He was talking directly to Hargrave, who hesitated, looked at his lieutenant and then said, “No. We checked him out with his boss and two other workers who put him in the warehouse at the time of the shooting. He isn’t a suspect. He didn’t say good riddance. He didn’t cry. He just asked when he could pick up the body.”
Nick jotted something on his reporter’s pad. The room went quiet for a moment. The rules were being set.
“Ferris is not a suspect?” Nick said, looking directly into Hargrave’s eyes, making sure he was getting the comment straight.
“Not at this time.”
Nick knew it was a fallback position, but OK, never say never, he’d give him that.
“OK, Nick. How about Ms. Cotton?” Canfield said, trying to swing the information tide back to his side. “You got to her before we did. What did she tell you?”
“Not much,” Nick said, rebuilding the scene in his head. “That she wasn’t the kind of person to look for retribution. She’s religious but isn’t going for that eye-for-an-eye thing.”
The heard-that-a-million-times feel in the room was as clear as if all three law enforcement officers had covered their mouths and yawned.
“She said she didn’t know anyone who would have done Ferris, and she hadn’t had any suspicious visitors or contacts that would lead her to believe anyone would shoot the guy for her.”
As he said it, Nick’s head jumped to a vision of the box of letters that Ms. Cotton had told him about. He should have looked at them. He should have taken down some names. But should he mention it to this group? Hell, if they’d asked the woman the same questions he had and she told them about the letters, they would probably have the box in the back room already. But just in case he jotted down “go back to Cotton on letters” in his notebook and flipped the page.
“OK, now what are you going to give me?”
Canfield started to say something, then stopped.
Nick looked over at the press officer. “You know,” he said. “The reason I came in here, agreed to this trade of information?”
Cameron cut his eyes the other way. Not my call, he was saying. I’m just taking orders.
“Well, you’ve already got the brother declared a nonsuspect. That isn’t out yet,” Canfield finally spoke up.
“At this time,” Hargrave said off to the side.
Nick went from face to face. All eyes were down. They always knew more than they told you. Always.
“How about ballistics?” he said, trying to pry something loose.
“You’ve already got that, Nick. It was a .308. Actually, a Federal Match loaded with the 168-grain Boat Tail Hollow Point,” Canfield said.
Nick jotted down the name. He didn’t know shit about bullets. But that didn’t matter much to his readers.
“Federal Match?” he said, cutting his eyes to the agent, who was still standing. “Does that mean it only comes from the military?”
The agent’s eyes lifted and Nick detected a muscle twitch in the guy’s jaw as it tightened. OK. If you were a poker player, that was a tell. Did mention of the military trip the guy?
“No, not at all,” Canfield said quickly. “It’s a round that’s on the civilian and law enforcement market. Anyone could buy it.”
“Any prints on the casing?” Nick said, working it.
“Never found a casing,” Hargrave answered, not looking up until he asked his own question: “Did you?”
Nick let it pass. He knew his reputation would have already been passed to Hargrave. He’d never keep something that vital to a case to himself. It was more than unethical, it would have been stupid. Instead he took the opportunity to nail an attribution for the rooftop site.
“So you’re saying the kill shot was taken from the roof?”
Canfield nodded. The creases in Hargrave’s brow made it clear he was in pain giving such information to a reporter. Nick let it sit for a moment and then carefully set up his next question, wanting to watch the reaction, see which of the men in the room clenched his teeth the hardest, or breathed deepest, or just got up and walked out.
“So, you’re working the angle that it’s a military sniper or a law enforcement sniper?”
No one flinched. The fed even controlled his jaw muscle. Everyone was in control, almost like they’d expected the question and rehearsed. Even Nick knew by now that it would be Canfield’s job to answer the delicate ones.
“We would be remiss in our duty, Nick, not to pursue all possibilities.”
Nick let the standard answer hang in the air for a moment, but couldn’t control himself.
“So you guys learned a lesson from the D.C. Beltway, eh?”
This time the federal officer’s eyes came up and seared into Nick’s. Gotcha, Nick thought.
In the fall of 2002, the Beltway sniper case had scared the hell out of Washington, D.C, and surrounding Virginia when ten innocent people had been killed, shot dead by a cold-blooded sniper from long distances as they were going about their daily lives. One was filling her tank at a gas station. Another was carrying groceries. Another picking up her son at school. In the flurry that built after the second shooting, the rumors and assumptions flew. The speculation, fed by so-called sources from the FBI and both the state and local police departments, was that a disturbed soldier, active or retired, or some rampaging cop was serially wreaking havoc. The shots were too difficult. The skill in striking and then disappearing was too well planned and logistical. The weaponry too sophisticated.
When the killer was finally caught, it turned out to be some teenager firing from the trunk of a car driven by the boy’s pissed-off and most likely deranged stepfather. Amateurs. The speculators had been all wrong.
“Like your fellow seers in the media didn’t like jumping on that? Like they had some fucking movie playing out,” Hargrave mumbled.
“No argument there, Detective,” Nick said. “No one’s finest hour on that one.”
In the following silence, Canfield shoved his chair back, signaling an end to the meeting. Nick flipped his notebook closed. The fed pushed off the wall with one hip, turned without a word and started out the adjoining door.
“OK, Nick. Please keep in touch through Mr. Cameron’s office,” Canfield said as he stood and offered his hand.
“I will,” Nick said, shaking the lieutenant’s hand over the table.
Hargrave stood during the formality and met Nick’s eyes, his own holding a look devoid of hostility or superiority. The softened lines surprised Nick, and forced his eyebrows to rise in anticipation.
“Check you later,” the detective said, a phrase that in one way may have said nothing. But Nick didn’t think so. There was a crack in the ice.
“Anytime,” he said, taking the man’s hand, almost skeletal in its thinness and sharp protrusions of knuckle and bone. But once again he noted the taut cablelike muscles in the detective’s forearm. I would not want to be caught in that guy’s grip in a dark alley, he thought and carried his own warning out the door.
When Nick got back to the newsroom it was almost six PM. It was the busiest part of the day, when reporters had all come back into the house after being out on assignment, when assistant city editors were working line by line to get through each of their charges’ daily stories, asking questions, getting clarification, trying to make sure photographs taken during the day were matched up with the right reports and generally busting hump to clear the decks before deadline.
He stopped at the city desk to tell the assistant in charge of the cop shift that he had a story coming as a follow on the jail shooting.
“Yeah, Deirdre said you’d have something,” the editor said as he looked through a sheaf of papers that Nick knew was a printout of tomorrow’s story budget. Man, that woman was something, he thought, shaking his head, but with a smirk of respect at the corners of his mouth.
“How much space do you think you need?”
Nick knew the question was really eighty percent rhetorical. By this time of
day, most of the paper would already have been laid out and story lengths pretty much decided. He also knew the business, this paper in particular, and knew what length would be acceptable and wouldn’t put a twist in anyone’s shorts.
“Twelve to fifteen inches should be enough,” he said.
“Sounds good,” the editor said and looked at his watch. “You’ve got two hours, man. Early deadline because of the breaking stuff coming in late from Miami on the mayor being indicted.”
Nick just nodded and moved away. Two hours to compose four or five hundred words. Easy. He might even get home to eat dinner with Carly. That was sometimes the blessing of early deadlines.
“Oh, and Nick,” the editor said as he started to walk away. “Call that story VIGILANTE3, and we’ll use file art on Ferris again.”
Vigilante. Shit, thought Nick. Where did they get that? TV? The Herald’s Web page? He hadn’t even written the piece and they were jumping to conclusions. Go write the story, Nick told himself. Go home. Keep your mouth shut.
At his desk Nick charged up the computer and ignored the blinking message light on his phone. The top of the story was already in his head and he clicked it off on the keyboard:
On the hunt for a sniper with an unknown motive, police yesterday began a widespread, investigation to track down the executioner of convicted child molester and murderer Steven Ferris.
Interviewing members of the Ferris family, the mother of the two children Ferris abused and killed and a witness who may have seen the triggerman Friday morning, sheriff’s detectives put their efforts on a fast track to find the marksman who shot Ferris inside the fences of their own jail.
From there Nick rolled through the piece like a simple game of eight ball: quotes from Canfield confirming they were looking for a sniper, all of the statements from Margaria Cotton that Nick thought were relevant, the admission by Hargrave that Ferris’s brother was not a suspect. Even if he was being given special access, Nick still wasn’t obliged to ease up on his own reporting. He included the quotes from the witness who had seen someone dressed in black and carrying a satchel leaving the roof of the building across the street just moments after the shooting. Even though he knew it would be questioned by the editors, Nick omitted the worker’s name. He knew that the guy would freak out if he saw his identity in print and would swamp the paper with complaints that Nick had set him up to be a target of the killer. And who knew if he wouldn’t be right? The editors didn’t like unnamed sources and Nick would have to explain it, but he figured he was on solid ethical ground.
The other thing he left out was the presence of the federal agent. It wasn’t necessarily a favor. Nick still didn’t know what agency this Fitzgerald guy was from. And other than following similar shooting reports, he had no idea why the hell the guy was here. The way he’d twitched up when asked about a military sniper made Nick nervous. Were the feds looking for a nutcase off the reservation of a military base? Had someone from the VA with a trigger finger gone wacky? Figuring no other media outlet was even aware of the feds’ involvement, Nick decided to work the angle a few days, call a friend at the local FBI office. He might have just put it off as some weapons-tracing program ATF was running, but that wouldn’t “fast-track” this specific investigation as Canfield had explained. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have prompted the Sheriff’s Office into letting a journalist like Nick into the inner circle. Something was humming on a higher level and he put it on his priority list to find out where Fitzgerald had come from.
After maxing out the story at exactly sixteen inches, Nick read it through one more time for spelling of names and attributions, made an electronic copy for himself and with a touch of a button shipped it to his editor. He slid his chair back and looked over at the metro desk to let him know and saw a knot of folks, including his man, an assignment editor and a woman from the photo department having a close conversation. This sort of gathering was always ominous, and ninety-nine percent of the time they’d end their little conclave by looking for someone to do something for them.
Nick pulled his chair back up to his desk and gave full concentration to his keyboard. It was seven thirty. He wanted to go home. He needed to be with Carly. Friday nights had been set aside for movies and popcorn and he’d been mostly true to that. He’d made a lot of those promises after the accident. He’d been guilty of not showing up on Friday nights, working big weekend pieces for the Sunday edition. He’d shortchanged his family. He hadn’t been there when they needed him.
When he took a chance and glanced over at the group, the photo editor was shaking her head and walking away. The assignment guy was looking at his watch. And Nick’s editor just shrugged his shoulders and headed Nick’s way.
“Hey, Nick. How’s that piece coming?”
“Pretty close,” Nick said. He hated lying. He’d always hated lying.
“Good, man. ’Cause we’ve got a situation.”
Nick pushed his chair back. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. There’s a multicar accident out on 1-95 down near the Hollywood Boulevard exit and, you know, traffic is hell and backed up all the way to the Dade County line.”
“Injuries?” Nick said, letting a forced passivity mask his face.
“Yeah. But we don’t know how serious. We’ve got a couple of reporters on their way.”
Nick had done this dance a couple of times since he’d come back to work, and he felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy. But he was a police reporter. It was still what he did and in his business death was a regular staple of the news cycle.
“Those guys will do the scene, Nick, so we don’t need you to go out there, OK?” the editor quickly said, trying to soften it. “But we’re going to need you to do rewrite, you know, so we can try to make deadline with it.”
“Yeah, sure. OK,” Nick said, turning his chair and bellying back up to his keyboard. “Just give ’em my extension. I’ll take the feeds.” He did not look back at the editor’s face and instead focused on the screen in front of him.
“And I’ll ship this other piece to you in a minute.”
“Thanks, Nick. I mean, you know, thanks.”
Nick waved him off and let his fingertips start snapping at the keys. He called up a street schematic of the accident location on MapQuest. He tried to visualize the businesses and major landmarks along that stretch of interstate from memory. But the scenes in his head kept jumping back to December, two years ago. Christmas decorations on the pods around him. Diane Lade with her inevitable miniature tree on top of her computer terminal. An editor’s voice: “Nick, we got some kind of wreck up in Deerfield Beach. Somebody T-boned a family van. Sounds like it might be a good story.”
His ringing phone snapped him back.
“Hey, Nick. Kevin Davis—I hear you’re doing rewrite?”
“Yeah, Kev. You out there yet?”
“Just got here. Man, the traffic is way backed up. It looks like four or five cars from here. The location is about two hundred yards north of the Sterling Road on-ramp in the northbound lanes. I’ll call you back when I get up there and see what’s what.”
Nick hung up and went back to his screen and tried to block out Christmas Eve.
He’d been wishing only that the night would end so he could go home and help lay out presents for his kids. He was looking for the swirl of blue cop lights and red ambulance strobes. He was walking up to the scene smelling the odor of raw gasoline and burnt rubber and recognized a motor patrolman he knew as a friend but was puzzled by the look on the guy’s face. He got a glance at the wreckage in the middle of the intersection. Steel twisting in the shine of headlights. Maroon color. Same as his own van.
“Hey, Nick?” The photo editor’s voice turned his head as she approached. “We’ve got this digital stuff that Lou got from the accident scene.”
She laid the printed photos on his desk.
“He’s sending them in from his laptop so we can make deadline. Thought maybe they’d help if you, like, needed a visual to pu
t the story together.”
Nick nodded, thanked her, but when she turned to go he shoved the prints over to the corner of his desk, partway under a stack of old newspapers.
In between the front of a squad car and the back end of a rescue vehicle he focused on a torn fiberglass bumper that had been split in two and could make out the jagged crease across a University of Florida Gator sticker that his wife had jokingly stuck on their bumper just a few weeks earlier and he felt the constriction, like a knot of physical fear, rising up to choke him. He took three more steps toward the wreckage before his friend the patrolman could get to him and the view opened up to reveal a yellow sheet, that fucking yellow sheet, already spread over something in the road. He could feel someone’s arms wrapping around his shoulders, more cops, more hands holding him back, and then he felt the rip of sound and pain that scorched the back of his throat when he started screaming.
“Hey, Nick, it’s Kevin,” the voice said and Nick realized that somehow he’d picked up the ringing phone without thinking about it.
“Yeah.” Nick managed to cough out a response.
“Hey, man, you alright?”
Nick was staring out into the newsroom, seeing something he could not banish from the inside of his head.
“Yeah,” he finally said into the phone. “I’m alright.”
“OK, this is a bad one out here. They say the FHP investigator is on his way, so we’re going to have to wait on the particulars ’cause they want everything to come through him. But from what I can tell we got at least two dead, maybe more. So I think we’re going to send Lisa Browne over to Hollywood Memorial to check on victims over there, and maybe she can get some I.D.s from folks there. I’ll just camp out here.”
“Yeah, OK. That’s cool,” Nick said. “Give me what you’ve got so far.”
He crooked the phone between his shoulder and ear and put his fingers on the keyboard to take dictation.
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