write, way more than she needed.

  At three-thirty, Larry started getting antsy.

  “Singleton. How’s that story coming?” he said, shouting from across the room. He was preparing for the afternoon news meeting and needed details.

  “I sent you a budget line. It’ll be filed by the time you get out of your meeting. I’m just waiting on one phone call.”

  A criminal profiler was going to call and talk about how the sniper was supposed to be an angry white man who felt slighted or was desperate for respect and attention. She wanted at least one voice of authority in her story.

  Apparently, Larry wasn’t satisfied with her answer. He walked to her desk and peered over her shoulder. Arianna swiveled her chair around so she was facing him, blocking her computer screen with her head.

  “You know how I hate that, Larry. What exactly is it that you want to know? Just ask.”

  “Did you get any really good quotes? I’m thinking about stripping the story across the bottom with mug shots of the people you talked to.”

  “I have lots of people saying they don’t believe they got the right guys. They used words like rednecks, crazy white supremacists, and skinheads. Is that sexy enough for you?”

  The phone rang.

  “I’ve got to take this,” she said. “It’s the call I’ve been waiting for.”

  “Go ahead. I’ve got to get to the meeting. I’m sure the story will be fine.”

  “Press Herald. Arianna Singleton.”

  “Ms. Singleton. You’re a difficult lady to reach. This is Detective Mitchell of the Los Angeles Police Department. Do you have a few m
oments?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I’m on deadline right now,” she said, her right leg beginning to shake.

  “Is there a better time for me to call you?”

  “Later tonight. In the meantime, can you tell me what this is regarding?”

  “A case we’re working on.”

  “Why do you need to talk to me?”

  “I can explain everything to you when you have more time to talk.”

  “I have to go now, detective.”

  “All right, Ms. Singleton. I’ll speak with you later this evening.”

  Why the hell don’t we have caller ID in this damn place?

  The next call was from the criminal profiler. She filed her story with a note that she had to leave early and if Larry had any questions to call her cell phone.

  She knew he wouldn’t. He never did.

  Before heading home, Arianna made a run to Staples.

  The cashier put an eighty-gigabyte hard drive in a bag. “Did you find everything you’re looking for?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Arianna handed her an American Express card.

  That night, after the kids were asleep, she planned to switch hard drives.

  Arianna was a packrat. She never threw away or deleted anything. She saved all the emails she thought were important or had sentimental value. Some of those emails could get her into trouble. Even if she deleted them, she knew there were ways to retrieve them. She didn’t want to take that chance.

  As she pulled out of the store parking lot, she grabbed her cell phone from the cup holder and spoke Janelle’s name into the receiver. After three rings, Janelle answered.

  “I was wondering when you would get around to calling me. I take it you heard from Detective Mitchell?”

  “I’m fine, Janelle. How are you?”

  “Oh, please. Why waste time with small talk. You don’t give a damn how I’m doing. You just want to know what I told the police.”

  “What did you tell them, Janelle?”

  “The truth, Arianna. I told them the truth. That you were at the murder scene and you were angry enough to kill him.”