Vengeance Road

by Rick Mofina

  His building had more good tenants than bad. There were a few noisy neighbors and a few creeps. And sometimes the halls were heavy with the smells of exotic cooking. But generally people left him alone.

  He liked that.

  His apartment had a large, sweeping view. The wind often charged off Lake Erie and rattled his windows, but it was warm in the winter.

  He sat on his couch and sorted through his mail. There were mostly bills, then a letter from Ron Cook, an old reporter friend, who’d quit his job at the Detroit Free Press to teach English in Addis Ababa.

  “Buddy, here’s an application if you’re looking for a career change and an escape from the snow!”

  Gannon pondered the idea for a moment, but he had too much going on here to give it serious consideration.

  No, thanks, Ron.

  Then he came to a letter from the lawyer handling his parents’ estate, reminding him that the anniversary was coming up for payment on the unit where he’d stored their belongings. Did he want to pay for another year, or did he have other plans for his family’s property?

  He’d deal with that later.

  He tossed the letters on his coffee table, opened his bag, and had started reading the file Mary Peller had given him on her missing daughter when his cell phone rang.

  “Gannon.”

  “It’s Fowler. We’ve got a substantial retraction going in tomorrow’s edition. In thirty minutes we start rolling it off the presses.”

  “You didn’t call to tell me that.”

  “Give me your source and I’ll kill the retraction.”

  Gannon said nothing. Now more than ever he didn’t trust his managing editor.

  “Jack, give me your source and we can all have our lives back.”

  “Does Bernice Hogan get her life back? Why does Styebeck get a free ride?”

  “The police have publicly pissed on your story and the Sentinel today. You were wrong. We have to swallow that and move on.”

  “I was not wrong. And I can’t give up my source.”

  “Think about what you’re risking. Your job is hanging by a thread, Gannon. You’ve got about twenty-nine minutes to think it over.”

  Gannon didn’t call.

  He took a hot shower, dressed and got into his car.

  Freeway traffic was light as he glided along Interstate 90.

  He left the interstate and got on Genesee. As he headed into the heart of the city, Buffalo’s skyline rose before him: the HSBC Center, the Rand Building and City Hall.

  He found himself at the Sentinel’s loading docks, an area bordered by a chain-link fence that trapped stray papers and flyers. The air smelled of newsprint and exhaust as trucks and vans performed a marshaling ballet in and out of the ten bays, laden with damp copies of the first edition.

  He was watching an act in the swan song of the newspaper industry, an industry in which he’d invested everything.

  But he was not giving up.

  He parked and went to the gate. Holding up a dollar bill, he flagged down a van departing for its route.

  “Sell me a copy?”

  The driver had a scar on his cheek. He snatched Gannon’s buck then reached to his passenger seat, grunted and handed him a fresh copy of the Buffalo Sentinel.

  The retraction was there on the front page, framed in a shaded box with a different font. He scanned, “Sentinel offers its apology…” “Uncorroborated information…” “Erroneous reporting…” “Taken action…” “Suspended…” The words landed like punches until he heard a clank down the street at a row of newspaper boxes.

  A carrier was loading a box for the Buffalo News. Gannon went over and bought a paper. The News had clobbered him with their front-page coverage, giving him his comeuppance in a column under the headline:

  The Pulitzer Finalist Who Got It Wrong

  The item pontificated about the journalistic failing of rushing to be first at the expense of getting it right. Gannon lowered the papers, like flags of defeat.

  What happened?

  Less than twenty-four hours ago he owned the news in this town. Now his world was collapsing.

  He nearly vanished in the dust that swirled around him as the delivery trucks thundered by. A cold wind kicked up from Lake Erie and he retreated to his car and drove away, traveling back through his life.

  Being a reporter was all he’d ever wanted to be.

  He was a blue-collar kid. His mother worked long hours as a waitress, while his father worked hard shifts in a factory on the lakeshore that made rope. Both of them were newspaper readers, a trait they’d passed on to him.

  Enthralled by life’s daily dramas, he read the Buffalo Evening News and the Buffalo Courier-Express. And when the Courier-Express folded, he read the Sentinel, which rose from its ashes.

  And he dreamed about seeing his own stories in print.

  When his parents worked late, his big sister, Cora, would take him to the library and get him books by Jack London, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.

  “This is what a future reporter should be reading, Jackie,” she’d said.

  Cora was five years older than him and nurtured his dream. She convinced their parents to buy him a second-hand computer and encouraged him to write. They were as close as any brother and sister could be. But their age difference would have a bearing on their relationship and eventually Cora grew apart from him and her family.

  She changed.

  It hit him the night police brought her home after she’d got drunk with friends who’d stolen a car. She’d grown into a different person, one who argued constantly with Mom and Dad. So many nights were filled with screaming, slamming doors, heart-breaking silence and tears. Cora started taking drugs, which led to more arguments until the day she ran away.

  All she’d left was a note saying she could no longer stand living under “their fascist rules.”

  She was seventeen.

  Friends told his parents Cora had gone to California with an older guy who was a heroin addict. When his father got an address, he flew to San Francisco and looked for Cora.

  It was all in vain.

  They never saw her again.

  They hired private detectives, flew to cities when they had tips. It was futile. He ached for her to come home. Then his anguish turned to anger for what Cora had done. Later, there were times he’d search for her on online databases. He even asked police friends to do whatever they could.

  Not much came of it.

  Cora was out of their lives.

  Or dead.

  Accept it and leave the past in the past, he’d always told himself.

  Miles and time swept by as he searched the night for answers.

  He drove through older neighborhoods; the best and the worst of Buffalo. Here were the abandoned factories, the shut-up mills and forgotten stores, reaching from the wasteland of the rust belt like a death grasp. And here were the new bohemian communities that resurrected historic, near-dead buildings and revived the never-say-die attitude of Buffalo.

  After Cora left, he’d worked brutal summer shifts on assembly lines in Buffalo factories to put himself through college because his parents had spent nearly all they had looking for her.

  When he found time, he reported for the campus paper, and freelanced articles to the Sentinel and the News.

  All the while, he yearned to escape Buffalo for New York City and a job with a big news outlet. After he graduated from college, he worked at small weeklies then landed an internship with the Buffalo Sentinel. Impressed by his determination, the paper gave him a full-time reporting job.

  The Sentinel would be his stepping stone out of Buffalo.

  Then, while dispatched to cover a shooting in Ohio, he’d met Lisa Newsome, a reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was a sharp-witted, brilliant writer. He remembered the way her hair curtained over her eye when she wrote the stories she’d cared about.

  She told him that she’d fallen for his edgy charm and “that Matt Damon thing you
got going in the looks department.” She wanted him to move to Cleveland and work at the Plain Dealer, or she’d offered to move to Buffalo because she yearned to have kids and settle down.

  He didn’t, so they broke it off and Gannon threw all he had into his reporting.

  Two years back, his talent was tested when a charter jet en route to Moscow from Chicago plunged into Lake Erie a quarter mile off Buffalo’s shoreline. Some two hundred people died.

  While the world press speculated that the cause was terrorism, Gannon found a Russian-speaking man in the Sentinel’s mail room. They worked the phones and the Internet, locating the pilot’s brother who was living in St. Petersburg, Russia. Turned out the brother had received the last e-mail the pilot had sent but refused to share it. “Think of the dead, their families deserve to know the answer. Think of the dead, their ghosts will haunt you,” Gannon and the Russian-speaking Sentinel worker kept telling the brother before convincing him to give them the final e-mail. It detailed the pilot’s plan to commit suicide by crashing his jet because his wife had left him for a woman.

  The story was picked up around the world.

  It led to Gannon’s Pulitzer nomination. He didn’t win the prize, but he got a job offer in New York City with the World Press Alliance, the global wire service.

  His dream had come true.

  Then fate intervened.

  About a week after the offer came, his mother and father were driving to see an old friend about another tip they’d had about Cora’s location. Even though she’d be close to forty years old, Gannon’s mother and father refused to give up searching for her.

  “She may have children, we have a right to find her,” his mother said.

  They never made it. A construction worker who’d spent the afternoon in a bar slammed into their car.

  They both died instantly.

  Gannon blamed Cora.

  It was a horrible time.

  Gannon was in no shape to do anything and declined the New York offer. Why didn’t he leave afterward? Maybe he stuck around to be closer to the memory of his parents. Maybe he thought Cora would miraculously appear. Even now, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. In the end, the New York job never materialized.

  So where did he go from here?

  He eased his Pontiac Vibe to a stop at the edge of a park alongside Ellicott Creek. As the Vibe’s engine ticked, he sat behind the wheel staring into the night.

  Everything he was, everything he dreamed of, was on the line.

  In his heart he knew he was not wrong on his reporting of Detective Karl Styebeck’s link to Bernice Hogan’s murder. Call it fate, destiny or a cosmic force, but something had guided him to that meeting-room door that day at Clarence Barracks and pointed to Styebeck.

  But all he had left were more unanswered questions about the case.

  There was only one thing he could do now.

  He reached to the floor behind the passenger seat for his lantern flashlight. It had a new six-volt battery and an intense-focus beam. The light was strong.

  He left his car and headed for the woods. If he was going to search for more answers, the shallow grave where they’d found Bernice Hogan’s corpse was the place to start.

  16

  Jolene Peller’s body swayed rhythmically to the low drumming of big wheels rolling at high speed.

  As she floated in and out of consciousness, she tried to seize upon a way to claw out of the darkness.

  She needed to think. Think of what she knew.

  Her prison—or tomb—whatever it was, was still moving.

  She knew she’d been abducted.

  But who had done this? And why?

  Someone had bound her hands, gagged her and imprisoned her. She had muzzy memories—or was it a dream?—of someone removing her gag, feeding her bread, chocolate bars, giving her water. Giving her a plastic bucket for a toilet, ordering her to relieve herself. There was tissue, but her hands remained bound with tape.

  Mercifully the bucket had a lid.

  Then she was forced to swallow capsules.

  Drugs?

  Someone was keeping her alive.

  Like a captured animal.

  Who? Who was doing this and what was he going to do to her?

  Or had he already done something to her while she was unconscious?

  The image made her retch. She swallowed. Please no. Jolene pushed back her tears.

  Please.

  What did he do to Bernice?

  Jolene had no concept of where she was, or how long she’d been here. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn when she tried to help Bernice.

  She wanted to shower, to cleanse herself of this foul, stinking nightmare.

  She knew by the steady drone that she was still moving. Maybe this was her chance to do something.

  But what?

  She was gagged. Her hands were bound, but not her legs or ankles. She was free to move, but she was blind in the absolute darkness. Maybe her abductor was watching her now with some sort of high-tech equipment? Maybe if he saw that she was awake he’d come to her?

  To do what?

  Jolene’s breathing quickened.

  She was so scared. She whispered a prayer.

  Stay calm.

  Using her fingertips, she felt in her pockets for her cell phone. It was gone.

  Take it easy.

  She steeled herself then probed the soft pad. Feeling its indentations, quilting and seams, she concluded that it was a mattress.

  Single-size.

  Pushed against a wall.

  Jolene drew herself into a sitting position. She was woozy. She waited and breathed slowly. Then she ran her fingers over the walls. They were solid wood with a rough pitted surface. At times, she felt the steel hardware of a hinge-and-bolt assembly. Felt the line of a door frame. But it was shut up so tight, no light, or hope, leaked through. At times she felt the head of a nail or screw protruding from the wall.

  It was familiar.

  In high school, when she was a part-time supermarket cashier, she’d helped inventory all the departments, even the warehouse. The big storage containers and trailers smelled like this and had the same rough surface.

  They were heavy, insulated, sound-absorbing walls, like those in a cooler. It was not refrigerated but it was cold. Near her were old blankets that smelled as if they’d been used for horses.

  Jolene stood.

  Waves of dizziness rolled over her and she steadied herself against the wall, waiting for them to subside.

  She raised her restrained hands above her head, felt nothing but air.

  Then carefully, starting with the nearest wall, she began inching her way around the boundary of her prison, steadying herself against the to-and-fro motion as she felt for a latch, a light switch, a door, a window, anything.

  As she groped cautiously, her fingers brushed against the chain bearing her locket. A gift from her mother. She stopped, found it in the dark, and while her bound hands made the simple movement awkward, Jolene touched it to her cheek.

  Cody.

  It gave her strength.

  It fueled her determination to get home to her little boy, who needed her, and to her mother, who’d be worried to death.

  What if her mother thought she’d run off? Got stoned, abandoned Cody.

  What if she died here and that was the last thought—the last memory—her mother had?

  No, no, NO!

  Jolene couldn’t bear the heartbreak for her mother. Her mother, who’d stood by her and supported her when everyone else had written her off.

  I love you.

  At that moment, Jolene promised her mom and Cody that she’d find a way out and back to the new life she’d worked so hard, so damn hard, to build for them.

  Jolene Peller’s life would not end in this dark stinking box, or hole, or whatever the hell it was. She’d been through too much, worked too hard to just give up to some crazy motherf—

  Jolene tasted the salt of her tears as
she completed moving around the perimeter of her cell. About eight-by-eight, she guessed as she blinked back her fear and braced herself in her starting corner. Moving blindly and slowly, she cut across the floor. She extended her right foot, then her left, to feel for a trap door, or anything on the floor.

  She was strong, smart and would fight, she told herself in the instant before her heart smashed against her chest and she froze.

  Jolene’s foot had hit something.

  Something that moaned.

  17

  Gannon started walking along the water’s edge.

  It was close to 3:00 a.m., the area was deserted. Breezes fingered through the elm and maple trees. After nearly a hundred yards, he came to the hilly bend where the two women had made the discovery.

  His flashlight captured a patch of shimmering yellow, a strip of flapping police tape knotted to a branch.

  It beckoned him to the grim scene beyond. But he didn’t move. He felt he was being watched. He swept his light beam up high through the trees.

  A pair of eyes glowed back at him.

  An owl hooted.

  As Gannon took stock of the area, he moved his light lower toward the spot where they’d found Bernice Hogan’s corpse.

  Trees and branches obscured the reach of his light.

  He proceeded.

  He left the footpath, going deeper into the woods. Few people knew that the scene had been released earlier tonight, after it had been processed by the State Police Forensic Investigations Unit, dispatched from troop headquarters in Batavia five days ago.

  They’d seized it for longer than usual.

  Maybe they’d had problems with this one?

  Now the tape was gone and all barriers had been removed.

  No one was here.

  The burial site was some thirty yards from the footpath, along hills and valleys, amid a stand of maple and shrubs. It was a long shot that the women would have spotted it, but conditions and lighting must have been just right.

  Or maybe the killer wanted it found? The area was popular with walkers, hikers, birdwatchers.

  During his time on the crime beat, Gannon had studied the same textbooks detectives studied to pass their exams. And he’d researched and reported on enough homicides, and murder trials, to know the procedures of an investigation and the collection of evidence.