THE CLOUDS DIPPED LOW, FILLING THE NIGHT AIR WITH freezing fleece. Pet Mercer stood in the parking lot beside her car, waiting. As she waited, she smiled. Even though the mercury was nearing zero, the air was full of rich aromas. She could smell a story. Her story. It was big. She could almost smell the ink on her Pulitzer, could see it hanging in her cubicle at the
Tribune,
could ⦠She arched her neck backward, staring up into the streetlamp that bloomed in the thick snow that sifted down over her head. The snow was falling faster now, the big soft flakes obscuring everything but the lamp, her car, and the surrounding twenty feet of pavement. Her search had mounted to a crescendo, gaining rapidly in the last few hours. What she had gotten from the geologists had clinched her theory. She had made the perfect phone call at the perfect moment, caught the right person off guard, ready to talk, and now here she was, waiting for him to come and spill it all to her under the cloak of darkness and in the silence of the falling snow.
In ecstasy, she opened her mouth to the falling crystals and let them melt on her tongue.
Pulitzer.
L.A. Times, Washington Post,
maybe even New York â¦
Her ear pricked to the sound of the approaching motor. Was that him?
She straightened her neck, then looked down. Snow was just beginning to collect on the blacktop.
The sounds of the approaching car grew, and she could see a brightening where the glow from its headlights roamed hungrily through the falling whiteness. Now she could see individual beams, now the form of the car. It was a Ford Explorer. She laughed to herself. How predictable. He was driving the most common vehicle in Salt Lake City.
As the vehicle pulled up next to her, she noticed that it was not exactly like every other Ford Explorer in town. This one had something mounted on the front bumper. It looked like a sheet of plywood, or ⦠no, it was cardboard. How odd.
The driver's window slithered down. “Pet? Pet Mercer?” a man asked.
Her heart beat even faster. “Yes, it's me,” she said brightly, going into her act. “Thanks for coming.”
“Okay. Yeah. Um, sorry about this. Iâ”
“It's okay. I haven't been waiting long.”
“Yeah. Just ⦠just let me get this thing parked,” the man said. He put the vehicle in reverse and rolled quickly backward, cutting his headlights as he went.
Pet lost sight of him in the snow. She looked down at her feet. The tire tracks had come quite close, but they were quickly disappearing in the gathering whiteness. The sound of the Explorer's engine seemed to have receded quite far. Now she heard it change gears. Why was he parking so far away? The engine was idling; now its sound indicated it was in forward, coming back her way, now accelerating.
Why? What?
Pet's quick little brain spun quickly, recalculating her conclusions, spurring her feet to move, but she was wearing the wrong shoes. The leather soles slipped on the frozen pavement, and she went down just as the Explorer barreled into her, crushing the fleeting light of life from her tender body.
The fire made its own draft ⦠.
By Wednesday afternoon, inside of twelve hours, half the heart of the city was gone. At the time I watched the vast conflagration from out on the bay. It was dead calm. Not a flicker of wind stirred. Yet from every side wind was pouring in upon the city. East, west, north, and south, strong winds were blowing upon the doomed city. The heated air rising made an enormous suck. Thus did the fire of itself build its own colossal chimney through the atmosphere. Day and night the dead calm continued, and yet, near to the flames, the wind was often half a gale, so mighty was the suck.
âJack London, “The Story of an Eyewitness” (Collier's, May 5, 1906), describing the devastating fire that consumed San Francisco immediately following the April 18, 1906, magnitude 8.2 earthquake that was centered in Olema. The quake burst water mains, causing cisterns to drain, leaving firefighters without hope of battling the blaze. By contrast, as the result of far better planning and preparation, only about two square blocks of San Francisco burned following the 1989 magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake.
WHEN I AWOKE WEDNESDAY MORNING, IT WAS SNOWING hard. The mood suited me: total isolation under a blanket of cold. Unable to stand the idea of being alone in bed, I jumped up, showered, dressed, and trotted down the stairs to see if there was a copy of the
Salt Lake Tribune
I could read. I hoped for a follow-up
story on the damage the earthquake had done to the stadium. Knowing what I now knew, I wanted to see how this would be reported. I wanted to read Pet's words. And I thought when I was done basking in my insider's knowledge, I'd read up on the legions of elite athletes who were now arriving in the Salt Lake area to acclimatize for the coming Olympic games. They were powerful, beautiful, and astonishingly grounded people, and I felt none of that. Like all the rest of creation, I hoped to pick up a little vicarious splendidness just by reading about them and goggling at their pictures in the paper. Or at worst, I thought I'd flip to the editorial page and see what Pat Bagley was doing with them in his cartoon.
I didn't subscribe to the paper, but I had found that one of the other occupants of the apartment house in which I lived often waited until evening to read the paper, which left it available to me during the day, providing I was respectful and returned it to the porch in the same condition in which I had originally found it. Or close enough to. I had never actually asked, but no one had come pounding on my door to complain.
Today, I found the paper in a snowdrift, which meant that I was going to have to thaw it and dry it before I read it, folded it up again, and put it back on the porch, because it had been put out there warm and the snow it landed on had thawed and frozen to it as it had cooled. No matter; I needed to keep busy, right?
Right, so I stuck it in my oven while I fired up my midget travel iron, which is all the iron I can stand to own. Then I laid the first section flat and began to iron it dry so it wouldn't wrinkle. Well, the point of all of this is that I usually don't read the front section, it being a chronicle of events too ephemeral to interest a geologist, but because I was working it over with the iron, I actually read the front page.
The first headline read SALT LAKE GRIEVES LITTLEST CASUALTY. It seemed that, after two days of valiant efforts to save him, little Tommy Ottmeier had died. The report was that his
weeping parents had stood by his bedside as the life-support equipment was removed, committing him to God's care and asking that he meet them when the day came that they would follow him to the next life. A funeral would be held. I noted that it was planned for the church at the same stakeâwhat Mormons call a parishâas Ray's family attended. I try not to read such things, as it seems an invasion of privacy, but this time I couldn't help it. I had connected this infant with Faye's, and I found myself fighting back tears.
I read onward. The article included moving testimonials by those who had known little Tommy, and who knew and revered his parents. Mercifully, it limited its recitation about the shortsighted choice of a sleeping area that had led to the child's death, but by the same token, said nothing about the mechanics of earthquakes, substandard building practices, or corporate greed that had contributed to the casualty. I figured that at least a summary about earthquakes ought to have been there. Pet could have dashed off a box with one hand tied behind her back.
I scanned the page, wondering where her story had gotten buried. Above the fold, there was another pump-up article about the arriving Olympians, this time featuring their reactions to arriving at a place that had just thrown its chimneys into the garden. I was pleased to know that all the healthy young jocks from California and other places more frequently known to shake had taken it in stride, and I tut-tutted sympathetically as I read that this year's great American hope for figure-skating gold had clutched her teddy bear tightly when she heard about Tommy Ottmeier, but overall the article left me feeling more impatient than gratified. In fact, I would have put the paper back on the front porch in disgust if I hadn't by then opened it up far enough that I was committed to ironing it so that I could refold it correctly. As I continued ironing, I finally looked below the fold.
In the lower right-hand corner of the front page, I found Pet Mercer's face looking back at me.
She was easy to recognize, since I had seen her so recently, but I had to look twice to believe it, because it didn't make sense. It was her all right, right down to the pert hairstyle and bright, observant eyes.
I scanned the headline over her face, thinking that she must have won some award and that her employer had decided to crow about her on the front page, but instead the headline read SCIENCE REPORTER FOUND DEAD.
The words so thoroughly stunned me that I straightened up and looked around my small apartment to make sure where I was, and where all other solid objects were, as well.
Everything was still right where I had left it.
I looked back at the paper. Read the day's date. It was correct. I had not slipped into a parallel reality.
Finally, I read the story:
Salt Lake Tribune
science reporter Amelia “Pet” Mercer, 26, was found dead shortly before midnight Tuesday in a parking lot near the state capitol. Mercer was pronounced dead at the scene. The cause of death is believed to be vehicular manslaughter.
Mercer had worked for the
Tribune
for five months. She was a graduate of the University of Utah and held a M.A. in Journalism from Columbia University.
The owners and staff of the Tribune are deeply shocked and grieved at her loss.
“We're putting everything we've got into the investigation,” said Salt Lake City Police Department detective Arnold Haas.
It went on from there, talking about what a promising reporter Pet had been and so forth, that she'd been destined for greatness, loved by all, but there was not a single additional bit of hard
information regarding where she'd been found, why she she'd been there, what had happened, who might have done it, or when, except that it had happened some time before midnight.
Which meant that I was probably the only person who knew anything about what had led to her death.
I slapped down the paper, unplugged the iron, and dialed Tom Latimer's number at the FBI.
Â
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“SHE WAS DIGGING into Sidney Smeeth's death,” I told him twenty minutes later in his office. “I told you that last night. So this has got to be connected.”
Tom closed his eyes and rubbed the space between his eyebrows. “How I hope and pray you're wrong,” he said. He opened his eyes and tried to smile, but he was not fully in control of his mouth, and he wound up looking like he was fighting off tears. Perhaps he was.
Not a good moment to go out of commission on me, Tom,
I decided, then mentally whipped myself for my selfishness. Tom was my friend, and he had a whole lot more on his mind than what happened to be bothering me.
I got up and closed the door. Leaning with my back against it, I asked gently, “Is there something else you need to talk about, Tom?”
He examined me distantly, as if I were something lovely and admirable but inanimate, such as a statue on display in a museum. I examined him right back, marveling at how remote a truly brilliant intellectual can be about his emotions.
I sighed, wondering how he and Faye were going to muddle through the challenge they had created for themselves. Last week, they had been two sexually satisfied adults who seemed to enjoy each other's companionship. Now they were like a couple of superannuated kids who'd just pushed the wrong button on their
toy rocket ship and found themselves on a foreign, potentially hostile planet. He seemed to have shrunk into himself, like a little boy caught sitting in his father's chair.
“Tom?” I said.
“It's okay, Em,” he said pleadingly. “You can open the door. Please.”
I stayed where I was.
He got up and opened it himself, returned to his seat, cleared his throat, then pressed onward. “Now, about the Mercer case: Let's review what you know about what she was working on.”
I told him again about the pizza dinner Monday evening, detailing the way she had pushed for information and who had worked hardest to stonewall her, and why. Hugh Buttons, the Seismic Station's director, had seemed pained but on the spot. Logan de Pontier had been brusque. Wendy Fortescue, the seis-miology tech, had kept her mouth shut. And Ted Wimler had been a drama queen. We reviewed our observations about how each of these people had behaved while entering the synagogue. Then I told him again about the tour of the City and County Building, and about our chat over tacos and beer.
Tom said, “So Mercer was asking about Sidney Smeeth's relationship with the governor, and she was interested in earthquakes. Anything else?”
“She said something about the Towne Centre project. Does that ring a bell?”
Tom nodded. “Yes, but I'm not going to say anything more for now,” he said. “Please don't push.”
I took a breath. I was beginning to get the picture now. Whatever was going on involved some kind of buy-off, some kind of cover-up. Large-scale developers and possibly high-level politicians. That old cocktail: people with a lot of money mixing it up with people with a lot of power, all interests fully vested, blinders on, no one looking out for the fact that they were building in an
earthquake zone. “How did Pet die?” I asked. “The paper said âvehicular manslaughter.'”
“She was run over. Twice.”
I winced. Once might be manslaughter, but twice was murder. Accomplished by a person or persons who also threw public servants off their sundecks, or hired someone to do it, and both times managed to do so without being seen. He was right: I should keep my nose out of this one.
Tom continued. “Thank God the murders aren't my jurisdiction. I hate that kind of stuff. Leave me the paper trails to be followed, the nice cold brutality of fraud or the lasciviousness of interstate theft, but spare me the personal stuff.”
I thought,
Now we're getting down to it,
but I said, “Running over someone with a car in a snowstorm sounds plenty cold and brutal. And so does heaving someone off the deck of their house. But maybe it's also stupid. I mean, the deck job might have been done on ice, where they'd leave no footprints, but didn't the vehicular job at least leave tire tracks?”
Tom nodded. “Police say the preliminary evidence is some kind of SUV or truck, a common chassis with very common tread. Whoever did it planned ahead enough to wear gloves and put some kind of covering over hisâor herâboots. And it was snowing hard. There were only the vaguest footprint impressions around her and leading up to her car, which had been systematically searched, the contents turned over, her files standing up on edge, very tidy.”
“A cold, brutal, methodical killer. Not my idea of a dream date, either.”
“This is of course not to be discussed.”
I knew Tom meant that I was not to tell Ray that he had passed me the evidence. “Don't worry,” I said, looking away. “I barely ever see Ray these days. When I do, it's to discuss exactly that fact, not chitchat about murder cases, of which he would disapprove of my interest in the first place.”
Now it was Tom's turn to sigh. “Sorry to hear that, sport.”
I glanced quickly at him, trying to discern whether this really was news to him, or if Faye had told him all about it and he was just being decent. It didn't matter, really; the two of them were the people I trusted most in Salt Lake City, next to Ray ⦠or perhaps now even more than Ray. I was sure they had their system about these things. Of course, I didn't discuss Faye with Tom, and only indulged in discussing the friendship aspects of Tom with Faye, never the business in terms of our friendship. It was a matter of propriety.
I moved back over to my chair and loaded myself into it. “So. What's my assignment?”