Nick did the initial stories, reporting the inconsistencies, and then kept track of the ongoing investigation while also interviewing the doctor's grown son and daughter and the doctor's girlfriend. The affair had been long and ongoing. Within two months of his wife's death, the doctor moved into a townhouse with the girlfriend. A special prosecutor from outside the county was assigned to the case. Phone records and financial statements threw red flags all over the field. But the doc sat back and maintained his innocence. Eventually, Chambliss was indicted on circumstantial evidence, and even though both of his children were convinced he had killed their mother and testified as witnesses for the prosecution, the jury could not be convinced to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He walked.
Nick had reported and written the stories straight up. He too was convinced of Chambliss's guilt, but he left the opinions to the columnists, and the readers, who sent him outraged messages about how the guy got off the hook.
Nick scrolled down Lori's list of follow-up stories. The cops had originally let loose that they were considering the doctor's shooting death a suicide, but crime scene technicians came up with proof that the bullet that killed Chambliss was fired from outside his car and that a high-powered round had penetrated the glass and had struck the doctor in the temple, killing him instantly. No further stories were in the collection that Lori had dug up.
Nick sat back and stared at the screen. He didn't like coincidences. They always made you start spinning off in areas that led to useless dead ends that were mostly a waste of time. But just like the cops, you had to do it so you wouldn't get your ass in a sling for not being thorough. Maybe it was Sergeant Langford's reference to "one of your stories" when he I.D.'d Ferris yesterday morning that made it more nagging. He started searching through his contact numbers for his FDLE source on Chambliss when his phone rang.
"Nick, could you come in to my office for a minute?"
Deirdre. She didn't have to say who was calling. Nick stood and took up an empty reporter's notebook to carry into her office. He knew it looked like he was a secretary answering the call to dictation. That's why he did it. On his way across the newsroom someone called out his name.
"Yo, Nicky."
He looked in the direction of the voice, where Bill Hirschman, the education reporter, was standing under one of the ceiling-mounted televisions tuned to the local news. On-screen was videotape from a position high in the sky over the Broward County Jail. The cameraman had zoomed down onto a rooftop that was empty except for four figures, three men standing, one seemingly crouched over. As the shot pulled in closer, Nick saw himself bent, face down into the roof gravel, his butt still up in the air and posing in all its breadth for the camera.
"Not your best side, Nicky," Hirschman said. "Is that textbook investigative reporting or what?"
Nick just shrugged and smiled. "No stone unturned," he said to the other reporter.
Hirschman laughed. The city editor wouldn't.
Deirdre did not look up from her screen, as usual, until Nick was seated.
"Good morning, Nick. Nice job on the shooting this morning. We really kicked the Herald's ass on that identification."
Nick nodded and said nothing. He did not read the competition's stories until he'd come in and gotten some phone calls out and seen what his own story might have stirred up overnight.
"The other editors really liked your detail on the caliber of the bullet and the placement of the wound. Good stuff."
She didn't say she liked it. She said the other editors, Nick thought, catching her words, studying them like some paranoid. Is she still pissed?
"So what are you thinking about for the follow today?" Deirdre said, moving on. "Are they going to give you anything on the shooter? Do you think they're going to go after someone connected to the dead girls' family? I mean, they gotta be looking for motive, right?"
"I'm trying to track down the mother of the girls through her attorney," Nick said. "It's been a while, but he might still have a line on her. Research also ran her name through the Florida driver's license database, but it still comes up with the same address she had back when the girls were killed, and we already know she hasn't been living there. But I can't see where this woman takes three years to learn how to fire a high-powered weapon and then stakes out the killer of her daughters and drops him with a single shot from the top of a building and then somehow disappears without leaving a trace behind. And that's even going on the supposition that Ferris was the target, which no one in law enforcement has yet to state."
Nick always tried to rattle off the steps he'd taken in reporting and the lines of inquiry he'd already thought out when Deirdre called him in to ask questions that were already obvious to him. It usually stopped her. Today it didn't. She leaned back in her swivel chair and laced her fingers. Nick knew the move as a sign of trouble.
"I want to ask one thing, Nick."
He tried not to show any emotion in his face or body language that would say, Oh, Christ, here it comes. But he was lousy at controlling it.
Still, he stayed silent, not falling into the old question for a question, not responding by saying, Yeah, and what's that?
Instead he waited her out.
"You got the caliber of the gun, Nick, the.308, which you knew was a high-powered rifle round. You were the one up on the roof, and nice close-up, by the way."
He nodded, wanting to match the grin she was trying to give him, but too obstinate to do it. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"So why is it that the Herald used the word sniper in their headline and in the body of their story and we never even mentioned it?"
She dug the Herald out from under the pile on her desk and held up the front page: SNIPER KILLS CHILD MOLESTER ON WAY TO COURT
Nick tried to keep a dry, unflappable look on his face.
"Attribution?"
Deirdre flipped the paper over and skimmed through the story like she was trying to find the line Nick knew was not there. If someone with any authority had called the shooting the act of a sniper, it would have been in the first paragraph of his story. No one called it that, even if it was true.
"Did they contribute that characterization to any source or member of the law enforcement team that's investigating?" he said. "I honestly didn't hear the spokesman or the detective in charge or the medical examiner that did the autopsy use the word sniper."
Deirdre finally looked him in the face and if anyone else had been in the room, they would have called it a look of compassion.
"Nicky. I know where you're coming from with your theory of black-and-white news," she said and Nick turned away from the look.
"You're a great reporter because you have the instincts and experience to go after your own suppositions, to prove them true."
"I'm still doing that!" Nick snapped, getting defensive.
Deirdre raised her palms. "I know. I know you are, Nick. But you're not putting it in the paper."
"When I nail it, it'll go in the paper," he said.
"It makes us sound unsure, like we're waiting for someone else to get the good stuff first. It makes us look like we're afraid to pull the trigger."
The heat was up in Nick's face now. He could feel the flush in his neck, the hot tingle on the edges of his ears.
"Is that why we never called Robert Walker a drunk driver in print, Deirdre?" Nick said through his teeth. "Were we waiting for someone else to get the goods on that guy after he killed my family? Why didn't somebody go and dig up that guy's background and pull the goddamn trigger in print?"
Now she couldn't hold his eyes. She knew the arguments he'd had with the paper's management after the accident that killed his wife and daughter. She knew Nick had tried to get the editorial writers to paint Walker as a drunken killer. But they had refused, citing journalistic standards and telling him to wait until after the trial. She knew it had hurt him.