"Good afternoon, Nick," he said, looking at Nick's shirtfront. "Got your I.D. with you?"
Nick and Jim had greeted each other nearly five days a week for the past eight years. The guard had commented on Nick's stories, had even congratulated him when he'd bought a new car three years ago. Yet after 9/11 all employees had to wear a badge identifying themselves. The first time he'd misplaced his I.D. and Jim made him sign in, Nick joked about joining al-Qaeda after eight years as a staff reporter, but the look the guard had given him was scary.
This morning Nick just shook his head and signed in.
"Try to find it, Nick. Or you'll have to buy a new one," the guard said.
Nick looked up at him. "How did you know my name without it, Jim?" he said and walked away.
Down in the newsroom the usual din was running. Most of the reporters were out on their beats. But folks on the daytime copy desk were in their nose-to-the-grindstone mode. While he worked his way through the back of the maze, Nick kept his eyes down, trying to be low-profile. Get in, get your stuff and leave. Simple as that. He ducked into a back room where they stored supplies and picked out an empty cardboard box and then made it to his desk.
The computer he'd used for the last several years was gone. Even the monitor. The only thing left was a pattern of dust where it once sat. When he tried the drawers of his desk, they'd been locked. He tried his key. No go, as he had figured. Even the belly drawer, which only held pencils and paper clips and stale breath mints, was locked. On the desktop the documents that Lori had delivered to his desk were predictably gone, used no doubt to put together this morning's story. His personal dictionary, a thesaurus and a copy of Bernstein's The Careful Writer were still stacked on one corner. There was a clay sculpture of a green-and-blue dog that his oldest daughter, by three minutes, had made and given to him on a Father's Day several years ago. The family photo, showing the four of them, was lying face down, apparently knocked over during the hasty removal of his computer. Nick could feel eyes on him when he picked it up and, refusing to be emotional, he slid it into the bottom of the box and then piled the rest of his stuff in after. On his way out Nick avoided Joe Binder's desk, even though he could see the back of the reporter's head, bent low as if he were studying some newly installed hieroglyphics on his keyboard. Carrying the box, he took the back way to the research center and when Lori saw him she got up from her terminal and walked straight to him. Her eyes were red-rimmed when she stepped up to the counter.
"I'm sorry, Nick. Really, I tried to call you and-"
Nick reached out and touched her hand. "It's OK, Lori. I shouldn't have put you in a bad position. It's all on me. Please. You're the best," he said and then hugged her to him, longer than he needed to, but not as long as he wanted to. "I'll call you. I'd like to see you, you know, off campus."
He smiled at the joke as he walked away, somewhat mystified that a moment that should have been sad had somehow left a lightness in his head.
Chapter 30
They met under the shade of a bottlebrush tree, gathered at a picnic table that was set up behind the county's fire and paramedics warehouse. It was a short walk for Canfield and Hargrave. Nick needed only to take the short drive from the newspaper he'd passed on earlier.
The meeting place was suggested by the detective after Nick called him on his cell. It was eighty degrees in the shade and the lieutenant in uniform was sweating twice as much as the two in plain clothes.
"It's out of the pattern. It's out of the sequence of logic. And you two are out of your minds," Canfield was saying to both of them but looking directly at Hargrave, who, for the first time since Nick had laid eyes on him, was appearing unsure.
"What, you're going to call this ex-con Walker and tell him some sniper might be targeting him because his good friend Mr. Mullins has an angel of death killing the subjects of his stories?
"And, I might add," he said, shifting his focus onto Nick, "you didn't write the story about the death of your own family, did you?"
Nick felt the anger starting up from that spot deep in his limbic system, the source in the very top of his spine where it always came from and where he so infrequently got it to stop before it came tumbling out of his mouth. This time he held it.
"Why don't you tell him yourself, Mullins?" Canfield continued, unaware of Nick's struggle. "You tell this Walker asshole he's in danger."
"I can't," Nick said. "I'm not allowed to have any contact with the guy."
"Yeah, no shit. We've got that in your file too. Stalking this guy, Christ. Why even bring it up? If you're so convinced this sniper is going to take Walker out, let him," Canfield said. "I would."
Nick could take the fact that the lieutenant would have pulled a copy of the dossier they undoubtedly put together on him when they invited him into this mess. But the suggestion of letting Walker be shot down in the street was one that made all three of them shift their eyes and go quiet. Nick had spun that scenario in his head a thousand times. He even thought of doing it himself but dismissed the notion by thinking of Carly having to come on visiting days at the prison. He'd done jail-house interviews himself and had seen children, dressed in their Sunday best, standing fidgety and unsure while their fathers, dressed in blue prison garb, tried to coax them into a smile. Could you trade retribution for that?
Canfield finally shifted his weight, stood up. The heat had caused dark semicircles to form under the arms of his uniform shirt.
"Mo, I can't believe you're going for this," he finally said to Hargrave, using a shortened form of the detective's first name that had not been used in Nick's presence before.
Hargrave shook his head. "Hard to judge this shooter, Lieutenant, I think we can all agree on that," he said, his voice flat and deliberately lacking in emotion. "The fact that he contacted Mullins gives a hell of a lot of credence to the theory that he's picking victims from Mullins's stories. That leads into the logic that he's read Mullins's work and has some kind of connection to him and would know about the accident that killed his family. So I'm not convinced it's that far of a jump to figure that the statement Redman made to Mullins-'One more. You're owed'-could mean he's going to take out this Walker character."
Nick remained silent. He couldn't have put it any better.
"I'm sorry, guys. I just can't go for it. I've already got deputies all over this OAS meeting and the Secretary of State coming to town and now some goddamn public relations thing they're going to do. You want to tell this guy Walker what you're thinking, go ahead, Mo. But I can't authorize some kind of protective custody or some damn sniper watch on a theory. You want to make it part of your investigation, go to it."
Canfield started to leave when Hargrave stopped him. "Sir, how about our man Fitzgerald? Did he show any interest in the story Mullins did about the secretary?"
Nick was looking at the tabletop when he heard the question. His head snapped up like he had been yanked by the hair.
"What the hell are you… What story?" he said, staring stupidly at Hargrave.
The detective pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket and handed it to Nick. "Your research person faxed this after you left," he said. "Remember you asked them to send you anything political you'd done that mentioned the Secretary of State?"
Nick unfolded the sheet and read the headline:
LOCAL GUARDSMAN KILLED IN IRAQ
Someone had highlighted certain lines in the story, including a quote by the dead boy's father blaming the Secretary of State for keeping his son overseas beyond his assigned date to come home.