Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  He flipped over the envelope and checked the postal cancellation date. One week after the trial that found Ferris guilty of rape and murder, but long before his sentencing was overturned. Redman. Hell, when was the last time Nick had even heard the name? Last thing he could remember was the pressure of moving the guy off to another division in the Sheriff’s Office after the newspaper’s editorial board pissed all over the guy.

  He looked down at the letter again and first thought about copying it in his home office and then second-guessed himself. He took out a reporter’s notebook and a pencil instead and then turned the page, using only the tip of the eraser to touch the paper. He then copied the message word for word into the notebook, and sat back, staring at the collection on the table in front of him. He was fighting an urge to call Hargrave and tell the detective to get the hell over here. “Chill, Nick,” he actually whispered out loud.

  There was nothing in the letter that said the writer was intending a specific act or what form of “something” would be done. It was also some three years ago when the thing was written. Ferris had been in jail most of that time and Nick didn’t even know where the hell this Redman guy had been. He knew that a cop writing to the victim of a crime was unusual because of legal considerations. But after a case was adjudicated? He’d never heard of it, though that didn’t mean anything. Coincidence again? Redman writes a vague letter to the mother of two dead girls. Their killer gets shot by a sniper three years later. Redman is a sniper. He must be the avenging shooter. It was the basic logic progression you used to construct in school, always of course in a vacuum. But Nick had learned long ago that logic rarely includes the spins that unpredictable humans can put on it.

  He got up from the table and opened a kitchen drawer and took out a large plastic freezer bag from its carton. Then, using the eraser, he pushed both the letter and the envelope it came in into the bag and then sealed it. He’d watched CSI too. He then put the bag aside and looked at the box of letters. Only halfway through. Be thorough, he told himself. Go through all of them. Don’t jump to conclusions. But as he did, he only skimmed the rest of the notes with less and less interest and kept looking for another plain envelope lacking a return address.

  Chapter 21

  Elsa woke him in the morning, partially with the scent of fresh-brewing coffee, then fully with a careful pat on the shoulder. Nick had fallen asleep on the couch fully dressed and with a jumble of unanswered questions and barely connected trails of victims and prisoners and violence that spun him enough to twist his shirt around his middle and cause his pants to shift a quarter turn around. When he finally stood, he had to adjust his clothes before he could walk to the kitchen counter and rescue his muddled brain with Elsa’s Colombian coffee, black, no sugar.

  It was nearly seven and he could hear Carly shuffling and moving in the girls’ bathroom that she had taken over since the accident. She had insisted on saving Lindsay’s bath oils and bottled fragrances, especially the ones they’d concocted together. And even two years later he couldn’t bring himself to toss them. Even in the master bath Nick had not had the heart to put away the makeup tray where Julie had kept her perfumes. He used to foolishly pick up a spritzer and squirt a cloud of her scent into the air and just stand there, breathing it in. It used to make him cry. He’d tried to break the habit. Her side of the vanity remained spotless. He used the other sink and a small kit bag in the corner that had always held his shaving stuff, deodorant and a toothbrush. Julie had joked that he was always packed and ready to go. But it had not been funny near the end and they had both known it. Still, he never changed.

  When Carly was ready for school she came out for breakfast and Nick moved his coffee to the table.

  “Hey, sunshine,” Nick said. His face was dark and slack with fatigue, but he was trying to cover it. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “Just stuff. But we are going to get to do some more clay sculpture in art and it’s going to be way cool. I’m finally going to put the legs on that angel I told you I was working on. Then we might actually get them in the kiln this week. Do you think I should paint her, or just leave her with the clay color—I mean, you can see the details and stuff without the paint and that’s what counts and it’s kinda weird to paint them all white and silver and stuff when nobody really knows what angels wear anyway and so what, you can do what you want, right?”

  Elsa came over and set a bowl of cream of wheat in front of the girl and smiled that smile at Nick that said, She is wound up this morning, eh?

  “Absolutely,” Nick said. “Art is in the eye of the beholder and you’re the beholder. Do what you want, babe.”

  Carly rambled on about her teacher and how she’d already figured out how to manipulate her. “I can just play around with my own ideas and she’ll still give me a good grade.”

  Nick listened, and thought, When did these kids get so smart?, and then they heard the car horn outside and his daughter jumped up, kissed him on the head, said, “’Bye, Dad,” kissed Elsa and thanked her for the half eaten breakfast and then blew out through the front door, leaving a fragrance and an energy wafting behind.

  Nick sat for a moment, sipping his coffee. When he finally rose, Elsa looked him in the face.

  “You look like the sin, Mr. Mullins,” she said with her thick accent and shaking her head as one might at a shameful sight.

  “Thank you, Elsa,” Nick said. “I’m going to shower and then I’m going to work. Please make me some more coffee.”

  He’d gone over the scenario too many times to count during the night and it was still in his head. Nick was trying to decide whether to turn the letters over to Hargrave, including the one with Michael Redman’s name on it, still in the plastic bag, right on top. The box was sitting on the passenger seat next to him. He couldn’t help glancing over at it, like some snake crate about to pop open and let loose a beast that would rise and start spitting venom in all directions. He knew it could be evidence, that wasn’t in question, whether it could be. But his reluctance through the night had been twofold.

  First, he’d called Lori in research before he left the house and she punched Redman’s name into the local and national media database and came up with nothing. The last reference had been Nick’s own story on the weapons-dealer shooting and the editorial before it. As far as he could tell, no media had any idea what the guy had been doing for the last few years or whether he was even still with the Sheriff’s Office. In Nick’s head, linking Redman to the recent shootings was premature.

  Second, if he gave the letter to Hargrave, then it would be in their house. Could Hargrave keep it under his hat? Would he have to tell Canfield, who Nick knew was Redman’s supervisor back in the day? Would anyone be able to contain it if it leaked? Tell two people and three will know. Once there are three, there will be four by the end of the day. Rumor was always exponential. He could see the Herald’s headlines:

  FORMER SWAT SNIPER INVESTIGATED FOR RECENT KILLINGS

  MODERN-DAY GUARDIAN ANGEL GUNS DOWN BAD GUYS

  IN THE STREETS

  Once the television guys and the Herald got the story about the letter, they’d be knocking on Margaria Cotton’s front door, dredging up all the ugly memories. Yeah, Nick thought, like you already have?

  “Christ!” he said. He was driving south on 1-95, trailing behind some late-model Chevy Cavalier. He looked over at the box and then at his speedometer. Fifty-four. OK, he might have been driving blind for the last twenty minutes, but it was putsy blind. He wasn’t a speeder when his head was tied up. By instinct he instead tucked in behind another car and followed without paying any damned attention. He punched the gas and passed the blue-haired old lady piloting the Cavalier and pushed it up to the normal sixty-five. Eight miles later he got off the interstate and then crawled with morning traffic into downtown. When he parked in the newspaper lot he left the box of letters on the passenger seat and locked the doors.

  The newsroom was, as usual in the morning, quiet.
Nick headed for his desk, snatching up a copy of the day’s paper and glancing at the front page as he went. His story on Michaels was below the fold, in the bottom right-hand corner.

  SECOND FELON ASSASSINATED IN FIVE DAYS

  POLICE LOOKING FOR CONNECTION

  Nick’s lead paragraph had not been changed. And they had also left Hargrave’s quote on the front before the story jumped and was continued on a deep inside page. Nick sighed a bit in relief, but the respite was short-lived. When he logged into his e-mail file and scanned the dozen or so names there, Deirdre’s was high up with a capitalized subject field: SEE ME!

  No, thank you, Nick thought. He started down the list, looking for someone familiar. Hargrave, Cameron, anyone. His eye instead settled on commiekid@computrust.net and the subject field read: you’re a smart guy, nick. m.r. The initials had already been branded into his head overnight. Michael Redman. Nick pulled up the message: meet me behind super saver at ten.

  He checked the time the message was sent. Almost two hours ago. The morning paper, displaying Hargrave’s paragraph, had been out since dawn. He then looked at the clock in the middle of the newsroom: nine forty-five. Fifteen minutes … if it was the old abandoned Super Saver Market three blocks away, he could make it.

  Nick closed out the message screen and then punched Hargrave’s cell number into the phone while he stood. He looked around the newsroom, where he could see only a few heads. After three rings on Hargrave’s cell, there was a heavy click and a recorded answer kicked in. Hargrave’s voice, in a clipped tone, said, “Leave a message.” Nick’s head was already dwelling somewhere else and he quickly came up with a stumbling message:

  “I might have gotten a response from the sniper. I’m going to meet him. I’ll call you later. Oh, the e-mail account he used to get the message to me was from an account called commiekid@computrust.net, so maybe you could find something out about that. I’ll call you later.”

  Nick punched off the phone and started around his desk on the way out. He took the long way around the assistant editors’ pod so Deirdre would not spot him from her office. But Bill Hirschman caught Nick’s eye from his desk in front of the city editor’s glass window and started toward him. When the education reporter came near, he stopped at an empty pod partition like he didn’t want to get too close to Nick and catch whatever he had.

  “The vultures are out after your ass, Mullins,” he said, just loud enough for Nick to hear. He tilted his head back toward Deirdre’s office. “They’ve been in there for an hour. The boss, the managing editor and the man.”

  Nick looked past Hirschman’s shoulder, but the angle on Deirdre’s floor-to-ceiling window was too severe to make out the occupants.

  “Best I could hear was something about you and a vigilante story you were supposed to be working.”

  Nick nodded, checked his watch and said thanks.

  “I’ll be back, I gotta go check out a lead.”

  Chapter 22

  Michael Redman was on the seventh floor of the parking garage attached to the Riverside Hotel, once a quaint two-story historical jewel that had been transformed into a huge chunk of lime-colored concrete block like any other modern-day structure that had gone up in the city over the past fifteen years. He was wearing navy blue chinos and a light blue short-sleeved shirt. There was a simple baseball cap, without a logo, on his head, and in his hand a zippered jacket. He could be security. Or a parking attendant. Or even a guest. He’d simply punched the PUSH HERE FOR TICKET button and then yanked the ticket and jogged in long before the wooden arm even rose. He put the card in one pocket. In the other he’d carried the spotting scope and at the moment was watching the sidewalk below, scanning the empty back lot of the closed grocery store, waiting for the arrival of Nick Mullins.

  Redman had been out on the street three minutes after the Daily News vendor dropped a dozen papers into the honor box. He’d then sat at the kitchen table of his new condo and read and reread Mullins’s story. He’d felt a warmth rise to his cheeks when he read the quote from Detective Hargrave, someone new that he’d never met during his time with the Sheriff’s Office: 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.

  Redman wasn’t stupid. He could spot a setup when he saw it. Hargrave and some dip from media relations had slipped that one to Mullins and he’d stuck it in there. It was meant for some hothead who’d boil over at the quote and do something foolish. They didn’t have a clue who they were dealing with. But the attempt to rattle him had made up Redman’s mind on one point: It was time to do the last one. He’d finished his list, but he had saved one last ex-con. Now he had to talk to Mullins, face to face so that he would understand, so that he would know, and would get the story right.

  When the library opened that morning at seven thirty, Redman walked in like any civilian and took a seat at the public terminals. He scrolled through some websites just to look busy. He’d visited the library several times, culling info he couldn’t get from his computer at home or to track back on archived stories that other journalists like Mullins might have done on the people on his list. Sometimes he’d take the dates and addresses straight to the courthouse, walk in like any other member of the general public and use their terminals or pull the cases he wanted to look at. He’d get the probable-cause statements and take down victims’ and arrestees’ addresses and check the file updates to find inmate numbers to cross-reference direct with DOC. Getting information was the easy part. Staying below the radar was only a bit harder. Now he had to come up from undercover. He had to make contact with the world again and he’d already planned it out.

  In the library he’d tagged a familiar mark, the kid with the earring and the Karl Marx T-shirt, who was working the computer a seat away. Redman had seen him before, probably went to the community college around the block. The kid thought he was a radical, but he did the same thing over and over. Human beings with their patterns, Redman thought.

  This morning the kid sniggered a couple of times after typing something into the terminal where he was sitting and then hitting the enter key. Then he got serious and walked back into the stacks and came out with a book or two and sat back down. Redman passed behind him once and confirmed that he was using his own Internet account, probably sending messages to some girlfriend. The next time he got up and went into the aisles, Redman slipped into the kid’s chair and quickly typed in Mullins’s e-mail address and sent him a message and walked away.

  Now he was in the parking garage, waiting to see if the reporter would take up the offer. The morning’s news clipping was now in Redman’s file with all the rest that marked the deaths of those deserving few on his list.

  That’s not how law enforcement works in a democracy. That’s not how this country operates.

  “No shit, bubba,” Redman whispered. The courts give a child killer like Ferris another bite at the apple to see if he can knock his sentence down instead of getting the death penalty. The country goes to Iraq and indiscriminately kills anything it sees in the name of retribution for 9/11 even if the skinny woman in the burka walking down the alley wouldn’t know the Twin Towers if they fell on her. The spotter tells me to kill her, I kill her. No questions asked. There’s your democracy.

  At least Redman knew who his spotter was now, and he would show up. He looked at his watch—9:57—then raised the spotting scope. Redman knew he’d show up.

  Chapter 23

  Nick looked at his watch—9:58—and kept moving. He was walking along the river, yachts and sailboats tied up along the seawall to his right, the new, monstrous condos on the left. He’d been trying to recall Redman’s face since reading the e-mail and all he could conjure was the intensity of the guy’s eyes when Nick had done a day of reporting on the SWAT team’s training. Sharp, clear and blue. Eyes that did not flinch even after twenty minutes of hard focus. There were few people on the street. A c
ouple of guys rubbing the brightwork on a fifty-foot double-masted schooner. A blond jogger trotting by. A delivery truck pulling into the service entrance of one of the condos. Around the curve of the river the back lot of the grocery store came into view, the exact opposite of the high-priced luxury he’d just passed. The lot was empty. The ground was covered with gravel and patchy weeds. The rear delivery doors were padlocked. Nick knew that the city had tried to save this chunk of land for a park along the river. But when the grocery chain went under, the prime real estate went to the highest bidder, another condo developer. It had been sitting unused and decaying while lawyers argued. On occasion a rumpled fisherman would be camped at the seawall, a line tossed into the New River. But it was empty now and Nick took up the spot where the fisherman would have been. He’d done this kind of thing before, met with sources who did not want to be identified and did not want to be seen with a reporter. He wasn’t thinking of safety, hadn’t even considered himself a target, but as he turned yet another three-sixty, scanning the back of the building and the hedge of ratty trees and sea grape that walled off the other side, he felt an uncomfortable itch on the side of his head, just above his left sideburn, and raised his hand to touch the spot with his fingers. If this guy was who Nick figured he was, there wouldn’t be such a thing as safety. If he wanted to take you out, you’d be dead.