Crime Beat Page 6

  It was my turn to smile, though I had to work at it a little. “Circulation is up. Our readers are informed citizens who respect integrity and the principal of innocent until proven guilty. In my opinion, the News & Observer is rolling in the sewer with the National Enquirer. Next you’ll be reporting on Tiger Woods’ idiot love child.”

  “Maybe, but at least none of us are murderers. You know what Hardison told me the SBI told him?”

  “That donuts make you fat and lazy?”

  “This serial killer may be a serial killer, but he’s not following the book. It’s like a killer whose heart’s not in it. He doesn’t take any pride in his work. That clipper thing seems like an afterthought, as if he had to throw in a gimmick to get taken seriously.”

  “There would be other ways to do that. Like, carve your initials, steal panties, or harvest a specific organ. I mean, is he going to sit on Death Row and brag about his fingernail collection?”

  She leaned forward, and I leaned forward as well. The beer was working on her a little, and her face relaxed. The electric candlelight sparkled in her big pupils. “You know something, you’re a smart-ass.”

  I smiled, a little easier this time. “Comes with the territory. Scratch a cynic and you get a disillusioned idealist.”

  She reached out a hand, the one that scrawled pencil notes in her composition book, and touched mine. I couldn’t help but notice her fingernails. They had a little bit of garlic toast crumbs stuck to them, but otherwise they were healthy.

  She curled her fingers into a claw and raked them across the back of my hand, hard enough to leave red trails. “I scratch you and all I see is meat.”

  I caught her hand and gently held it. “You shouldn’t be driving. If you got pulled, I’d have to run your arrest on the front page, with a gorgeous mug shot.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the reporters.”

  “Only the gorgeous ones.”

  Her face got softer. Her eyes got softer. Her hair got softer. It must have been a while for her.

  We went to my place, where some things got softer and other things got harder.

  Things like my life.

  12.

  The call for the arson case came in early the next morning. I was late, being the gentleman that I was, but Moretz was in his cubicle as usual. He’d texted me but I hadn’t turned on my phone, because I hate the sound of beeping when I’m trying to be romantic. But I heard the sirens on the way in and was glad I had a reporter on the job that didn’t require sleep.

  If only I could be lucky enough to keep him out of prison for a while.

  Moretz called me from the scene as I started laying out the obituary page. Obits are one of our staples. When someone dies in a small town, you can count on at least 30 friends and family members picking up a copy to clip out that last public artifact.

  For some reason, Facebook and Twitter hadn’t erased that simple, solemn ritual for most people. In death, we still had the final word—and a corner on the market.

  “Two-story house, fully engaged,” Moretz said.

  I tried not to cheer for the total loss. That seemed like bad form. “Any fatals?”

  “Not so much as a heat rash.”

  “Okay.” If a death had occurred, I’d have been conflicted. Kavanaugh would probably want to write it up for the News & Observer, and her story would hit the street hours before our edition. But she wouldn’t cover a run-of-the-mill fire. I recognized the wisdom in the saying, “Don’t play where you make your hay.”

  ”But we did get a dog,” Moretz said.

  Dog death. Every storyteller since the dawn of time understood that you never killed off the dog. Immolate thousands, wipe out the rain forest, let the human race endure a nuclear holocaust, but never, ever let the dog die. Dean Koontz had subsidized a new head of hair embracing that core principal.

  “We can’t run that,” I said. Which didn’t keep me from plotting the follow-up, the tearful burial scene and the impassioned plea to donate in Fido’s honor to the local animal shelter.

  “You’ll want this one,” Moretz said. “Dog’s trapped inside, one of the firefighters goes up and knocks the door apart with a sledgehammer. Dog comes out yipping and steaming, they hose him down, happily ever after.”

  My pulse rate increased. “You got photos?”

  “That’s why you pay me the big bucks, Chief.”

  The fire was front-page kind of stuff, a vacationing couple who barely got out with their lives. The house was owned by a doctor who recently lost his license because of pill pushing, and word on the street said he was strapped for cash. Naturally, everyone in the community believed he’d torched his own house for the insurance money.

  But we in the newspaper business, unlike the judicial system and the court of public opinion, gave him the benefit of a doubt. Though we liked to hint at guilt whenever it might get people to drop quarters in our little metal boxes.

  An “unsung hero” piece was even better than a murder. It had drama—though we’d have to embellish the firefighter’s risk, because those guys were always treated for smoke inhalation whether they needed it or not—and it had a dog. With any luck, the couple was young and good-looking. And the backstory of the doctor could be dumped into the last paragraph, along with the fire chief’s clichéd comment of “The cause of the fire is under investigation.”

  Heck, Moretz would probably even score a little goodwill with Hardison and the other cops. And we’d get a follow-up or two out of it as we recounted the doctor’s past transgressions and subtly raise a cloud of suspicion.

  “Can you wrap it by deadline?” I asked.

  “If I don’t get arrested before then.”

  “Yeah. Hard to type in handcuffs.”

  “We’re all in handcuffs,” he said. “They’re just invisible most of the time.”

  He rang off with that. Good line.

  I called Kavanaugh to see if she was awake and tell her where the coffee was.

  13.

  Hardison messed up our plans by being competent, detail-oriented, and able to set aside his personal dislike of both Moretz and the media.

  In short, he did the unexpected.

  He brought in a different suspect for questioning. It was the man who had been romantically linked to the first victim of the Rebel Clipper, the one Moretz had broken to the public and Hardison. He had been on the initial short list of people wanted for questioning, but the second murder had danced the investigation onto a broader stage.

  The man, Grayson Jennings, claimed he learned of the woman’s death and had contacted her family. She had broken up with him a month before the murder, and he’d cleared her off his speed dial and headed for the coast.

  “A sensible explanation,” Hardison said, in a manner that suggested the cover story was a little too sensible.

  The fact that Jennings had returned was a little less sensible. He’d called the sheriff to ask if he could be of any help, and the sheriff was happy to oblige. Kavanaugh must have been tipped, because she had a photo of Jennings being escorted into the office. Moretz, apparently, was now on the sheriff’s “Do not call” list, at least as a reporter.

  Kavanaugh didn’t mention it to me, probably as revenge for freezing her out of the arson story, and our little dalliance cooled almost as fast as it began. When her story broke, we were left with eggs on our faces.

  Actually, I took the hit, as the publisher summoned me into his office and slapped the News & Observer on that maple desk that cost almost as much as my annual salary. I got the message, which of course meant I had to go ride Moretz’s case for getting scooped.

  His desk, which used to be tidy and organized, was now a mess of coffee rings, rumpled stacks of paper, bent paper clips, and scratched-up computer discs. I slid the newspaper onto his keyboard as he was typing.

  “I thought you and she were an item,” Moretz said, looking up from the article with his cold, dark eyes.

  I frowned. A journalist always protect
s his sources, and I had kept my love life a secret. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, as sharp as Moretz was. He knew a lot more than he put in the paper. “That’s beside the point.”

  “Is it? She seems to be getting inside information.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She’s including details that you snipped out of my copy.”

  “I edited for accuracy and any potential for libel.”

  He tossed the newspaper toward the recycling bin, but it unfolded like a stiff parachute and floated to the floor. “And then fed it to her like it was whipped cream on your fingers.”

  “Look, John, we’ve got a good thing going here. I toss her a few crumbs and I get the whole cake, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, you’re sleeping with the enemy. And that’s more important than the truth.”

  “Hey, this Jennings thing pushes you out of the spotlight. We got our mileage out of the con game, and now we can go back to cranking copy and selling papers. You’ll still be a celebrity until they make an arrest. And, who knows, this might make your career. Word gets around in this business, and somebody will probably steal you away in six months.”

  “I like it here,” Moretz said.

  I waved my hand. “We’re a dying breed. Print journalism is going the way of vinyl albums and disco. You’ll be off blogging or doing an Internet podcast somewhere, the next Julian Assange.”

  “If print is dying, what are you doing here, then?”

  That was a bigger question than anyone could answer. But this was my one shot at a surge, and though the Picayune was a small-town paper, I wanted a single success to cap off my obituary.

  I’d proofed enough obits to know that most people didn’t accomplish anything significant, and there were no Lifetime Achievement Awards for being a decent human being. If you wanted to be remembered, you had to make your moment.

  I finally came up with a suitable answer. “I’m doing the best I can, that’s what I’m doing here.”

  “The best you can do is second best.”

  The scanner crackled and a call for an accident with possible injury came through. Moretz grabbed his laptop and camera. “With any luck, I’ll give you some fresh meat for the front page,” he said.

  As he brushed past, I said, “Who told you about me and Kavanaugh?”

  “I have my sources.”

  He hurried away, and I kind of missed the old days when he’d called me “Chief.”

  14.

  I was mad at Kavanaugh, but once you’ve been to the trough, it’s hard to keep your nose out of it. She was over at my place, filling me in on the Jennings interrogation. In trade, I filled her whiskey glass.

  “You think he did it?” I said, flopping beside her on my shopworn couch.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said. “It’s what Hardison thinks. But, personally, it sounds like Jennings was nowhere around when Shumate got it.”

  I put an arm around her, testing things. Plus it was November and getting cold. “When are they pulling you back to Raleigh?”

  She shrugged, but not hard enough to shuck my embrace. “They’re thinking of setting up a mountain bureau. Our readers like this little hillbilly crime beat.”

  “Incest and moonshine, huh?”

  “Hooks them every time. And don’t forget dogs. That ‘unsung hero’ piece was pretty schmaltzy, Howard.”

  “Come on. The way you’ve been glorifying Hardison, you have no room to talk.”

  “He’s the story. If this turns out to be a real serial killer instead of a string of coincidences, we need a tentpole. Right now, it’s Hardison. I could run with Jennings, but I get the feeling Hardison is just stabbing in the dark, especially after the Moretz fiasco.”

  I didn’t say anything. The liquor kept my mouth busy.

  “But if we get a real suspect, then the suspect becomes the tentpole and we get a ton of inches out of the creep—his damaged childhood, his connection to the victims, the public outrage at the monster in our midst. Then we get to trial and we focus on the attorneys. If we’re lucky, there’s a death sentence and we fill up the editorial page with that whole circle-jerk moral debate.”

  “Sounds like enough to build a career.”

  “Or write a true-crime book.”

  “But we’re not even sure this is a serial killer.”

  “That’s the whole problem. The SBI hasn’t pulled rank because there isn’t a compelling link, and Hardison doesn’t have anything but some fingernail clippers, a couple of random suspects, and a size-nine footprint.”

  I raised one of my dirty L.L. Beans. “That’s about average for a man, so that narrows it down to three billion suspects.”

  “If you stretch it far enough, you could tie that first murder, the Hanratty case, into it, and you’d have it tied into a neat ball.”

  “But that one’s totally different. A male victim, a death by gunshot wound. The others were hands-on. Clubbing, strangling, razor blade.”

  The liquor was working on her and she smiled. “I love it when you talk murder.”

  Her lips tasted like Jim Beam. “Well,” I said, when I was ready to catch my breath, “if it turns out to be three or four different murderers, that’s a pretty good string, too.”

  “You still think Moretz is clean?”

  “You said yourself that Hardison wouldn’t have let him walk if there was a chance of guilt.”

  “Hardison’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s holding out on the SBI when he should be taking advantage of their lab resources. That clipper thing has to be traceable somehow.”

  “Dead end,” I said, reaching over her, not unduly pressing my body against hers. I slid open a drawer on the coffee table and showed her the bag of the fingernail clippers. “You buy these things like candy. They’re not unique enough to pin a clever murderer. I figured we would do some sort of commemorative giveaway when this was over.”

  She pulled one out and toyed with it. The clippers featured a nail file that swiveled out so you could finish the job with a nice buffed edge. “I don’t see why the ‘Rebel Clipper’ thing stuck. They found clippers with the second body but not the others. If it wasn’t for you guys running that nickname, the cops might have a better handle on the murders.”

  “I think they did find them on the other two,” I said. “I believe they are withholding the information.”

  “You said your boy Moretz was hot on that Shumate scene. He would have seen them discovering the clippers.”

  “They were giving him a hard time, fighting their little turf wars, violating the public’s right to come and go as it pleases. They think they can play Maypole with a little bit of yellow tape and put the truth in bondage.”

  “If Moretz was there, he wouldn’t need to plant the clippers, or maybe he ran out of time.”

  “You’re getting paranoid,” I said. “You’ve been spending too much time in the city.”

  “Is that an invitation to move in with you?”

  “Just for the night,” I said. “One thing you can set in stone, there’s no future with me.”

  She kissed my cheek. “Sure thing, Mr. Melodrama.”

  “Just one thing before we go to bed,” I said.

  She groaned with impatience. “I’ve got a deadline in the morning.”

  “Those tidbits I fed you, the stuff I’d trimmed out of Moretz’s stories?”

  “Come on, you’re not going to hold that over my head, are you? You’re already getting the plum pudding. You don’t need the bribery.”

  “I’m just wondering if Moretz has ever seen us in the same place at the same time, besides that one press conference.”

  “Who cares? We’re consenting adults.”

  “He might be stalking me. He knows we’ve been hooking up.”

  “Please. Call it ‘dating.’ I’m old-fashioned and I like to pretend I’m a lady.”

  “Either way, he knows stuff he shouldn’t.”

  “Th
at’s his job. You said it yourself, he’s good at what he does.”

  “A little too good.”

  She pressed closer, her warm whiskey breath on my face, the girlish, meadow scent of her in direct contrast to her severe, square-jawed features. “What, you’re afraid he’s going to bust in and make us victims number four and five of the Rebel Clipper?”

  Just four, I thought. But I didn’t say that. It just plain wasn’t romantic.

  15.

  The actual fourth victim was found the next afternoon. Peggy McDonald was in her early 20’s, dressed in a practical outfit and sneakers, her long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She’d been on her way to a shift at the local library when the Rebel Clipper made her overdue in more ways than one.

  McDonald lived downtown and regularly walked the half mile to work. A stretch of the walk was through an undeveloped lot that contained a couple of leaning, decaying farm sheds. It was a popular shortcut for locals, and the occasional wino found rainy-day refuge in one of the sheds.

  Apparently the killer secreted away in the shadows and took her as she passed, looping a section of old clothesline around her neck. Her body was discovered by a town employee who was mapping the sewer system.

  Moretz, who’d been nearby at the courthouse, had all that in his article, of course. And, as if to remove any doubt that the strangulation was an echo of the second murder, the trusty pair of clippers had been found tucked into McDonald’s pocket.

  Sheriff Says Killings Linked, read my banner head. I sent Fitz out to get a shot of the site where the body was found, but Moretz had engaged in his usual modus operandi and was on the scene minutes after the call came in.

  Because our broadband scanner monitors all streams of public traffic instead of just the emergency band, he picked up the town worker’s original call to the dispatch office.

  To score some points with Hardison, I ran a mug of his concerned, jowly face. There was the usual jurisdictional tug-of-war, since the body had been found inside the town limits, ensuring Hardison would be battling both the town cops and the SBI during his investigation, inevitably drawing out any resolution.