"I didn't say that."
"Nobody said it was an asshole pedophile who killed two little girls either," Nick said and watched for the quick twitch in the corner of Cameron's mouth that always gave him away
Both of them stopped the dance for a silent few seconds. Cameron put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. Nick put his notebook away and started spinning the pen in his fingers like a miniature baton and watched the top of the ladder where Hargrave and his partner had not yet shown themselves.
"Nick," Cameron finally said. "How did you know to go up there? Were you tipped off?"
This was what they called trading information. It was a subtle agreement to give each other what they had. The only rule was truth. But it worked with certain press officers, the ones with personal integrity and the ones who trusted that Nick wouldn't burn them with the other media. Cameron was one of the few.
"No," Nick said. "It was just a guess based on your guys lining up the shot and the spatter pattern that our photographer caught with the zoom."
Cameron nodded. "And the pedophile thing?"
"Just a tip, Joel. Nothing insidious."
Cameron shook his head. He knew Nick had made contacts over the years. He also knew he'd just made a bad bargain.
"You'll confirm if I get anything first, right?" Nick said just to make sure.
Cameron kept shaking his head, this time with a grin. "Yeah, I'll confirm. You just can't use my name."
Nick returned the grin, slapped the press officer on the shoulder and walked away.
Back out on the street, the media gang was peeling away. But the camera guys were still there. And two remote television news trucks were still on the sidewalk. That meant the body was also still there and hadn't been moved and nothing with more violence or potential for blood had hit the police scanners in South Florida this morning. They were all waiting for the shot of the body bag being loaded into the medical examiner's black SUV, the shot that would inevitably lead the local news.
Nick made two stops on his way back to the newsroom. First to the coffee shop on the ground floor of his building, where he picked up a large with cream and sugar and then stood in the lobby letting the caffeine hit the back of his brain for a few minutes. When half the coffee was gone, he rode the elevator up and went the back way to the library and talked quietly to Lori.
"I shipped a bunch of stuff to your queue, Nick," she said. "Was it him?"
"They're not letting it loose officially yet," he said. "But I think my source is good. What I want to do now is get some kind of an M.O. thing going. Can you do a search first locally and then nationwide on shootings, homicides that involved rifles and that might have been described as sniper-type shootings?"
Lori was writing on a pad. "Pretty broad, but yeah, we can do all the South Florida media. National is going to take some time. We can do most of the online newspaper archives and the Associated Press stuff. How far back do you want to go?"
"Two, three years," Nick said. "No, make it four."
She looked up from her pad over the top of her frameless reading glasses. "You've got an editor's approval on this, don't you, Nick?"
In the corporate world of news gathering, computer search time was money. Somebody had to be held responsible for every dime spent. Nick knew that. Lori knew that.
"Yeah," he said. "Deirdre."
Lori was still looking over her lenses. "My ass," she said.
"OK. I'm grandfathered in," Nick said.
"My ass again," she said, this time grinning.
Nick just looked at her with his eyebrows up, surprised.
Lori shook the pad at him and smiled. "Off the books," she said. "For now."
Nick almost winked, but then thought, Don't do that. That's what Carly would call "weird Dad stuff."
"And speaking of books," Lori said, bailing him out, "I've got that Van Gogh book that you said Carly might like." She bent under the shelf and came up with a big picture book he'd commented on weeks ago.
"How's she doing, anyway?"
"Better," Nick said, taking the book and wondering about the coincidence that they'd both thought of his daughter at the same time. "She'll love this, Lori. Thanks."
On the way back through the rat's maze to his desk, Nick kept his coffee cup up to his face. Maybe no one would interrupt him at midswallow. But before he got to his chair an editor for the online edition of the paper asked if he had anything new on the jail shooting and could he please file something so they could put it up on the website. Nick just nodded. In another era newspaper reporters had a daily deadline: Get the best and most accurate story you can by nine or ten o'clock tonight so it makes the morning's paper. Only the wire service and radio reporters had to make several updates during the day, leaving them little time to dig deeper into a story. But in a time of website mania, every daily reporter was in competition on an hourly basis. File what you have so the office workers sneaking looks at the news on their computers at their desks can follow your shifting speculation all day.
Nick hated it, but played the game.
He sat down and called up a blank file and wrote: An inmate being transferred to the county's downtown jail was killed by an unknown gunman at 7:55 this morning, police said.
The prisoner, whose name was being withheld by the Sheriff's Office, was the only person injured during the rush-hour shooting as he was being walked into the rear of the jail building in the 800 block of South Andrews Avenue.
A Sheriff's Office spokesman said the shooting took place after a van transporting several prisoners was inside a closed gated area just a block from the county courthouse. Investigators were unsure how many shots were fired, said spokesman Joel Cameron, and officials would not speculate on a motive for the killing.
"The shooting piece is in," he called over his shoulder to the online editor when he finished. It had taken him eight minutes. A lot of nothing, he thought. But it'll hold them off for a while.
He took a long sip of coffee and then called up his e-mail message inbox and started at the real work.
Lori had sent him several files and he opened up the one titled YOURFERRIS, figuring it to be the story he had written on Steven Ferris just four years ago.
THE PREDATORS AMONG US
By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer They walked hand in hand on the street, two little girls, one in green-and-white sneakers, the other in pink shorts, sisters strolling home after school.
When they were stopped by a soft voice, it didn't startle them-it was familiar. When they turned to the big doughy man with the kind smile, they felt no fear-they knew him. When he invited them into his green pickup, they didn't panic-they'd been in his truck before.
In the full sunlight of a warm afternoon, two little girls looked into the face of evil, and didn't recognize it.
The public now knows the face of Howard Steven Ferris, 30, who police say confessed to the abductions and killings of Marcellina Cotton, 6, and her sister Gabriella, 8.
We know their bodies were found in the attic of Ferris's Fort Lauderdale apartment. We know, according to his confession, that his sole motivation was to sexually assault them.
But if the allegations are true-which only a court can determine now-do we really know Steven Ferris?
And what of the other 300 sexual predators identified and released from Florida prisons? What of their dark motivations and urges? How do you recognize evil coming, and what can we do about the men who bring it?
The habits and methods of child molesters are no secret. Law enforcement has worked off a general but clear profile for years.
The more that is learned about Ferris, the closer he fits that outline. Detectives could have picked him off the pages of their own investigative handbooks.
The story went on to describe how Ferris, a part-time construction worker and handyman, had come across the two girls and their mother in a local park. They had been living out of their car for several months. Nick had interviewed the mother, who could not find work and was in South Florida alone. She was cooking the family meals on the grill of the campsite and at night she made up an impromptu bed of blankets and pillows made of clothes packed in pillowcases in the back seat for her daughters while she slept in the front. She said her pride had kept her from going to the homeless shelters and community aid programs. She was doling out her savings in order to pay the monthly fee for the camping space. Restricted to only one month at a time, she would drive off for the minimum three days, parking on the streets, and then come back and pay again, taking yet another spot for another month. The woman said she had specifically picked this park because it was close to an elementary school and that she had enrolled her daughters there using the address of a friend who had put them up for a time until her boyfriend had demanded they leave. The mother said she wasn't afraid of living out in the streets as long as her daughters were near. At night she could reach across the seat back and touch her girls and hear them sleeping in the dark. She considered the park safe. And then Steven Ferris had found them.