Nick knew from covering too many perp walks the layout of the jail's sally port. They always kept the reporters and photographers out on the sidewalk. The automatic gate was always closed before the bus or van guards even opened the doors and led the prisoners out.
"Any I.D. on the dead guy, Sarge?" he said.
"You ain't quoting me, right, Nicky?"
"Have I ever?"
"I hear it was that asshole who raped those two little girls a few years ago and then killed them when they threatened to tell," he said and then went silent, trying to remember the name, just like Nick was.
"Come to think of it, that was probably one of your stories, wasn't it? The woman was homeless and sleepin' in the park?"
The communications guys were notorious for scanning the newspapers for crime stories, mostly to laugh at how the department put out the news versus the way they knew it really went down. Since Nick talked to them every day, they especially liked to stick him when he got it wrong. They also paid attention when he got it right.
It didn't take Nick three seconds to come up with the name of the killer: Steven Ferris.
"Yeah," Nick said. "He was one of mine."
"Well, somebody just saved the taxpayers some money. We'll be toasting the shooter over at Brownie's tonight."
"Have one for me, Sarge," Nick said. "And thanks."
Nick hung up the phone, stuck a pad into his back pocket and started for the elevators, synapses clicking, trying to set up the scene in his head. One of the most notorious pedophiles and child murderers in area history had been assassinated on the jailhouse steps. How do you play that? It was bound to go out on the front page. He remembered the reaction to his stories three years ago, the fear in the neighborhoods. Schoolgirls swept off the street and killed on their way home. People would remember. Nick was going to have to put Robert Walker aside, shift him into that corner in his head where he had been festering for all these months. Nick had just begun to believe that he could control him, keep him back in that dark spot. But now Walker was out walking the streets and the memory was loose.
He stopped at the assistant city editor's desk on the way out.
"I'm going over to the scene. It's a shooting, but my source says that no guards or cops were hurt," Nick said. "It might have been a prisoner. I'll call you guys when I find out something definite."
"No cop-shooting?" the editor said, letting a tinge of disappointment slip into the question.
"No."
"No jailbreak?" The guy was hoping at least for plan B.
"No."
"Trigger-happy officer?"
Nick was walking away.
"I'll call you guys when I find out something factual." He thought he was being nice. OK. Maybe he did emphasize the word factual.
He went directly to the editorial research room around the corner and got the attention of Lori Simons, who was experienced enough not to flinch when reporters called her office the morgue or the library instead of the research center.
"Hey, Nick, whatcha need?"
"Hi, Lori. I need everything you can search up on a guy named Steven Ferris, pedophile who killed two little girls about four years back."
"I remember that one. You did one of your big Sunday pieces on him, right?"
Nick smiled at her institutional memory. Computers don't make people smart, people make people smart.
"That's the one," he said and then lowered his voice. "He might have just been shot to death over at the jail. Can you send the stuff straight over to my queue? I'm going over to get some confirmation."
Lori was tall and thin, with long feathered blond hair and blue eyes. Nick had always liked her because she was bright and eternally positive. After the accident, when he'd come back to work, he'd been drawn to her. It was that positive force, he told himself. She came over to the counter that fronted her room of computers and bookcases and fact books and jotted down the name.
"It shouldn't take me too long, Nick. You want all the court stuff too, right?"
"Yeah, anything you can find," he said, thanking her and turning to go.
"Good luck," she said, watching him walk away. "On the confirmation, I mean. If it's the guy I'm remembering, nobody's gonna be shedding any tears."
Nick waved over his shoulder and went straight to the elevators. On the ride down he recalled a line that an old-timer homicide detective had delivered to him when he was just starting out: "Even the bad guys got a mom, kid."
Somebody's always going to cry.
Chapter 3
Out on the street, Fort Lauderdale's morning commuter traffic was still heavy. The main county jail was only a few blocks away on the other side of the river. Nick decided it was easier to walk. He'd stopped being in a hurry to crime scenes years ago. He'd gone to enough of them to know that the bodies would still be there, as if he needed to see another body. The immediate area would be cordoned off by the responding officers, so you weren't going to beat them before the yellow tape went up and get some kind of close-up and personal view. And if friends and neighbors and possible eyewitnesses were what you were after, they'd all still be hanging around, at least the ones willing to talk or wanting to be quoted.
He climbed the pedestrian stairway of the Andrews Avenue Bridge. From the top he could see a television news truck already pulled up onto the sidewalk three blocks to the south. When he got down and made it within a block of the rear entrance of the seven-story jail, he slowed and started observing. Camera guys were up against the chain-link gate to the sally port, trying to get shots through the wire mesh. They would consider themselves lucky if they could get a telephoto of a blood pool or, even better, a shot of the medical examiner guys picking up the body and loading it into their black van. The newspaper's camera guys would be doing the same, afraid somebody else might get a shot they didn't have even though they knew no photo editor was going to put fresh blood on the front page. But better to be safe and get the gore shot than have some boss ask you why you didn't get it.
Bridge traffic going north was backed up, the omnipresent rubberneckers slowing to see what they could see and tell everybody at the office when they got in. Nowadays, they'd probably call it in on their cell phones: Hey, Jody, I'm down on Andrews and there's a bunch of cops and television guys. What's up? Did you hear anything? I mean, wow, the traffic, ya know? It was the electronic version of the backyard fence, instant and without boundaries.
Oh, and Jody? Tell the boss I'm gonna be late, OK?
As Nick approached the growing bubble of press, he recognized the TV reporters from Channels 7 and 10. They had done lots of crime scenes together over the years. It was a fraternity of odd undertakers.
"Matt. How's it goin'?" Nick said to the Channel 10 guy.
"Hey, Nick," he answered, nodding in the direction of the gate. "They got somebody down at the bottom of the steps to the back door. Gotta guess that it's a prisoner or they wouldn't still be standing around letting the body lie there."
Nick looked around and found the Daily News photographer. She was on one knee at the far edge of the fence, a camera body up to her face. He walked over to join her.
"Hi, Susan."
"Figured you'd be here," she said, not bothering to look away from her viewfinder.
Nick bent down. From her vantage point he could see a long lump shrouded with a yellow sheet at the base of the staircase. He always wondered why they used bright yellow, making it obvious to anyone and everyone that a corpse was lying there. It stuck out, a happy color surrounded by the dark green and blue of uniforms and gray concrete and black van. While the camera guys focused on that, Nick stood up and began searching the faces of the officers, trying to recognize someone he knew, someone he could call later to get an inside edge on information.