Hush (8 page)

One day not long ago, Max had told him he'd
better start thinking about his future, making plans. Didn't the
guy know you shouldn't say that to a sixteen-year- old? A real
parent wouldn't have said that kind of crap. They'd say things
like, "When I was your age, I didn't know what I was going to do
either. Don't worry. It'll come. And when it does, you'll know it."
But no, Max didn't say anything like that. Instead, he started
grilling him, asking him what he was interested in. And Ethan would
answer, "Hell no, I don't want to be a cop!" Or, "Hell no, I don't
want to join the army!" And then Max would start talking about
college, and how Ethan had better start studying for his ACT. And
that would make Ethan's heart beat all the faster. He was just a
kid. He'd spent his whole life doing nothing, and now, suddenly he
was supposed to know exactly what he wanted.

What he wanted was to find his father. All
along, he'd had the idea that if he could find his dad everything
would fall into place. Because his real dad would know what to say.
He and his real dad would sit around in the backyard, drinking
beer, shooting the shit. His real dad would show him how to clean a
carburetor, and how to tune an engine just like his friend Tyler's
dad had done. His real dad wouldn't talk about the importance of
noticing details in case you were ever a witness to some kind of
crime—which is exactly what had happened to Ethan a couple of years
ago. He'd been in the Quick Stop buying some pop when it was
robbed.

"What'd they look like?" his dad had asked.
"How tall? What kind of clothes?" He didn't say, "I'm glad you're
okay." And when Ethan had said he didn't know, Max had gotten this
look on his face, a look of confusion, then acceptance. Like he
shouldn't have expected anything of Ethan in the first place.

His real dad wouldn't have done that. His
real dad would have just been glad he was okay.

His mom . . .

Sometimes he thought he remembered her, but
how could that be? He was three years old when she died. Death—the
idea of death—scared the hell out of him. First you're there, then
you're not.

He could almost remember her voice, and the
way he felt when she spoke to him. Loved. That's how her voice made
him feel. But how could he remember that? No, he was only filling
in the blanks with his own imagination.

Max. Max was the first person Ethan
remembered. It was Christmas, and he and Max had gotten a tree. Max
had lifted him up so he could put tinsel on the top. When Ethan
remembered those times, he didn't hate Max. But that Max didn't
seem like the high- strung Max he knew today.

A person could almost think Max didn't have
any feelings, but Ethan knew better. He'd never forget a night,
years ago, when Max had picked him up from the baby-sitter's. All
the way home, he didn't say a word. Ethan finally asked about the
smell—a rotten, sweet, awful odor that seemed to be coming from his
dad.

Max didn't say anything for a long time, then
asked, "You can smell it too?"

"Yeah," Ethan said.

"Rotten cantaloupe," his dad finally told
him.

And when they got home, Max took a long, long
shower. When he came out he was wearing a clean pair of jeans, his
wet hair smelling of lemons. In the middle of the night, something
woke Ethan up. At first he couldn't place the noise, and then, with
a sort of awkward embarrassment, he realized his dad was
crying.

When he got older, he found out that lemon
shampoo was the best way to wash the smell of death from your
hair.

Abraham gripped the wooden podium, pulling
his thoughts into coherence while the always solid, always
dependable Detective Irving stood to his right. Also present at the
press conference were Cook County State Attorney Roger Jacobs, Cook
County Board President Jane O'Riley, and Deputy Chief of Area Five
Grace Simms.

Abraham had spent the entire morning on the
phone. The mayor had called twice in three hours, with Abraham
assuring him that this latest homicide could not yet be linked in
any way to the homicides of sixteen years ago.

He'd also had several conversations with
hospital administrators who were expecting panic to erupt in their
maternity wards.

He could have let his assistant handle some
of the lighter calls, but that wasn't what Abraham was about.
Through his entire career, he'd made it a point to be accessible,
even from his position at the top. He wanted the public to know
that the murders were high on everyone's priority list, especially
the Superintendent's. By the time the conference rolled around,
Abraham had put away two pots of coffee and a roll of antacid
tablets, and he needed something stronger than aspirin for his
headache.

Looking out into the auditorium, he was
relieved to see that the majority of the seats were vacant. So far
the mother-and-child homicide wasn't big news and wouldn't be
unless a connection was made to the Madonna Murderer.

Many of the faces were familiar. Chris Humes,
from the Sun. Victoria Price-Rand, from the Trib.

Abraham quickly gave them the facts.

"What about the Madonna Murderer?"

The question Abraham had hoped to avoid came
from a shiny-faced young man Abraham had never seen before.

The good reporters, the ones who didn't screw
up a case by leaking information, were, in turn, respected by the
police. In exchange for their cooperation, they were sometimes
granted starring roles in the investigation process. They were
sometimes given exclusive information that could eventually lead to
a distinguished career in the newspaper business.

Stalling, Abraham asked, "What's your
name?"

The reporter fiddled with the plastic press
pass clipped to his shirt, as if Abraham could read the name from
thirty feet away. "Alex Martin, sir."

Irritated, weary, Abraham plunged in. "At
this point, there's no evidence to draw any kind of connection
between this homicide and the homicides of sixteen years ago. Next
question." He directed his gaze away from the new reporter.

"B-but, sir," Alex stammered, his hand
raised.

Superintendent Sinclair ignored him, choosing
instead to call on one of the more established reporters.

The incident made Alex so angry that he sat
in his chair biting his nails and obsessing over it while losing
track of his immediate surroundings. Ten minutes later, the room
came into focus as Detective Irving eased his way behind the
podium.

Alex settled back to listen to more
bullshit.

"What about the FBI?" someone asked.

"The FBI's Chicago field office is involved
in the case," Max Irving said.

"Any plans to bring in other agents?"

"Not at this point. We have our own excellent
profiler, Special Agent David Scott, who has been instrumental in
the apprehension of several criminals over the last four years,"
Irving told them. "He has a remarkable success rate."

"But he's only one man. What about his
caseload?"

The reporter, Victoria Price-Rand, had
brought up an ongoing problem. Everyone in the police department
and FBI was overextended. Last Max heard, Agent Scott was juggling
150 different homicide cases. Max himself was overseeing about the
same number. Too much crime, not enough law enforcement, not enough
crime labs, not enough manpower. And it was only going to get
worse. DNA labs could now process results in as quickly as two
weeks, a vast improvement over the time it used to take, but
technicians were so backed up that it could still take months to
get results.

And to get an FBI agent sent down from
Quantico—well, the only way that would happen was if this last case
could be linked to the Madonna Murders.

Two hours later, Alex Martin sat in the belly
of the newsroom, fingers flying over his keyboard, typing up his
condemning piece on Superintendent Sinclair, getting more pissed as
he wrote. Around him, other reporters sat in front of computers,
keys clicking, phones ringing, printers spewing out stories that
were coming in off wire services.

Journalists just getting out of college
always imagined themselves doing human-interest stories. Or
commentary. Or starring in a column dealing with life, the United
States, the world. A column where the person would become famous
and readers would wait in anticipation for the next
thought-provoking article.

Those were the kind of things journalists
dreamed of. That and of course a billion-dollar career writing more
than one Great American Novel. Nobody ever said, I'm going to cover
high school basketball. I'm going to write obituaries—which were
tough as hell to do. Alex knew that for a fact because that's where
he'd started out. And nobody said, I'm going to go to college,
major in journalism, so I can hang around police stations, so I can
sift through daily logs of domestic arguments, public intoxication,
traffic arrests, and report it. Day after day after day.

Wouldn't win a Pulitzer that way. No, to win
a Pulitzer, you had to dig and dig, you had to uncover everything
you could uncover, expose every corner to light.

He was paying his dues, he knew that, but he
wanted a story. A real damn story. He also knew that wasn't going
to happen either, because cops had their favorite reporters, guys
they'd worked with for years. Those were the ones who got the
stories, those were the ones who got the exclusives. Not somebody
like him. That much was made obvious when Sinclair ignored him in
front of his peers. It was hard enough to earn the respect of
fellow reporters without someone publicly humiliating you like
that.

And so he typed, hitting the keys with hard,
angry strokes, wondering if he'd ever get a decent story, if he'd
chosen the right career. But with four years of student loans
hanging over his head, he had to stick with it. Even if it wasn't
right. Even if he'd made a mistake. That was the heartbreaking
thing about college. You had to make a choice—a guess, really—
about what you wanted to do with the rest of your life. It was a
roll of the dice, because there was a big chance you could be
wrong, a very big chance. And unless you were independently
wealthy, once it was done, it was done.

More and more, Alex was thinking he'd made a
mistake. And that was a hard thing to deal with. That feeling of
knowing you didn't belong somewhere, that
what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here feeling of mounting desperation.

Alex gave his story a file name: Abraham
Sinclair.

He was still staring at the article when his
desk advisor stopped by.

A few years back, the Herald had hired a new
CEO and gone through massive restructuring. During that time, some
lamebrain had come up with the idea of changing everybody's job
title. Gone were the more militant-sounding titles like "chief' and
"deputy." Now people were "directors," and "advisors," and
"overseers." In effect, they'd edited the edit out of editing.

His advisor's name was Maude Cunningham.
Maude was probably called a broad in her younger days. She could
have been anywhere between sixty and seventy. She'd started when
the paper was a male-dominated ship and female reporters had to be
tough and resilient. She smoked, and Alex suspected she drank
fairly heavily because she had that dried-up-prune look people got
after indulging for decades. Her voice was a harsh rasp, and the
air that came from her lungs was as stale as a mausoleum's. Alex
figured she was one X-ray away from a cancer diagnosis.

"We can't run that." She was perched on the
corner of his desk, tapping a long red fingernail against a yellow
front tooth.

Alex reread it.

It was an out-of-control defamatory piece,
full of adjectives and qualifiers used to describe Sinclair's
callous treatment of Alex. There wasn't a newsworthy bit of
information in the entire thing.

"I was just shitting around." He clicked the
cancel button, then tried to exit the program, but the software
wouldn't let him off the hook so easily.

Do you want to save file Abraham
Sinclair?

The question blinked at him.

He hit the "no" button, deleting his
article.

"I'd like to do some research on Sinclair,
find out what he had to do with the Madonna Murders," he said.

"Are you talking a revenge piece? That's not
what this paper is about. I don't want you using the paper to carry
out a personal vendetta. You have to grow a thicker skin if you're
going to stay in this business. Every day you're going to run into
people who don't even know you, but hate you because you're a
newspaper reporter. That's because writers have power. Don't abuse
it. Go ahead and look in the archives, but stay off Sinclair's
back. I can tell you he was in charge of the Madonna case years
ago. It cost him his marriage and he ended up having to go to a
treatment center in Minneapolis to dry out. Try to see it from his
side for a moment, and maybe you won't resent him so much."

"So I have your approval to see what I can
dig up?"

"I want you to have something ready in case
we need it. If any more murders occur, or if the police come up
with a solid connection between these new cases and the Madonna
Murders. In the meantime, just try to stay abreast of the current
situation without making enemies of the entire police force." She
smiled at him in a tough-broad, I-like-you sort of way. "I realize
those two things might be a little hard for you to accomplish, but
please make an effort."

The lady Ethan was trying to serve couldn't
decide what she wanted. She stood staring up at the wall menu,
waiting for something to hit her in the face, as if expecting the
menu to change or start flashing or something. Who knew?

Ethan wished lightning would strike them
all.

It was a bagel shop, for chrissake, not some
five-star downtown snobbery where Ethan's next step would be to
suggest a hundred-dollar wine. Why couldn't people make up their
minds?