Eye of Vengeance Page 8

  Nick was back home by the time his daughter got up for school. He was at the kitchen table looking through the sports pages when Carly shuffled across the tile floor, her eyes half opened and puffy with sleep. Her small high voice scratched out, “Morning, Daddy,” and he pushed back his chair and let her climb onto his lap.

  “Hey, sweetheart. How’d you sleep?”

  “OK.”

  “Good,” he said and let her head rest warm and scented with sleep into the crook of his neck. He said nothing for a full minute, letting their hearts talk in silence.

  “Big day today?” he finally said.

  “Not really.”

  “I thought you were doing those FCAT exams.”

  “Pssst,” she said, coming more awake, at least enough to start injecting cynicism into her voice. “Those things are easy, Dad. And it’s boring to just sit through the whole time.”

  “Well, I’m proud that you’re such a brainiac, but you still have to go to school,” Nick said, bouncing her just a bit with his knee.

  “I knowwww,” Carly said with that omnipresent nine-year-old whine.

  “So let’s get moving,” Nick said, bouncing his knee higher.

  His daughter stood, trying to look disturbed, started away and then turned with one of those preteen looks.

  “Brainiac? Dad, that is like sooooo old.”

  Nick watched her spin and walk back toward her room, the sleepy shuffle already replaced by a small bounce. She already had her mother’s legs, delicate ankles, strong calf muscles. Her sister had had those long and impossibly skinny legs, her knees like knots in a rope. She’d walked like a newborn colt. Carly’s gait was more like a sturdy dancer. Watching the colt might not have made him think of his wife, but watching the dancer made him miss her so much he had to turn his face away. Nick took another sip of coffee and looked down at the newspaper on the table, where he had covered his 1A story with the local section, letting only a touch of red from the masthead show. I’ll have to get into the office by ten, he thought. Anything you put on the front page, they’re going to want a follow-up story for tomorrow.

  He was only halfway through the newsroom when one of his fellow reporters said, “Nice story this morning, Nick. Like that lead, man.”

  First paragraph, always the grabber if you did it right. If you did it wrong, Nick always worried, they’d turn the page on you.

  When he got to his desk he fired up the computer and then looked apprehensively at the blinking light on the phone. Messages. He’d learned to hate the messages. Every story had the potential to bring out the nuts. Every sentence was just lying out there every morning for someone to disagree with, poke fun at, provide black-and-white proof that the reporter was incompetent. If you wrote anything even bordering on the political, you took the chance of having the right-wingers blasting you the next morning for your unfair liberal stance and the liberals calling you a fascist. Nick preferred to get it from both sides. It was the only way you could tell you’d been fair.

  But crime stories rarely had a political bent, so he was safe from most of the second-guessing. He dialed up the message system and listened to the first call:

  “Hello, Mr. Mullins. I read your story this morning and would like to compliment you on your writing. But who gives a shit? The guy is scum and should have been executed the day they found him in that house with those little girls. Why do you guys even waste the ink? Who cares who did it except for maybe we want to give him a medal. Anyway, good riddance.” OK, Nick thought, I’ll forward that one off to the editorial-page folks. He punched up the next message:

  “Hey, Mullins, are the cops going to waste a bunch of time and money trying to find out who pulled the trigger on a guy we all would have gladly shot ourselves? I paid for this man’s trial. I paid to have him fed and housed for the last four years in prison. And I would have ended up paying for him to sit on death row for the next twenty while the lawyers got rich filing appeal after appeal. Now I suppose they’re going to use my taxes to find his killer. Please. Give me a break.”

  The next call was from Cameron:

  “Thanks a bunch, Nick. You swamped my ass already this morning. Give me a call when you get in. Hargrave is all over me to find out where you got the info on the .308 round. He thinks you might have pocketed evidence from the rooftop and lied to him about it.”

  “Shit,” Nick said aloud. He didn’t need the detective to be pissed off. If he could work with the guy, that would be helpful. But if Nick was just going to have to filter everything through Cameron’s press office anyway, he didn’t think it was worth it. He wasn’t going to give up the doc just to pacify the homicide team. He was thinking about a strategy and unconsciously punching up the next message, so the next voice snuck up on him:

  “Thank you for your story today, Mr. Mullins. A very thorough job, as usual. I look forward to your next case. Your profiles have been very helpful over the years. I hope this has been as gratifying for you as it has for me. Thanks again.”

  Nick fielded an occasional compliment call. Rare, but sometimes it helped him get through the others. But the voice on this one had a timbre that made him replay the message. He listened closely to the deep male monotone. “Your next case.” Odd for a caller to use a law enforcement term when talking to a reporter. Profiles? Yeah. But reporters didn’t do cases, they did reports on other people’s cases. And what did the guy mean by gratifying? Nick had never thought of what he did as gratifying. It was reporting and he had always considered it straight reporting. He told himself he was after the truth in black-and-white or as close to it as he could find. Yeah, he knew a woman who sneered at him each time he made that statement: Nicky, there is no truth, only perspective.

  Part of that statement was true for him now because the only gratification he could see was if Robert Walker was on the autopsy table. And that was his perspective.

  A blinking e-mail notice popped up on his screen, pulling him back to the work. He opened it with a click and saw it was from the city editor: Come in and talk when you get a chance.

  Right. When I get a chance. It was a polite order and he knew it.

  Nick scrolled down through the rest of his messages. Some he recognized as reader comments. The one he was looking for, the information from the library on similar shootings of inmates from around the nation, was down the list.

  He ignored the rest and called it up. Lori had left a note up top: I came up with a few sniper-type shootings. Hope some of these help. I put the Florida events first instead of doing them by time line. I also searched for stories where both inmates and former felons were shot and killed on the outside. I might have generated a lot of drug killings, but I stuck them on there anyway.

  Nick checked the size of the file. Huge. He shook his head and looked at the time Lori had sent him the message: past eleven last night. She’d put in some overtime, and he’d have to take her to lunch or at least order her some flowers or something. But before the thought turned into action, his eye caught a name in the first batch of pages he scrolled through: Dr. Markus Chambliss.

  Nick scrolled through the accompanying story, pulled from the archives of a newspaper over on the west coast of Florida.

  A prominent San Sebastian physician and former medical examiner, who had once been the target of a police investigation into the death of his wife, was found dead of a single gunshot wound Tuesday, Hillsborough County police said.

  Dr. Markus Chambliss, 58, was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car about nine AM in the driveway of his home in Tropical Park. Police declined to say whether they considered the death a homicide or a possible suicide. Chambliss had lived in the quiet suburban home for more than a year, moving there with his girlfriend from northern Florida’s Dixie County, where he had once been a suspect in the death of his wife of 26 years, Mrs. Barbara Chambliss.

  How the hell did I miss this? Nick thought as he checked the date of the story. Four months ago. The story had run in the St. Petersburg T
imes. Nick closed his eyes. You’re slipping, man, he thought. Two years ago that never would have gotten by you. Two years ago nothing got by you when it came to work. He went back to the file and moved down to subsequent stories by the west coast newspaper.

  A few years ago Chambliss had been the subject of one of Nick’s own big Sunday profiles. When the stories had first broken on the M.E. suspected of killing his own wife, Nick had talked his editors into letting him travel to north-central Florida to do a story on what was already being called the perfect murder.

  Chambliss was described as a respected member of the community and a doctor whose reputation was beyond reproach. That’s always a clue, Nick had argued at the time. Human beings are always fallible, and he had learned long ago that when you started digging, you could find something on everybody. Now, whether it was illegal, immoral or unethical was in the sorting, but no one was as perfect as the superficial stories first tell you. The editors relented and Nick went and dug. With the help of a contact he had in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, he was able to get the inside information.

  Chambliss had called 911 on the morning of his wife’s death, telling a dispatcher that he discovered that his wife had passed away during the night. A rescue squad had responded and they did little more than confirm that Mrs. Chambliss was indeed dead. Knowing the medical examiner on a professional basis, they did not question his request to transport his wife to his office. The doctor did the autopsy himself and ruled his own wife’s death as heart failure from natural causes. Case closed. Burial set for the next day. Grieving to begin.

  The local cops probably would have let it go. But the FDLE heard of the case and said, Whoa. For a man to do an autopsy on his own wife and make an evaluation of death by natural causes might have seemed all right for the rural areas of Dixie County, but that’s not the way it worked in Tallahassee. They sent an investigator to town, and Nick had a direct line to the guy. Within a day, Nick was told about a phone records request and the discovery that Chambliss had made three calls during the night to the number of a woman who was quickly determined to be the good doctor’s mistress. When she was interviewed, her story was way too well rehearsed, and the FDLE was suspicious enough and powerful enough to have an independent autopsy ordered. A team was called in and the pathologists found a suspicious injection point on Mrs. Chambliss’s thigh that was fresh. When questioned, the doctor said that he had given his wife, a diabetic, an injection of insulin at the time she went to bed. Some insulin was found in the house, but because Chambliss had already done an autopsy, had already drained his wife’s blood and filled her veins with embalming fluid, the concentrations of insulin—which can be deadly on its own in high amounts—or any other chemicals could not be ascertained. The perfect murder? Possibly.

  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 qu
estion 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.