time.”
“Well, I’m proud that you’re such a brainiac, but you still have to go to school,” Nick said, bouncing her just a bit with his knee.
“I knowwww,” Carly said with that omnipresent nine-year-old whine.
“So let’s get moving,” Nick said, bouncing his knee higher.
His daughter stood, trying to look disturbed, started away and then turned with one of those preteen looks.
“Brainiac? Dad, that is like sooooo old.”
Nick watched her spin and walk back toward her room, the sleepy shuffle already replaced by a small bounce. She already had her mother’s legs, delicate ankles, strong calf muscles. Her sister had had those long and impossibly skinny legs, her knees like knots in a rope. She’d walked like a newborn colt. Carly’s gait was more like a sturdy dancer. Watching the colt might not have made him think of his wife, but watching the dancer made him miss her so much he had to turn his face away. Nick took another sip of coffee and looked down at the newspaper on the table, where he had covered his 1A story with the local section, letting only a touch of red from the masthead show. I’ll have to get into the office by ten, he thought. Anything you put on the front page, they’re going to want a follow-up story for tomorrow.
He was only halfway through the newsroom when one of his fellow reporters said, “Nice story this morning, Nick. Like that lead, man.”
First paragraph, always the grabber if you did it right. If you did it wrong, Nick always worried, they’d turn the page on you.
When he got to his desk he fired up the computer and then looked apprehensively at the blinking light on the phone. Messages. He’d learned to hate the messages. Every story had the potential to bring out the nuts. Every sentence was just lying out there every morning for someone to disagree with, poke fun at, provide black-and-white proof that the reporter was incompetent. If you wrote anything even bordering on the political, you took the chance of having the right-wingers blasting you the next morning for your unfair liberal stance and the liberals calling you a fascist. Nick preferred to get it from both sides. It was the only way you could tell you’d been fair.
But crime stories rarely had a political bent, so he was safe from most of the second-guessing. He dialed up the message system and listened to the first call:
“Hello, Mr. Mullins. I read your story this morning and would like to compliment you on your writing. But who gives a shit? The guy is scum and should have been executed the day they found him in that house with those little girls. Why do you guys even waste the ink? Who cares who did it except for maybe we want to give him a medal. Anyway, good riddance.” OK, Nick thought, I’ll forward that one off to the editorial-page folks. He punched up the next message:
“Hey, Mullins, are the cops going to waste a bunch of time and money trying to find out who pulled the trigger on a guy we all would have gladly shot ourselves? I paid for this man’s trial. I paid to have him fed and housed for the last four years in prison. And I would have ended up paying for him to sit on death row for the next twenty while the lawyers got rich filing appeal after appeal. Now I suppose they’re going to use my taxes to find his killer. Please. Give me a break.”
The next call was from Cameron:
“Thanks a bunch, Nick. You swamped my ass already this morning. Give me a call when you get in. Hargrave is all over me to find out where you got the info on the .308 round. He thinks you might have pocketed evidence from the rooftop and lied to him about it.”
“Shit,” Nick said aloud. He didn’t need the detective to be pissed off. If he could work with the guy, that would be helpful. But if Nick was just going to have to filter everything through Cameron’s press office anyway, he didn’t think it was worth it. He wasn’t going to give up the doc just to pacify the homicide team. He was thinking about a strategy and unconsciously punching up the next message, so the next voice snuck up on him:
“Thank you for your story today, Mr. Mullins. A very thorough job, as usual. I look forward to your next case. Your profiles