as a man who had befriended them. It took a day for detectives to track him down. They found him in the small rental house and interviewed him for an hour. They read him like a book and returned the same afternoon with a search warrant.
Nick had gone to the crime scene. He had been there when the two small body bags were carried out, just like the rest of the press. But for this one he could not tear his eyes away. He remembered the look in the lead investigator’s eyes when he later told Nick he would never forget the feeling of realizing that the bodies of those girls had been lying right above him as he’d listened to Ferris deny he had even seen the children. Nick remembered thinking they should not let detectives or police reporters who have kids of their own go to crime scenes involving the deaths of children. He remembered interviewing the mother, even though he knew she was still in shock, her eyes swollen, the pupils enlarged and glossed by sedatives and some internal message that kept trying to convince her it wasn’t so. He remembered hating Steven Ferris.
Nick scrolled down through the story, past the history he’d dug up on Ferris: the arrests for loitering, the multiple laborer jobs, the interview with the girlfriend who had left him after she’d caught him in her daughter’s room but had never reported it, just cursed him and kicked him out.
None of that had come out in court. Ferris’s trial had been emotional and sensational. Nick hadn’t covered it. That assignment belonged to the court reporter. But Nick had slipped into the courtroom on several days, squeezing into the back rows and watching the back of Ferris’s head as he sat at the defense table. One day the little girls’ mother, who could not stand to sit inside, was in the hallway on a bench and recognized Nick as he quietly left during testimony.
“Mr. Mullins,” she said and stood.
Nick stopped and looked at her face, trying to read whether she was indignant or angered by something he had written. “You are the reporter, yes?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nick said, taking two steps closer to her.
When she put out her hand, he closed the final gap and clasped her fingers softly.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “For the way you treated me and my girls in your stories.”
Nick was silent, not knowing how to react, seeing her eyes again, clearer now, but still holding a pain that would be there forever. Nick knew even then that whatever went on in the courtroom would never ease her pain.
“They were beautiful children,” he remembered saying and then had excused himself and walked away.
Now he knew the pain personally. Loved ones dead. A child you could never hold again. The urge for vengeance. Robert Walker.
Within days of the start of Ferris’s trial the predator was convicted by a jury that would later recommend the death penalty. The judge had agreed. Nick shook the scenes out of his head. He remembered each detail, but today’s story wasn’t so much about Ferris as it was about his killer.
He moved on to the other stories Lori had sent him. There was a hearing that the newspaper’s court reporter had written months after Ferris’s conviction. An appeals court had ruled on arguments raised over the prejudicial nature of the trial itself. Several people in the courtroom gallery had worn buttons on their shirts and blouses adorned with photographs of the dead girls. Ferris’s lawyer argued that the crowd and the photos had influenced the jury. Though the prosecution argued that members of the public had a right to attend the proceedings, a panel of judges disagreed.
“Here, the direct link between the buttons, the spectators wearing the buttons, the defendant, and the crime that the defendant allegedly committed was clear and unmistakable,” read the document handed down by the three-judge appellate court panel. “A reasonable jurist would be compelled to conclude that the buttons worn by members of the gallery conveyed the message that the defendant was guilty.”
Lori had sent another quick story that quoted a defense attorney who claimed the conviction should be thrown out. Another hit on the computer came up with only a single line: “Convicted murderer Steven Ferris sits mute as lawyers argue for a new hearing for the man who was given the death penalty for raping and killing two sisters, 6 and 8, three years ago. Ferris is currently serving