Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

I looked at him blankly.

“You mean I’m not being laid off?”

Kramer continued as if I had not asked a question, as if he had not heard me make a sound at all.

“What we’re offering here is a six-month contract extension that would commence upon signing,” he said.

“You mean, then, I’m still laid off, but not for six months.”

Kramer turned the document around and slid it across the desk to me so I could read it.

“It’s a standard extension we will be using a lot around here, Jack.”

“I don’t have a contract. How can it be extended when I don’t have a contract in the first place?”

“They call it that because you are currently an employee and there is an implied contract. So any change in status that is contracturally agreed to is called an extension. It’s just legal mumbo-jumbo, Jack.”

I didn’t tell him that contracturally was not a word. I was speed-reading the front page of the document until I bottomed out on a big fat speed bump.

“This pays me thirty thousand dollars for six months,” I said.

“Yes, that is the standard extension rate.”

I did the quick, rough math.

“Let’s see, that would be about eighteen thousand less than I make for six months now. So you want me to take less to help you stay out front with this story. And let me guess…”

I picked up the document and started flipping through it.

“… I’m betting I no longer get any medical, dental or pension benefits under this contract. Is that right?”

I couldn’t find it and I guessed that there wasn’t a clause on benefits because they simply did not exist.

“Jack,” Kramer said in a calming tone. “There is some negotiation I can do financially, but you would have to pick up the benefits yourself. It’s the way we’re going with this now. It’s simply the wave of the future.”

I dropped the contract back on his desk and looked up at him.

“Wait till it’s your turn,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“You think it ends with us? The reporters and the copy editors? You think if you’re a good soldier and do their bidding that you’ll be safe in the end?”

“Jack, I don’t think my situation is what we’re discuss-”

“I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I’m not signing this. I’d rather take my chances on unemployment. And I will. But someday they’re going to come for you and ask you to sign one of these things and then you’ll have to wonder how you’ll pay for your kids’ teeth and their doctors and their school and everything else. And I hope it’s okay with you because it’s simply the wave of the future.”

“Jack, you don’t even have kids. And threatening me because I do is-”

“I’m not threatening you and that’s not the point, Crammer . The point I’m trying to make is…”

I stared at him for a long moment.

“Never mind.”

I got up and walked out of the office and straight back to my pod. Along the way I looked at my watch and then pulled out my cell phone to see whether I had somehow missed a call. I hadn’t. It was nearing one P.M. in Washington, D.C., and I had heard nothing yet from Rachel.

Back at the cubicle I checked the phone and the e-mail and I had no messages there either.

I had been silent and had avoided intruding on her till now. But I needed to know what was happening. I called her cell and it went right to voice mail without a ring. I told her to call me as soon as she could and clicked off. On the slim chance her phone was dead or she had forgotten to turn it back on after the hearing, I called the Hotel Monaco and asked for her room. But I was told she had checked out that morning.

My desk phone buzzed as soon as I hung up. It was Larry Bernard from two pods away.

“What did Kramer want, to hire your sorry ass back?”

“Yeah.”

“What? Really?”

“At a reduced rate, of course. I told him to cram it.”

“Are you kidding, man? They’ve got you by the balls. Where else are you going to go?”

“Well, for one thing I’m not going to work here on a contract that pays me way less and takes away all my benefits. And that’s what I told him. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Are you making the checks on the story today?”

“Yeah, I’m on it.”

“Anything new?”

“Not that they’re telling me. It’s too early, anyway. Hey, I Tivoed you on CNN yesterday. You were good. But I thought they were supposed to have Winslow on. That’s why I put it on. They were promoting it at first and then he wasn’t on.”

“He showed but then they decided they couldn’t put him on the air.”

“How come?”

“His penchant for using the word motherfucker in every sentence he speaks.”

“Oh, yeah. When we talked to him Friday I picked up on that.”

“Hard not to. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Hunting.”

“What?”

I put the phone down on his question, shoved my laptop and files into my backpack and headed out of the newsroom to the stairwell. The newsroom might have at one time been the best place in the world to work. But it wasn’t now. People like the axman and the unseen forces behind him had made it forbidding and claustrophobic. I had to get away. I felt like I was a man without home or office to go to. But I still had a car, and in L.A. the car was king.

I headed west, jumping onto the 10 Freeway and taking it toward the beach. I was going against the grain of traffic and moved smoothly toward the clean ocean air. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I drove with subconscious purpose, as though the hands on the wheel and the foot on the pedal knew what my brain didn’t.

In Santa Monica I exited on Fourth Street and then took Pico down to the beach. I pulled into the parking lot where Denise Babbit’s car had been abandoned by Alonzo Winslow. The lot was almost empty and I parked in the same row and maybe even the same space where she had been left.

The sun had not burned off the marine layer yet and the sky was overcast. The Ferris wheel on the pier was shrouded in the mist.

Now what? I thought to myself. I checked my phone again. No messages. I watched a group of surfers coming in from their morning sets. They went to their cars and trucks, stripped off their wet suits and showered with gallon jugs of water, then wrapped towels around their bodies, pulled off their board shorts and changed into dry clothes underneath. It was the time-honored way of the pre-work surfer. One of them had a bumper sticker on his Subaru that made me smile.

CAN’T WE ALL GET A LONGBOARD?

I opened my backpack and pulled out Rachel’s legal pad. I had filled in several pages with my own notes from the survey of the files. I flipped to the last page and studied what I had put down.

WHAT HE NEEDED TO KNOW

Denise Babbit

1. Details of prior arrest

2. Car-trunk space

3. Work location

4. Work schedule-abducted after work

5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs

Sharon Oglevy

1. Husband’s threat

2. Hiscar-trunkspace

3. Work location

4. Work schedule-abducted after work

5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs

6. Husband’s home location

The two lists were short and almost identical and I felt sure that they held the connection between the two women and their killer. From the killer’s angle, these were all things that he would seemingly need to know before he made his move.

I lowered the car’s windows to let the damp sea air in. I thought about the Unsub and how he had come to choose these two women from these two different places.

The simple answer was that he had seen them. They both displayed their bodies publicly. If he was looking for a specific set of physical attributes, he could have seen both Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy onstage.