Spiked (2 page)

Boden chuckled. “You scooped me where? In The Empire? You mice can roar all you want—around here, nothing is news until
I
say it's news.”

“You mean the daily hype you do?” Eddie said.

“I got a million viewers every night at six and eleven. What's your circulation? Forty thousand?”

That punch stunned Eddie. Then Boden swung the haymaker. “Speaking of Vermont, I hear there's going to be a wedding up there in the spring, for another former colleague of ours.”

Eddie felt battered. He tried for nonchalance. “Pam and I are still friends,” he said, “and I couldn't be happier for her.”

Boden moved in to finish him off. “I never thought it was in her best interest to follow you from Lowell to Vermont,” he said. “But I guess I was wrong—she found the man of her dreams. He's a teacher or something?”

“A college professor, in journalism,” Eddie corrected.

Boden looked delighted. He waved, flashing his white caps. “See you around, Ed. When you come to Boston, let me know. I'll arrange a tour of a big-city newsroom for you.”

Eddie for an instant savored the mental image of his fist shattering ten grand in dental work. But that was not his style, especially not while at the police station. He was livid he had let Boden get to him.
This job is just temporary,
Eddie reminded himself.

The police chief was finishing another TV interview. Eddie shook Boden out of his head. He was here for a story, and nothing was more sacred than the news. He put his fingertips on the chief's shoulder to turn him away from other lingering scribes, and kept his voice low. “Did you recover any bullets or shell casings?”

“Not yet. The shooter may have grabbed the casings. We'll be looking to dig a slug out of a wall or a fence.”

Eddie said, “If you know the caliber of the gun, and you don't have a slug, I'm assuming you have the weapon, right?”

The chief looked at his shoes to see if his pants were down. Trapped, he gave up the info. “We believe our officers have found the weapon, which could have been dropped when the shooter jumped the fence around the basketball court.”

That was all Eddie could get; the chief was back on guard. He thanked him and ran out of there. Cars honked in protest as Eddie ignored the signal lights and dashed across the intersection toward the Empire Building.

Phife called out the moment Eddie burst off the elevator. “Twenty minutes, Eddie. I need time to read it.”

Eddie nodded and slammed into his chair. A paper cup on his desk held two inches of tepid coffee the color of potting soil. It had been terrible on Friday when it was fresh from the vending machine. Eddie downed it in one gulp and pounded the keyboard with his middle fingers:

He probably could write a better opening with more time, but it would do. He phoned the hospital and asked about the victim; she was listed in good condition with a wound in the shoulder. In a second paragraph, Eddie typed her name and her prognosis. In a perfect world, he'd call her family for comment, but deadline is imperfect.

The third graph stated plainly that the shooter fled and got away. The fourth, that police had recovered a gun. It was the one detail nobody else got at the press conference, and Eddie wanted it high in the story. Let Chuck Boden choke on it.

Then, some description:

The language was bumpy, but Eddie had no time to smooth it. In the five minutes he had left, he added the details about the gun, the number of shots fired and the chief's promise to solve the case.

Bang. He smashed the send key to file the story.

“You got it, Gordie,” he yelled across the newsroom.

Phife flashed thumbs-up and called up the story on his own screen to edit it.

Eddie leaned back and looked around the newsroom for the first time that day. It was a long, narrow space containing twenty-five beaten metal desks, layered with strata of newsprint, overstuffed manila folders, reams of government documents and empty Chinese food boxes. Eddie's desk was messier than most. He filed paperwork by the geological method—oldest stuff on the bottom. Nowlin's desk, the next one over, was neater than most. It held only his computer, a desk blotter with his appointments printed neatly in ink, a foam wrist pad to ease his carpal tunnel syndrome, and a framed picture of his wife, Jesse.

With the writing deadline for the last edition gone by, the room was quiet. Most of the reporters on the day shift were out meeting sources. A few worked the phones.

Look at you, right back where you started
.

Eddie picked up his telephone, changed his mind, and slapped it down.

What are you afraid of?
He snatched back the receiver and dialed a Boston number with the eraser end of a pencil.

A man answered. “Boston Globe, where may I direct your call?”

“Human resources, Patricia Dannon, please.”

The phone rang seven times.

A woman answered, pleasant but rushed. “Ms. Dannon's office, may I help you?”

“Yes, yes,” Eddie said, keeping his voice low, yet trying to sound breezy. “Edward Bourque from The Daily Empire in Lowell. Is Ms. Dannon available?”

She wasn't. Eddie took a deep breath and plunged on anyway. “I sent Ms. Dannon my resumé and some story clips some time ago, and I haven't heard from her. I wanted to make sure my material arrived. Perhaps I could make an appointment—”

The secretary cut him off, icy and efficient. “That won't be necessary. I'm sure your material is here, Mr. Bourque.” The woman's voice sweetened. “Please be patient with Ms. Dannon. She's four weeks behind on her rejection letters.”

A million hot ants tangoed over Eddie's face. He thanked her—out of habit, nothing more—and hung up, muttering. “Save the stamp.”

Across the newsroom, more potential bad news. Franklin Keyes, the paper's executive editor, was reading Eddie's story over Phife's shoulder. Eddie trusted Phife, but Keyes outranked him as second-in-command to the publisher. It was too bad; he wasn't half the editor Phife was. A good editor is more than a magician with rough news copy, a good editor is a bullshit-stopper who protects reporters from dumb assignments or silly decrees rolling downhill from upper management. Franklin Keyes was a bullshit superconductor. When it hit him, it accelerated.

Eddie's phone rang. It was Bruno, his barber, whose shop faced Fire Department headquarters.

“I just-a saw the dive team scrambling,” he said, the words running together in a thick Italian accent that was a put-on. Bruno was third generation American. He thought an accent was good for business in an immigrant town.

“You gotta have-a somebody in the shop with you,” Eddie said, mimicking the barber. “Because I know you were-a born in Worcester, and not even the Italian section.”

Bruno laughed. “You keep the secret, Eddie, or your next flat-top not be so flat.”

Eddie chuckled and hung up. The dive team rolling usually meant somebody had spotted a floater in the canals. He called the Fire Department. The dispatcher was abrupt, but Eddie got an address out of her. It was just a few blocks from the paper.

Phife was still tied up with Keyes. Eddie typed him a one-line message about the body in the canal and sent it to him electronically.

Outside, Eddie walked three blocks to Dunkin' Donuts. The sidewalk was deserted. There were few footprints in the fresh snow. In summer, Merrimack Street was crowded with businesspeople in suits and shoppers hustling between the boutiques, old men leaning their crooked backs against brick walls and talking conservative politics, and packs of teenaged girls comparing their glitter lipsticks and their babies.

Eddie bought a large dark roast with cream, and then trudged into the wet sleet toward the Worthen Canal.

Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants had dug Lowell's canals to channel the muscle of the Merrimack River to the city's textile mills. The mill companies had long gone south in search of cheaper labor, but the canals—six miles' worth—still churned out bodies. Most were heroin addicts with blue skin and sticky white lips puckered in an overdose kiss. Other addicts, stoned stupid and too scared to call 911, dumped the bodies into the canals. They floated with the trash, the brown bubbles and little oil slicks, passing over stolen shopping carts and discarded tires. There was barely a ripple as the canals dragged their dirty cargo around the city like tired blood.

The Worthen Canal, which passes through some of the city's roughest neighborhoods, was known to produce a murder victim on occasion. Since it flowed from the outskirts of the city to downtown, it was usually impossible for police to pinpoint where a body had been dumped.

Diesel exhaust was heavy at the scene. Three cruisers with blues spinning, a fire engine, and an ambulance idled in a semicircle near the edge of the canal. A swelling crowd of scanner junkies had gathered, kept back from the interesting stuff by yellow police tape.

It seemed a big production for a dead drug addict.
Better put Danny on alert. I might need a hand with this one
. Eddie paged Nowlin to his cell phone number.

Eddie didn't know the uniformed cop working crowd control along the police tape, but that wasn't usually a problem. The trick was to hold the notebook in plain sight and act like you were invited.

“Captain McCabe here yet?” Eddie asked the cop as he ducked under the tape.

The officer's whole face squinted, like a guy waking up to a bright light. “He's back there. Who are you?”

Eddie walked on. “Edward Bourque, from The Empire. If McCabe comes this way, tell him I got here as fast as I could. Thanks.”

He didn't look back.

Gerald McCabe was a source of Eddie's. Both used to work the graveyard shift. Eddie would tip off McCabe whenever the patrolmen's union planted a story in the paper whacking police management. And anytime Eddie missed a late-night car wreck or bar stabbing, McCabe would ring Eddie's cell phone.

The captain's thick frame—an oil drum on cannon legs—stood out among the handful of uniformed officers breathing steam in the winter air and peering into the water. A police photographer clicked photos. A diver in a skin-tight blue suit dropped a rope ladder over the canal's edge. Another diver crouched ready with a large vinyl sack.

The stone and concrete canal was about as wide as a city street. It smelled like a wet basement. Water ran through it about five feet below street level. Two weeks of relentless cold had iced the canal at its edges, narrowing the flow of water to a channel down the middle.

A body lay face down, partially trapped in the ice. It was a man, judging by the gray trench coat. He was maybe five-foot-nine, dressed in dark slacks with black-stocking feet. The left sleeve of his raincoat was torn off at the shoulder, exposing a bare arm, ugly white and bent back the wrong way at the elbow.

Eddie had seen bodies before—real bodies, like this one, so unlike the illusions in caskets made up by an undertaker. He asked McCabe, “Suicide or overdose?”

“Neither. The chief's on his way.”

The chief didn't go out in the snow for accidents or for addicts. Eddie gulped the rest of his coffee, wished he had another, and then got to work. He sketched the scene and the position of the body in his notebook, and listed the cops he recognized.

He scanned for details that would illustrate the story. The closest building was a three-story brick cube, the backside of a hardware store. There were two faces in a second-floor window, probably store employees on a gawk break. In the other window, somebody had taped a red and blue political sign. It read “Re-elect Hippo Vaughn to Congress.” The sign was either a year old, or a year premature. Vaughn had been reelected in a landslide last year, but it reminded Eddie he had promised Phife a campaign analysis on the upcoming city election.

Above, on the building's roof, something drew his eye. A silhouette against white sky. He shielded his eyes with the notebook. A woman's face teased from behind long black hair. She swept the hair back with a red mitten, revealing skin the shade of clear tea. She was young, maybe late twenties, and striking—Cambodian, most likely. Eddie's eyes lingered on her.

A yelp echoed off the canal walls.

“Shit! This is cold,” a diver yelled from the water. “My balls are shrinking to BBs.”

McCabe bellowed at him. “You don't need 'em. I wear out your old lady whenever you work a double shift.”

All the cops chuckled. The diver yelled back, “Small price to pay for overtime.”

The divers slipped the bag under the body and fed straps up to the cops on the ledge. The uniformed guys pulled up the corpse and set it face-up on the ground. McCabe wrestled his huge hands inside rubber gloves and squatted next to the body in silence for a minute, touching nothing.

He deadpanned, “Boys, I don't think this guy's gonna make it.” Eddie made a note that the body still had a wristwatch, a black sports model, on the left wrist.

“White male,” McCabe said. “Severe trauma, face and head.”

That was police understatement. Something had smashed this guy's nose to pulp. The lower lip was split. The cheeks were beaten to the bone. Maybe he jumped off a building, or stumbled drunk into a passing truck—or maybe this was a homicide.