Nathan’s Run

by John Gilstrap

  Michaels thought he shook his head, but in reality didn’t move. “I don’t know, jed.” His eyes never left the screen. His throat was thick. “Look at his face, Jed. Look. He’s got Brian’s eyes.”

  Jed saw it, too. The likeness was remarkable, though not so much in the eyes as in the expression. He felt awful for not catching it during his previous viewings of the tape. He could have warned Warren up front, or even avoided that portion of the tape. Jed felt genuine pain for him.

  “I’m so sorry, Warren,” Hackner said. “I’ll turn it off.”

  “No, don’t:’ Michaels said firmly, having regained his composure before ever really losing it. “Jesus, Jed, I thought I was past it. I can’t keep reacting like that. I’m okay. Let’s watch the rest of it.”

  Jed kept a careful eye on his boss as he restarted the tape. Once again, the electronic image melded together, just long enough for the boy to slip quickly out of the frame. There was a quick editing blip on the screen, and then they were looking at the exterior of the exit. In the foreground were a portion of the driveway and a short sidewalk. In the background was a door, which opened slowly to reveal the hero of this little television drama as he slipped out of the door, relocked it, and then sprinted out of the picture. One more blip, and the screen was blank.

  Neither man said anything for a long moment while Hackner thumbed the power button and killed the television. “Well, boss, what do you think?”

  Michaels sighed loudly, rubbing his face with both hands. “I think I wish I hadn’t watched it. That tape’s going to make my job a lot harder. Does the press have it yet?”

  “What, are you kidding? Petrelli’s hounds were all over that tape like flies on dog shit. He’s got a movie of a blood-soaked murderer. My guess is they had it to the news stations even before we had copies made.”

  Michaels chuckled softly. “I don’t know about you, Jed, but what I saw looked less like a murderer than a frightened puppy.” He could just imagine the look on Petrelli’s face the first time he viewed the tape and realized that his minions had already turned it over to the press. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but Warren would have paid a hundred dollars just to be there.

  “J. Daniel’s going to shit pickles.”

  With the briefest movement of his head, Michaels returned to the business at hand: catching the whipped puppy who was making Petrelli sweat so much. Rising abruptly out of his chair, he led the two-person parade back toward his office. “One thing I want you to check up on, Jed, is the telephone records to that radio show. Every time a call is made to an 800 number it’s got to be logged into a computer somewhere. I want you to tap into that computer and find out the number where that call originated. We’ll trace it and get the kid back home.”

  Hackner moaned. He had done similar searches before, most recently for a fraud case, only to be inundated with hundreds of telephone numbers, each of which had to be checked. The case he recalled was an investigation of a small consulting business, and that investigation had taken a week to complete. The Bitch had a nationwide audience, attracting probably a thousand calls an hour. There weren’t enough police officers in the world to complete that kind of investigation in anything close to a reasonable time.

  “We’ll need a court order,” Jed stalled. “We won’t stand a chance against a radio station.”

  “Get them to volunteer the information,” Warren suggested without breaking his stride. “Be persuasive. You know, invaluable service to their community, that sort of thing.”

  “They’ll never buy it, Warren.”

  Michaels stopped abruptly. Jed missed a collision by inches. “Look, Jed, we’ve got a job to do, and so far we haven’t been doing it. We don’t have a clue where this kid went, so don’t tell me what we can’t do until we’ve at least tried, okay? You were at the meeting this morning, and I think I was pretty clear. I want Nathan Bailey in custody tonight. Understand?”

  Jed sensed that the others in the squad room were desperately trying not to hear. He turned and left without saying a word.

  Five minutes later, Michaels left as well, telling his secretary that he could be reached on his cellular phone.

  Chapter 12

  Over the last five years, Denise Carpenter had interviewed hundreds of guests, ranging from the famous to the infamous, but never had she received such a response as the one generated by her conversation with Nathan. Her plans to discuss the president’s foreign policy would have to wait for another day. The lines were so jammed that other 800 numbers with the same three-digit exchange were unable to receive calls, creating a nightmare of enormous proportions for the phone company.

  On the other side of the glass, Enrique was struggling to manage the tidal wave of calls, coaxing those who’d been on hold for over an hour to hang in there while screening the few additional callers who’d been able to get through. For Enrique, the universe of callers fell neatly into only two categories: sincere and crackpot. His job was to make sure that the only people who got to talk on the air with Denise were stating their legitimate beliefs, and were able to remain topical. This was not the time to discuss the moral aspects of capital punishment, as Maureen from Seattle had wanted; nor was it the time to discuss the weaknesses of the foster care system in Des Moines, as Charlie had wanted to do. In practice, it was impossible to keep callers on the topic once they started talking, but that was okay, so long as they started out on the right track.

  Then there were the sickos. Like William from Bakersfield, who wanted to point out the most efficient ways to kill with a knife, or Paula from Bangor, Maine, who wanted to see Nathan hoisted slowly by a noose so that he could suffer the way he had made Ricky suffer.

  Enrique’s job was to find a trace of sanity among a group of listeners who seemed to exhibit that trait only rarely. Once found, he then had to convince them to hang on the line while Denise spoke to each of them in turn. What most callers didn’t realize was that the talk radio business was not first come, first served. Once they made it past Enrique, he entered their names, cities of origin, and a brief description of what they wanted to talk about into a computer terminal on his side of the window, which simultaneously displayed the information on a screen on Denise’s side., She then made the decision, sometimes arbitrarily, as to which callers would be spoken to first. He’d make suggestions, but she’d listen to him only about half the time. It was not unusual for a caller to remain on hold for the entire four hours of the show, only to be told thanks but no thanks. That job, of course, also fell on Enrique.

  Enrique had met The Bitch when she was still a program assistant, and even thought for a brief while that he was in love with her. She’d just broken up with her husband, and Enrique had had exceptionally strong shoulders to cry on. As Denise’s career blossomed and she healed emotionally, he tried dozens of times to summon the courage to ask her out, but he could never make the words form in his throat. They were “just friends”—intensely dear friends. Like brother and sister.

  As Denise rose to stardom, Enrique followed closely behind in producerdom, each day engineering the opportunities for his boss to sound great on the air. The Bitch was a hit in syndication for two reasons: First, because Denise was the most talented on-air personality that he had ever seen, and second, because he was the best producer in the business. It wasn’t bragging if it was true.

  But even the best in the business couldn’t keep up with this volume of calls. On his side of the window, there was total bedlam; on hers, total silence, pierced only by the sound of her own voice. People often asked Enrique if he got jealous, him doing all the work and Denise getting all the credit. His answer was always the same, and completely honest. There was no room for jealousy on a team. And in a business measured by individual achievement, theirs was the only real team around.

  A tap on his shoulder startled Enrique. He turned to see one of the summer interns standing next to him, holding a pink telephone message slip. Annoyed at the interruption, Enrique pulled one earpho
ne away from his head. “What is it, Tim? We’re in the middle of a show here.”

  “Uh, it’s, uh, Tom, sir.”

  Enrique’s reply was a silent look that eloquently stated how little he cared what the hell Tom’s name was. NewsTalk 990 worked their summer interns like slaves, allowing them to hang around the station for no pay, in return for the privilege of working twelve to eighteen hours per day. The station did it because it was free labor. The students did it because they knew there was a line a hundred deep just waiting to take the places of people who were stupid enough to put sleep or a social life ahead of their dreams of broadcast stardom.

  “It’s, uh, the police, sir,” Tom stammered. “They want to talk to you on the hotline. They say it’s very important.”

  “Quit calling me sir, you moron. This isn’t a ship. Tell them we’re in the middle of a show. I’ll call them back when we’re done.” He moved to replace the earphone, but Tom’s body language told him there was more. “What’s wrong?”

  Tom shifted his feet uneasily. “Well, I already tried that, and they said something about obstruction of justice charges.”

  Enrique looked as though he’d just been slapped. “Obstruction of—Shit! That’s exactly what I need right now,” he said through clenched jaws. “Okay, fine. I’ll take it in here.” Dismissing Tom by turning his back on him, Enrique angrily snatched the phone from its hook.

  “This is Enrique Zamora, can I help you?” His tone sounded anything but helpful.

  Patrolman II Harold Thompkins of the Braddock County Police Department was determined to be noticed. After five years of rotating shifts, traffic stops and every conceivable piece of grunt work, he was ready to try some real police work. Even as a little kid, watching Columbo and MacMillan and Wife, Harry knew that he’d be a detective one day. He was willing to pay his dues, work his way through the ranks. So far, he’d punched all the right tickets, getting his Associate’s degree in Criminology before applying to the Academy, and busting his balls to graduate at the top of his class.

  He took the detective’s exam at his first opportunity, just two weeks after his fifth anniversary with the department, and, true to form, finished in the top three percentiles. Problem was, he was a healthy white Christian of European ancestry who was too young to have gone to Vietnam, and at this particular time in his department’s history, that put him at a significant disadvantage.

  What he needed was an opportunity to shine on the job, not just in the classroom. He needed the big success. He needed to find just the right piece of evidence or uncover just the right lead to break a big case. He’d studied the rise of other officers in his situation, and it was clear as crystal that the most reliable road to a gold badge was to get a tenured member of the club to carry your flag. For the last six months, Harry had volunteered for all the right cases, attended all the right meetings, and engineered the right introductions to get himself known in the network. But he was still missing the big kill.

  When Sergeant Hackner came to him that morning with the task of tracking down Nathan Bailey’s location through the telephone records, he knew this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. Hackner was a good guy, and a known flag carrier. The fact that he was best buddies with Lieutenant Michaels made it all the better. For Harry, the mission was clear. He’d do his job quickly and efficiently, making Hackner look good to his boss, and at the same time have a pivotal role in what was turning out to be a high-profile case.

  Utilizing what he’d learned at the Academy, he’d started his quest with the obvious—a call to the phone company. After being handed off a half-dozen times from one bureaucrat to another, Harry was finally connected with the Vice President of Customer Service, who broke the news that absent a court order, he could not authorize the dissemination of telephone records without the customer’s permission. Invasion of privacy and all that, don’t you know. Harry asked if he understood that this could be the key to corralling a murderer, in response to which the vice president said something about a call waiting on another line.

  Court orders took forever, and they were well outside of Harry’s power to obtain. Legal briefs would have to be filed, and arguments would have to be heard. Even on an expedited basis, obtaining a court order could easily take more time than the Bailey kid figured to take holing up somewhere. If they waited, they could lose their prisoner. And even if they caught him, it would be the Commonwealth’s Attorney who would get the credit, not him.

  No, Harry needed to go to the source. He needed to talk the owners of those telephone records—The Bitch and her production staff—into releasing the records to his custody. He just had to be persuasive. He briefly considered a soft-pedaled, altruistic approach, but rejected it as too wimpy. Instead, he settled on the forceful approach. Those radio people didn’t know squat about the real world. If he leaned on them hard enough and played the obstruction of justice card just right, they’d cave in. After all, what did The Bitch have to lose? Helping to solve a murder case was the kind of publicity anyone would welcome.

  By the time Harry was done with Enrique Zamora, the producer could hardly speak, he was so befuddled. Now, as he sat on hold, Harry found himself regretting some of the things he’d said. In the spirit of the moment, Harry had led Enrique to believe that there was imminent danger of jail if he didn’t cooperate. Harry had no such power, of course, but he supposed that really didn’t matter. What the American public didn’t know about their rights was amazing. Even more amazing was how willing people were to surrender those rights if you just gave them half a chance.

  As he sat on hold, listening to some inane car commercial, Harry decided that if challenged on his representation of fact, he would simply tell whomever that the producer must have been mistaken.

  On her side of the glass, The Bitch sipped at her Diet Coke and took another caller. The message on her screen said that Joanne from New York City didn’t believe that Nathan did anything wrong.

  “This is The Bitch. Joanne from New York, what’s your problem?”

  The Brooklyn accent from the other end of the phone was as thick as syrup. “My problem is that I don’t think that sweet voice could do any of the things that the police are claiming he did. He sounds like he could have been my son when he was that age.”

  “What’s not to believe, Joanne? The kid says he stole a car to get into jail, and that he killed the guard—supervisor—to get out.

  Granted, he claims it was an accident rooted in self-defense, but you have to believe the basic facts.”

  Joanne explained her position, but Denise was distracted by Enrique’s voice in her headphones telling her to go to a commercial. She shook her head and scowled, pointing to her watch. They had another six minutes before the next set of spots. Enrique scowled back and mouthed something unintelligible through the glass. Then he held up the telephone.

  When Joanne from New York paused to take a breath, Denise dumped her call. “Well, I guess everyone’s entitled to their opinion,” she said. “Some folks just want to make them up on the fly. We’ve got to do a couple more spots, and we’ll be right back.”

  As soon as the commercial started, she wheeled back around to Enrique. “What the hell’s the matter with you? I don’t take hotline calls during the show. You know that.”

  “Lighten up, Denise,” Enrique shot back. “I’ve got a cop on the phone who wants to use our telephone records to trace down Nathan’s call.”

  Denise evaluated the options in an. Instant. If word got out that the police could trace calls through a radio talk show—her radio talk show—that would spell the end of controversial discussion. Government and military officials would stop calling to complain about their bosses for fear of being fired. Citizens would stop calling to complain about the president for fear of being audited. Every well-placed source she’d established over the years would instantly evaporate. Without controversy, and without callers, The Bitch would be just another disc jockey.

  “Hell no,” she resp
onded quickly. “You tell him that our telephone records are off limits. We’re talking a serious First Amendment issue here.”

  “Well, I already told him that—at least the ‘hell no’ part—and he says he’s going to bring us up on obstruction of justice charges if we don’t cooperate.”

  Denise recoiled at the thought. “Oh really? Well, patch him through to my board. We’ll put him on the air when we come out of commercials. What’s his name?”

  “Thompkins.”

  The current commercial ended fifteen seconds later, with Crazy Somebody-or-other screaming about thousands of dollars in savings at a local car dealership. At her cue from Enrique, Denise opened her microphone.

  “Welcome back, America, to this most unusual show this morning. The interest spawned by my conversation with Nathan Bailey just continues to grow. On the line with us now is a police officer from Braddock County, Virginia, who’s threatening to send my staff and me to prison over all of this. Officer Thompkins, this is The Bitch, and you are on the air.” She stabbed his blinking light with her forefinger.

  For a long moment, there was no sound from the other end. Finally, a tentative voice said, “Hello?”

  “Officer Thompkins?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Denise cackled into the microphone. “Ma’am? Did you just call me ma’am? You must not listen to this show very often, or you’d know better than to call me ma’am. That word’s got the same letters as mama, and honey, I ain’t your mama. Now, I understand you want to throw me in jail. What gives?”

  The voice stammered badly on the other end. Denise loved it. “Am… am I on the radio?”

  “You called a radio station, mister. That generally gets you on the radio. So, why do you want to toss me in the hoosegow?”

  “I’m sorry, but I think we need to discuss this in private. I didn’t call to get put on the air.”

  Denise’s voice was suddenly devoid of all playfulness. “I’m sure you didn’t. According to my producer, you want to use this program’s telephone records to find out where Nathan Bailey was calling from this morning. Is this correct?”