Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  He joined several other people at the elevator and saw the door to the conference room open at the end of the hallway. The editors’ meeting was breaking up. He ducked into the elevator and watched the doors close, perhaps on his career. He could stay and fight with Deirdre or go out to work a shooting that hadn’t yet occurred, but would, all because the shooter thought Nick was owed something.

  Chapter 25

  This time they met him in Canfield’s small office and they weren’t nearly as accommodating as in the last round. Hargrave was standing, leaning against a bookcase jammed with big tutorials with titles on the spines like Bomb and Arson Specialties in the Field and The ATF Field Guide to Indeterminate Explosive Devices and three of the middle volumes of the Florida statutes that Nick knew as those that dealt with felony arrests.

  Canfield was in the chair behind his desk but stood when Nick and Joel Cameron entered.

  “You can sit, Mr. Mullins,” he said, indicating a chair positioned in front of the desk. It was both a greeting and an order. Cameron took a step back but also remained standing and Nick got a flash scene in his head of some damned interrogation in a gulag described by Solzhenitsyn.

  “Let’s start with you telling us about this meeting with Mr. Redman this morning, Mr. Mullins. And then we’ll go from there,” Canfield said and Nick swallowed any idea of holding out on them, though that had not been his intent when he came in. After all, he had agreed to work with them. He just hated the feeling of being bullied.

  He took the reporter’s notebook from his back pocket and flipped the page.

  “Assuming everybody now knows Mike Redman, I got an e-mail from him that the timing signature said was sent at seven forty-five this morning. I didn’t read it until two hours later when I checked my computer at the office. I already gave Detective Hargrave the information on the e-mail account that it was sent from,” Nick began, hoping to first show that he had indeed tried to keep them in the loop, sort of.

  “The tech guys that do computer crime and Internet porn investigations are running down the commiekid account,” Hargrave said. “Looks like some student type, on the surface. They’re going to get an address and we’ll go from there.”

  Nick couldn’t tell by his tone whether Hargrave was defending him or just making a verbal report to Canfield. The detective wouldn’t meet his eyes, so he went on.

  “The message was signed ‘m.r.’ in lowercase letters and asked me to show up for a meet at ten, so I really didn’t have a lot of time to, you know, alert anyone other than to just call the detective and tell him what I was planning to do, to meet with the guy.”

  He was dancing, but it was truthful dancing.

  “Description?” Canfield said like he knew what Nick was doing and wasn’t swallowing it.

  “I’d say he looks just like he used to when you used to work with him only a little more worn,” Nick said, putting it back on the former SWAT supervisor. “Clean-shaven. In pretty good shape. Tanned. Same blue-gray eyes. He was wearing some kind of uniform like a maintenance man, you know, blue work pants and a light blue short-sleeved shirt.”

  “Carrying anything you could notice?” Canfield said, slightly emphasizing the you as if Nick would not have the kind of powers of observation that a trained law enforcement officer would.

  “He had a navy jacket draped over one arm, so he could have had something wrapped in it, but nothing as long as a McMillan M-86 or even a broken-down MP5,” Nick said, using what little he did know to defend his ground. “He might have had an ankle holster, but I really couldn’t tell.”

  “OK, OK, boys,” Hargrave chimed in. “Enough of the pissing match.”

  Canfield looked down, even though he did officially outrank Hargrave. Nick took a deep breath and nodded in assent.

  “What the hell did the guy say, Mullins?” Hargrave said.

  Without realizing it, Nick was sitting on the front edge of the chair, like he was ready to pounce on something, or run. He sat back, took in another breath and flipped another page in his notebook.

  “First of all, he never clearly said that he killed anyone,” Nick began. “I mean, he was being real careful about the exact words, like he thought I might be wearing a wire or something.”

  Nick saw both Canfield and Hargrave raise their eyebrows at the suggestion.

  “Oh, is that why you guys wanted to see me before I met with the guy? To wire me up?”

  “Don’t go Hollywood on us, Mullins. We don’t wire anymore. We usually just put a microphone inside your cell phone. That gets most of them,” Hargrave said with that grin in the corner of his mouth, his way of leaving a doubt in the veracity of every statement.

  Canfield just made the motion of a wheel turning with his hand. “Go on.”

  Nick looked at the notebook. He was about to continue when he heard the door behind him open without a knock and all heads turned. Fitzgerald, who Nick now knew was working with the Secret Service, stepped in and said, “Excuse my lateness, gentlemen. I hope you haven’t begun without me.”

  Canfield kept a straight face. “Just some preliminaries. Nothing pertinent,” he said. “We were just going into Mr. Mullins’s contact this morning with Redman.”

  The look on Fitzgerald’s face said he didn’t believe a word of it. He also never asked who Redman was, so Nick figured he’d already been briefed. “Go on, then,” he said as if they needed his permission.

  “Redman said he’d been in Iraq. I was going to check that out,” Nick continued and then looked up with his eyebrows raised, a silent question.

  “Yeah, he was,” Canfield said. “It was while he was still on the job. They called up his reserve unit and he went over there as a specialist. He was working as a sniper with some other military group because of his skills, according to his reserve CO. But he’s been back for over a year.”

  Nick turned his head and saw Fitzgerald take out a small notebook of his own. For some reason it pissed Nick off.

  “Like I said, he was being very careful. I was trying to draw him out a little about the recent shootings and he said the victims brought it on themselves, like he’d convinced himself that they deserved to die. But he never said in any specific words that he shot them,” Nick said.

  “And you didn’t ask him?” Fitzgerald said, using the same incredulous tone Canfield had used.

  “It wasn’t an interrogation,” Nick snapped. “I’m not a cop. I talk to people, I don’t grill them.”

  Hargrave jumped in to keep things from derailing again.

  “Did he say anything about what’s next, Nick? What his plans were?” Hargrave asked.

  Nick smiled. Now Hargrave was on a first-name basis.

  “He said he had a list that had to be cleaned out before he left,” Nick said, reading from his notes. “He called me his spotter—‘the architect of the list’ are the words he used. Then he said I wasn’t personally on the list but that he was going to do one more because I was owed.”

  The room went silent. It was a good fifteen seconds, a vacuum quiet enough to imagine the wheels turning in each man’s head.

  “Did he say anything about hating the war and the man who sent him there?” Fitzgerald said, his professional focus made obvious.

  “He used the phrase ‘War is Hell,’ ” Nick said.

  “Christ!” the agent said.

  “But he didn’t say anything about the Secretary of State,” Nick said, trying to cut him off. “Not a word.”

  Fitzgerald’s mask of professional decorum cracked at the mention of the secretary. His lips went into a thin hard line and he stared at Nick and then at Canfield.

  “But he called you his spotter. Which dovetails into the list, our list, of those convicts you’ve personally written about that are now dead,” Hargrave jumped in. “So if he’s working off a list he made up from your bylines, who else is there? Who else have you done a piece on who was a blatant asshole like these other guys who he figures deserves to die?”

  Nick had
been running the same question through his head. He couldn’t remember every one of the victims he wrote about. He used to be able to recall their faces, before his own family took their places.

  “I’ve done dozens of stories like that,” he said. “I’d have to go through them all.”

  “So go through them all,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Hey, it’s not like you just put my byline and the word asshole in the search field,” Nick said, getting irritated by someone telling him what to do again.

  “OK, Nick,” Hargrave said. “Just do a search with your byline and the word killed or raped or abused, something you know would be in the real bad ones. We could start there.”

  “Start with the ones that have ranked politicians or their cabinet members in them,” Fitzgerald said and all eyes turned to him and Nick let the order go this time. “The Secret Service is here for a reason, which you all now appear to know,” he said, again cutting his eyes toward Canfield. “Intelligence has indicated a sniper on the wing in this country, gentlemen, and it’s not a threat that we think is idle. We have credible reason to believe the gunman we’re looking for is somewhere in Florida and with the political climate as it is, we’re not turning away from any leads, no matter how thin. The fact that you have possibly identified a suspect who has a military background and was recently in Iraq raises that profile.”

  The room went quiet, with each man running the possibilities through his own head.

  “I’m doing my job, gentlemen,” Fitzgerald said before anyone else could speak. “We have been tracking this for over a year now. Does that not coincide with your Mr. Redman’s return to this country from a position in Iraq where he could have easily come in contact with people who are a danger to the command decision makers within our government?”

  Nick was weighing the possibilities: Redman targeting the Secretary of State? Redman killing someone for Nick that might be considered a favor? The two possibilities had no tie-ins. But Fitzgerald had the floor. Don’t fuck with him now, Nick thought.

  “Our information is that this man, this threat, is a trained sniper. Does that not coincide with the skills of this Redman? The Secretary of State is scheduled to speak at a conference being held not eight miles away from where we are and within a ten-mile radius of the three killings you are now investigating yourselves. You might think I’m paranoid, but it is my job to be paranoid, gentlemen. And if your Mr. Redman is a threat, then he is on my screen and I expect any information you turn up to be immediately forwarded to me as a matter of national security. Clear? Gentlemen.”

  Fitzgerald’s little speech was directed at everyone in the room, but the last part was specifically aimed at Canfield, who was the ranking officer. Nick was just a civilian. He didn’t have to respond, so he stayed quiet.

  “Yeah. Clear, Mr. Fitzgerald. Whatever we’ve got, you’ll have,” Canfield finally said.

  Fitzgerald came this close to saluting before he left the room, Nick thought, and when the door closed, Canfield looked at his shoe tops for a beat and then took control.

  “OK, Detective,” he said to Hargrave. “If you will work with Mr. Mullins here and see if you can come up with a viable ‘final target’ for our sniper based on their conversation, I’ll get in touch with all the SWAT team guys who were around when Redman was here, see if they’ve heard from him. We can also pull his file and try to make contact with a family member. I know the guy wasn’t married, he was all about the job, but his parents or a sibling might still be around.

  “And like the man said, everything comes through me first,” the lieutenant said, winking at Hargrave. “Then I decide what gets passed on for national security reasons.”

  Hargrave got up and Nick followed him. Cameron slipped out the door first, not even waiting to ask if anything that had been said in the room was to be distributed to any other member of the media.

  Out in the hallway he said, “I’ll just assume that all of that was off the record.”

  Nick just looked at him, and Hargrave said, “Jesus, I would hope so.”

  Chapter 26

  Nick followed Hargrave down to the detective bureau and as they were about to pass through a door, the receptionist stopped them.

  “Detective, you’re going to have to sign this visitor in,” she said.

  Hargrave stopped just as he was about to put his badge holder against the electronic lock scanner.

  “Yeah, sorry, Mary. It’s Mike Lowell, he’s a CI.”

  The woman didn’t move.

  “A confidential informant,” Hargrave said, raising his eyebrows.

  “He’s still going to have to sign in on his own,” she said, pushing the clipboard across the shelf that separated them.

  Nick caught Hargrave’s eye and then stepped over and signed the name Mike Lowell as his own. The woman thanked him and buzzed them both through.

  Hargrave again led on, forcing Nick to catch up.

  “The Marlins’ third baseman? That’s the best you could do in a pinch?” Nick said.

  Hargrave did not turn around, but Nick again saw that twitch appear in the corner of his mouth that must pass as the thin man’s only smile in life. They walked past three rows of office pods that looked way too much like those in Nick’s newsroom and then through a door against the wall that led into Hargrave’s office.

  The room was half the size of Canfield’s and it held two desks. Hargrave took his black suit coat off and hung it on a coat tree. The guy’s white shirt was crisp. Not a sign of sweat stain, like he’d just gone down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He sat down in the desk chair to the left, so Nick took the one on the right.

  “Make yourself comfortable. Meyers is on vacation until the eighteenth,” Hargrave said over his shoulder.

  While he tapped into the computer in front of him, Nick took out his cell phone. He’d turned it off before going into Canfield’s office and when he powered it back up the screen showed that there were four new messages. He looked at his watch. The daily budget meeting was coming up, when all the assistant editors met with Deirdre to pitch the day’s stories. It had to be driving them crazy not to have heard from him. Never mind the fact that he had blown her off earlier in the day. He dialed into the research library instead and asked for Lori.

  “Lori Simons,” she said after Nick was transferred.

  “Hey, Lori, it’s Nick. You know that search I asked you to do that matched up my bylines with that list?”

  “Jesus, Nick,” she said and her voice went low and conspiratorial. “Where are you? I mean, the rumors are flying over here that you’re big-time in the shit.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I suppose I am.”

  “No, really. Hirschman was over here and said Deirdre was bouncing off the walls.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me, Lori,” he said. “But she hasn’t fired me yet and I need another search if you can, please?”

  “Sure, Nick. I was just worried about you.”

  Her voice sounded sincere. It always had. Nick just hadn’t been paying attention to his allies, especially Lori.

  “Thanks, Lori. Really, I’m OK. But this story is really starting to roll up on me and I think I’ve stuck myself into it so deep now, I’m going to have to finish it.”

  “And finish it your way. Even if you get fired.”

  Christ, when did she get to know me so well? Nick thought. The comment was something his wife might have said three years ago.

  “I put that other list on your desk,” Lori said into the silence. “So what do you need?”

  Nick explained how he wanted to look for his byline and all the stories he’d done that included homicides or rapes or incest. He didn’t need the full stories, just the initial page that contained the doer’s or arrestee’s name.

  “That’s going to be a lot of stories, Nick. You want to narrow it down some, maybe by years?” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nick said and then covered the mouthpiece and asked Hargrave, “When did Redman s
tart with the Sheriff’s Office? What year?”

  “Eight years ago,” Hargrave said without turning around.

  “Eight,” Nick said into the phone. “Oh, and also pull anything that I’ve written that included the U.S. Secretary of State’s name. It’s a long shot, but it might come up in one of those stories I did on local soldiers who were wounded or killed in Iraq.”

  Nick waited, like he could hear Lori scratching the request down on paper, like he’d watched her do so many times before.

  “OK, anything else?” she said.

  “That’s it. See what we get and then I need you to e-mail everything to …” He looked up at Hargrave, who was already scratching down something on a business card, which he handed over.

  “To maurice69 at kingnet.com” Nick read and looked up at Hargrave, who had already turned his back on him.

  “Nicky, that’s off-campus,” Lori said.

  “Yeah, I know. I owe you.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said, but there was something light in her voice. “I’ll get it to you soonest.”

  Nick hung up and was flipping the business card with the e-mail address between his thumb and forefinger and wearing a bemused look on his face when Hargrave turned around.

  “Year I graduated from high school,” Hargrave said.

  “Huh?” Nick answered, playing dumb.

  “It was 1969.”

  “Personal e-mail?” Nick said, now smiling.

  “I don’t want that stuff coming through the department system or the fax,” Hargrave said, staying serious. “We’ve got a thing here you might have heard about, called an Internal Affairs Division?”

  “OK,” Nick said, going instantly sober. Nick knew the newspaper had its own form of IAD, they just never gave it a moniker. He remembered the employee upstairs who was rumored to be logging in to pornographic websites during the day. Management had his screen monitored by the computer techs through remote access. They caught him and canned him the same day.