OOMCs . . . Christ . . .
So, retirement.
Maybe he’d write his memoir. Maybe teach. Maybe fish.
He stared at the scanner again, waiting for any juicy reports from the front.
Nothing. Radio silence.
With some effort, breathing hard, he bent over and dug for his dusty digital camera in his bottom desk drawer—in his more than three decades working for the paper, he’d never had to take his own cuts. He found the small Nikon behind a sloshing Jack Daniel’s bottle. The battery was dead. He plugged in the charger cable.
The scanner spoke. A special agent with the FBI’s VCTF—Violent Crimes Task Force—would soon be setting up a mobile command center near the kidnapping site. After this tease, it fell silent.
He stared at the camera. The battery indicator remained bar-less. His phone’s camera? No, not enough resolution. Should just buy a new camera on the way. But they weren’t cheap . . .
“I asked. We can’t do it.” A woman’s voice startled him.
He glanced at his doorway.
Kelley Wyandotte—she went by the anachronistic “Dottie”—was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, less than half Fitz’s age. She was a staffer with ExaminerOnline. Her business card described her as a “Senior Content Editor,” and her job was to spawn OOMC. If anyone could tell him what an influencer was, it’d be she. He had no desire to ask.
Fitz was concentrating on the camera, willing it to charge. And on the police scanner, willing it to speak. In response to her comment he muttered, “Ridiculous.”
He wanted to say, “Bullshit,” but that would be like dressing down somebody else’s child. Just didn’t feel right. Fitz hardly knew her. Like the editor in chief, Dottie was new to the organization; she’d come from Manhattan.
Her complexion ghostly, Dottie had short spiky brunette hair, wore black tights and, it seemed, three tank tops. Her ears sported a half dozen rings and her tats were quite well done, notably the butterfly on her neck and a scorpion on her forearm. Four studs pierced her left cheek, perhaps in the shape of some constellation. He’d tried to imagine her at a White House press briefing.
One bar on the camera battery. Charge. Please charge.
“You asked?” he queried.
“I just said I did.”
There was asking and then there was asking.
Their dispute: Until the print edition shut down, the ExaminerOnline published the same stories as in the traditional paper. But two of his pieces had been buried in the back of the online site. One was about the county’s new domestic abuse shelter; people needed to see the piece, and the online edition went to many more readers than the print. His stories were also infested with links to sites only tangentially connected to the shelter piece and served no purpose, Fitz could see, except to generate revenue.
Angry, he’d complained to Dottie. She’d explained, astonishingly, that algorithms decided which stories would run and where. “News aggregators do it all the time,” she’d added, as if perplexed he didn’t know that. “Look at your inbox for the news feeds you subscribe to. Why do you think you get some stories and not others? Why are some at the top, others at the bottom?”
His feed was called a newspaper, the inbox was his front doorstep and he got every damn word that was fit to print.
She now added, “Placing a story manually would damage the optimal targeted impact model.”
That pushed him over the limit. “Bull . . . shit.”
“Say what you like, you saw Gerry’s memo? Readership is up twenty-seven percent since the merger.”
Lions don’t merge with gazelles.
Fitz was going to argue, or complain, or just be snarky—she’d met his “bullshit” with a steely glare—but by now the camera battery registered two intrepid bars. Good enough. He unplugged the device and pocketed it, along with two notebooks.
Anyway, why bother to battle? In a few weeks, he’d be gone.
Happily retired.
Writing memoirs, teaching, fishing.
Those days couldn’t come fast enough.
5
She was a stocky woman in a navy-blue pantsuit and a white blouse buttoned to the neck. Practical flats, like the shoes that Jen wore every day of her adult life. Dark. Always dark.
Fitz watched the woman through the open side door of the forty-foot mobile command center, FBI and VCTF printed on the white sides in dark-blue ink.
With dry blonde hair, cut shoulder-length and sprayed insistently into place, she was on her feet, bending over a desk in the middle of the MCC. She held two phones. One she was speaking into via hands-free, the other bore a text she was reading. Simultaneously she was studying a map, probably of downtown Garner. Fitz snapped a few pictures.
They were in a strip mall on Hawthorne between Sixteenth and Seventeenth, near the site of the kidnapping. Through trees and abundant shrubs, Fitz could see gowned crime scene officers at work.
Roughly twenty reporters had gathered, Fitz in the front. The on-air men and women were the attractive ones, nightly-news ready. The others were more casual about their dress, and some bellies curled over belts, some hairdos needed coiffing, some shoes could have benefited from polish.
The MCC was like a long and narrow police station, only the furniture was bolted to the floor and the seats featured belts. One wall was filled with the electronic gear that’s absolutely necessary to solve crimes—at least, according to TV shows in which mobile command centers figure.
He snapped away with the low-end camera.
The woman now stepped outside and was joined by the Fairview County sheriff and the Garner police chief, two middle-aged white men so similar in their solid appearance that they could have been related. The trio faced the reporters, squinting. The July sun was fierce.
“Good afternoon. I’m Special Agent Sandra Trask with the joint Violent Crimes Task Force of the Bureau.” She introduced the others, though there was no doubt who was in charge.
Fitz had heard of her. She was based out of the VCTF headquarters in Manhattan, seventy miles south. He noted that she, unlike insecure law enforcers Fitz had known, introduced herself by her first name and not just her last. Cops without confidence wore their titles like the shields around their necks.
Two more pictures, then he grew frustrated and pocketed the camera. He replaced it with a notebook, which felt much more comfortable in his hand, and started to speed-write—his own version of shorthand.
“Between twelve thirty and one thirty this afternoon, a thirty-seven-year-old male, Jasper Coyle, resident of Garner, New York, was abducted at his parked vehicle on Hawthorne Road, near Seventeenth. The perpetrator left behind a note and identified himself as the Gravedigger, the same as a kidnapping near Baltimore in late June of this year. Just like in that incident, the note included a clue as to the victim’s whereabouts. Presumably—given the perpetrator’s name and his MO—it’s underground somewhere.
“There were no witnesses to the first taking, in Maryland, and that victim couldn’t provide a description. But someone saw him here. The witness described him as over six feet, blond, pale complexioned. Wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt, sunglasses. That was all the information he gave us. It was an anonymous call from a pay phone.”
“Copycat?” someone called.
Fitz thought: Of course not. The FBI would know by now that the handwriting matched that from the note in the first kidnapping.
“No, the handwriting matches that from the first abduction.”
“What’s the clue?” another reporter called.
Trask nodded to a young male agent, who began distributing sheets of paper. Then she said, “It’s a limerick.”
6
In the Gravedigger’s Maryland kidnapping, three weeks ago, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Shana Evans was knocked unconscious, drugged and placed in a three-foot-wide drainage tunnel under a highway. The Gravedigger had piled rocks at the entrances. She’d screamed and screamed, she later told the cops, but
cars passing overhead were too loud for anyone to hear her. The risk wasn’t that she’d suffocate, but that she’d drown in a storm if the tunnel flooded.
To find her, the police had to decipher a curious sentence:
Recklessness Times 7 Mean Mayhem That We Overcome
Figure it out, save the victim.
XO, the Gravedigger
Finally, a concerned citizen cracked it. The first letters of the phrase spelled out “RT 7, MM Two”: she was at Route 7, mile marker 2.
There they found and saved Evans, largely unharmed, but traumatized by having to fight off several angry, and hungry, rats.
Fitz now looked down at the Coyle abduction clue.
There once was a man with a car.
Whose trip didn’t get very far.
Not one single mile,
Oh, my what a trial!
He’s trapped somewhere under the bar.
Figure it out, save the victim . . .
XO, the Gravedigger
So, the victim was buried within a mile or so of the point of abduction—a huge area to comb, especially challenging when looking for someone hidden underground. As for the other lines in the clue, Fitz could not decipher them.
The reporters peppered Trask with more questions: about fingerprints (none), about Coyle’s family (he was unmarried), about the anonymous witness (still unidentified), about CCTVs downtown (none—Fitz had a laugh at that one), the number of officers on the case (twenty-five and counting), canvassing for other witnesses (yes, but no luck so far).
Finally Special Agent Trask ended the press conference. “There’ll be an update later. But, for now, I’d like to ask you please to get that limerick out to as many people as possible on your broadcasts and in your newspapers. We’ve sent it to Quantico and are having forensic linguists look it over.” As cameras and microphones hovered, she added, “And I hope you all try your hand too. We’ll have to assume that Mr. Coyle doesn’t have long to live.”
7
Brick against brick was pointless.
Like trying to cut paper with paper. Jasper Coyle, sweating, had made very little headway, other than removing small chips of mortar . . . and breaking the terra cotta ax he’d found earlier.
Brick dust coated his mouth but he didn’t want to spit. Conserving moisture. He was already furiously thirsty. He needed a better tool. He was reluctant to turn away from the brick wall; he found comfort in the slivers of illumination coming through the cracks in the mortar.
On hands and knees once more, patting the ground. Ten feet, twenty . . . He didn’t know.
Finally: ah, yes!
His hand landed on a piece of rock, not brick. Solid and heavy—about five pounds, he estimated, like the dumbbells he held when jogging on the treadmill during his early-morning workouts at Fitness Plus. A good size for pounding and, better yet, the right shape; one end was sharp, like the end of a pickax.
Thank you, God, he said silently to the entity whose existence he’d given up acknowledging years ago.
Maybe that would change.
Coyle made his way back to the wall and once again began chipping away, as splinters and then chunks of mortar loosened and dropped to the floor. The tool was better but it was still a slow process. He had to run one hand over the target, then move the appendage away before the blow. He did this ten or so times, using all his strength. Then he’d pause, suck air from the hose, and return to the digging, a nineteenth-century coal miner. The final brick grew loose, like a seven-year-old’s baby tooth.
Coyle was growing increasingly faint. Slamming rock into mortar used up more air than he was taking in.
Please, just let me last long enough to get a few bricks out. Light meant air. Air meant survival.
Breathe less, breathe less, he told himself.
He did, but this only made him delusional, even giddy. He remembered when he’d met a young woman at Fitness Plus. Side by side on the treadmill, they’d chatted and laughed. Coyle had asked her out afterward. At the restaurant—one of Garner’s nicest, prime rib the specialty—he’d swallowed water wrong and got the hiccups. He’d gone to the restroom and, in a desperate attempt to rid himself of the spasms, held his breath for as long as he could.
And promptly passed out in the stall.
Quite the first date . . .
Coyle found himself laughing out loud at the memory.
He said to himself, Don’t be an idiot. Laughing uses air.
Keep . . . digging.
Was this really that psycho he’d read about in Maryland, the Gravedigger? His name, the crime he’d committed seemed like the stuff of a horror movie or Stephen King novel. Why go to all the trouble to kidnap me and then leave clues? Since this was the second time the man had struck, Coyle knew he’d been selected by coincidence. No better reason than that. Dying for a cause or for a reason like being a witness to a crime, well, tragic as that may be, it was better than dying for no reason.
The headline would read: “Body of Random Victim Found.”
Okay, enough. Get this body out of here!
After ten minutes, refreshed by a hit of the sour oxygen from the garden hose, he swung particularly hard and knocked the brick clean through to the other chamber.
Light filtered in—very dim, but because his eyes were so unaccustomed, he was nearly blinded. Air flowed in too. It stank of mildew and fuel oil but it was a blessed relief.
He rested for a moment, forehead against the brick, mouth open, inhaling deeply. Then, energized by the thought that freedom was within grasp, he began the demolition once more.
8
For an hour or so, Fitz wandered the kidnapping scene and interviewed anyone who would talk to him—mostly deputies he knew from his crime beat in Fairview. They didn’t provide much new information. He did, however, get one federal agent, speaking off the record, to say that the FBI’s behavioral experts had yet to come up with a profile for the Gravedigger. “On these facts, as presented, this individual does not fall into any of the generally recognized categories of serial perpetrators.”
Fitz loved cop-speak.
He then returned to the office to write up the piece. He hunt-and-pecked the twelve-hundred-word story and sent it to Gerry Bradford, who’d forward it to the managing editor. From there the story and the cuts (the photos were not bad) would go to the copyeditor for final edits, layout and writing the heds and cutline under the pictures.
No goddamn algorithms involved.
The copyeditor didn’t need to send Fitz the heds for approval but did this time.
“Gravedigger” Kidnaps Second Victim in Garner
Insurance Manager Abducted on Hawthorne Road
Clue Left at Scene Holds Answer to Victim’s Whereabouts
Fitz scanned the heds. The top line seemed to indicate that the perp had kidnapped two victims in Garner. He made the correction and sent it back:
“Gravedigger” Kidnaps Second Victim, in Garner
The comma meant that he’d taken a second victim, who happened to live in Garner, while the first was kidnapped somewhere else.
How Fitz loved the rules of grammar and punctuation and syntax. They were to him like pets, companions. Fitz thought of the dogs—the cairn terriers that he and Jen had for years. (He’d quietly slipped their collars into her coffin at the funeral home viewing.)
Out of his hands now, the piece made its way to production for printing and to online for posting.
Fitz gave it a few minutes, then turned to his computer and called up the ExaminerOnline. He hit Control-R to refresh the page. He was loaded for bear, to use a cliché he would never allow in his writing. To his surprise, his story appeared right up front. No influencers, no celebs. A few pop-ups but, in truth, he couldn’t complain about that; journalism had always relied on advertising for survival. Reader subscription revenue was never enough.
He was about to log off, but changed his mind. He scrolled through blogs and stories and posts. He reached into his lower desk drawer, foun
d the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, poured himself some and tossed it down. Scanning the stories. Reading, sometimes quickly, sometimes in depth.
OOMC . . .
He stood up and wandered from the old part of the editorial floor to the new. Dottie Wyandotte was at her computer. She worked nearly as many hours as he did. His coughing fit startled her.
“Sorry,” he said.
She lifted a no-worries hand.
“I saw my story. Where it ran in the online. You overrode the algorithm?”
“The software wanted a banner on the front page, linking to page two. I thought the whole article should be above the fold.”
Fitz was surprised she’d used a term from traditional publishing—it meant the top half of the front page, where a story would be seen when the newspaper, folded in half, sat on the newsstand. The most important stories in any newspaper appeared above the fold.
“Thanks.”
“I had to move your other stories down,” she said. “The governor’s profile and the guardrails on Route 29.”
“Not a problem. Serial killers take priority.”
The young woman lifted a palm at this truism. She had a tattoo of Chinese characters on two fingers. Tiny, perfect letters. What did they mean?
Fitz said, “Have a question.”
“Hm?”
“The sidebar?” Fitz had written a short, boxed article to accompany the main one. It included the Gravedigger’s limerick and a request for readers to try to decipher it.
She glanced at the lower part of the screen. “That. Yes.”
“Can you get it to other places?”
“Places?”
“Other, I don’t know . . .” He coughed. Did the lozenge thing. He waved at her computer, irritated that he didn’t know the lingo. “Other sites, feeds, platforms . . . whatever they’re called. I want as many people as possible to see it. Not just us, not just CNN, Fox, the traditional media.”
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