Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  Even then, Kavanaugh wrote, investigators had nothing really linking Moretz to the two crimes besides coincidental timing. Then came the third victim, and practically everyone in town was under suspicion. The coverage implied that Sycamore Shade was populated by a bunch of inbred hillbillies who were only barely literate, and Moretz would have never gained a readership without a few screaming headlines.

  Kavanaugh’s article didn’t mention me, though she’d asked me a few questions for deep background. Apparently Hardison had played it close to the vest and hadn’t told her who had tipped the deputies.

  Technically, detectives would have needed a search warrant, but I reasoned that Moretz’s desk was the newspaper’s property and therefore I had a right to prowl in his top drawer. I’d been looking for scanner codes, I’d told Hardison, when I’d discovered the pair of clippers lurking in a tray full of bent paper clips.

  Hardison didn’t make the arrest, though. He was content at that point to imply Moretz was under a watchful eye. Moretz had been advised not to leave the county until the investigation was complete. Such vague instructions meant nothing, but it made a good wrap for Kavanaugh’s story.

  Moretz was back on duty the next day. I’d been forced to run the wire story Kavanaugh had written, but I also hashed out a little column on “Innocent until proven guilty.”

  No one really put stock in that phrase. Injustice was such a part of the collective experience that I could just as easily have entitled it “Guilty until high-priced lawyers bribe the judge.”

  “What do you want me to write, Chief?” Moretz asked. His desk had been emptied by the cops, but he had a fresh composition book and a few pens in his pocket.

  “We’d better keep you low profile for a while,” I said. “There’s a chili cook-off to benefit the garden club.”

  Moretz grinned. “No chance of any arsenic sliding in with the cumin and garlic powder? With some fingernail clippers spread among the cooking utensils?”

  “A reporter can always dream. But I guarantee you it will be the most widely read puff piece of the year. You’re a celebrity now.”

  “Yeah, a legit person of interest.”

  Of course, Moretz’s previous stories on the murders had become hot property, so much so that the publisher took the unprecedented step of firing the presses back up and printing second runs of each of the issues. Since collectors were ordering multiple copies on the off chance that Moretz got the needle, demand was through the roof.

  Or at least out the back door. Nelson, the head press operator, had been caught loading up a stack in the bed of his pick-up. But times were good, so the publisher laughed it off. Kavanaugh sent me a couple of belittling e-mails, calling our coverage “sloppy” and “yesterday’s fish wrap.”

  I texted her back, saying she was cute when she was channeling Ann Coulter.

  Of course, there was no way Moretz could afford an attorney on a reporter’s salary, and we weren’t about to send the corporate lawyer into the fray. As far as the Picayune and its parent corporation were concerned, Moretz had not in any way acted on behalf of his profession in committing whatever he had or hadn’t committed. And I’m sure the firm billed the company four figures to issue that assessment.

  The publisher asked if I thought we should sideline Moretz until the investigation was complete. His implication was that we might get a black eye in the community for harboring, or at least tolerating, a felon.

  When I pointed out that our circulation had increased 125 percent since Moretz had arrived, which likely meant performance bonuses for the entire staff, he softened a little. Funny how journalistic prudence gives way to the weight of a wheelbarrow full of dollars.

  For his part, Moretz played it cool around the office. Brianna, the front-desk clerk who took phone messages and classified ads, batted her fat, fake eyelashes at him but he didn’t seem to notice.

  I don’t know. Maybe he was homosexual. He never said anything about a wife or kids, and any man who reaches 30 without a track record must have something wrong with him.

  Except me, of course. I’m just fine.

  Baker and Westmoreland got past their jealousy enough to welcome Moretz fully into the fold, even taking him to lunch one day, though they neglected to invite the sports guy. They asked him for tips, and their copy actually got stronger as a result.

  I was almost starting to believe in this “teamwork” stuff.

  Then Kavanaugh gave me a call and accepted that offer for dinner.

  11.

  The lasagna sat heavy on my stomach as I swilled my iced tea. I’d chosen Roman Joe’s, an Italian joint with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and candles with electric teardrop bulbs. Joe was American enough to sell beer and pizza but added a few bucks to your tab because he occasionally waltzed through with an accordion, singing an off-key version of “That’s Amore.”

  Kavanaugh was as cold as the frozen cubes tinkling in my glass. She’d had spaghetti, and a little tomato sauce stuck to her chin.

  “So, you want to talk,” I said.

  “I thought I’d bring this to you first, since we go way back,” she said. She was having her second Bud Light, and she punctuated her sentence with a belch.

  “Yeah. I appreciate the respect.”

  “So, what did your background check on Moretz turn up?”

  “My what?”

  “Check. You looked him up before you hired him, of course.”

  I clacked the cubes in my glass. “Sure.”

  “So you know about the rap sheet.”

  “Everyone deserves a second chance.” I was dying to know what she was talking about. Hardison might have fed her some information under the table.

  “A little bit risky. I mean, I could see letting shoplifting slide, or even a Driving While Impaired. But aggravated assault is pretty serious when you’re expected to earn the public trust.”

  “The past is the past. His clips were solid.”

  “Recent past. He pled down on the charge, got six months’ probation and 200 hours of community service. Didn’t the gap show up on his resume?”

  I didn’t want to admit that he’d put in his hours on a publication serving Medicare recipients. I’d assumed he was on salary, but he must have been working with the threat of jail time over his head.

  “Well, I never did get the full details,” I said.

  Roman Joe came over, smelling of garlic, and asked how our food had been. Kavanaugh said “Swell” and ordered another Bud Light.

  “You’re one of those who never scratches beneath the surface,” she said. “It’s the hallmark of somebody like you.”

  “Somebody like me?”

  “Somebody who gets stuck at a small-town paper. You fight for a couple of years, write editorials criticizing the town council, launch a couple of investigations, but it all comes to nothing. You can’t get any letters to the editor coming in, and the corporate heads don’t have your back. On the tough stories, they sell you down the river to the Chamber of Commerce.”

  “You fight the good fight where you can.” I hope I wasn’t whining.

  “Yeah, but then you get comfortable. The Picayune’s supposed to be a stepping stone, but you didn’t make the break when you should have. After five years in a job like that, you either change careers or settle in. And we know which road you followed.”

  “What’s all this got to do with John Moretz?”

  “Shows how soft you are. If you were on your toes, you would have nailed him for a con man. Instead, you practically roll out the red carpet. And if it turns out he killed these three women, then you have blood on your hands.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t start believing your own press releases. Moretz was only brought in for questioning. He wasn’t even ‘brought.’ He drove himself to the sheriff’s office and walked out clean. If the sheriff had anything, Moretz would be behind bars right now.”

  “Moretz has experience.”

  “Wait, you’re saying he came here jus
t to get away with murder?”

  “No, I think he came here to get a job, blend in, put on a façade of respectability. But a man with a violent streak doesn’t wash it out so easily. Hell, who knows? He might have been a serial killer in California and just skipped out before the trail led to his back door.”

  I had to admit, California was the serial-killer capital of the free world. But Moretz, despite his mysterious, elusive nature, just didn’t give off that vibe. I could sense he was a powder keg when somebody lit his fuse, but he had managed some stressful stories. The Wilbanks pervert case was enough to make anybody crack, but Moretz had turned in his copy with nary a hiccup.

  “That past arrest of his? What did you find out?”

  She grinned around her beer foam. “He broke a man’s arm at work.”

  “Fighting, huh?”

  “Not really. It was his editor at the San Obispo Courier-Times. The editor changed his headline, made his hard-hitting investigative series on the massage industry seem like a lighthearted romantic comedy, and Moretz walked in and swung a laptop at his head. If the editor hadn’t lifted his arm in self-defense, Moretz might have been staring at a murder conviction.”

  The lasagna was like a sack of cement in my guts. “He’s an exemplary employee.”

  “Best cover for a killer. That’s why we always get those neighbor quotes that go ‘I never would have suspected.’”

  “If the cops had anything on him, they wouldn’t have let him walk out of the building. That was just a dog-and-pony show to buy some time.”

  “Is that why you didn’t cover it?”

  It was my turn to smile, though I had to work at it a little. “Circulation is up. Our readers are informed citizens who respect integrity and the principal of innocent until proven guilty. In my opinion, the News & Observer is rolling in the sewer with the National Enquirer. Next you’ll be reporting on Tiger Woods’ idiot love child.”

  “Maybe, but at least none of us are murderers. You know what Hardison told me the SBI told him?”

  “That donuts make you fat and lazy?”

  “This serial killer may be a serial killer, but he’s not following the book. It’s like a killer whose heart’s not in it. He doesn’t take any pride in his work. That clipper thing seems like an afterthought, as if he had to throw in a gimmick to get taken seriously.”

  “There would be other ways to do that. Like, carve your initials, steal panties, or harvest a specific organ. I mean, is he going to sit on Death Row and brag about his fingernail collection?”

  She leaned forward, and I leaned forward as well. The beer was working on her a little, and her face relaxed. The electric candlelight sparkled in her big pupils. “You know something, you’re a smart-ass.”

  I smiled, a little easier this time. “Comes with the territory. Scratch a cynic and you get a disillusioned idealist.”

  She reached out a hand, the one that scrawled pencil notes in her composition book, and touched mine. I couldn’t help but notice her fingernails. They had a little bit of garlic toast crumbs stuck to them, but otherwise they were healthy.

  She curled her fingers into a claw and raked them across the back of my hand, hard enough to leave red trails. “I scratch you and all I see is meat.”

  I caught her hand and gently held it. “You shouldn’t be driving. If you got pulled, I’d have to run your arrest on the front page, with a gorgeous mug shot.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the reporters.”

  “Only the gorgeous ones.”

  Her face got softer. Her eyes got softer. Her hair got softer. It must have been a while for her.

  We went to my place, where some things got softer and other things got harder.

  Things like my life.

  12.

  The call for the arson case came in early the next morning. I was late, being the gentleman that I was, but Moretz was in his cubicle as usual. He’d texted me but I hadn’t turned on my phone, because I hate the sound of beeping when I’m trying to be romantic. But I heard the sirens on the way in and was glad I had a reporter on the job that didn’t require sleep.

  If only I could be lucky enough to keep him out of prison for a while.

  Moretz called me from the scene as I started laying out the obituary page. Obits are one of our staples. When someone dies in a small town, you can count on at least 30 friends and family members picking up a copy to clip out that last public artifact.

  For some reason, Facebook and Twitter hadn’t erased that simple, solemn ritual for most people. In death, we still had the final word—and a corner on the market.

  “Two-story house, fully engaged,” Moretz said.

  I tried not to cheer for the total loss. That seemed like bad form. “Any fatals?”

  “Not so much as a heat rash.”

  “Okay.” If a death had occurred, I’d have been conflicted. Kavanaugh would probably want to write it up for the News & Observer, and her story would hit the street hours before our edition. But she wouldn’t cover a run-of-the-mill fire. I recognized the wisdom in the saying, “Don’t play where you make your hay.”

  ”But we did get a dog,” Moretz said.

  Dog death. Every storyteller since the dawn of time understood that you never killed off the dog. Immolate thousands, wipe out the rain forest, let the human race endure a nuclear holocaust, but never, ever let the dog die. Dean Koontz had subsidized a new head of hair embracing that core principal.

  “We can’t run that,” I said. Which didn’t keep me from plotting the follow-up, the tearful burial scene and the impassioned plea to donate in Fido’s honor to the local animal shelter.

  “You’ll want this one,” Moretz said. “Dog’s trapped inside, one of the firefighters goes up and knocks the door apart with a sledgehammer. Dog comes out yipping and steaming, they hose him down, happily ever after.”

  My pulse rate increased. “You got photos?”

  “That’s why you pay me the big bucks, Chief.”

  The fire was front-page kind of stuff, a vacationing couple who barely got out with their lives. The house was owned by a doctor who recently lost his license because of pill pushing, and word on the street said he was strapped for cash. Naturally, everyone in the community believed he’d torched his own house for the insurance money.

  But we in the newspaper business, unlike the judicial system and the court of public opinion, gave him the benefit of a doubt. Though we liked to hint at guilt whenever it might get people to drop quarters in our little metal boxes.

  An “unsung hero” piece was even better than a murder. It had drama—though we’d have to embellish the firefighter’s risk, because those guys were always treated for smoke inhalation whether they needed it or not—and it had a dog. With any luck, the couple was young and good-looking. And the backstory of the doctor could be dumped into the last paragraph, along with the fire chief’s clichéd comment of “The cause of the fire is under investigation.”

  Heck, Moretz would probably even score a little goodwill with Hardison and the other cops. And we’d get a follow-up or two out of it as we recounted the doctor’s past transgressions and subtly raise a cloud of suspicion.

  “Can you wrap it by deadline?” I asked.

  “If I don’t get arrested before then.”

  “Yeah. Hard to type in handcuffs.”

  “We’re all in handcuffs,” he said. “They’re just invisible most of the time.”

  He rang off with that. Good line.

  I called Kavanaugh to see if she was awake and tell her where the coffee was.

  13.

  Hardison messed up our plans by being competent, detail-oriented, and able to set aside his personal dislike of both Moretz and the media.

  In short, he did the unexpected.

  He brought in a different suspect for questioning. It was the man who had been romantically linked to the first victim of the Rebel Clipper, the one Moretz had broken to the public and Hardison. He had been on the initial sho
rt list of people wanted for questioning, but the second murder had danced the investigation onto a broader stage.

  The man, Grayson Jennings, claimed he learned of the woman’s death and had contacted her family. She had broken up with him a month before the murder, and he’d cleared her off his speed dial and headed for the coast.

  “A sensible explanation,” Hardison said, in a manner that suggested the cover story was a little too sensible.

  The fact that Jennings had returned was a little less sensible. He’d called the sheriff to ask if he could be of any help, and the sheriff was happy to oblige. Kavanaugh must have been tipped, because she had a photo of Jennings being escorted into the office. Moretz, apparently, was now on the sheriff’s “Do not call” list, at least as a reporter.

  Kavanaugh didn’t mention it to me, probably as revenge for freezing her out of the arson story, and our little dalliance cooled almost as fast as it began. When her story broke, we were left with eggs on our faces.

  Actually, I took the hit, as the publisher summoned me into his office and slapped the News & Observer on that maple desk that cost almost as much as my annual salary. I got the message, which of course meant I had to go ride Moretz’s case for getting scooped.

  His desk, which used to be tidy and organized, was now a mess of coffee rings, rumpled stacks of paper, bent paper clips, and scratched-up computer discs. I slid the newspaper onto his keyboard as he was typing.

  “I thought you and she were an item,” Moretz said, looking up from the article with his cold, dark eyes.

  I frowned. A journalist always protects his sources, and I had kept my love life a secret. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, as sharp as Moretz was. He knew a lot more than he put in the paper. “That’s beside the point.”