Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  I backpedaled fast. “Probably a domestic. Jilted lover, somebody cheating, the usual.”

  “Ordinary murder, huh?” Kavanaugh grimaced. The setting sun through the trees made her teeth orange, and the air was heavy with October mist.

  “Sure. We get them here in Sycamore Shade, same as the big city.”

  “I noticed. Lots of other stuff, too. I flipped through the reports down at the station.”

  “A rash, for sure. Plus we’re doing a lot more investigative reporting, so from the outside, it looks like there’s something in the water and our people are going bonkers.” I was freezing but didn’t want to appear wimpier than her, so I left my jacket open. I turned and watch a couple of cops circling the perimeter.

  “This reporter of yours. Moretz. He’s got a lot of hot clips.”

  “With good editorial direction, reporters really have an opportunity to shine,” I said, a line I’d heard in journalism school that sounded like I was patting myself on the back.

  “You guys are great with your chili cook-offs down at the volunteer fire department, but just stay out of the way when the big stuff hits, okay?”

  “Moretz is as good as anyone at the News & Observer,” I said. “Just because we’re a tri-weekly doesn’t mean we’re something for the puppy to pee on.”

  Kavanaugh laughed, sounding like a barking seal. I let my anger simmer a little. If I wasted time on a pissing match, I might miss something we could use in the follow-up.

  Luckily, one of the detectives came toward us, ducking under the crime tape. The detectives on the Pickett County force wore uniforms, unlike on the television shows, though the SBI agents wore plain clothes. Kavanaugh rushed toward him with surprising grace, another bottom feeder at the news trough.

  “Anything new?” she asked.

  The detective shrugged. “Sheriff will issue a statement once we figure out jurisdiction.”

  “Did you find the murder weapon?”

  “No.”

  “Ruling on cause of death?”

  Kavanaugh was spitting out questions faster than I could write down the detective’s responses. The detective shook his head. “You’ll have to wait for the report.”

  “So the county is handling it?” I said.

  “It’s complicated,” the detective said. “State has a conservation easement on the property but technically it belongs to the county.”

  “Which means we’ll be getting stonewalled by at least two agencies,” Kavanaugh said.

  The detective grinned and gave a shrug of helplessness. He was smart enough to shut up, just like most cops. It was a wonder they ever solved any crime, much less a big one.

  They’d come to treat the press as adversaries, giving only the minimum required by public-records law. The game had been going on for centuries. Personally, I blame Gutenberg.

  For every person who believed in the free flow of information, there was another person who feared information. And some pundits felt controlling information would be the next step in creating a totalitarian world government.

  That was too big for me to wrap my head around. All I needed was enough to make it look like the Picayune was doing its job.

  “Did you confiscate the paddle as evidence?” Kavanaugh said, seemingly without moving her lips.

  “What paddle?” the cop answered.

  “The murder weapon.”

  The cop glanced behind me, looking for a higher-ranking officer. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

  Kavanaugh scratched in her notebook with a pencil. I could see the angle. Mention the paddle and let the reader make the logical leap.

  I wasn’t about to be left out. “A canoe would normally have two paddles, wouldn’t it, Lt. Mathis?” I said, reading the brass pin on his chest.

  Mathis frowned at me, “No comment” written in the hard, cold lines of his face. Kavanaugh didn’t have an ounce of feminine sparkle, but apparently I was even less worthy of a response.

  “We gave your reporter all we had,” the cop said.

  “We can help if you give us a description of any vehicles or persons of interest.” I looked at Kavanaugh, smirking a little at the one advantage we held over the big papers.

  “Check with the sheriff. We’re done here.”

  As he wandered back to the crime scene, oblivious of any evidence he might be grinding into the mud and leaves, Kavanaugh finished her notes.

  “Guess we’ll have to wait for the official report, huh?” I said, trying to be friendly.

  “Yeah, right,” she grunted.

  Yeah, right. She had a pencil. I had Moretz.

  5.

  Sycamore Shade was buzzing about the latest murder. Our publisher upped the run by an extra thousand copies, and they flew off the racks. The network news crews came up a day late, but all they got was boring B-roll of the lake and a couple of people-on-the-street interviews, the typical shocked reactions of people who always expected the worst but still managed genuine surprise when it occurred.

  Kavanaugh filed twelve inches in the News & Observer, with little more than name, rank, and serial number, though the paddle was a nice touch. It didn’t take much imagination to picture a serene canoe ride turned deadly.

  But so far nobody had worked a suspect into the picture, although popular opinion clearly favored a love triangle gone bad.

  While the sheriff issued his standard “Ongoing investigation” blather, Moretz had worked behind the scenes to get an exclusive interview with the dead woman’s sister. Somehow he’d even talked her into a photo where she sat on a sofa, clutching snotty tissues and a framed portrait of the victim. Front-page gold.

  After the follow-up paper hit the street, I IM’ed Moretz and asked him to come by the office. Even though his cubicle was next door, I had to pretend to be cutting edge and not just yell for him. That’s one of the challenges of the newspaper business, embracing technology while pretending tradition is so important.

  He poked his head in, impatient. “Yeah, Chief?”

  “You’ve only been in the area a couple of months, and you’re getting all these locals to trust you. Whatever you got, you better bottle it and sell it to journalism schools.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  I slapped the fresh edition on my desk. “This is better than a job.”

  “All I did was write down what happened and what people said. The credit goes to the murderer.”

  I looked at him with narrowed eyes. Journalists had little room for sentimentality, but we also pretended to care about our public. We didn’t show any more callousness than was necessary.

  “I know we’d all rather publish happy endings,” I said. “But we didn’t create human nature.”

  His dark eyes seemed to absorb the fluorescent lights of my office and the room grew a shade darker. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn the temperature fell by several degrees. “If we could just tell the story of the human heart, I think we’d all be better off.”

  I chuckled, but it was strained. “Yeah. Every journalist is a novelist waiting to happen, right?”

  “I hear what you’re saying. Give the public what they want.”

  “Yeah.” His grammar was technically incorrect, because it should have been “what it wants,” but his face was so blank and weird I didn’t dare correct him, even in jest.

  “They wanted murder and they got it.” Monotone.

  “Nice timing,” I said. “You show up and suddenly we get a crime spree.”

  He approached my desk but didn’t sit in the little interrogation chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. You’re scooping everybody—Frank Comstock at the radio station, reporters from the dailies, even the local gossip bloggers.”

  I lowered my voice, though the newsroom was empty except for a few press operators banging around on the machinery in the back. “I think this stuff’s been going on all along, but nobody’s ever reported it.”

  Moretz rec
overed a little and almost smiled. “Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it really fall?”

  “Something like that. Or the sound of one hand clapping.”

  He squinted. “You lost me.”

  “You’ve been pushing it hard, John. Why don’t you take a day off?”

  “News never sleeps. Besides, I’m still on employee probation.”

  “Don’t worry about the paperwork. I’ll move your hours around.”

  Our human-services director had taken passive aggression to an art form, to the point where everyone was afraid to speak to her, much less ask about benefits, retirement funds, or how many sick days we had left. We just filled out all the proper forms and made sure everything looked good on paper, then went ahead and did whatever worked best for the team.

  I wasn’t that lenient with the other reporters, whom I barely noticed these days. I was hoping Moretz’s performance would inspire them to mediocrity if not greatness, but apparently they’d been all too happy to take a back seat and slack off even more.

  “I can’t afford to take time off,” Moretz said.

  “You’ll be paid. You’re on salary anyway.” Reporters sign special contracts acknowledging they might have to work crazy hours because of the nature of the job. Plus, contract workers are incredibly easy to terminate.

  “It’s not the money. It’s this murder case. I think the cops are keeping something from us.”

  “We do what we can do as the Fourth Estate. We’re making sure our public officials are serving the public.”

  “That’s what doesn’t pass the smell test. A murderer loose in this little community, and we seem to know more about it than anybody, including the police.”

  “Cops may look dumb, but they have a ton of resources. Sure, they hardly ever solve a breaking and entering, but once a case hits the front page, they make an arrest or else.”

  The police scanner in the newsroom squawked and Moretz cocked an ear, hungry for an emergency. The static-filled stream of English interrupted by numeric code revealed the cops were 10-20ing for a late lunch at Aunt Annie’s, a greasy spoon where it was still okay to flirt with the waitresses and run a tab if you were a regular. Moretz deflated a little at the lack of crime, like a junkie watching the empty needle pull away.

  “Okay,” Moretz said. “I’ll work from home. I have a few calls to make, anyway.”

  He paused at the door. “But text me if anything develops.”

  “Sure,” I said, an odd sense of relief washing over me. I had the feeling that if I followed him out of the parking lot, he would dissipate once he left the property, as if he only existed when he was chasing a story.

  The phone rang, my direct line, which meant the caller was one of the Big Fish. “Hello, this is Howard,” I said in the guarded voice that most people initially took as a recording.

  “Sheriff Hardison,” came the equally guarded reply.

  “Hello, Sheriff, how can I help you?”

  “This story of yours that just ran in the paper.”

  I glanced at the edition splayed across my desk: the heartbroken sister, the 40-point headline No Leads Yet In Murder, and a thumbnail mug of Hardison just to remind everyone who was in charge of the mess. “Yes, sir?”

  “That reporter of yours put in about how the sister told about the victim’s boyfriend. Things were said we hadn’t been told about.”

  “According to the story, Jennings wasn’t a boyfriend, just a guy she’d dated a few times in the summer.”

  “Same difference. Any man sniffing around a sweet young thing that turns up dead is a person of interest.”

  I hated the phrase “person of interest.” It had been created to give the government permission to hassle people without the formality of calling them “suspects.” But it wasn’t the time, place, or opponent for fighting that particular battle. I borrowed a phrase from Moretz. “My reporter just wrote down what she said.”

  “That’s the problem. She never bothered mentioning such a boyfriend to us when we interviewed her. Makes us look like a bunch of dumb-hick ‘Walking Tall’ wannabees.”

  “Sheriff, Moretz invited you to go on the record with any comments. And you have my direct number.”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  The sheriff paused and it sounded like he was spitting smokeless tobacco. “The public might rest easier knowing there’s a suspect sitting in my jail.”

  “But you don’t want just any old suspect, do you? You want the right one.”

  “Howard, you and this Moretz wouldn’t be holding anything out on me, would you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your reporter seems a step ahead of my detectives on all this.”

  I grinned to myself. “We do what we do.”

  “Just don’t be playing no games. I’d hate to have to come down and search your building after receiving an anonymous tip. No telling what we might find.”

  “Is that a threat, Sheriff?”

  “Nah, consider it an anonymous news tip.” He rang off.

  So the sheriff was reading our paper along with everyone else. Maybe it was time to ask the publisher if we could move to a daily. It all depended on whether he’d paid cash for the Porsche.

  6.

  It was the second victim that spawned the nickname “The Rebel Clipper.”

  A couple of weeks had passed, and police efforts in the first murder had shifted to the missing, mysterious boyfriend. We did our due diligence, tracked down the guy’s name and a mug shot, no criminal record, just another college grad in between jobs and pursuing other opportunities in the wonderful new economy.

  I didn’t grumble too much about running his mug as a person of interest, since Moretz had other crime news crammed around it. The break-ins were causing a restless populace, and the sheriff had arrested a couple of Mohawk-wearing skater punks and charged them. Conveniently for him, they were minors and their names couldn’t be released.

  Moretz wasn’t in the office when the scanner announced a body had been discovered, possible homicide. I texted him and he buzzed back that he was already on the scene. Of course.

  This victim was also a woman, a little older, mid-thirties. She was found sitting in her car behind the county health department, head pitched forward over the steering wheel. Her scarf had been tightly wrapped around her neck, but otherwise she was unharmed.

  Except for being dead, of course.

  Her husband had reported her missing after midnight, according to Moretz’s article. A housewife, no kids. I was glad about the “kids” part, even though we could have squeezed some column inches about the grief counselors swarming into a local school and protecting children from the hard realities of life.

  “Do we want to put in the part about the clippers?” Moretz asked, as we proofed the story.

  “Clippers?”

  “Found at the scene. A little pair of nail clippers with a Rebel flag etched in the handle.”

  “Do you think it’s significant?”

  “Hardison asked me to keep it off the record. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Hmmm. Probably nothing. Maybe this time we throw a bone to the sheriff to keep him from growling.”

  “You think it means something? Some sort of symbolism?”

  I waved my hand. “If they get fingerprints, maybe. I don’t think a killer is going to sit around pruning a corpse’s fingernails to protest Northern aggression. ‘The Rebel Clipper’ isn’t in the same league with the Bind Torture Kill guy or the Green River Killer.”

  “Might make a more interesting story, though.” Moretz repeated the phrase aloud. “‘The Rebel Clipper.’ Has a ring to it.”

  “Yeah, like Joe DiMaggio was ‘The Yankee Clipper’ in baseball. But we don’t know if this is the same killer and we just promised the sheriff we’d sit on that little detail.”

  “Since when has a journalist ever kept a promise when it stood in the
way of a story?”

  “Good point. If nothing breaks, we’ll run with it as Friday’s lead. We’ve got three hours before press time. Get on the phone to some retired FBI types for a quote.”

  7.

  The sheriff wasn’t too happy with the story, but it helped him out in one way. The SBI sent a couple more agents in, which allowed the sheriff to deflect some of the blame for the unsolved murders. More passive voice.

  “Progress has been made, but the state boys asked me to keep a lid on it,” he said at his press conference. “Leads have been pursued, but that’s about all I can say.”

  Seven newspapers were represented in the little gray-walled conference room in the courthouse basement. Moretz was there for the Picayune, of course, sitting up front with his laptop, and I’d sent Fitz with her camera for the obligatory official-at-the-podium shot.

  Kavanaugh was on hand with her stub of a pencil scratching at her notebook, glowering at me for coming up with the Rebel Clipper. I figured there was a rule that a serial killer ought to be named by a local, not by somebody who just wandered into town for a cheap thrill.

  Two of the network affiliates had news teams on hand, and those guys like to take over a room, arranging chairs, setting up lights, and sticking cameras in front of print reporters, whom they regarded as only slightly above movie bloggers on the media hierarchy.

  Three radio stations had parked microphones on the table in front of the sheriff, and he looked at them occasionally as if they were about to spray water at him. Hardison was clearly uncomfortable with all the attention, chewing on the edge of his Styrofoam coffee cup and at one point letting a white pebble fall from his lips.

  “Sheriff,” Kavanaugh shouted as he rose to leave.

  He blinked as if not realizing someone might actually ask a question at a press conference. “Huh?”

  “The Rebel Clipper. Do you think it’s some sort of political statement?”

  “What, like a terrorist or something?”

  “A fingernail clipper is one thing, but a Rebel flag is still controversial.”

  “Murder is controversial,” the sheriff said. Nice quote.