Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

Christ, when did she get to know me so well? Nick thought. The comment was something his wife might have said three years ago.

"I put that other list on your desk," Lori said into the silence. "So what do you need?"

Nick explained how he wanted to look for his byline and all the stories he'd done that included homicides or rapes or incest. He didn't need the full stories, just the initial page that contained the doer's or arrestee's name.

"That's going to be a lot of stories, Nick. You want to narrow it down some, maybe by years?" she said.

"Yeah, yeah," Nick said and then covered the mouthpiece and asked Hargrave, "When did Redman start with the Sheriff's Office? What year?"

"Eight years ago," Hargrave said without turning around.

"Eight," Nick said into the phone. "Oh, and also pull anything that I've written that included the U.S. Secretary of State's name. It's a long shot, but it might come up in one of those stories I did on local soldiers who were wounded or killed in Iraq."

Nick waited, like he could hear Lori scratching the request down on paper, like he'd watched her do so many times before.

"OK, anything else?" she said.

"That's it. See what we get and then I need you to e-mail everything to…" He looked up at Hargrave, who was already scratching down something on a business card, which he handed over.

"To maurice69 at kingnet.com" Nick read and looked up at Hargrave, who had already turned his back on him.

"Nicky, that's off-campus," Lori said.

"Yeah, I know. I owe you."

"Yes, you do," she said, but there was something light in her voice. "I'll get it to you soonest."

Nick hung up and was flipping the business card with the e-mail address between his thumb and forefinger and wearing a bemused look on his face when Hargrave turned around.

"Year I graduated from high school," Hargrave said.

"Huh?" Nick answered, playing dumb.

"It was 1969."

"Personal e-mail?" Nick said, now smiling.

"I don't want that stuff coming through the department system or the fax," Hargrave said, staying serious. "We've got a thing here you might have heard about, called an Internal Affairs Division?"

"OK," Nick said, going instantly sober. Nick knew the newspaper had its own form of IAD, they just never gave it a moniker. He remembered the employee upstairs who was rumored to be logging in to pornographic websites during the day. Management had his screen monitored by the computer techs through remote access. They caught him and canned him the same day.

He didn't see how the research he was doing would be considered off-limits to his story enough to push Deirdre to fire him, but the doubt must have shown in his face.

"You're not even supposed to be here, Mullins," the detective said. "Your participation is on the QT. No one outside of that room back there knows about you. And I doubt that you, as a professional journalist, would want your cooperation to be broadcast material either."

Nick was about to say that he doubted that he was going to be employed as such by tomorrow, but held his tongue long enough for Hargrave's phone to ring. He listened while the detective grunted some acknowledgments, picked up a pencil and gave two-word answers to whoever it was on the other end.

Nick looked around, as was his training, for family portraits or awards or plaques of recognition in Hargrave's work area. Nothing. Not a sign of anything personal. He spun around in the chair. The other detective's space was cluttered with softball trophies, photographs of what must be grandchildren and a prominently placed photo of a man and woman in their late fifties or early sixties, arms around waists, smiles on faces, Hawaiian leis around necks in a too-bright sun. Nick's eyes went to the now-closed door and a map of the city that was taped to the back. He got up and took in the four red stars that had been placed on the nearest cross-streets of where the sniper's victims had been shot. Hargrave had obviously lumped them together long before today. Nick was studying the map for some kind of pattern when Hargrave hung up.

"The SWAT team went in on commiekid's apartment after they didn't get a response and found the guy in the sack with his girlfriend," Hargrave said. "His real name is Byron Haupt, if you can believe that one. He's nineteen, a student at BCC and says he was at the library from seven to ten this morning working on some project. Said he uses the computer terminals there to send information to the other kids in his project group and maybe, just maybe someone could have had access to his e-mail account while he was away from the desk.

"Canfield went in with the team and flashed an old photo of Redman and the kid said he might have seen someone who fits the description, but he really doesn't pay that much attention to other people unless they 'get in his space.' "

Hargrave rolled his eyes at the last part and Nick waited for him to say, kids these days, but it didn't come.

"They ran Haupt's juvenile record and he's clean. They're going to make the kid sit tight, but at this point Canfield's going on the assumption that Redman used the library terminal after the kid logged on. They're going to interview the girl too just in case she used the boyfriend's log-on, but it's looking like a dead end."

The two men sat in silence, but their thoughts were rolling around the same subject, the questions and scenarios spinning on such similar wavelengths they could have been having an unspoken dialogue.

"I don't know, maybe he could be setting up on the secretary," Nick said out loud.

"Pissed off at some sense of command, some buck-stops-here idea he got from Iraq? Somebody has to be responsible for what he saw over there," Hargrave picked up. "God knows what a guy sees in those damned rifle scopes just before he pulls the trigger. I couldn't do it."

"But it goes out of his pattern, his M.O., as you guys call it."

"No, you guys call it that, we just feed it to you," Hargrave said, but his attempt at levity didn't cut the mood.

"The man's about retribution," he finally said.

"So he blames a politician for Iraq?"

Hargrave put an eye on Nick. "Who else you gonna blame?"

Nick's cell phone vibrated in his pocket and he automatically pulled it out. The readout on the screen gave just the main switchboard number for the newsroom, so it could be coming from anyone's extension.

"Shit," he said.

Hargrave stood up. "I'm not you, Mullins, but you gotta take that call sometime. Why not get it over with?" the detective said. "I'm going to get coffee, want some?"

"Black," Nick said as Hargrave closed the door behind him.

On the fourth buzz Nick punched the answer button. "Mullins," he said.

"Nick. You need to come in off the street," Deirdre said, her voice unmistakable with a distinct commanding edge in it.

"I'm working a story, Deirdre," Nick said.

She only hesitated a second. "Yeah? What story is that, Nick? The serial killer story? The story that matches up the ballistics on the sniper killings? Or the story that shows that an assassin is somehow connected to your byline?"

"I'm not sure where you get your wild imagination, Deirdre, but I wouldn't say any of those stories is on my budget."

Nick was scraping, trying to figure out if she was just guessing. None of the information about the ballistics or his byline list matches had been in his earlier pieces because he'd deleted it.

"Well, I know it's not on your budget line because you haven't filed one today, and that's the first rule you've repeatedly broken, Nick. Secondly, don't think for a minute that everything you write on our computers doesn't belong to this newspaper and is available to those who have the clearance to see it, because that would be at your peril."