years. The guard had commented on Nick’s stories, had even congratulated him when he’d bought a new car three years ago. Yet after 9/11 all employees had to wear a badge identifying themselves. The first time he’d misplaced his I.D. and Jim made him sign in, Nick joked about joining al-Qaeda after eight years as a staff reporter, but the look the guard had given him was scary.
This morning Nick just shook his head and signed in.
“Try to find it, Nick. Or you’ll have to buy a new one,” the guard said.
Nick looked up at him. “How did you know my name without it, Jim?” he said and walked away.
Down in the newsroom the usual din was running. Most of the reporters were out on their beats. But folks on the daytime copy desk were in their nose-to-the-grindstone mode. While he worked his way through the back of the maze, Nick kept his eyes down, trying to be low-profile. Get in, get your stuff and leave. Simple as that. He ducked into a back room where they stored supplies and picked out an empty cardboard box and then made it to his desk.
The computer he’d used for the last several years was gone. Even the monitor. The only thing left was a pattern of dust where it once sat. When he tried the drawers of his desk, they’d been locked. He tried his key. No go, as he had figured. Even the belly drawer, which only held pencils and paper clips and stale breath mints, was locked. On the desktop the documents that Lori had delivered to his desk were predictably gone, used no doubt to put together this morning’s story. His personal dictionary, a thesaurus and a copy of Bernstein’s The Careful Writer were still stacked on one corner. There was a clay sculpture of a green-and-blue dog that his oldest daughter, by three minutes, had made and given to him on a Father’s Day several years ago. The family photo, showing the four of them, was lying face down, apparently knocked over during the hasty removal of his computer. Nick could feel eyes on him when he picked it up and, refusing to be emotional, he slid it into the bottom of the box and then piled the rest of his stuff in after. On his way out Nick avoided Joe Binder’s desk, even though he could see the back of the reporter’s head, bent low as if he were studying some newly installed hieroglyphics on his keyboard. Carrying the box, he took the back way to the research center and when Lori saw him she got up from her terminal and walked straight to him. Her eyes were red-rimmed when she stepped up to the counter.
“I’m sorry, Nick. Really, I tried to call you and—”
Nick reached out and touched her hand. “It’s OK, Lori. I shouldn’t have put you in a bad position. It’s all on me. Please. You’re the best,” he said and then hugged her to him, longer than he needed to, but not as long as he wanted to. “I’ll call you. I’d like to see you, you know, off campus.”
He smiled at the joke as he walked away, somewhat mystified that a moment that should have been sad had somehow left a lightness in his head.
Chapter 30
They met under the shade of a bottlebrush tree, gathered at a picnic table that was set up behind the county’s fire and paramedics warehouse. It was a short walk for Canfield and Hargrave. Nick needed only to take the short drive from the newspaper he’d passed on earlier.
The meeting place was suggested by the detective after Nick called him on his cell. It was eighty degrees in the shade and the lieutenant in uniform was sweating twice as much as the two in plain clothes.
“It’s out of the pattern. It’s out of the sequence of logic. And you two are out of your minds,” Canfield was saying to both of them but looking directly at Hargrave, who, for the first time since Nick had laid eyes on him, was appearing unsure.
“What, you’re going to call this ex-con Walker and tell him some sniper might be targeting him because his good friend Mr. Mullins has an angel of death killing the subjects of his stories?
“And, I might add,” he said, shifting his focus onto Nick, “you didn’t write the story about the death of your own family, did you?”
Nick felt the anger starting up from that spot