Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  He would wait for her in the parking lot. When she came out of the hospital, he would be standing somewhere close to her car with the Sig 226 Tactical. He would use the silencer, of course. He would walk over, shoot her as she was about to get into the car, push her inside if necessary, and calmly walk away. He’d used that tactic once in a busy parking lot in St. Louis. It was three days before anyone had noticed the body in the front seat of the car.

  At some point today, Catherine McLeod would return to the hospital to see if the gorilla was still alive. He would be waiting.

  4

  Silence gripped the newsroom the instant Catherine came through the door. She could sense the vibrations in the air, as if the conversations had stopped on the same beat. The newsroom was half the size of a ballroom, a dozen reporters bent toward computer screens inside small cubicles separated by glass partitions. She started down an aisle, conscious of the eyes boring into her back. Then something extraordinary happened: A rhythmic clapping started up and gathered energy. Then applause and cheers swept around her.

  Catherine stopped. She felt as if her breath had been knocked out of her. She glanced around at the familiar faces of her colleagues, all of them on their feet, clapping and smiling. There were times when they disagreed, when they got into heated arguments over the direction of a story; it was the nature of the business. They competed against one another, and they backed up one another. They went to the Denver Press Club on Friday nights for a drink. This morning they had read the brief article from the police reports that had probably made it into the last edition, or heard about what had happened on the radio. Now they were cheering her on, but the applause felt strange and out of place, like the applause at a funeral. It was as if they were cheering the fact that Maury had taken the bullet meant for her.

  She was shaking her head, she realized, waving all of them back to work. Go back, go back. Let everything be normal. She swallowed the urge to burst into tears, hurried to her own cubicle at the end of the aisle, and set her bag in the lower desk drawer. A dull ache was invading her head. The applause began to fade away. Across the glass partition she saw her colleagues dropping onto their chairs. Chair legs scraped the tile floor, and there was the rapid-fire start-up of computer keys, like the riff in a jazz piece. She sank onto her own chair and jammed a fist against her mouth.

  The little red light on the phone was blinking. She stared at it, reluctant to lift the receiver and listen to the messages—anonymous voices of readers who read her articles and considered themselves her best friends. So sorry to hear what happened. If there’s anything I can do . . .

  And probably a message or two from the crackpots: Hey! So somebody finally got mad enough to come after you. Surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

  She looked away from the blinking light; she would listen to the messages when she was up to it, she thought, wondering how she would ever be up to it. Finally she squared herself in front of the desk and forced her attention on the computer, aware for the first time of the faint buzzing noise emanating from the base of the machine. It was probably always there, that noise, but she’d never noticed before. She felt raw and shaky, her nerves a jumble of live electric wires. The headache started to bore in. She had to concentrate hard in order to log into her e-mail. Still it took two tries before she had typed her password correctly and the long list of messages began to scroll down the screen.

  “Everyone’s glad to see you.”

  The voice behind her came like a gunshot. Catherine swung around, her heart pounding in her ears. Violet Henderson, the research assistant from an adjacent cubicle, stood in the doorway, medium height and about Catherine’s age, with the slim, muscular figure of a biker, long, dark blond hair, and the freckled skin of a woman who spent a lot of time in the outdoors when she wasn’t digging through archives and legal documents. “Marjorie’s waiting in her office,” she said.

  Catherine turned back to the desk and rummaged through the clutter of the top drawer. She felt herself switching onto automatic. A summons had arrived from Marjorie Fennerman, managing editor and walking encyclopedia of facts, innuendos, and minutiae, which she spewed forth like voice mail in fast-forward mode. She never repeated herself for any reporter neglectful enough to enter the inner sanctuary without a pad and pen. Catherine had only made that mistake once.

  She clipped a pen to the top of a small pad, gave Violet a half smile as she brushed past, and headed across the newsroom. All the sounds were familiar—keyboards clacking, phones ringing in various keys, a man’s voice in one of the cubicles drilling questions at someone on the other end of a line. She rapped on the pebbly glass door that had a sheet of orange construction paper pasted in the middle. Someone had written in black marker: Stuff Stops Here.

  She opened the door and stepped inside. Marjorie was bent over the computer on the small table set at a right angle to her desk, backlit by sunlight streaming through the window. Her light brown hair fell forward like a veil along her face. “You wanted to see me,” Catherine said.

  Marjorie swung sideways, got to her feet, and came around the desk. For an instant, Catherine felt herself enveloped in fleshy arms, then Marjorie stepped back and looked at her, as if she wanted to assure herself that Catherine was there. “You okay?” she said.

  Catherine nodded. “Maury’s in critical condition.”

  “I know, and I can’t tell you how sorry all of us are. Sit down.” She waved her to a chair in front of the desk. “Jason has the police report,” she said. She had brown, bushy eyebrows that rose in arcs over deep-set brown eyes. “He’s interviewed some of your neighbors. Didn’t get much. Seems they heard the commotion and sirens, that’s all.”

  Marjorie maneuvered herself around the desk and dropped back onto her chair. She took a moment—positioning her elbows on the desk, lacing her fingers together—before she said, “We have a scoop here. One of our own, the primary witness. Jason needs to talk to you.”

  Catherine looked away. She let her gaze run over the rows of plaques and citations that lined the wall on her left: Best news story, best news photograph, best editorial. The name of Jason Metcalf, police reporter, had been engraved on three of the plaques. He was nothing if not thorough and persistent in running down witnesses, following them to their homes and offices, not giving up until he had the exclusive inside story at least one issue ahead of the Mirror. Marjorie Fennerman backed up her reporters. And wasn’t that why Catherine had jumped at the chance to come back to work as an investigative reporter at the Journal? Journal reporters plumbed the depths; they went after the real news behind the stories. Lawrence had remained tight-lipped when she’d told him she had taken the job, but at that point, they both knew the marriage was over.

  Jason Metcalf would want to plumb the depths of her story, she knew. And wouldn’t she do the same? But this was different—this was Maury in ICU, maybe dying, and the idea of smearing the details across thousands of newspapers with large, black headlines that screamed at every stranger passing by newspaper stands on every downtown corner made her feel naked, stripped of her defenses, of everything normal that protected her.

  “You’re up to it, aren’t you?” Marjorie said, and when Catherine didn’t respond, she hurried on: “Jason could put off the interview for a couple hours, but we want the story for tomorrow’s paper. You understand.”

  Catherine pried her eyes from the plaques on the wall and looked at the woman on the other side of the desk. It was her story, hers and Maury’s, but it was also the intruder’s, the monster who had shot Maury. And wasn’t that what investigative journalism was all about— finding the kernel of truth that could bring a monster to justice?

  “I understand,” she said, but Marjorie’s hand was already reaching for the phone. How well Marjorie knew her, Catherine thought. This was who she was, an investigative reporter. Maybe a story never told all of the truth, maybe there would always be questions and unproven suspicions and doubts, but it was the reporter’s job to uncover a
s many of the jagged pieces of truth as possible and fit them into a story that made sense out of a small part of the world’s madness.

  Catherine was barely aware of Marjorie’s voice, low and confidential, like the background purr of an engine. Marjorie set the phone back into the cradle. “You sure you’re okay with this?” she said. “Want a cup of coffee or something?”

  Catherine waved away the offer. She stopped herself from shouting out the truth: She was not okay. Maury could be dying and nothing was okay.

  The door opened and Jason Metcalf crept into the office, like a cat stalking its prey. He was short and barrel shaped with a pink, balding scalp visible beneath the spray of brown hair. He pulled a side chair forward, sat down, and opened a laptop on the corner of the desk. Not until he’d tapped on the keys a moment and squinted at the screen did he look over. “Tough luck last night,” he said, and she had the feeling that was what he always said on such occasions. Tough luck—to the murder witness, the victim’s wife, husband, mother, the coroner up to his elbows at an autopsy, the police officer sucking on mints to get the smell of death out of his air passages. Real tough luck.

  “I don’t know what I can add to the police report,” she managed.

  “Well, you never know.” He gave her a mirthless grin that pulled his lips back over his upper teeth. “Maybe you remember something familiar about the shooter, now you had time to think about it.”

  “There was nothing familiar. What do you know about any recent rape cases in Denver? That’s your story, Jason. That’s what you should investigate.”

  “You telling me how to do my job?”

  “How many unsolved rape cases are out there?” Catherine hurried on. “Half a dozen? A dozen? Ask Bustamante if he’s working on that.”

  Jason Metcalf tapped on the computer keys a moment. Without looking up, he said, “Your common, deranged rapist, huh? How come he knew where you lived? Police report says you thought you got inside your town house while he was still looking for you. All those town houses look alike. How’d he know which one was yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened after you got inside?”

  “For godssakes, Jason. You read the report.”

  “Just tell him.” Marjorie spread her hands on the desk. The thin gold chain at her throat bounced over the neckline of her blue blouse.

  Catherine set both elbows on the armrests and dipped her head into her hands. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, trying to massage away the headache blossoming behind her eyes. She had locked the door when she got inside, she said. Then she spilled out the rest of it, everything she’d told the officers last night and Bustamante this morning. All the details burned into her memory. There was nothing new.

  When she had finished, he said, “You think it’s possible the guy had a beef with you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re a reporter,” Marjorie said, and Catherine realized that she and Jason had already reached a conclusion that Jason simply wanted to confirm. “You’ve covered controversial issues; you’ve made people mad at you.”

  “The Journal has been making people mad for more than a hundred years. When was the last time a killer came after one of the reporters?” She glanced from Marjorie to the stocky man who had inched his way forward and was perched on the edge of the chair. “When was the last time a killer came after you, Jason? What about the illegal immigrant that shot the police officer last fall? Weren’t you the reporter who found the cousin’s house where he was hiding? He might have hidden out for a long time before he disappeared back into Mexico. Thanks to you, he’s going to prison for life. Any relatives come after you?”

  “Look, Catherine,” Marjorie said. “Maybe you don’t know that twenty-five, thirty years ago, a deranged lunatic shot and killed a Denver talk show host because he didn’t like what he’d said. It’s not impossible that you were the target.”

  Catherine felt the office walls closing in on her, the plaques leaping off the wall, the dark, engraved words dancing in front of her eyes. She closed her eyes. What they suggested was not true, she told herself. The intruder had nothing to do with her work, with her life. “It was a random attack,” she heard herself say. She opened her eyes and made herself look at Jason Metcalf. “There’s no evidence to suggest otherwise. You can quote me.”

  “Okay.” Jason went back to tapping the keyboard. “So after he shot Maury Beekner, he ran out the front door. Tell me, why did he leave a witness still breathing? Why didn’t he shoot you before he got out of there?”

  “He had intended to rape me,” Catherine said. “He heard the sirens and ran off.” They had gotten to the truth now, she was thinking, snapped the last random piece of the puzzle into place. She felt a wave of appreciation for the skills of the police reporter leaning toward the laptop, keys clacking into the silence. He had asked the key question that brought the story into focus. Of course that was the reason the intruder hadn’t shot her while she’d crouched under the table. He had never intended to shoot her. He’d shot Maury because Maury had tried to subdue him. It made sense. It was as if Jason Metcalf had dug into the ground and hit something hard and true.

  She went back to massaging her forehead. The headache entrenched now: the stress of last night and the thought of Maury probably draped in white sheets with needles in his arms and a tube jammed into his mouth—all of it coalesced into a steel ball inside her head. But there was something else, something moving away from her grasp. She could picture herself hiding in the darkness, watching Maury and the intruder wrestling about the room, the chairs and lamps crashing on the floor. She could see the gun in the intruder’s hand; she could almost hear the shot. She tried to freeze the picture in her head: The moment when he stood still, looking around the room, and outside, the sirens blaring. He had run out then, but not for a long moment. He had taken the time to look around for her.

  If he had seen her . . . She pushed away the thought. She was imagining things, she told herself. She’d been over the story so many times, scrutinizing the details. Maybe she was starting to make them up, give Jason Metcalf and Marjorie Fennerman and even Nick Bustamante the story they wanted—that the attack hadn’t been a random act of violence, but a calculated and planned attack on her life.

  “What is it?” Marjorie said. Jason glanced over the top of the computer screen, a look of hunger in his eyes, as if she might toss him a tasty morsel.

  “Nothing. I need to get back to work.”

  Jason snapped the laptop shut at this and got to his feet. “I’m gonna be all over this story like superglue,” he said. “Nobody’s coming after one of our reporters without paying a big price, you hear me?”

  “Thanks, Jason,” Catherine managed, but she was talking to his back as he went through the door. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her, or that it made any difference.

  Marjorie jumped to her feet, closed the door, and leaned against it. “Until we know what this is all about, I don’t think you should come in. I’ll arrange an administrative leave of absence. I’ll see that you’re paid.”

  “Don’t say that.” Catherine got to her feet. Her legs felt numb and wobbly; she had to lean against the chair for support. “I need to work. I have to go on. He can’t take that away from me.” God, it was enough—it was too much—that he may have taken Maury. “Detective Bustamante is still investigating. There’s no reason to think that it was anything other than a random attempt at rape.”

  Marjorie was gripping the doorknob hard. White knuckles popped in her reddened hand.

  “Listen, Marjorie.” Catherine pushed on. “I’m working on the story about the Arapaho and Cheyenne land claims. I want to stay on the story.”

  It was a moment before Marjorie said, “That story has a shelf life of a carton of milk. The tribes are going nowhere with their claims. They were settled forty years ago. The governor is on record opposing any further settlement. The entire story will wrap up in the next couple of weeks.” Sh
e paused. “I suppose you could work on it from home.”

  Catherine shook her head. “That’s funny, Marjorie. Bustamante told me to stay away from the town house, and now you’re telling me to stay away from the paper. Just what am I supposed to do? Change my whole life? He’s not coming back, not with the neighbors watching anybody walking through the neighborhood and the police patrolling the streets.”

  “What about your mother?” Marjorie said, still on her own track. “You could stay with her. What about friends? You could stay in a hotel.”

  Catherine squeezed her eyes shut a moment against the throbbing pain. She stopped herself from reminding Marjorie that she had a dog, that not every place might welcome Rex. It was too stupid to discuss. “I’ll think about it.” She stepped toward the door.

  “Hold on.” Marjorie went to the desk, picked up a brown envelope, and thrust it toward Catherine. “I had Violet pull your articles for the last month. Go through them, mark the names of anyone you interviewed who had been reluctant to talk or might be upset over what you wrote.”

  Catherine took the package. It was lighter than it looked. A month of her life wrapped in a brown envelope that a gust of wind could blow away. She had to tighten her fingers to keep it from sliding out of her hand. “It’ll be a waste of time,” she made herself say, because, she realized, the saying might make it true.