Eye of Vengeance (9 page)

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.

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.

“I want to ask one thing, Nick.”

He tried not to show any emotion in his face or body language that would say,
Oh, Christ, here it comes.
But he was lousy at controlling it.

Still, he stayed silent, not falling into the old question for a question, not responding by saying,
Yeah, and what’s that?

Instead he waited her out.

“You got the caliber of the gun, Nick, the .308, which you knew was a high-powered rifle round. You were the one up on the roof, and nice close-up, by the way.”

He nodded, wanting to match the grin she was trying to give him, but too obstinate to do it. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“So why is it that the
Herald
used the word
sniper
in their headline
and
in the body of their story and we never even mentioned it?”

She dug the
Herald
out from under the pile on her desk and held up the front page:
SNIPER KILLS CHILD MOLESTER ON WAY TO COURT

Nick tried to keep a dry, unflappable look on his face.

“Attribution?”

Deirdre flipped the paper over and skimmed through the story like she was trying to find the line Nick knew was not there. If someone with any authority had called the shooting the act of a sniper, it would have been in the first paragraph of his story. No one called it that, even if it was true.

“Did they contribute that characterization to any source or member of the law enforcement team that’s investigating?” he said. “I honestly didn’t hear the spokesman or the detective in charge or the medical examiner that did the autopsy use the word
sniper.
”

Deirdre finally looked him in the face and if anyone else had been in the room, they would have called it a look of compassion.

“Nicky. I know where you’re coming from with your theory of black-and-white news,” she said and Nick turned away from the look.

“You’re a great reporter because you have the instincts and experience to go after your own suppositions, to prove them true.”

“I’m still doing that!” Nick snapped, getting defensive.

Deirdre raised her palms. “I know. I know you are, Nick. But you’re not putting it in the paper.”

“When I nail it, it’ll go in the paper,” he said.

“It makes us sound unsure, like we’re waiting for someone else to get the good stuff first. It makes us look like we’re afraid to pull the trigger.”

The heat was up in Nick’s face now. He could feel the flush in his neck, the hot tingle on the edges of his ears.

“Is that why
we
never called Robert Walker a drunk driver in print, Deirdre?” Nick said through his teeth. “Were
we
waiting for someone else to get the goods on that guy after he killed my family? Why didn’t somebody go and dig up that guy’s background and pull the goddamn trigger in print?”

Now she couldn’t hold his eyes. She knew the arguments he’d had with the paper’s management after the accident that killed his wife and daughter. She knew Nick had tried to get the editorial writers to paint Walker as a drunken killer. But they had refused, citing journalistic standards and telling him to wait until after the trial. She knew it had hurt him.

“That situation was different, Nick. That was personal. You’re an employee. It would have looked prejudicial.”

“But you want me to call this guy a sniper on the front page before we know who or what he is,” Nick said, trying to make the statement sound smug, but that emotion was no longer in him.

Deirdre just looked down at her desktop.

“I’ll keep chasing what happens next,” Nick said, getting up. “You’ll get the truth in my story at eight.”

As he turned to go, Deirdre couldn’t help herself, as if her comeback were so ingrained in her psyche that it was like an involuntary muscle response:

“The truth is in the—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nick interrupted. “The eye of the beholder.”

He didn’t turn around, just kept walking out the door.

Chapter 11

W
hen he got back to his desk, Nick started to call up the list from research but only got back to Dr. Chambliss’s name when his phone rang.

“Mr. Mullins? This is Brian Dempsey. I’m a lawyer representing Margaria Cotton, the woman whose children were killed by Mr. Ferris four years ago that you wrote about in the paper today.”

Nick was instantly wary. Lawyers, by profession, are not impartial. They do what they need to do to help their clients. A reporter never talks to an attorney without thinking, Wha’s his motive?

“Yes, Mr. Dempsey. What can I do for you, sir?”

“Well, Mr. Mullins, against my advice, Ms. Cotton would like to meet with you.”

“Great,” Nick said and then quickly toned down his exuberance. “I’d lost touch with her, Mr. Dempsey, and didn’t have a contact number or I certainly would have interviewed her for today’s story.”

Nick could hear the lawyer’s hesitation in the beat of silence.

“Ms. Cotton has tried very hard to keep her life private after her tragedy, Mr. Mullins. But I felt duty-bound to pass on your request to speak with her and again, against my advice, she would like to meet with you first.”

“First?”

“Yes, Mr. Mullins. Investigators from the Sheriff’s Office are also interviewing Ms. Cotton today in my office, at one o’clock this afternoon. She would like to speak with you first.”

Nick looked at the huge clock on the wall, omnipresent in the newsroom to remind everyone of their daily deadlines. It was nearly eleven.

“OK. At your office, then, Mr. Dempsey?”

“No. Ms. Cotton would like you to come to her home. She’s awaiting your arrival. When you’re through, I hope you could give her a ride to the Sheriff’s Office in time for the detectives, if you would.”

“Absolutely, sir.”

The attorney gave Nick the addresses of both Cotton’s home and his law office.

“And please, Mr. Mullins,” he said before hanging up, “I hope you can appreciate the delicacy of this matter.”

Nick could not come up with an answer to the statement before the line went quiet. He looked up again at the clock. Cotton’s address was less than twenty minutes from the newsroom, thirty even if traffic was bad. He closed the research file in front of him, stuck his reporter’s notebook in his pocket and told the assistant city editor that he was going out on an interview and could be reached on his cell phone if they needed him.

Standing at the elevator door, Nick could feel an electricity in his blood. You’re not supposed to get giddy when you’re going to talk with a woman whose children were raped and murdered. But he still gave up on waiting for the elevator and took the six flights of stairs to the parking level, two steps at a time.

Nick looked at the address on the page of his notebook one more time and then slowly rolled up Northwest Tenth Avenue. The houses were single-story and all seemed to be painted a dusty color—pale yellow, powder blue—and even the white ones gave off a hue of bone. The yards were mottled with patches of dirt and the green grass seemed to have been robbed of its chlorophyll. The macadam road surface had been bleached a soft gray by the sun. Nick always wondered at the ability of poor and neglected neighborhoods to dull even the effects of the bright Florida sunshine. Postcard photos were never taken here.

The number he was looking for was not visible on the house where it should have been. He drove past two more before spotting an address painted above a doorway and then put the car in reverse and backed up, subtracting by lot. He pulled into the two-strip concrete drive in front of a dull beige clapboard home that must have been built in the early 1960s. But the roof was newly shingled. There was a potted red geranium on the front step and the porch had been swept clean. When Nick raised his hand to knock, the inside door opened before his knuckles touched wood.

“Good morning, Mr. Mullins,” the woman’s voice said.

“Ms. Cotton?” Nick said, though he still could only see her dark figure in the shadows of the room.

“Please,” she said, pushing open the screen door for him to enter. Nick took note of the thin forearm, mottled as much as the grass yard, with patches of pink marring the naturally dark skin.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Nick said, taking two steps into a darkened living room where the odor of medicine and potpourri battled one another.

When his eyes adjusted he could see the features of Margaria Cotton’s face and small figure. They had changed over the years, pulled perhaps by the gravity of grief, as if every bone and every centimeter of skin had been attached to a weight. Her shoulders were slumped, her back, which had been proudly stiff when she sat in the courtroom for Ferris’s sentencing, was bowed forward. Her cheekbones were sharp, but in the way of malnutrition versus some role of fashion. Nick, as was his way, preferred to watch her eyes, which still held the intelligence and strength that he had noted three years ago. She did the same, meeting his gaze, not with defiance, but more as a way of showing her confidence and lack of pretension.

“Can I get you something, Mr. Mullins? Coffee? Water?” she said while extending her hand to show him a seat.

“No. Thank you. I’m fine, ma’am.”

The woman nodded and took a seat opposite him on a sofa. A low, glass-topped table separated them. Nick noted the stack of newspapers on one end, the
Daily News
and, he could tell by the style of the type, the
Herald,
and at least one out-of-town publication.

“I was hoping to get in touch with you, Ms. Cotton,” he began. “I assume that you have heard of the shooting death of Mr. Ferris.”

“Yes,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “Mr. Dempsey called me yesterday. And I read it in the newspapers this morning.” She too looked over at the papers.

“I read the news every day, Mr. Mullins. I suppose it isn’t always healthy to let all that ugliness inside my house,” she said, but did not look around herself when she made the comment. Nick, however, took the opportunity to take in the small wooden cross mounted on the wall behind her. It was flanked by the elementary school photos of what he recognized as her daughters. They were the same photos that his newspaper had used during the coverage of their killing. The same computer-stored photos had run in this morning’s edition.

“I know it might sound kind of, you know, sick,” she said, bringing his attention back to her eyes. “But there is something about the tragedies of others, Mr. Mullins, that helps remind me that I am not the only one suffering.”

Nick nodded his head.

“I am sorry about your children, Ms. Cotton,” he said, motioning slightly to the photos behind her with his eyes.

“You were very kind to us in your stories, Mr. Mullins. There was a word my minister used for it, I forget …” She closed her eyes for a moment, searching. “Compassion. That was it. He said your writing had compassion in it.”

Again, all Nick could do was nod. He noted the diction in her conversation. A poor black woman, but one who was educated, maybe even well read. She went out of her way to choose her words in the presence of someone like Nick, only letting an occasional slip of slang enter her sentences. It was perhaps an unconscious habit she fell into when she wanted her listener to be comfortable. Nick did the same thing when he was with southerners, slipping into a minor drawl that did not belong to him. His daughters always noticed and would tell him later that he had embarrassed them. He shook off the recollection and reached into his back pocket. He took out the notebook and drew a pen from his shirt, a signal that he was here to work.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Cotton. I don’t want to sound simple here, but in your position, these years later, I was calling to find out what your reaction to Mr. Ferris’s death might be.”

The woman went quiet for several moments, but Nick had learned long ago not to give up on any interviewees other than politicians when he could see in their eyes that they were forming an answer to his questions, testing a reply in their mind.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mullins,” she finally said. “I guess I wanted to say relief, or maybe some kind of feel of justice. But I can’t say I have that. I have long given judgment up to the Lord Himself, and that man is meeting his Maker this very morning on his own terms,” she said with a certainty that Nick was always befuddled by with people of faith.

“No, sir, I would have to tell you, Mr. Mullins, that I don’t believe that any kind of vision of Mr. Ferris has entered my mind for some time. I believe he was already gone in my mind.”

“But you still wanted to see me,” Nick said. “Is there something that you wanted to say about the shooting?”

“Only that I was bothered by some things in the newspapers, not yours, of course, that said maybe I or my people might have done something to get revenge for my girls.”

“OK,” Nick said, without taking his eyes off hers.

“And we did not do anything. I did not,” she said, bringing the strength back into her voice that had been there during Ferris’s trial.

Nick nodded and wrote on the pad, a nonsensical squiggle that the woman could not see, just to make her know she was being heard.

“Revenge is not in my blood, or my family’s blood, Mr. Mullins,” she said. “And I cannot think of anyone I know who would have been wanting to kill Mr. Ferris.”

“I think the detectives will have to look at any and all possibilities, Ms. Cotton,” Nick said. “I would think that’s why they want to interview you, ma’am, not because of anything that was put into the newspaper.”

He stopped. Wondering why he was defending himself.

“But since I am here, has anyone contacted you, Ms. Cotton? Anyone, say, on the phone? Or anonymously written you, someone who might have sounded like they were doing this on your behalf? You know, like taking action because they felt you deserved closure or something?”

Nick hated even using the word. There was no such thing. Closure. It was a buzzword someone came up with and then it spread like kudzu into the vernacular.

“No, sir,” she said, then hesitated, not speaking as she held up the fingers of her right hand, as though stopping time.

“Mr. Dempsey did give me a whole bunch of letters after the trial from folks sending me sympathy,” she said after gathering her memories. “Sometimes he still does. I put them all in a box, and I think it’s very kind.”

“Has he brought you anything recently?” Nick said. The mention of paper piqued his interest. Something written and verified, especially with a postage mark, was manna for a journalist. It was the fuel for a paper trail.

“I can’t say I recall the last time,” Cotton said. “Might have been in the fall. I am not much for keepin’ track of time anymore, Mr. Mullins.”

“Any names in the box that were familiar, Ms. Cotton?” Nick pressed, envisioning a list of names, something he could use, something solid he could trace.

“Well, I don’t really pay much attention to the names, sir. I read the ones from the mothers mostly,” she said and a wistful look came into her face, making Nick feel a twinge of guilt at his grilling. But not too guilty.

“Could I perhaps take a look at the letters, Ms. Cotton? Just sort of go through the names, I mean. I don’t want to pry,” Nick said, lying. Of course he wanted to pry. It’s what reporters did.

“I would have to look up in my closets to find them. I believe that’s where I might have stored that box away.”

Nick looked at his watch. It was late. They would have to leave soon for her to make her appointment with the detectives. But he didn’t know what to ask.

“Ms. Cotton, has anyone related to Mr. Ferris, or even someone who said they knew him, ever come to speak to you or even introduce themselves?”

Nick watched her close her eyes, searching again for a picture of the past.

“His brother,” she said, her eyes still closed. Then she opened them. “His brother seen me in the hall outside the court and walked up to me on that day when the jury found him guilty.”

“And he talked with you?” Nick said, prodding her.

“He said he was sorry about what happened. I could see it in his eyes, Mr. Mullins, that he was hurtin’.”

“You do seem to have that ability, Ms. Cotton,” Nick said, making a guess as to why he was here. “To pick up on people’s pain.”

This time she looked straight into Nick’s face, studying it, the creases in his brow, the lines at the corners of his eyes.

“I read about your family, Mr. Mullins. I recognized your name right off and remembered the way you had with your words, that compassion. It was your wife and daughter, so you know how it is when somebody needs that,” she said. “Maybe someone else is going to need that now.”

Nick looked down at his open notebook. He had yet to enter a word with any meaning or usefulness in his “exclusive” interview.

“Is that why I’m here, Ms. Cotton?” he finally said, not wanting to look in her eyes, not wanting her to see his. “Is that why you asked to see me? Because of my compassion?”

He felt her nod more than saw it.

“I read the newspapers a lot, Mr. Mullins,” she said. “Sometimes I can feel people in there, in the words. I learned that by readin’ what happened to me, to my family. And like I said, you had that feeling in your words before.”

“But not now?” Nick said, wanting her to continue.

“I watched the paper to see when you got back to your job. I have seen your stories now and compared them with before. And if you don’t mind my saying so, sir … you changed,” she said without taking her eyes off him. “The pain changed you.”

Nick stared at her, this small black woman, telling him about his heart with a plain open face that did not show sympathy or judgment, or assess fault.

“Compassion,” she said. “I believe you are losin’ that, Mr. Mullins. And I believe that would be a terrible thing in the end, sir.”