Nick recognized the line as a caption that must have run under a photo that appeared with no story. He wondered how he could have missed it. He checked the date it ran: January 21 of last year.
Nick had not been aware of anything during that month or the February after that. He’d been on an extended leave of absence. Death in the family.
He refocused on the screen and called up the next mention of Ferris. But with continued delays of the hearing dates, each story got smaller and was placed deeper on inside pages until they were barely noticeable.
Nick knew that information about court hearings and calendar calls wouldn’t make the paper. He switched out of the stories and called up a website from his favorites list on the Internet: Florida Department of Corrections. From here, he could enter Ferris’s name and date of birth and find out where he had been held in the prison system. While he was waiting, his phone rang.
“Nick Mullins,” he answered.
“Hey, Nick. It’s Lori. I’ve got some court docket stuff on Ferris that I got online. The last entry was a request by defense to show cause for a change of sentence that looks like it had been delayed a couple of times.”
“Let me guess,” Nick said. “Rescheduled for today.”
“Two in the afternoon in Judge Grossman’s courtroom,” she said.
Nick could hear the tinge of disappointment in her voice that she hadn’t been ahead of him.
“Was that in the clips?” she asked.
“Nope. Hell, the guy was off our radar for almost a year,” Nick said, as much to himself as Lori. “Can you print that stuff and send it over?”
Nick knew that to get into the court’s docket database you had to have a subscription. Most attorneys did. Most large newspapers did. It was expensive. But Nick also knew you could still do it the old-fashioned way. The case notes are public record and anyone with an interest in Ferris could have walked into the court records office and checked out the file. From there you could get the date of his next appearance and set up your own appointment for a morning shooting.
Nick thanked Lori and went back to his DOC search and in five minutes had an electronic sheet on Ferris. His most recent home had been the South Florida Reception Center. Before that he’d been up in Tomoka Correctional, a maximum security prison near Daytona Beach.
Nick sat back and took another long sip of coffee. He was gathering string. Piecing stuff together. Speculating? Yes. But not out loud. Hell, even though he trusted his source at dispatch, confirmation that the dead inmate was Ferris was still in the wind. And at this point Nick didn’t even know if the shooter was targeting anyone specific. Maybe the sniper was just some whack job out to pop a bad guy, any bad guy, and knew the sally port was where prisoners were off-loaded. But the picture was still in Nick’s head, the roofline looking down into the fenced yard, the distance, the single blood spatter. No way, he decided. There were probably half a dozen prisoners down there. All this guy wanted was one shot. One preselected victim.
Nick called up an old file on his computer, a huge list of telephone numbers he’d collected over the years. He was the kind of reporter who recorded nearly every substantial contact number he’d gathered over the years. Each time he finished a story, he’d copy the numbers from his notebooks or cut and paste them from his computer notes and put them on the bottom of this list. There were hundreds. He knew he’d never use eighty percent of them ever again, but times like these kept him at the habit.
Using a search function for Ferris’s name on the computer, he found what he was looking for in seconds—Ferris’s father’s and brother’s names and their telephone numbers. The father had been in West Virginia three years ago and hadn’t been much help. But the brother lived here. The cops would have the same numbers and at some point they would call to inform next of kin. Nick knew if he got some family member on the line, he’d have a good chance of confirming it was Ferris who was now lying in the morgue. He picked up the phone and started to punch in the number for the brother, then stopped. David Ferris’s address, in a mobile