Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  Nick hated it, but played the game.

  He sat down and called up a blank file and wrote:

  An inmate being transferred to the county’s downtown jail was killed by an unknown gunman at 7:55 this morning, police said.

  The prisoner, whose name was being withheld by the Sheriff’s Office, was the only person injured during the rush-hour shooting as he was being walked into the rear of the jail building in the 800 block of South Andrews Avenue.

  A Sheriff’s Office spokesman said the shooting took place after a van transporting several prisoners was inside a closed gated area just a block from the county courthouse. Investigators were unsure how many shots were fired, said spokesman Joel Cameron, and officials would not speculate on a motive for the killing.

  “The shooting piece is in,” he called over his shoulder to the online editor when he finished. It had taken him eight minutes. A lot of nothing, he thought. But it’ll hold them off for a while.

  He took a long sip of coffee and then called up his e-mail message inbox and started at the real work.

  Lori had sent him several files and he opened up the one titled YOURFERRIS, figuring it to be the story he had written on Steven Ferris just four years ago.

  THE PREDATORS AMONG US

  By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer

  They walked hand in hand on the street, two little girls, one in green-and-white sneakers, the other in pink shorts, sisters strolling home after school.

  When they were stopped by a soft voice, it didn’t startle them—it was familiar. When they turned to the big doughy man with the kind smile, they felt no fear—they knew him. When he invited them into his green pickup, they didn’t panic—they’d been in his truck before.

  In the full sunlight of a warm afternoon, two little girls looked into the face of evil, and didn’t recognize it.

  The public now knows the face of Howard Steven Ferris, 30, who police say confessed to the abductions and killings of Marcellina Cotton, 6, and her sister Gabriella, 8.

  We know their bodies were found in the attic of Ferris’s Fort Lauderdale apartment. We know, according to his confession, that his sole motivation was to sexually assault them.

  But if the allegations are true—which only a court can determine now—do we really know Steven Ferris?

  And what of the other 300 sexual predators identified and released from Florida prisons? What of their dark motivations and urges? How do you recognize evil coming, and what can we do about the men who bring it?

  The habits and methods of child molesters are no secret. Law enforcement has worked off a general but clear profile for years.

  The more that is learned about Ferris, the closer he fits that outline. Detectives could have picked him off the pages of their own investigative handbooks.

  The story went on to describe how Ferris, a part-time construction worker and handyman, had come across the two girls and their mother in a local park. They had been living out of their car for several months. Nick had interviewed the mother, who could not find work and was in South Florida alone. She was cooking the family meals on the grill of the campsite and at night she made up an impromptu bed of blankets and pillows made of clothes packed in pillowcases in the back seat for her daughters while she slept in the front. She said her pride had kept her from going to the homeless shelters and community aid programs. She was doling out her savings in order to pay the monthly fee for the camping space. Restricted to only one month at a time, she would drive off for the minimum three days, parking on the streets, and then come back and pay again, taking yet another spot for another month. The woman said she had specifically picked this park because it was close to an elementary school and that she had enrolled her daughters there using the address of a friend who had put them up for a time until her boyfriend had demanded they leave. The mother said she wasn’t afraid of living out in the streets as long as her daughters were near. At night she could reach across the seat back and touch her girls and hear them sleeping in the dark. She considered the park safe. And then Steven Ferris had found them.

  Like a predator, Ferris had singled out their weakness. Hanging out in the park where children often played, he read their situation and then struck up a conversation with the mother when she had trouble starting her car. Could he help her? He knew something about engines. He fixed some loose spark plug wires. Later, investigators couldn’t say whether Ferris had pulled the wires in the first place.

  Another evening he showed up with food and treats for the girls. Another time he gave them all a ride to the grocery store. He made himself familiar. He made himself look safe.

  Nick remembered the interviews he’d done with teachers and the principal of the elementary school, their recollections of the girls, how bright and eager they were to learn and be with the other children. The way the older one was so protective of her sister. The description of what they were wearing on their final day.

  As the girls were walking to the park which they now considered home, Ferris pulled alongside in his familiar truck. He told them their mother had gone out to look at a house they might move to. He said she’d asked him to give them a ride. Maybe the girls were reluctant, but they knew him, had ridden in the truck—with their mother—before.

  Ferris took them to a small house less than three miles from the park. He knew it was the younger girl’s birthday and promised a cake. But once inside, he molested the six-year-old in a bedroom. When she began to cry, her sister came to her aid. Ferris killed them both and then hid their tiny bodies in the attic of the house. When they failed to show up at the park, the girls’ mother went to the school and police were called. She immediately identified Ferris as a man who had befriended them. It took a day for detectives to track him down. They found him in the small rental house and interviewed him for an hour. They read him like a book and returned the same afternoon with a search warrant.

  Nick had gone to the crime scene. He had been there when the two small body bags were carried out, just like the rest of the press. But for this one he could not tear his eyes away. He remembered the look in the lead investigator’s eyes when he later told Nick he would never forget the feeling of realizing that the bodies of those girls had been lying right above him as he’d listened to Ferris deny he had even seen the children. Nick remembered thinking they should not let detectives or police reporters who have kids of their own go to crime scenes involving the deaths of children. He remembered interviewing the mother, even though he knew she was still in shock, her eyes swollen, the pupils enlarged and glossed by sedatives and some internal message that kept trying to convince her it wasn’t so. He remembered hating Steven Ferris.

  Nick scrolled down through the story, past the history he’d dug up on Ferris: the arrests for loitering, the multiple laborer jobs, the interview with the girlfriend who had left him after she’d caught him in her daughter’s room but had never reported it, just cursed him and kicked him out.

  None of that had come out in court. Ferris’s trial had been emotional and sensational. Nick hadn’t covered it. That assignment belonged to the court reporter. But Nick had slipped into the courtroom on several days, squeezing into the back rows and watching the back of Ferris’s head as he sat at the defense table. One day the little girls’ mother, who could not stand to sit inside, was in the hallway on a bench and recognized Nick as he quietly left during testimony.

  “Mr. Mullins,” she said and stood.

  Nick stopped and looked at her face, trying to read whether she was indignant or angered by something he had written. “You are the reporter, yes?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nick said, taking two steps closer to her.

  When she put out her hand, he closed the final gap and clasped her fingers softly.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “For the way you treated me and my girls in your stories.”

  Nick was silent, not knowing how to react, seeing her eyes again, clearer now, but still holding a pain that would be there forever. Nick k
new even then that whatever went on in the courtroom would never ease her pain.

  “They were beautiful children,” he remembered saying and then had excused himself and walked away.

  Now he knew the pain personally. Loved ones dead. A child you could never hold again. The urge for vengeance. Robert Walker.

  Within days of the start of Ferris’s trial the predator was convicted by a jury that would later recommend the death penalty. The judge had agreed. Nick shook the scenes out of his head. He remembered each detail, but today’s story wasn’t so much about Ferris as it was about his killer.

  He moved on to the other stories Lori had sent him. There was a hearing that the newspaper’s court reporter had written months after Ferris’s conviction. An appeals court had ruled on arguments raised over the prejudicial nature of the trial itself. Several people in the courtroom gallery had worn buttons on their shirts and blouses adorned with photographs of the dead girls. Ferris’s lawyer argued that the crowd and the photos had influenced the jury. Though the prosecution argued that members of the public had a right to attend the proceedings, a panel of judges disagreed.

  “Here, the direct link between the buttons, the spectators wearing the buttons, the defendant, and the crime that the defendant allegedly committed was clear and unmistakable,” read the document handed down by the three-judge appellate court panel. “A reasonable jurist would be compelled to conclude that the buttons worn by members of the gallery conveyed the message that the defendant was guilty.”

  Lori had sent another quick story that quoted a defense attorney who claimed the conviction should be thrown out. Another hit on the computer came up with only a single line: “Convicted murderer Steven Ferris sits mute as lawyers argue for a new hearing for the man who was given the death penalty for raping and killing two sisters, 6 and 8, three years ago. Ferris is currently serving time and no decision by the court was reached.”

  Nick recognized the line as a caption that must have run under a photo that appeared with no story. He wondered how he could have missed it. He checked the date it ran: January 21 of last year.

  Nick had not been aware of anything during that month or the February after that. He’d been on an extended leave of absence. Death in the family.

  He refocused on the screen and called up the next mention of Ferris. But with continued delays of the hearing dates, each story got smaller and was placed deeper on inside pages until they were barely noticeable.

  Nick knew that information about court hearings and calendar calls wouldn’t make the paper. He switched out of the stories and called up a website from his favorites list on the Internet: Florida Department of Corrections. From here, he could enter Ferris’s name and date of birth and find out where he had been held in the prison system. While he was waiting, his phone rang.

  “Nick Mullins,” he answered.

  “Hey, Nick. It’s Lori. I’ve got some court docket stuff on Ferris that I got online. The last entry was a request by defense to show cause for a change of sentence that looks like it had been delayed a couple of times.”

  “Let me guess,” Nick said. “Rescheduled for today.”

  “Two in the afternoon in Judge Grossman’s courtroom,” she said.

  Nick could hear the tinge of disappointment in her voice that she hadn’t been ahead of him.

  “Was that in the clips?” she asked.

  “Nope. Hell, the guy was off our radar for almost a year,” Nick said, as much to himself as Lori. “Can you print that stuff and send it over?”

  Nick knew that to get into the court’s docket database you had to have a subscription. Most attorneys did. Most large newspapers did. It was expensive. But Nick also knew you could still do it the old-fashioned way. The case notes are public record and anyone with an interest in Ferris could have walked into the court records office and checked out the file. From there you could get the date of his next appearance and set up your own appointment for a morning shooting.

  Nick thanked Lori and went back to his DOC search and in five minutes had an electronic sheet on Ferris. His most recent home had been the South Florida Reception Center. Before that he’d been up in Tomoka Correctional, a maximum security prison near Daytona Beach.

  Nick sat back and took another long sip of coffee. He was gathering string. Piecing stuff together. Speculating? Yes. But not out loud. Hell, even though he trusted his source at dispatch, confirmation that the dead inmate was Ferris was still in the wind. And at this point Nick didn’t even know if the shooter was targeting anyone specific. Maybe the sniper was just some whack job out to pop a bad guy, any bad guy, and knew the sally port was where prisoners were off-loaded. But the picture was still in Nick’s head, the roofline looking down into the fenced yard, the distance, the single blood spatter. No way, he decided. There were probably half a dozen prisoners down there. All this guy wanted was one shot. One preselected victim.

  Nick called up an old file on his computer, a huge list of telephone numbers he’d collected over the years. He was the kind of reporter who recorded nearly every substantial contact number he’d gathered over the years. Each time he finished a story, he’d copy the numbers from his notebooks or cut and paste them from his computer notes and put them on the bottom of this list. There were hundreds. He knew he’d never use eighty percent of them ever again, but times like these kept him at the habit.

  Using a search function for Ferris’s name on the computer, he found what he was looking for in seconds—Ferris’s father’s and brother’s names and their telephone numbers. The father had been in West Virginia three years ago and hadn’t been much help. But the brother lived here. The cops would have the same numbers and at some point they would call to inform next of kin. Nick knew if he got some family member on the line, he’d have a good chance of confirming it was Ferris who was now lying in the morgue. He picked up the phone and started to punch in the number for the brother, then stopped. David Ferris’s address, in a mobile home park only twenty minutes away in Wilton Manors, was typed in next to the number. Nick checked his watch: eleven o’clock. He was not pressed for time. No other stories were breaking. He’d made a dozen of these calls before. After the ones in which he was the first person to tell a relative that a son or wife or brother was dead, it always left a soured lump of guilt in his gut. He hung up the phone and logged off his computer.

  “We’re still waiting on the identification of that shooting victim at the jail,” he said to the assistant city editor as he walked by. “I’m going out. But I’m on my cell.”

  Nick made sure the editor had heard him and waved the phone and got a nod from the guy.

  You tell somebody his brother is dead face to face if you can, Nick thought as he rode the elevator down.

  Chapter 4

  Don’t hesitate, he told himself, sitting in his car outside David Ferris’s double-wide, watching the curtains in the window just to the right of the louvered front door. Nick had driven up Federal Highway, practicing the words he’d use when the brother of the dead man answered the door: Excuse me, Mr. Ferris, I hate to bother you. I don’t know if you remember me, Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I did some stories about your brother a few years back?

  Liar, Nick thought. You don’t hate to bother him when there’s a good chance that his brother has just been shot dead. You’re after a story. You need a comment.

  Hello, Mr. Ferris. Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I’d like to verify if you’ve heard from the Sheriff’s Office concerning your brother.

  The straight-out-in-their-face technique was at least honest.

  Oh, and by the way, if you have heard, could you please spill your guts to me on how you feel about this news for two hundred thousand strangers to read in tomorrow’s editions?

  When he’d arrived in the correct block, Nick pulled into the entrance of the Palms Mobile Park and checked the address on his pad. But after the first left turn, his memory served him. He eased down the narrow street past Flamingo Trail, Ponce
de Leon Court and Anhinga Way. Speed bumps between each block jounced him, and palm trees, all with too-thin trunks and browned fronds, leaned precariously at each corner. Nick once noted that trees did not like to thrive in trailer parks. Maybe it was the cramped space that wouldn’t let the roots spread. Maybe the cheap owner associations refused the expense of fertilizers and care. Maybe, as with the natural instincts of animals, they somehow knew better than to grow in places that always seemed to be magnets for tornadoes and hurricanes.

  Nick had turned onto Bougainvillea Drive, gone all the way to the end and parked in front of the dusty turquoise-and-white trailer. He then turned off the ignition and made the mistake of letting the quiet form around his ears. When he was a rookie reporter in Trenton, two weeks on the job, the Marine barracks in Beirut had been bombed. Every reporter on the metro desk was given a list of six names, families who had lost sons and husbands and daughters. All had to be interviewed within two days. He had done the same thing years later after 9/11. And he still hadn’t learned to avoid hesitating.

  He finally picked up the pad from the passenger seat and opened the door. Before stepping out, he took off his sunglasses. You don’t ask a man if he knows his brother is dead and not have the balls to show your eyes. He put the pad in his back pocket.

  There were no other cars in the drive. The carport, little more than a sheet of tin supported by poles and tacked to the roof of the trailer, was filled with a full-sized washer and dryer, rusted at their edges. A chaise lounge was missing two plastic straps. And water-stained cardboard boxes containing God knows what were stacked alongside the front of a sheet-metal utility shack. Nick kept checking the curtains, waiting for a movement that would tell him someone was inside who didn’t want to talk to him.