Eye of Vengeance (8 page)

Chapter 10

M
ichael Redman was peering out the glass door of the rented townhouse, watching for the delivery truck that would fill the newspaper racks across the street. It was seven in the morning and he’d timed the stubby-looking guy who pulled up in the step van around sunup and stuffed the day’s news into the honor boxes and collected the quarters. Redman could have watched the television news last night and seen their coverage of the shooting, but he had no use for that. There was only one story he wanted to see, only one journalist who would tell the truth.

When the silver-sided van rolled into view, Redman took a step back from the door. No sense being more obvious than he needed to be. He’d taken this place back from the main roads and near a corner where a canal split the flat land and separated two equally boring housing developments. He’d signed a year lease with a fictitious name knowing he’d skip out on it in a month at the most. He was surprised, though, that his old stomping grounds had felt so comfortable. He didn’t have to map out the routes and time out the distances to the interstates and account for bridge openings and all the other exigencies that might hamper his movement or possibly his escape. Redman had worked these streets as a sheriff’s road deputy for several years. When he moved onto the department’s SWAT team the surveillances and the detailed mapping of troubled neighborhoods only intensified. That knowledge and training aided him now. Just like when he used to do undercover INTEL gathering, he would have to be careful out in public. Some of the criminal lowlifes he’d dealt with then were still out here. And now he also had to stay cognizant of the law enforcement personnel who might remember him. So he tended to move only at night. Shopped for food at three AM in the twenty-four-hour grocery, pumped his own gas after midnight, had the local phone company install a DSL line while he was out and made sure all of his lethal equipment was locked in a storage garage signed for under yet another alias. During the day he stayed in, doing research and setting up his next target. The
Daily News
archives had made that so much easier for him. He could even do a search that would highlight all of Nick Mullins’s bylines. The man had a gift for writing about the evil assholes in the world that deserved to die.

Redman stood at the door waiting anxiously for a full five minutes after the deliveryman had pulled away before slipping on his dark windbreaker and then walking out to the honor box with a handful of coins in his fist.

By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer

On his way to try to overturn his death sentence, a convicted child murderer and molester instead walked into his execution yesterday as he entered the Broward County Jail in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

In a blatant morning shooting as commuters drove by on Andrews Avenue, Steven Ferris, convicted three years ago for the murder and rapes of a 6-year-old girl and her 8-year-old sister, was killed by a single bullet fired from somewhere outside the fenced compound just before 8
AM,
said Broward Sheriff’s Office spokesman Joel Cameron.

“One man was fatally wounded as the detainees were being brought through the main jail’s secured north entrance. The location of the shooting is not accessible to the public and no member of the public was in any way endangered,” Cameron said.

Police authorities would not confirm the identity of the dead man, but the sister-in-law of Steven Ferris, Charlene Ferris, said that the Sheriff’s Office had called to inform her husband, David, of his brother’s killing. David Ferris, who attended each day of his brother’s jury trial in 2001, was unavailable for comment.

“David still loved his brother,” Charlene Ferris said. “And now we have a funeral to plan.”

On Thursday sheriff’s officials would not speculate on the motive for the shooting but said they had not yet ruled out a random drive-by or that a shot meant for one of the other inmates had simply struck Ferris by chance. But other sources described Ferris’s wound as being precisely placed to kill instantly. The ammunition used, a .308-caliber round, is commonly used in high-powered rifles. Less than two hours after the shooting, investigators were inspecting the rooftop of a building directly across from the jail compound. Spokesman Cameron would not comment on the possibility that someone may have taken the deadly shot from that position.

Assistant State Attorney Mark Sheffield, who originally prosecuted Ferris and was due in court today to defend the death sentence, received by the convicted murderer, said:

“I believe we would have been able to withstand the defense challenge that Mr. Ferris did not deserve to go to the electric chair. I don’t know how anyone familiar with the case, in which a man hunts down two innocent children, rapes and murders them, could accept anything less. But obviously, after what has occurred, there will be no further action by this office.”

When contacted late Thursday in his office, Ferris’s defense attorney, Jake Meese, said:

“This is a tragic situation. We were prepared this morning to show that Mr. Ferris did not receive a fair sentencing three years ago and that he was deserving of an equitable resentencing. The man never got his day in court.”

Meese was Ferris’s attorney at the time of his conviction and had presented his defense over a two-week trial to a jury of twelve that convicted Ferris of two counts of murder and two counts of sexual assault of a minor under the age of eleven.

The rest of Mullins’s story was on the inside pages of the A section and reiterated the background of crimes that Ferris had been guilty of. Redman had read those accounts a dozen times. When he got back inside, he flattened the newspaper out on his door-panel table and reread the beginning. He was only mildly surprised that Mullins had named the caliber of the sniper round he had used. But that was standard ammunition. No way to trace it unless they obtained the weapon, and there was no way they would ever take his weapon. Redman was also stopped by the quote from the defense attorney. What an asshole. Never got his day in court! Ferris should have been strapped into Old Sparky and electrocuted. Redman didn’t have a broad-brush dislike for lawyers. He knew they were just doing their jobs, and some did them professionally and ethically. They’d studied and trained and worked their way up the line, just like he had, and some were damned good. He’d had a pretty damned good one himself when the PBA represented him before the shooting board after he was involved in the death of a suspect after a SWAT operation. But come on, Ferris never got his day in court? This guy didn’t need to spit out that old cliché. Whose ass was he kissing? He knew what he was defending. He had to be thinking good riddance.

Redman shook his head and carefully cut the story out with a razor blade, then folded it and placed it in a manila folder before putting it into the back half of an accordion file. Reports, he thought. Always hated writing up the reports afterward. In Iraq, his Marine spotter did all the reports. Redman only fired the shots, and then sat alone back at the goddamn dusty tent barracks and let it grind on him, not knowing whose lives he’d taken that day. This time he knew. And the next one he would know too. Redman rifled through the accordion file, split into two parts; the back half were missions accomplished, the front half were possibilities. He pulled three jackets from the front and on the door he spread out three manila envelopes. The first thing he did was take out the newspaper printouts and then he began to read.

Nick was back home by the time his daughter got up for school. He was at the kitchen table looking through the sports pages when Carly shuffled across the tile floor, her eyes half opened and puffy with sleep. Her small high voice scratched out, “Morning, Daddy,” and he pushed back his chair and let her climb onto his lap.

“Hey, sweetheart. How’d you sleep?”

“OK.”

“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.