“Trace Michaels,” he said, as if he’d finally found the name. “He was in for attempted murder after he set his girlfriend on fire. He’s been out almost eight months according to the research files. Plenty of time to make more enemies, I suppose.”
Nick told himself he was not really trying to steer Deirdre away from the similarities in the sniper story.
“But it’s a long-range shooting, right? And it was a large-bore bullet wound, right?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. She wasn’t so stupid.
“So we have a serial sniper running around the city shooting ex-cons and bad men, right?”
Deirdre’s language always got tougher as the excitement of a good story got up her nose. After all, she had been a reporter before she joined management.
She leaned over his partition and lowered her voice. “Nick, do we have some serial killer out there doing a Son of Sam thing to scumbags on the streets? Are you working that angle or what?”
Nick looked away and flipped through a couple of pages in his notebook like he was searching for an answer.
“We’ve both been at this game a long time, Deirdre. You never say never. But to tell you the truth, right now I’m not focused on speculation and screaming headlines,” Nick said, getting hot. “I mean, shit, since when does two dead jump to serial killer? Christ, Son of Sam had five shooting scenes and a ballistics match in before they started calling Berkowitz a serial killer.”
The heads of other reporters and editors started peeking up over their cubicles. Even with Nick’s reputation the tension level of his voice was rising too high for the modern newsroom-as-insurance-office protocols. Nick went silent.
“Instead I’m looking into any connection between this guy and the one from last week, but as of this minute, I don’t have anything,” he began again, quietly. “Research is running some driver’s license history to see if they ever even lived in the same area. And I’m trying to get the probable-cause affidavits from their prior arrests to see if they were ever listed as running together on any of their earlier crimes.”
The investigative theory, Nick knew, was to find out if any of the victims had something in common that might be a motive for their killer, and by now Nick and Hargrave were both on that page.
“Alright, alright. Do what you’re doing, Nick,” Deirdre said and started to walk away, but stopped. “And hey, send some of your contact numbers with the Sheriff’s Office over to the national desk so they can assign someone to that OAS security story.”
Nick nodded and she spun on her heel again, but not all the way around.
“And hey, why not check the DOC files too. See if these guys ever spent prison time together, you know, for midweek. But not today. Today,” she said, looking at her watch, “we got deadline.”
As she left, Nick was cursing himself. OK, OK. I didn’t tell her about the other sniper shootings out of our area, or my byline connections with these guys, five now, just like Berkowitz, smart-ass. But you are not the story, Nick. You are not the story. Hargrave had already given him shit about that theory being an ego trip and he sure wasn’t tossing that ammunition to Deirdre.
He turned back to his computer and started clicking keys. But that was good about the DOC files. Why didn’t I think of that?
By seven o’clock Nick had finished the Michaels shooting story. He had not been able to track down the girlfriend that the ex-con had set aflame. His contact, a social worker in the hospital where the woman was treated, could only tell him that the burn victim and her daughter had moved out of state. The attorney who prosecuted Michaels would only say things like “What goes around, comes around” that were off the record. The public defender that represented Michaels had moved on to another lawyer job.
Nick ended up laying it out in simple news style:
A 43-year-old construction laborer was shot to death outside a Pompano Beach parole office early Monday morning, just as he was entering for a weekly appointment.
Trace Michaels, who worked part-time with Hardmack Construction, was declared dead at the scene in the 100 block of McNab Road, police said. He was shot once in the head, police said.
The shooting of Michaels, who had recently served five years in prison for attempted manslaughter after setting his girlfriend aflame during an argument, was the second time in two