The eyes continued to look out and the crack widened, letting sunlight give blueness to their irises.
“My name is Nick Mullins, ma’am, I’m a reporter for the Daily News.”
“I know who you are,” the woman said. Her voice was neither accusatory nor contemptuous. Nick took it as a good sign.
“Have I met you before, ma’am?” Nick said.
“You interviewed my husband about four years ago, right here on these steps,” she said, opening the door wider, her hand high on the edge of the jamb. The sun glinted off thin strands of blond hair that dangled in front of her face like a spider’s web catching light. She was a small, thin woman dressed in a flower-patterned smock and loose matching pants, the kind of outfit a nurse would wear.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I, uh, I don’t recall your name.”
She just nodded, offering nothing.
“David isn’t in, then?”
“He just called, Mr. Mullins. They got ahold of him on his cell phone at work. He’s on his way home.”
Nick looked down again, as though he understood.
“He’s still at the Motorola plant, then?” he said, recalling the reporting he’d done on the earlier Ferris stories.
“We’re both still working, Mr. Mullins, trying to pay off the lawyer’s bills,” she said, only now letting an edge into her voice.
Nick shifted his weight. He was still standing below her, looking up now into her face. He thought he’d remembered her being in her mid-twenties on the documents he’d dug up on the Ferris family. But the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and the pull of skin from her cheekbones did not fit that age. He felt somehow responsible, but could not leave it alone.
“Was the phone call about Steven?” he finally asked and she simply nodded in the positive and looked off into the distance behind him. Again Nick let silence surround them, second-guessing whether she was relieved or saddened. He finally took a step back.
“May I wait for David to get here?” he said.
She fixed her dry blue eyes on his. “He doesn’t want to talk with you, Mr. Mullins. Enough has been said,” she said. “I know that people can’t understand it, why he stood up for his brother after what he did to those children. I don’t know that I even understand it.”
She looked down for the first time, a crack in her show of defiance.
“But David still loved his brother, sir. And now we have a funeral to plan.” Nick nodded his head again, this time in deference, and continued stepping backward.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ferris,” he said and then closed his lips around the air that had started behind his teeth before he could say, Thank you.
By the time he opened his car door, she was gone. He climbed in and the spiral wire of his notebook caught the fabric of the seat. He had not taken it from his back pocket.
Chapter 5
On the way back to his desk Nick made his obligatory stop at the assistant city editor’s pod.
“I have an I.D. confirmation on the dead guy at the jail,” he said.
The editor rolled back his chair while his fingers were still on his keyboard, reluctant to leave unfinished a sentence for a budget line item that would have to be presented in yet another news meeting at noon.
“OK, great, Nick. Anybody we know?” he said, finally bringing his head and a grin around with the final word.
“Yeah. It’s a guy they put away a few years ago on a double homicide and rape of two elementary school sisters.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, knowing he’d finally gotten the guy’s attention. “He was coming back into court for a hearing on a change of sentencing and it looks like somebody from the outside popped him.”
The editor’s name was John Rhodes. He’d only been at the Daily News for a year and had been told early that Mullins had an attitude, most of it coming after a car wreck that involved his family some time ago. He was told to walk lightly with him. But he’d also learned quickly that when Mullins brought something to the editors’ desk, the guy would have nailed it down.
“No shit,” he repeated and looked around to see if anyone else was within earshot and sharing the news of the minute. “How long ago did this guy do the … uh, murder the kids?”
“Four years,” Nick said. “Only the sentencing was in litigation.”