"Lori, Nick. Hey, can you run a name for me, please? I'm coming in from a shooting from this morning. The vic's name is Trace Michaels, common spelling."
"Got it. Another single gunshot wound to the head?"
"Yeah, but I gotta tell you, Lori, I'm not sure I like the fact that you're always ahead of me," Nick said with a smile at the corners of his mouth. He knew she kept an ear on what was happening in the newsroom during the day and that she also would have been required to be at the morning news editors' meeting where they discussed what might make the next day's paper.
"You have no idea how far ahead of you I am, Nick."
But before he could ask what she meant by that, she changed the subject.
"Did you do a piece on this guy in the past too?" she asked and he could tell from the slight lilt in her voice that there was more in the question so he didn't answer right away, waiting for the punch line.
"I did that comparative list for you," she continued. "Man, you ought to buy some lottery tickets quick, Nicky. If you did a piece on this morning's guy too, you're gonna be five for five. They're going to start calling you the Grim Reaper Writer."
"Five?" Nick said, and then tripped off the names to her from memory. "Chambliss. Crossly. Ferris. And now Michaels."
"Pretty good, Nick, for a reporter," Lori said. "But you forgot Kerner."
Nick did not respond. The name had slapped him, hard.
"Charles Kerner," Lori said into the silence. "Kerner was the boyfriend of Margaret Abbott, who helped him suffocate her own father while they were robbing him at his little mom-and-pop store for cash to go buy more crack," she said, obviously reading from some document on the screen of her computer.
"From the clips it looks like some overzealous prosecutor took Abbott's twelve-year-old daughter to trial first to get leverage on the adults and the kid got sentenced to life on a felony murder charge. You wrote a piece about how the daughter was just a tag-along in the robbery and that the justice system sacrificed her to get convictions on the other two."
Nick remembered the case too well. He had worked the story night and day. The daughter had been raised mostly at home by Abbott, who kept her near her side for company, like a doll or a confidante or maybe just some maternal reason to live. When the girl was ten she'd been sent out to the selling streets to buy cocaine, the adults knowing that even if she did get arrested she'd be a minor and wouldn't get too busted. It started out as a court story, but Nick couldn't let the thing go. He'd spent hours with the kid's older siblings, who had escaped the home. He'd interviewed teachers about the potential the child had and the corner drug sellers about the fear in her eyes when she had to approach them. The resulting stories detailing her upbringing-details which had not been allowed in court-had been pipelined to the appeals court in Atlanta where her conviction was being reconsidered. Her mother and the boyfriend, Kerner, had been sentenced to life.
"Nick? You still there? "
"Sorry, Lori," Nick said into the cell phone. "Yeah, I remember."
"Well, I included a short piece from the Birmingham paper about Kerner being shot in a possible drive-by while he and some other Alabama road gang prisoners were out picking trash along the highway. He'd been transferred up there by DOC in a state swap to put some other convict closer to family in Florida. I'll print all this stuff out and put it on your desk and get as much as I can on this Michaels guy, alright?" Lori said.
"Thanks. Yeah, I'm on my way in now."
Five, Nick was thinking. Or seven if you include my own wife and daughter. Maybe I am the reaper. When he got back into the newsroom, Nick cleared a pile off his desk. Included was a manila office-to-office envelope with Lori's name written on the most recent line.
He pulled out the list of sniper-style shootings that she had culled from archives throughout the United States along with the five names that had matched with stories he'd written for the Daily News. From his reporter's notebook, he took out the Secret Service list of deaths that Hargrave had somehow gotten from agent Fitzgerald. Then he untied the box from Ms. Cotton and tucked everything inside. When he used his fingers to open a space between the letters, he noticed that each letter and card had been stuffed back into its original envelope with the original postal cancellation mark printed over the stamp.
He was tempted to start pulling them, but what would he be searching for? More names? Some religious poem? Some envelope marked: REDEMPTION? His fingers had pinched a single letter from the box when a voice made him jump.
"Hey, Nick. How was it out there? Do we have a story or not?"
Deirdre had left her office bunker and was roaming the newsroom, her nervous energy and aura of supervision making everyone around duck and start clicking at their keyboards. Live by the day's lineup of stories, die by the lack of same.
"Yeah, sure," Nick said, clamping the top back onto the box and shoving it down in the knee space under his desk and then flipping open his notebook for effect. "Let's see. We got a forty-three-year-old male, supposedly coming in to the parole office up on McNab to check in with his parole officer for their weekly meet, and bam! Gets one in the head just as he's opening the door."
"Nobody else but the ex-con hurt, right?"
"No, but I did get some good quotes from the woman who was standing in front of him," Nick said, lowering his voice. "Got the guy's blood splattered all over her."
"We get a picture of that? Tell me we got a picture of that!" Deirdre said, not bothering to hide her enthusiasm.
"I don't know. I think you guys dispatched a photographer after I left," Nick said. But he did know the blood factor might get her off his back for a while.
"I'll check," Deirdre said, but she didn't leave. Instead she put an elbow on the top of Nick's partition and set a hip into the side of it like she was going to stay awhile.
"I was going to have you do a security piece on that State Department visit to the OAS convention, but this is sounding a lot more interesting," she said. "So what's the deal? Drive-by? Guy doing some other felon's old lady?"
"I can't say the detectives are that far along yet, Deirdre."
"But you got the guy's background, right?"
"Sure," Nick said, again looking at his pad even though he didn't have to read it. He was just relieved that Deirdre was pulling him off the OAS gig. This was what he needed to be doing.
"Trace Michaels," he said, as if he'd finally found the name. "He was in for attempted murder after he set his girlfriend on fire. He's been out almost eight months according to the research files. Plenty of time to make more enemies, I suppose."
Nick told himself he was not really trying to steer Deirdre away from the similarities in the sniper story.
"But it's a long-range shooting, right? And it was a large-bore bullet wound, right?"
"Yeah," Nick said. She wasn't so stupid.
"So we have a serial sniper running around the city shooting ex-cons and bad men, right?"
Deirdre's language always got tougher as the excitement of a good story got up her nose. After all, she had been a reporter before she joined management.
She leaned over his partition and lowered her voice. "Nick, do we have some serial killer out there doing a Son of Sam thing to scumbags on the streets? Are you working that angle or what?"
Nick looked away and flipped through a couple of pages in his notebook like he was searching for an answer.
"We've both been at this game a long time, Deirdre. You never say never. But to tell you the truth, right now I'm not focused on speculation and screaming headlines," Nick said, getting hot. "I mean, shit, since when does two dead jump to serial killer? Christ, Son of Sam had five shooting scenes and a ballistics match in before they started calling Berkowitz a serial killer."
The heads of other reporters and editors started peeking up over their cubicles. Even with Nick's reputation the tension level of his voice was rising too high for the modern newsroom-as-insurance-office protocols. Nick went silent.