But crime stories rarely had a political bent, so he was safe from most of the second-guessing. He dialed up the message system and listened to the first calclass="underline"
"Hello, Mr. Mullins. I read your story this morning and would like to compliment you on your writing. But who gives a shit? The guy is scum and should have been executed the day they found him in that house with those little girls. Why do you guys even waste the ink? Who cares who did it except for maybe we want to give him a medal. Anyway, good riddance." OK, Nick thought, I'll forward that one off to the editorial-page folks. He punched up the next message:
"Hey, Mullins, are the cops going to waste a bunch of time and money trying to find out who pulled the trigger on a guy we all would have gladly shot ourselves? I paid for this man's trial. I paid to have him fed and housed for the last four years in prison. And I would have ended up paying for him to sit on death row for the next twenty while the lawyers got rich filing appeal after appeal. Now I suppose they're going to use my taxes to find his killer. Please. Give me a break."
The next call was from Cameron:
"Thanks a bunch, Nick. You swamped my ass already this morning. Give me a call when you get in. Hargrave is all over me to find out where you got the info on the.308 round. He thinks you might have pocketed evidence from the rooftop and lied to him about it."
"Shit," Nick said aloud. He didn't need the detective to be pissed off. If he could work with the guy, that would be helpful. But if Nick was just going to have to filter everything through Cameron's press office anyway, he didn't think it was worth it. He wasn't going to give up the doc just to pacify the homicide team. He was thinking about a strategy and unconsciously punching up the next message, so the next voice snuck up on him:
"Thank you for your story today, Mr. Mullins. A very thorough job, as usual. I look forward to your next case. Your profiles have been very helpful over the years. I hope this has been as gratifying for you as it has for me. Thanks again."
Nick fielded an occasional compliment call. Rare, but sometimes it helped him get through the others. But the voice on this one had a timbre that made him replay the message. He listened closely to the deep male monotone. "Your next case." Odd for a caller to use a law enforcement term when talking to a reporter. Profiles? Yeah. But reporters didn't do cases, they did reports on other people's cases. And what did the guy mean by gratifying? Nick had never thought of what he did as gratifying. It was reporting and he had always considered it straight reporting. He told himself he was after the truth in black-and-white or as close to it as he could find. Yeah, he knew a woman who sneered at him each time he made that statement: Nicky, there is no truth, only perspective.
Part of that statement was true for him now because the only gratification he could see was if Robert Walker was on the autopsy table. And that was his perspective.
A blinking e-mail notice popped up on his screen, pulling him back to the work. He opened it with a click and saw it was from the city editor: Come in and talk when you get a chance.
Right. When I get a chance. It was a polite order and he knew it.
Nick scrolled down through the rest of his messages. Some he recognized as reader comments. The one he was looking for, the information from the library on similar shootings of inmates from around the nation, was down the list.
He ignored the rest and called it up. Lori had left a note up top: I came up with a few sniper-type shootings. Hope some of these help. I put the Florida events first instead of doing them by time line. I also searched for stories where both inmates and former felons were shot and killed on the outside. I might have generated a lot of drug killings, but I stuck them on there anyway.
Nick checked the size of the file. Huge. He shook his head and looked at the time Lori had sent him the message: past eleven last night. She'd put in some overtime, and he'd have to take her to lunch or at least order her some flowers or something. But before the thought turned into action, his eye caught a name in the first batch of pages he scrolled through: Dr. Markus Chambliss.
Nick scrolled through the accompanying story, pulled from the archives of a newspaper over on the west coast of Florida. A prominent San Sebastian physician and former medical examiner, who had once been the target of a police investigation into the death of his wife, was found dead of a single gunshot wound Tuesday, Hillsborough County police said.
Dr. Markus Chambliss, 58, was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car about nine AM in the driveway of his home in Tropical Park. Police declined to say whether they considered the death a homicide or a possible suicide. Chambliss had lived in the quiet suburban home for more than a year, moving there with his girlfriend from northern Florida's Dixie County, where he had once been a suspect in the death of his wife of 26 years, Mrs. Barbara Chambliss.
How the hell did I miss this? Nick thought as he checked the date of the story. Four months ago. The story had run in the St. Petersburg Times. Nick closed his eyes. You're slipping, man, he thought. Two years ago that never would have gotten by you. Two years ago nothing got by you when it came to work. He went back to the file and moved down to subsequent stories by the west coast newspaper.
A few years ago Chambliss had been the subject of one of Nick's own big Sunday profiles. When the stories had first broken on the M.E. suspected of killing his own wife, Nick had talked his editors into letting him travel to north-central Florida to do a story on what was already being called the perfect murder.
Chambliss was described as a respected member of the community and a doctor whose reputation was beyond reproach. That's always a clue, Nick had argued at the time. Human beings are always fallible, and he had learned long ago that when you started digging, you could find something on everybody. Now, whether it was illegal, immoral or unethical was in the sorting, but no one was as perfect as the superficial stories first tell you. The editors relented and Nick went and dug. With the help of a contact he had in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, he was able to get the inside information.
Chambliss had called 911 on the morning of his wife's death, telling a dispatcher that he discovered that his wife had passed away during the night. A rescue squad had responded and they did little more than confirm that Mrs. Chambliss was indeed dead. Knowing the medical examiner on a professional basis, they did not question his request to transport his wife to his office. The doctor did the autopsy himself and ruled his own wife's death as heart failure from natural causes. Case closed. Burial set for the next day. Grieving to begin.
The local cops probably would have let it go. But the FDLE heard of the case and said, Whoa. For a man to do an autopsy on his own wife and make an evaluation of death by natural causes might have seemed all right for the rural areas of Dixie County, but that's not the way it worked in Tallahassee. They sent an investigator to town, and Nick had a direct line to the guy. Within a day, Nick was told about a phone records request and the discovery that Chambliss had made three calls during the night to the number of a woman who was quickly determined to be the good doctor's mistress. When she was interviewed, her story was way too well rehearsed, and the FDLE was suspicious enough and powerful enough to have an independent autopsy ordered. A team was called in and the pathologists found a suspicious injection point on Mrs. Chambliss's thigh that was fresh. When questioned, the doctor said that he had given his wife, a diabetic, an injection of insulin at the time she went to bed. Some insulin was found in the house, but because Chambliss had already done an autopsy, had already drained his wife's blood and filled her veins with embalming fluid, the concentrations of insulin-which can be deadly on its own in high amounts-or any other chemicals could not be ascertained. The perfect murder? Possibly.