Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

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.