Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

"Hey, sweetheart. How'd you sleep?"

"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 Times. 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.