The Last Journalist

by A. C. Fuller

  The man on the phone told Shannon he had information that would take the CIA-Burnside story to a whole new level, and that he had to work downtown that day, so they should meet at the entryway to the tour. Assuming this was a lie, Shannon had decided to make herself bait.

  The entryway was a walkway that sloped down and was blocked off with a metal gate between 5 PM and 9 AM. The streets weren't crowded, but they weren't deserted, either.

  "Remember," I said. "Keep your back to the gate so you can be on the lookout. We need to get a photo before he gets close enough to do anything." The bet was, assuming her source was the killer, he'd need to get close to do anything. Unless he was perched in one of the surrounding high-rises with a rifle, he'd try to approach her on the street and shoot from close range, then flee. Anything else would be too risky.

  Through the camera, I scanned the block, up past a bank and a coffeeshop, then back past Shannon and past a closed bar. Nothing.

  Camera back on Shannon, I said, "Looks pretty dead around here. A couple people in the coffeeshop, but not our guy. At least I don't think so."

  "Shut up, Alex. I'm trying to focus." She looked left and right, then shot her head back to the left. "What's that?"

  I followed her gaze with the camera. The auto-focus took a second to get the man, who walked slowly, a newspaper under his arm, up the block toward Shannon. He wore a black cowboy hat that, while not totally out of place in Seattle, was incongruous with his sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt. "Man, white, forties or fifties. Newspaper under his arm. Could be our guy."

  "Neck mark?"

  "Can't see. He's wearing a hooded sweatshirt."

  He stopped to look into the window of a fancy chocolatier, holding his hand up to the glass. I snapped a few photos, trying to lock in on his face. The sweatshirt was pulled up too far to see if he had the mark on his neck, which is exactly what the killer would do since we'd published the story about it.

  Oddly, the man took out his phone and started snapping pictures of the chocolates displayed in the window. "I don't think this is our guy." I tilted my head toward the phone while keeping the lens trained on the man. "He's either a tourist or maybe he's on acid or something."

  I watched for another few seconds. The man put the phone back in his sweatshirt, then turned on his heels and headed back in the direction he'd come. I snapped photos the whole time, hoping to get a picture of his upper neck or cheekbone.

  "I don't think that was him." I moved the camera slowly up the block back to Shannon's spot. "He was—"

  Shannon was gone. Her red umbrella lay on the ground exactly where she'd been standing not more than a minute ago. "Shannon?" There was nothing. No answer. "Shannon!" I screamed. "Say something."

  I let the camera fall and frantically scanned up and down the block. A man in a gray suit walked briskly into the coffeeshop, talking on his cellphone. A young woman fumbled with a set of keys at the bank's front door, likely the first worker to arrive for the day.

  I checked the cars. A couple blocks away, a black van pulled out of a spot under a tree and made a u-turn. I picked up the camera and trained it on the license plate to snap a photo. How long had I been staring at the man in the cowboy hat? Thirty seconds? A minute? There was no way they could be as far away as that van. At least, I didn't think so.

  The street now felt deserted. A ghost town. Shannon had disappeared.

  Grabbing my cellphone and the camera, I bolted from the car and sprinted toward the spot where Shannon had been standing. I stopped at the umbrella, then spun to look down into the dark, descending entryway that led underground. No, no, no. The gate was open. It had been unlocked from the inside.

  Shannon had been pulled into a winding maze of desolation more than a century old.

  My first instinct was to call the cops, but that lasted only a second. My phone wouldn't work when I entered the underground, and I had to go in after her.

  Every second mattered.

  I raced down the ramp, skidding to a stop at the bottom after about thirty feet. I was faced with a choice. The passage veered left and right. On the tour, we'd gone left, winding a few blocks through the subterranean passages that were once the central roadways and first-floor storefronts of old Seattle. We'd seen a saloon and the busted entryway of an old hotel as the guides told us stories of the city's colorful and sometimes scandalous past. I figured whoever grabbed Shannon would have thought this through well enough to choose a direction that had an escape route. But I couldn't remember if the left passage did.

  "Shannon!" I screamed as loud as I could.

  I stood perfectly still as my shout echoed down the tunnel. I pulled out my cell and turned on the flashlight, then took off down the right tunnel, crouching to avoid hitting my head on the low-hanging tunnel ceiling. It was almost pitch black except for the three feet in front of me, dimly lit by my phone's flashlight.

  After only fifty feet, the tunnel opened into what looked like it had once been an underground square. An eerie gray light crept through a patch of glass blocks that made up the ceiling, and I remembered the blocks from Pioneer Square, where you can stand on them and look down.

  "Shannon!"

  A trickle of water gurgled above me. A horn blared at street level. I looked at the arched doorways along the wall to my right. Most were bricked up. Some weren't. In the cone of light from my phone, all were full of shadows, and I waited for a shape to lunge at me, or for the flash of a gunshot against the darkness.

  Neither came.

  "Shannon!"

  I heard a voice, far away. Had it come from the tunnel or from aboveground?

  My heart thumped and I took deep breaths to quiet it. Every time I moved my phone, the shadows shifted, and always looked for an instant like they were coming for me.

  "Shannon?"

  I heard the voice again. Still faint, but louder this time. "Aleeeeeeex."

  It was Shannon. Behind me.

  I swiveled and dashed back in the direction I'd come, through the low tunnel and into the main entryway. Shannon was there, her face matted with sweaty dust, her neck bleeding.

  I stopped about a foot from her. "What happened?"

  "Shut up and follow me."

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me back up the ramp, past her umbrella toward the car. "What the hell is happening?"

  I tried to keep up with Shannon, who was in a full sprint, but I fell behind. "Give me the camera," she shouted back to me.

  She slowed her pace slightly as I swung the camera off my neck and handed it to her like a sprinter handing the baton to a fresh pair of legs at the end of a relay race. Camera in hand, she bolted, leaving me way behind. When I reached the car, I stopped, still panting, my side aching.

  Yet again I remembered the young reporter I used to be, but this time I thought of all the beach running I did back then, and how this kind of chase wouldn't have exhausted me. Shannon kept going, entering Pioneer Square. She passed a row of benches by a water fountain, then crouched on one knee. What the hell was she doing?

  I walked towards her at a steady pace.

  Deftly, she swung the camera around and trained it on...what? I tried to follow the line, but it looked like she pointed at nothing. At an empty space in the park.

  Then a figure emerged from the ground. A man of medium build. He was maybe a hundred yards from me, with Shannon crouched on one knee between us. His back was to us, but I knew it was our guy.

  He jogged a few paces, then I heard Shannon call, "Hey! I'm right here."

  He turned and I saw a nondescript white face. I couldn't see whether he had the neck mark. I couldn't see his eye color or make out any distinguishing marks. In another second, he turned away and disappeared around a building.

  I hadn't gotten a good look at him, but Shannon had.

  Chapter 26

  "Did you get his face, the marks on his neck?" I asked as Shannon knocked back a double espresso in a single gulp.

  "I could barely see. Sweat made the dir
t drip into my eyes as I was shooting the picture. I don't even know if it was in focus."

  After we'd stepped into the coffeeshop, I'd called 9-1-1 first. They assured me they'd send out a car to take our statements and put out a description of the man who'd grabbed Shannon. But they were receiving hundreds of tips each day claiming to know who the killer was, so we weren't convinced they'd take us seriously, even after I'd told them we had a photo of the killer, which I wasn't yet sure we had.

  On a whim, I called Officer Sanchez, hoping she might feel an obligation to take us seriously. She was off duty and in the area. She agreed to meet up.

  Shannon had a manic look on her face, half intensity, half panic. I almost asked her about what had happened underground, but thought better of it. That could wait.

  She said, "What the hell were you doing taking so many pictures of that weirdo in the cowboy hat looking at chocolate?"

  "I'm sorry. I thought it was the guy and—"

  "Wait, I'm at the ones I took."

  I swung my chair to her side of the table as she scanned through the photos. The camera was a high-end digital I'd borrowed from The Barker on the way to the meet-up. I'd never used it before, but it had a massive memory card and a fast shutter, the sort that can take dozens of photos a second.

  The first twenty or so were blurry, and only caught the killer's back. The next ten, probably all taken within a second, caught a side view of his face, but were still too blurry to see anything useful. Shannon zoomed in on one frame, thinking she could see his neck mark, but it turned out to be a shadow.

  "At least you can describe him to police, right? I mean, you saw him even if we don't have a good picture."

  "A picture is much better though." She passed another ten or twenty useless images. "Wait. Here's something. My hands were shaking and I kinda jolted the camera as I yelled for him. I was hoping he'd turn and he did."

  The next series of images were direct hits on his face, but too blurry to make out anything clearly.

  "Did you have the autofocus on?" I asked.

  "I had it on whatever settings you had it on, jackass. I told you, my damn hands were shaking all over the place."

  "I'm still impressed with how quickly you acted."

  She continued scrolling slowly through the facial shots, which seemed to be getting clearer and clearer as she went.

  On one I could make out his nose, round and smaller than average. Then I saw his eyes, brown. A few pictures later, Shannon stopped. "Hot damn!"

  The image was crystal clear. The man looked over his shoulder, eyes focused, black t-shirt just low enough on his neck to reveal a wine-colored birthmark. Carlson's description had been spot on. Average height, average weight, round face. For a long moment, Shannon and I stared at each other, silently asking each other the question we hadn't fully considered. What do we do now?

  When Officer Sanchez appeared in the doorway, Shannon swung the camera around and put it on her lap under the table. She didn't know Officer Sanchez, didn't trust her. That was going to make this a difficult conversation because, though I wanted Shannon to lead the way, she wouldn't be able to lead Sanchez far if she didn't want to tell her about the picture.

  "Shannon, this is Officer Sanchez. She was one of the two officers who took me to identify the body."

  "Sounds like you had a run-in." Sanchez pulled up a chair across from Shannon and me. "Alex said something about the underground?"

  On the phone, I hadn't mentioned that the whole thing had been a setup.

  "That's right," Shannon said. "The man who's been killing journalists called me, offering information on a story, like he did with the other victims."

  Sanchez looked from me to Shannon in disbelief. "And you went?"

  "We were fairly sure it was the killer," I said. "Remember he tried to blow up my office yesterday."

  "We don't know that," Sanchez said, "we're—"

  "We know it," Shannon said. "Anyway, we took precautions. We knew it was the killer and—"

  Shannon's hand moved subtly under the table. She'd gotten to the point at which she had to mention the photo, and she was hesitant.

  Sanchez was smart. She could tell something wasn't making sense. "And your plan was…"

  "Shannon," I said. "Officer Sanchez is the one who gave me Gunstott's address. She didn't have to and frankly, I kinda wish she hadn't. But you can trust her." I turned to Sanchez. "If we tell you something, can you for one minute just be a friend and tell us what to do, setting aside any allegiance to the department?"

  "No," she said immediately. "I can't stop being a cop. Not even for a second. But I will admit the department is overwhelmed right now, racing to catch up with a thousand calls a day on this and getting pressure from the governor."

  "So?" Shannon asked.

  "So I think I know where this is headed anyway and I'd implore you let the police handle this before you publish a story or whatever."

  "We have First Amendment rights to publish whatever we want," Shannon said.

  "You do, but you also have a civic duty, an obligation to the citizens of Seattle not to jeopardize their safety and—"

  Shannon yanked the camera up from under the table and set it with a thud in front of Sanchez, screen still displaying the perfect image of the man's face.

  Sanchez zoomed in on a few sections of the photo, studied it, then set the camera down, shaking her head. "Damn."

  "Damn what?" I asked.

  "Why didn't you contact us before you met with him? We could have—"

  Shannon swiped up the camera. "We did!"

  "She's right," I said. "We tried and they said—"

  "They were too busy." Shannon finished my thought.

  "Why didn't you call me?" Sanchez asked.

  "Damnit!" Shannon said. "In thirty seconds I'm going to walk out of here. Alex said he trusted you to give an opinion. What should we do next?"

  "Wait here and give statements to the responding officers. Give them the photograph. Let them handle it. They'll determine whether to release the photograph to the media, and if so, when and how. What you're missing here is that the interaction with you, especially if he knows there's a photo, could trigger him in some way. We have psychological profilers who—"

  "Thanks," Shannon said sarcastically. "We get it."

  "Before you run off and publish something for your personal benefit—"

  "Personal benefit?" Shannon's elbows were on the table now. She leaned in like she was getting ready to spit in Sanchez's face.

  "Yes," Sanchez said cooly. "Personal benefit like stealing evidence from a crime scene."

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Shannon sat back suddenly, then glared at me.

  Sanchez watched us. "Don't look at him, Shannon. Alex didn't tell me."

  For the first time since I'd met her, Shannon was speechless. I could see the possibilities racing through her mind. If I didn't tell them about the notebook, how'd they know? Maybe a witness had seen her, maybe there had been security cameras on the side of the building where Burnside had died, and maybe Shannon's stories about Burnside and the CIA had confirmed it.

  It didn't matter. Shannon was in deep trouble, and she knew it.

  "The look on your face tells me I'm right," Sanchez continued. "Maybe you missed this in journalist school when you learned about the First Amendment, so I'll explain how it works. You're right that we can't stop you from publishing something. And we can't prosecute you for using information you have in a story. But when that information is stolen off the bloody corpse just minutes after his death, oh yeah, we can investigate you for that. And you can be damn sure we are!"

  I thought Shannon was going to run out of the coffeeshop with the camera, but instead she went to the counter and ordered another espresso. "How long does it usually take responding officers after a 9-1-1 call?" I asked Sanchez.

  "Ten minutes, but things are weird right now. Officers are spread thin chasing leads all over the city."
r />   Shannon returned to the table but didn't sit. She caught my eye as she sipped her espresso. Her look told me she was trying to communicate something in silence. If so, it was something I didn't understand.

  She smiled apologetically, then casually walked out without another word.

  Chapter 27

  The next time I saw Shannon was on the morning news.

  After she'd walked out, I waited for the police, who showed up five minutes later. I gave them my statement, made up an excuse for Shannon—"…she left because she was afraid the killer might return…I'm sure she'll come give a statement later…"—then headed to The Barker.

  A memorial for Carlson had been set up around his spot in the bushes—flowers and cards were strewn over his bedding. I lit a candle for him, then headed up to our floor and found Mia who, with Bird still in the hospital, had taken control of the office. Roughly half of our staff was there, working in the areas not cordoned off with police tape.

  "How is everyone?" I asked. "What's the temperature of the office?"

  "We're all shaken up," Mia said. "About twenty people are taking a personal day. Chloe from tech support took Carlson’s dog home with her. He was out front of the building. I've arranged a carpool to go see Bird in the hospital around lunchtime. That's when the doctors said he'd be most alert."

  "Good. And the…" I trailed off, gesturing at shards of a blown up desk and a small crater in the floor.

  "Building repair is on it. Police were here earlier and they said they got everything they needed. Photos and samples or whatever."

  "Let's leave it until we catch this guy."

  "Speaking of, where's Shannon?" Mia asked.

  That's when I saw her. A channel on one of the flat-screens on the wall was just heading into its morning news program. Like every station in town, the serial killer was the main story. This one led with a picture of Shannon and a red "Breaking News" banner.

  Mia unmuted the TV as the report began.

  Brooke Haberman, a young woman with straight black hair, began the report. "New this morning, KRON has obtained an exclusive photograph of the man who may be the journalist killer. And right now, we have the woman who took the photograph, who says she was kidnapped by the man in downtown Seattle only hours ago."