Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  Niko clambered onto the top level a hundred feet away. He stood searching, then spotted us. “Go!” Lance shouted in my ear. We hunched as we ran, trying to make ourselves into smaller targets. I wondered how many bullets he had left, if he was carrying more ammo.

  The roar of the presses was so deafening that I wasn’t even sure whether he had fired more than once. With one in the stairwell, that left him at least four more in the weapon.

  Lance stopped. Niko had reached the spot where the ink spill was and ran full tilt, gun in hand. Waiting for a sure shot before he fired.

  Lance drew back and heaved the wrench like Dan Marino releasing a pass. The powerful throw spun it through the air, end over end. Niko saw it coming, as I flung the pail with both hands, sending it rattling along the platform, the rags spilling out.

  Shielding his face, evading the wrench as he ran, Niko saw the pail at the last moment and leaped over it, startled. Pail and wrench both missed him, but suddenly he teetered like a tightrope walker in trouble, arms windmilling to regain his balance on the slippery surface.

  His left foot skidded out from under him and he plummeted off the catwalk, but, like an acrobat, in midair his right hand caught onto the moving conveyor belt. I did not see his gun; he must have lost it. The belt moves papers up through an opening in the ceiling to the fifth floor. It carried him along, lurching in our direction for several moments as he dangled, clinging to it one-handed. As he drew closer, swaying in sheer space, I saw that he no longer had an acrobat’s grip on the belt. It had him. His hand was caught in the metal jaws that normally feed paper through the mechanism. I did not hear him scream, but saw his face.

  He plunged suddenly, as blood exploded through the air. His fingers, half his hand, still rose, moving along without the rest of his body. Whether he still had the gun no longer mattered. He glanced off a steel support girder jutting out from the first tier. The sound of the impact as he slammed into the folding machine below was lost in the pulsating roar that filled the space around us.

  Carried along, his head at an impossible angle, his body finally jammed against the unforgiving steel framework where teeth pull the paper into folds. We scrambled down the ladders. There is zero tolerance, no clearance where the machine was trying to fold him like a newspaper, but his hair was caught. Before we reached the emergency shutoff button, the ponytail was gone. So was his scalp.

  The dinosaurs shuddered into blessed silence as a paunchy middle-aged security guard burst through the double doors. Seeing us, he crossed his arms, brow furrowed, mouth open in an indignant expression.

  “What do you think you’re doing in here?” he demanded, glaring at me. Then his eyes narrowed at Lance.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but the movie crew has finished in here, and my orders are that you no longer have access to these premises.

  “You know better,” the guard muttered, turning to me. “I’m gonna have to report this.”

  Then he saw Niko and his eyes widened.

  25

  Niko was definitely dead this time, his neck broken.

  Karen Sawyer drove away when she saw the patrol cars. They pulled her over at 36th Street and the Boulevard.

  She denied everything. Said she’d had trouble sleeping, had gone for a drive. But we were not the only ones who had seen her at the News building. A totally independent eyewitness could put her in the parking garage. His name was Harvey Shimmel. They stopped him as he, too, tried to drive off. He had seen her and had apparently been waiting for her to leave. The cops asked us to step outside to see if we recognized him.

  We did not. Small and pasty-faced, the man smiled in recognition as though he knew me. On the front seat of his car was an orange and black pair of knee-high fire department boots.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” I said, “Those are mine.”

  Somebody had broken into my T-Bird. Nothing else was taken. Not my gun or my roll of quarters for tolls and meters; only my boots.

  The officer leaning into Shimmel’s car found a high-heeled shoe, then a sheer stocking. They were not mine. “This guy could be a robber.” The cop held the stocking up, mistaking it for a makeshift mask.

  “No,” I said. “I know who he is.”

  Much of the mystery was solved when police learned Karen Sawyer’s place of employment. She worked at Stephanie’s answering service, got the job shortly after the movie crew arrived in Miami. Sullen, she refused to talk at first, though police were certain she and Niko knew each other in LA.

  When she did talk, all she would admit was that they were lovers, that she did as he asked because he promised a huge payoff and a future for her in movies. He had divulged few details about the scheme and had never named the source from whom the big payoff would come.

  The total truth may have died with Niko. The FBI and police in both South Florida and California are still investigating the murders and the plot to scuttle the film. They found that WFI is in financial trouble, floundering in red ink, stripped of many of its assets by those operating it, but more proof is needed for a prosecutable case, proof that may never be found.

  The threat to Lance has hopefully been eliminated because the details were exposed and because both the FBI and Lance’s attorneys have talked to Gettinger—who, of course, claimed to know nothing. He has his own problems, with creditors closing in and a possible collapse of the studio. WFI’s attorneys suggested that Niko was freelance, working on his own.

  Our best guess is that the man whose body was left in his place was selected during one of Niko’s charitable forays to the homeless shelter’s food bank. He would have had no difficulty luring a street person to Lance’s house with the promise of money, food, or clothes. Missing persons reports have yielded nothing. The homeless are rarely reported missing. Lance, of course, will continue watching his back. He’s used to that. Unlike the image the public has of film stars, it is lonely at the top. Whom can you trust? If anything, Niko’s “second death” hit Lance harder than the first. It is tragic to mourn a friend, but somehow sadder to realize you never had one.

  Stephanie was flown back home by private plane and is being treated in a Boston psychiatric hospital.

  They finished Margin of Error. In light of the events surrounding it, there was no wrap party; the crew just left town quietly.

  Margin of Error took so long to finish that Lance would have no break between movies. He stayed on for a few more days before flying to England to start shooting his next project, another Titan film.

  The night before he left, we had a late dinner and then stopped by the paper to pick up some prints Lottie had left for him, pictures she had shot of him and his children. The building was quiet and we sat at my desk, where we first met.

  “Come with me,” he said, eyes intense.

  “Is that a proposal?”

  He paused for a long moment. “No.”

  I understood.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  I shook my head and shrugged. “What would I do?”

  “Be with me.” He looked hurt.

  “And when you’re working? Which is most of the time.”

  He didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “You’re sure?”

  “My judgment’s been way off on a lot of things lately. But I’m sure.”

  He studied me. “How could you want this,” he asked, glancing around the newsroom with the contempt I saw that he still felt for most reporters, “more than you want me?”

  “I don’t. It’s not this. But every once in a while, there comes a story. A story that blows your mind. One where you know you’ve made a difference. That’s what makes it all worthwhile. That and the anticipation. It’s addictive, because you never know when it will happen. It could be tomorrow, next year, or five minutes from now, but when it does, nothing in the world is as important. Maybe I’m as obsessed as Stephanie, in my own way. But this is my home, and Miami is a helluva news town. If I took off with y
ou I might miss something.”

  He leaned back in his chair, long legs stretched out, stared at the floor, then raised his eyes to mine. “Would your answer be different if this was a proposal?”

  My turn to pause. I smiled at him. “No. I can’t compete with Hollywood.”

  “Hell, Britt. Hollywood can’t compete with you.” He leaned forward to touch my hair.

  “That’s a nice thing to say. Where did you—”

  “It’s original.”

  I got teary-eyed.

  “Another time, another place,” he said, “this would have worked.”

  “Another time, another place, we never would have met.”

  I rode with him in the car to the airport. “I can’t say I’m sorry to say goodbye to Miami,” he said. “It’s been a trip. You’re the only thing I’ll miss.”

  We walked to the concourse, his arm around me. I tried not to think of the last time I had come here, rushing to catch a flight. “This new movie will be fun,” he was saying. “I get to fly a helicopter.”

  “Nice.”

  “Of course, then I have to hang from it as it careens between the mountains…”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “… and ride the top of a speeding train. We’re negotiating now on the film that I really want to do after this one.” He paused. “It’s a comedy.

  “This isn’t goodbye forever,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I would see him again, as long as I had the price of a ticket.

  The driver took me back to the paper. I arrived at my desk suddenly cheerful, and full of hope for the future. I knew what I had to do.

  Before I could make the call, my phone rang.

  The caller was one I didn’t expect to hear from again.

  “What’s happened, Angel? Is everything all right?”

  She shushed the children playing noisily in the background and then bubbled over. “I think I’ve got this job, Britt! I can start part time, with no benefits now, then switch to full time after the baby arrives. We can even get medical coverage!”

  “Good for you, Angel,” I said, relieved that there was no problem. “I guess school paid off.”

  “Sure did. I’m going back for my second interview this afternoon. What I need to know is, can I put you down for a reference?”

  “Sure,” I said doubtfully. “I guess so. Where is it?”

  “The News!” she trilled. “They need a secretary in the advertising department. I’ll be working in the same building as you! Is that neat, or what?”

  I punched in the number I wanted as soon as Angel got off the line.

  “Lieutenant McDonald, please.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  I told her. Surprisingly, he picked up.

  “Some time ago,” I said, “you gave me a list of professionals to call. You know, to decide who to see for some help. Remember?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I lost it.” Then I thought, No more denial. This is the time to be honest with myself and everybody else. “Actually,” I said, “I never wrote it down. I didn’t bother. Do you still have it?”

  “I think I can put my hands on it.”

  “Good. I need it now.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to South Florida’s best and brightest: Miami Homicide Lieutenant Gerald Green, Officer D. C. Diaz, the brilliant Dr. Eduardo Alfonso, and my wonderful and patient friends David M. Thornburgh, Renee Turolla, and Peggy Thornburgh. My Hollywood buddy, Peter Lance, and Marilyn Lane, Cynnie Cagney, Karen McFadyen, Bill Cooke, Bill Dobson, and Steven B. Waldman all generously shared their brilliance and expertise. So did Alex Justo and his sparring partner, Jorge Torres. Arnold Markowitz, The Miami Herald’s greatest natural resource, always manages to be there for me when it counts. I appreciate the help of Michael Clark and Gay Nemeti Robson of The Herald Library, and Arthur Stillman and John Hoover. My thanks to David Utley, Everglades District Manager of the Florida Division of Forestry, to firefighter Carl Aloi, and the man with the gun, Robert P. Hart, of the Metro-Dade Crime Lab’s Firearms Division. Co-starring in this production, as always, are Leslie Wells, my editor, and Michael Congdon, my agent. What a sterling cast of characters!

  More from Edna Buchanan

  Contents Under Pressure

  The first novel in Pulitzer Prize-winning Edna Buchanan’s riveting Britt Montero series.

  Meet Britt Montero, a crime reporter for a major Miami newspaper. She practically sleeps with a police scanner by her bedside. She’s smart—and reckless—enough to pursue a story no matter where it takes her.

  When a high-speed police chase leads to the death of a black football hero, Britt discovers that what seems like a cut-and-dry case is actually an intricate web of racially charged violence. As the city she loves explodes into a major riot, Britt is caught-up in life-threatening events that bring the case to its shocking twist.

  Miami, It’s Murder

  Edna Buchanan weaves a tale about the murderous streets of Miami, and how the predator can quickly become the prey.

  Miami crime reporter Britt Montero has a lot on her hands. She’s investigating a series of bizarre deaths involving sex, electrocution, and freshly poured concrete. As if that isn’t enough, there’s the long unsolved murder of a young girl that may implicate the front-runner in the governor’s race.

  Pursuing a lead, Britt follows the trail of a serial rapist. Enraged by her stories, the rapist is soon the one trailing her. Tensions mount as Britt fights to uncover the truth with all the odds stacked against her.

  Suitable for Framing

  Edna Buchanan returns with another tale of violence and murder on the streets of Miami.

  A mother and child are the recent victims of a fatal hit-and-run. Miami crime reporter Britt Montero witnesses the tragedy and relentlessly pursues the story. At the same time, trouble lurks in the newsroom. A new, ambitious reporter covets Britt’s job. Britt begins to suspect that her rival’s “breaking news” stories may not be what they seem. As she investigates, Britt herself becomes the prime suspect in a shocking murder. Faced with losing more than just her job, Britt is left fighting the most desperate deadline of her life.

  Act of Betrayal

  The Britt Montero series continues with this thrilling installment from Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Buchanan.

  When Miami crime reporter Britt Montero reports a missing teenager, she discovers that the case may be related to a string of ­­­­unsolved disappearances. As Britt delves into the baffling case, an old mystery opens new wounds: she unexpectedly meets two men who knew her deceased father. Through them, Britt learns that he left a diary identifying the man who betrayed him. But the diary isn’t easily possessed; anyone who finds it seems to be marked for murder. At the height of a terrifying category five hurricane, Britt needs to face the man who betrayed her father in order to uncover more than one truth, but will her hunger for justice turn her into the next victim?

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