Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  “I did that comparative list for you,” she continued. “Man, you ought to buy some lottery tickets quick, Nicky. If you did a piece on this morning’s guy too, you’re gonna be five for five. They’re going to start calling you the Grim Reaper Writer.”

  “Five?” Nick said, and then tripped off the names to her from memory. “Chambliss. Crossly. Ferris. And now Michaels.”

  “Pretty good, Nick, for a reporter,” Lori said. “But you forgot Kerner.”

  Nick did not respond. The name had slapped him, hard.

  “Charles Kerner,” Lori said into the silence. “Kerner was the boyfriend of Margaret Abbott, who helped him suffocate her own father while they were robbing him at his little mom-and-pop store for cash to go buy more crack,” she said, obviously reading from some document on the screen of her computer.

  “From the clips it looks like some overzealous prosecutor took Abbott’s twelve-year-old daughter to trial first to get leverage on the adults and the kid got sentenced to life on a felony murder charge. You wrote a piece about how the daughter was just a tag-along in the robbery and that the justice system sacrificed her to get convictions on the other two.”

  Nick remembered the case too well. He had worked the story night and day. The daughter had been raised mostly at home by Abbott, who kept her near her side for company, like a doll or a confidante or maybe just some maternal reason to live. When the girl was ten she’d been sent out to the selling streets to buy cocaine, the adults knowing that even if she did get arrested she’d be a minor and wouldn’t get too busted. It started out as a court story, but Nick couldn’t let the thing go. He’d spent hours with the kid’s older siblings, who had escaped the home. He’d interviewed teachers about the potential the child had and the corner drug sellers about the fear in her eyes when she had to approach them. The resulting stories detailing her upbringing—details which had not been allowed in court—had been pipelined to the appeals court in Atlanta where her conviction was being reconsidered. Her mother and the boyfriend, Kerner, had been sentenced to life.

  “Nick? You still there? ”

  “Sorry, Lori,” Nick said into the cell phone. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, I included a short piece from the Birmingham paper about Kerner being shot in a possible drive-by while he and some other Alabama road gang prisoners were out picking trash along the highway. He’d been transferred up there by DOC in a state swap to put some other convict closer to family in Florida. I’ll print all this stuff out and put it on your desk and get as much as I can on this Michaels guy, alright?” Lori said.

  “Thanks. Yeah, I’m on my way in now.”

  Five, Nick was thinking. Or seven if you include my own wife and daughter. Maybe I am the reaper.

  When he got back into the newsroom, Nick cleared a pile off his desk. Included was a manila office-to-office envelope with Lori’s name written on the most recent line.

  He pulled out the list of sniper-style shootings that she had culled from archives throughout the United States along with the five names that had matched with stories he’d written for the Daily News. From his reporter’s notebook, he took out the Secret Service list of deaths that Hargrave had somehow gotten from agent Fitzgerald. Then he untied the box from Ms. Cotton and tucked everything inside. When he used his fingers to open a space between the letters, he noticed that each letter and card had been stuffed back into its original envelope with the original postal cancellation mark printed over the stamp.

  He was tempted to start pulling them, but what would he be searching for? More names? Some religious poem? Some envelope marked: REDEMPTION? His fingers had pinched a single letter from the box when a voice made him jump.

  “Hey, Nick. How was it out there? Do we have a story or not?”

  Deirdre had left her office bunker and was roaming the newsroom, her nervous energy and aura of supervision making everyone around duck and start clicking at their keyboards. Live by the day’s lineup of stories, die by the lack of same.

  “Yeah, sure,” Nick said, clamping the top back onto the box and shoving it down in the knee space under his desk and then flipping open his notebook for effect. “Let’s see. We got a forty-three-year-old male, supposedly coming in to the parole office up on McNab to check in with his parole officer for their weekly meet, and bam! Gets one in the head just as he’s opening the door.”

  “Nobody else but the ex-con hurt, right?”

  “No, but I did get some good quotes from the woman who was standing in front of him,” Nick said, lowering his voice. “Got the guy’s blood splattered all over her.”

  “We get a picture of that? Tell me we got a picture of that!” Deirdre said, not bothering to hide her enthusiasm.

  “I don’t know. I think you guys dispatched a photographer after I left,” Nick said. But he did know the blood factor might get her off his back for a while.

  “I’ll check,” Deirdre said, but she didn’t leave. Instead she put an elbow on the top of Nick’s partition and set a hip into the side of it like she was going to stay awhile.

  “I was going to have you do a security piece on that State Department visit to the OAS convention, but this is sounding a lot more interesting,” she said. “So what’s the deal? Drive-by? Guy doing some other felon’s old lady?”

  “I can’t say the detectives are that far along yet, Deirdre.”

  “But you got the guy’s background, right?”

  “Sure,” Nick said, again looking at his pad even though he didn’t have to read it. He was just relieved that Deirdre was pulling him off the OAS gig. This was what he needed to be doing.

  “Trace Michaels,” he said, as if he’d finally found the name. “He was in for attempted murder after he set his girlfriend on fire. He’s been out almost eight months according to the research files. Plenty of time to make more enemies, I suppose.”

  Nick told himself he was not really trying to steer Deirdre away from the similarities in the sniper story.

  “But it’s a long-range shooting, right? And it was a large-bore bullet wound, right?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. She wasn’t so stupid.

  “So we have a serial sniper running around the city shooting ex-cons and bad men, right?”

  Deirdre’s language always got tougher as the excitement of a good story got up her nose. After all, she had been a reporter before she joined management.

  She leaned over his partition and lowered her voice. “Nick, do we have some serial killer out there doing a Son of Sam thing to scumbags on the streets? Are you working that angle or what?”

  Nick looked away and flipped through a couple of pages in his notebook like he was searching for an answer.

  “We’ve both been at this game a long time, Deirdre. You never say never. But to tell you the truth, right now I’m not focused on speculation and screaming headlines,” Nick said, getting hot. “I mean, shit, since when does two dead jump to serial killer? Christ, Son of Sam had five shooting scenes and a ballistics match in before they started calling Berkowitz a serial killer.”

  The heads of other reporters and editors started peeking up over their cubicles. Even with Nick’s reputation the tension level of his voice was rising too high for the modern newsroom-as-insurance-office protocols. Nick went silent.

  “Instead I’m looking into any connection between this guy and the one from last week, but as of this minute, I don’t have anything,” he began again, quietly. “Research is running some driver’s license history to see if they ever even lived in the same area. And I’m trying to get the probable-cause affidavits from their prior arrests to see if they were ever listed as running together on any of their earlier crimes.”

  The investigative theory, Nick knew, was to find out if any of the victims had something in common that might be a motive for their killer, and by now Nick and Hargrave were both on that page.

  “Alright, alright. Do what you’re doing, Nick,” Deirdre said and started to walk away, but stopped. “An
d hey, send some of your contact numbers with the Sheriff’s Office over to the national desk so they can assign someone to that OAS security story.”

  Nick nodded and she spun on her heel again, but not all the way around.

  “And hey, why not check the DOC files too. See if these guys ever spent prison time together, you know, for midweek. But not today. Today,” she said, looking at her watch, “we got deadline.”

  As she left, Nick was cursing himself. OK, OK. I didn’t tell her about the other sniper shootings out of our area, or my byline connections with these guys, five now, just like Berkowitz, smart-ass. But you are not the story, Nick. You are not the story. Hargrave had already given him shit about that theory being an ego trip and he sure wasn’t tossing that ammunition to Deirdre.

  He turned back to his computer and started clicking keys. But that was good about the DOC files. Why didn’t I think of that?

  By seven o’clock Nick had finished the Michaels shooting story. He had not been able to track down the girlfriend that the ex-con had set aflame. His contact, a social worker in the hospital where the woman was treated, could only tell him that the burn victim and her daughter had moved out of state. The attorney who prosecuted Michaels would only say things like “What goes around, comes around” that were off the record. The public defender that represented Michaels had moved on to another lawyer job.

  Nick ended up laying it out in simple news style:

  A 43-year-old construction laborer was shot to death outside a Pompano Beach parole office early Monday morning, just as he was entering for a weekly appointment.

  Trace Michaels, who worked part-time with Hardmack Construction, was declared dead at the scene in the 100 block of McNab Road, police said. He was shot once in the head, police said.

  The shooting of Michaels, who had recently served five years in prison for attempted manslaughter after setting his girlfriend aflame during an argument, was the second time in two weeks that an ex-convict has been murdered in Broward County. But sheriff’s detectives investigating the shootings say they have yet to find any evidence linking the two cases.

  Nick had then run out the story with quotes from the office employees at the scene and from Joel Cameron, who had given the basics of the “ongoing investigation” to all the media. While he was constructing the piece he had typed into the file some of the linkages with the lists that Hargrave had given him from the Secret Service agent and his own research from the library but had then deleted the information off his screen. If the only thread in the cases was that he had written extensive stories about the shooting victims, he wasn’t going to go there. A journalist wasn’t supposed to be part of any story, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to go there without a lot more factual evidence.

  Before he wrapped up the piece, he gave Hargrave a final call. He went through the basics of what the next morning’s story would say. Hargrave only listened and gave an occasional grunt of assent, or maybe just of boredom.

  “So what else do you want, Mr. Mullins?”

  “It’s the serial killer thing, Detective. You and I both know the other newspapers and TV are going to start pounding the hell out of that line whether they have any facts or not,” Nick said. “My editors are already on my ass about it.”

  Hargrave again went quiet, deciding something.

  “We’ve got a ballistics match on the bullets used in both Michaels and Ferris,” he finally said. “But that’s not a public fact yet, Mr. Mullins. And I don’t want it to be public yet.”

  Nick had been in on such negotiations before. Official sources and reporters played the game every day.

  “OK. Give me something else,” he said. “Something that’s going to benefit both of us, because you know and I know the stories I’m going to have to write if these names keep matching up.”

  Again silence. But this time Nick knew the detective was being thoughtful instead of uncooperative. They both knew what the accuracy, efficiency and technique of the shooter meant. Unlike the Beltway shooter, this wasn’t some kid in a trunk shooting people for some insane reason. This shooter was a professional, either military- or law-enforcement-trained. Without either one of them naming it, or its purpose, they collaborated on a message in the form of a quote:

  “We will investigate both shootings as we would any illegal killing. The victims’ pasts don’t open up an avenue for them to be gunned down in the streets. That’s not how law enforcement works in a democracy. That’s not how this country operates,” said Broward sheriff’s homicide detective Maurice Hargrave.

  The quote went high in the story.

  “Maurice?” Nick had said on the phone after asking for Hargrave’s full name.

  “Shut up,” the detective had answered.

  Chapter 20

  On the drive home Nick paid little attention to the traffic rules. He was in the passing lane of 1-95 northbound doing well over the sixty-five limit. He had promised his daughter that he would no longer show up from work after her bedtime and that he would no longer be the father who was absent from his family’s dinner table, even if it was just the two of them. And because he missed her. His wife was gone. Lindsay was gone. All Nick had left was this dry, document-chasing, linguistic-game-playing pursuit of the truth that he called work, and Carly. There was no competition. Carly would win hands down, he told himself over and over and over again.

  He skipped up the driveway and walked through the front door, dropping Margaria Cotton’s box of letters on the couch out of sight. Elsa passed him with a basket of laundry and said good evening in a professional manner and her strict avoidance of eye contact screamed that he had fucked up again.

  Carly was at the kitchen table doing homework. Dinner was done. The dishes cleared. Nick fought the mood with a chipper “Hi, sweetheart, whatcha’ doin’?”

  His daughter did not look up. He pulled out the chair next to her and sat. He studied her hair, the hues of blond the sun had put in it, the glisten, just like her mother’s. She used her left hand to pull one long, loose strand and tucked it behind her ear and he still stared, now at the exposed profile.

  “What,” she finally said, without moving her eyes from the page, “are you looking at?”

  “A pretty girl,” he said. He got not a crinkle of response in the corner of her eye or flinch of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

  “One that is trying to get her homework done?” she said instead and the exasperation in her voice was much too mature for a nine-year-old and even though it was a good approximation of a pissed-off adult, it didn’t quite work.

  “No. One who cannot hide her wonderful heart,” Nick said. “I’m sorry I’m late, babe. I got kinda caught up at the office.”

  “I know,” she said, still not looking up. It had been his standard excuse for years.

  “I know you know,” he said, pushing back his chair, the wooden legs screeching on the floor.

  The noise seemed to startle the girl. She jumped, just slightly, and then she pushed her own chair back and rose as Nick pivoted and she climbed into his lap and he could feel the wetness from her eyes against his neck and he held her and could think of nothing to say but kept repeating, “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …”

  After he had dried her tears, after they put the homework away, he waited for her to get ready for bed and this time laid down next to her and read some of her favorite Shel Silverstein poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends. When her eyelids fluttered and she yawned, he stroked her hair and told her he promised never to come home late again and then stared up at the ceiling thinking how often he had made that same promise to his wife. Don’t go there again, Nick, he told himself and then tried to block out everything but the sound of his daughter’s breathing. When it became deep and rhythmic, Nick slipped out of the room and retrieved the box of letters and sat it on the kitchen table.

  He started randomly. The first letter was dated a week after the killings and was from another mother of two wh
o scribbled condolences and then copied a psalm that included something about lambs and innocence and God’s love. Nick slid it away.

  Another was from a parent at the school where Ms. Cotton’s girls had attended sporadically. She had known the children “both of them bright and beautiful and I cannot comprehend your anguish.” No, you can’t, Nick thought and flipped that one into a growing pile.

  After a dozen, he started from the back of the box and became more systematic in his search, not knowing what he was searching for. He first concentrated on the place, the postmark and the date sent. Then he studied the name to see if it sparked even the slightest memory Then he scanned the contents, getting the gist of each letter without focusing on the words. The messages were familiar. He had thrown out a similar pile a month after the death of his wife and daughter without reading or even opening the majority of them.

  He was more than halfway through the box when he picked up a long envelope, business-sized, with no return address. Ms. Cotton’s address was typed on the face of it. Inside was a folded sheet of stiff stationery. No card. The message was also typed: Condolences on your loss … a complete and utter lack of justice … we failed you and your children … something must be done, and will … the elimination of those that threaten civil society …

  Nick jumped to the bottom of the page where the name of the writer was not signed, but simply typed, in an uncapitalized format:

  yours,

  mike redman

  The name was so out of place Nick recognized it immediately. Redman. The SWAT team member. Five killings in the line of duty. A professional with a sniper rifle.

  Nick had written an extensive story about a SWAT shooting that took place in Deerfield Beach a few years ago. His editorial board had taken the opportunity to chastise this guy Redman for killing an armed man, one of a group of guys who were selling weapons out of some motel room and then tried to shoot their way out when the team busted them. Nick had been so incensed over the editorial, he’d gone out and interviewed every team member, including Steve Canfield. He was allowed to view the video- and audiotape of the bust and heard, with his own ears, the whumph of the door breaking down, the shouts of “POLICE, POLICE, DON’T MOVE” and then the scuffling of feet and the sound of gunfire. He’d pulled schematics of the parking lot setup, measured the distances himself and sat in the room where this Redman guy had been acting as sharpshooter and cover man. He’d even gone out on a training day to see how the team was trained. He’d come away impressed and wrote a detailed Sunday story called a tick-tock that gave a second-by-second unfolding of the drama. He had not been allowed to interview Redman, who was still waiting to be cleared by a shooting board investigation. But Nick remembered him. Six-foot. Muscled. Close-cropped hair. And strange eyes, the kind that seemed to absorb everything around him and give nothing back. Nick had read somewhere that his partner had been killed in a SWAT operation years ago. When Redman was eventually cleared, Nick had felt a personal vindication. No one from the editorial board ever said a word to him.