It seemed hard to fathom that the manner in which he’d reported the news had actually become the news.
But being in the biz, so to speak, he knew that not even Miami had near enough crime to fill the expanded news hours of local TV shows.
To avoid the commotion, he drove to the next street that ran parallel to his. The houses in the 171
THE INFORMANT
Riviera subdivision were laid out in rows of two, so that the fronts faced the street and the backs faced each other.
He parked in front of the Old Spanish–style house that backed up against his own backyard. Quietly, he got out of his car and walked behind his neighbor’s house, praying not to get shot. He walked faster as he approached the iron picket fence that separated the two backyards; then he jumped it and tumbled to the ground on the other side, on his own turf.
He picked himself up and stood in the darkness, looking across the kidney-shaped swimming pool and through the wall of French doors that ran across the back of his house. With the lights on in the family room he could see everything inside, including Karen sitting on the couch. She was wearing a blue knit sweater and shorts, with her legs extended and feet up on the coffee table.
She was reading some magazine and sucking on—if memory served him—a Weight Watchers chocolate mousse fudge pop. He felt like he could have stood there all night, watching, and never been detected. He felt like
anyone
could have stood there all night—and the thought chilled him. He dashed across the lawn and tapped lightly on the French door.
Karen jumped at the noise and nearly shrieked, until she recognized his face through the little windowpane.
She unlocked the door and let him in.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t come in the front. There’s an army out there. Where the hell is your protection anyway?”
“They’re parked out front. They’re using a media van to look less conspicuous.”
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James Grippando
“Fat lot of good that does. What if I’d been—”
“A crazy serial killer?” she said, finishing his sentence.
“They gave me an alarm in case anything goes wrong.”
She held up her wrist and displayed what looked like a watch, except that where the face should have been was a tiny red button. “They didn’t want to be intrusive.”
“Well, my fellow newshounds don’t seem to have any qualms. Looks like our separation isn’t common knowledge yet.”
Karen frowned. “This story sure is common knowledge.
It was all over the evening news: Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist pays off an informant who may be a serial killer.
Where are they getting this stuff?”
“It has to be Brenda Baines. She overheard me on the phone with the guy that night you came by the newsroom, and she must have heard more than I thought. I’m not exactly on her Christmas list, you know. She’s the only one I know who’d be vicious enough to leak something outside rather than take it up with the
Tribune.
”
“It’s terrible, what they’re saying. Haven’t you seen
any
of it?”
“No, actually. I was, uh, over at the Airport Hilton.
With Victoria.”
“Great,” she said. “It’s not enough that I have to overhear the two of you arguing like boyfriend and girlfriend in our own house. Now you’re meeting at hotels.”
“C’mon…”
“Sorry,” she said with heavy sigh. “Listen to me, I sound like somebody out of a soap opera.”
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“Yes, you do,” he said, smiling.
“I guess this is all starting to get to me. The FBI’s on my tail. The media’s on my doorstep. My husband’s on a first-name basis with a serial killer.” She turned and ran a hand through her hair, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. “And now this jealousy thing. I
hate
this.”
“Sounds to me like you still value our marriage, that’s all.”
She looked into his eyes. “What should we do about that?”
“We could alert the media,” he said, jerking his head toward the front door.
Her eyes brightened. “I got a better idea. Why don’t we just forget about them, forget about everything. Just sit on the couch, me and you, and talk.”
“I’d like that.”
She smiled thinly, then turned serious. “I’ve been feeling like a hypocrite, the way I came down on you for not telling me about your arrangement with the FBI.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have, well…secrets of my own—things I’ve wanted to tell you about for a very long time.”
“What kind of secrets?” he asked warily.
“Things about myself. I’ve been beating myself up lately, blaming myself for not telling you. But there are two sides to this. I remember so many nights lying in bed, listening to you in the other room talking on the phone with your sources, trying to coax information out of them. You were always so patient with them, so understanding. Sometimes I wish you’d be more like that with me. Maybe I would have opened up more.”
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“Well,” he said, “let’s talk about it.”
Suddenly, the SkyPager on his belt blared with a pulsating beep, signaling a message.
They exchanged glances. Time froze. Then finally he looked down.
“Damn. I think that’s Aaron Field’s home number.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Karen, it’s not every day my publisher calls me from home. He must be watching the news. I better return this.”
She sighed and shook her head. “You’ll have to plug in the phone. I pulled it when those reporters kept calling.”
“It will just take a minute, I promise. Hold your thought.”
“Right.”
He dashed to her office and connected the phone. He paused to peer outside through the mini-blinds. The mob of reporters had grown larger. With a sinking sense of dread, he picked up the receiver to return Aaron’s call.
Victoria showered and slipped into the white terrycloth robe that came with her hotel room. Her wet hair was twisted up in a bath towel. Too tired and too busy to call any of her old friends in Miami for dinner, she ordered room service and ate in bed while reviewing the autopsy protocol from the Arkansas case. It wasn’t until she was halfway into a protein-rich bean salad that she’d realized she was actually putting food
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in her mouth while reading about “petechiae in the con-junctiva,” or tiny hemorrhages in the mucous membrane of the brain caused by increased pressure in the head at the time of death.
The phone rang on the nightstand. She answered and tucked the receiver beneath her chin. It was Tony Costello, an agent from the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office who’d been Victoria’s Georgia coordinator ever since the Gerty Kincaid murder.
“Victoria, hey. Sorry to bug you so late, but I think we got something for you on these tongue murders. Have you been watching the news at all?”
“No, I was just having a nice quiet dinner with a corpse.”
“Huh?”
She shook her head. Chasing serial killers could do strange things to your sense of humor. “Never mind.
What’s up?”
“In a nutshell, there’s some controversy brewing over Posten’s coverage of the murders, and it’s getting some coverage.”
“What kind of controversy?”
“I’m not exactly sure, and that’s not the reason I’m calling. What happened is that a guy in Atlanta—Reggie Holland—was watching the news, and the particular report he saw discussed in some detail the articles Posten has written about the murders, including that one he wrote after the Copeland murder in San Francisco. You know, where he describes how the killer cuts out the tongue—two small incisions on each side of the tongue using a diver’s knife with a serrated edge.”
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James Grippando
“Right. The one I told him he shouldn’t have written.”
“Well, it may be a good thing that he did, because that’s what got Holland’s attention. His wife—Cybil is her name—was attacked in Atlanta on a Monday, the
day
after
they found Gertrude Kincaid in Candler County.”
“We got another victim?” she said apprehensively.
“Well, that’s the issue. See, Mrs. Holland wasn’t murdered and she didn’t have her tongue slashed, but whoever attacked her sliced off her finger to get her engagement ring. They never caught him, and from what I’ve gathered so far, the Atlanta police don’t really know very much, because she was knocked unconscious and hardly remembers anything. But by looking at the wound they’ve been able to figure out that, whoever he is, he used one heck of a big knife with a serrated edge—like a diver’s knife—to cut off her finger.”
“So, Mr. Holland thinks—”
“He thinks what
I
think. The killer struck in Hainesville over the weekend, and by Monday he was trying to disappear into Atlanta, the nearest big city. He got hard up for cash or whatever, and his wife with her diamond ring was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Victoria grabbed the notepad from the files spread across the bedsheet, then jotted down a quick thought.
She suddenly felt like this could be it—the killer had finally slipped. “Have you talked to the wife? Did she get a look at her attacker?”
“She didn’t see a thing. Got blindsided, knocked 177
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down a flight of stairs. Put her in a coma for almost a week.”
“Did they recover the knife?”
“No.”
“Well, then, what
do
we have?”
“The finger,” he said. “They weren’t able to reattach it, so it’s sitting in a container of liquid nitrogen in the Georgia State Crime Lab in Decatur. The police wanted it preserved. Their hope was that if they ever recovered the knife, they could match the blade to the cut marks on the finger.”
“If they don’t have the knife by now, they’re probably never going to find it.”
“True,” he said. “But if you get the right forensic pathologist, I was thinking maybe he could compare the stab wounds on our victim in Hainesville to the cuts on that finger sitting over at the crime lab. It would be nice to know if our killer is the same man who stole a diamond ring in Atlanta. I could have a team of agents scouring every pawnshop in the city, seeing if he hocked it. Maybe one of the shop owners even got a look at him.”
Victoria sat up in her bed, her lips curling with a faint smile of hope. “This is good, Tony. Set up an appointment with the Georgia State Crime Lab for tomorrow morning.
I’ll make
sure
we have the right pathologist.”
178
m
ike collected his thoughts for a moment before dialing the number. He actually called directory assistance first, just to make sure it was Aaron’s home number that had flashed on his pager. It was. Aaron snatched up on the half-ring, as if he were sitting beside the phone waiting for the call.
“What the hell is going on, Mike?”
Mike caught his breath. “I don’t know exactly. I’m just as blindsided by this as you are. But you’re obviously upset—”
“Damn right I’m upset. We’ve got a major crisis here.
The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. And it’s not penny-ante local stuff.
Newsweek, Time
, the network news.
They’re all on top of it now.
Nightline
’s even doing a spot tonight on ethics in journalism—focusing on the alleged payments we’ve made to your confidential source. I have to go on TV tonight to defend my own newspaper. It’s like that big ethics debate back in
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eighty-eight, when everyone from Rivera to Koppel was asking whether those Miami reporters went too far by hiding in the bushes outside Gary Hart’s town house.
Only this is a thousand times worse. Two of my editors threatened to resign if I don’t fire your ass.”
Mike drew a deep breath. “What are we going to do?”
“We knew we’d have to go public with this eventually.
Granted, we all hoped that would come
after
we’d caught ourselves a serial killer. I don’t know who let the press in on our little secret, but it sure wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Charlie.”
“Are you accusing
me
?”
“It had to be you. Maybe not on purpose, but somewhere you slipped. And we made it clear from the very beginning that if you did slip, you were the one who was going down. Not me. Not Charlie. And certainly not the
Tribune.
That was our deal.”
Mike took a deep breath. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that, for the time being, I know only one way to handle this. I’m sorry, but I’m putting you on probation.”
“For
what?
”
“I can’t just ignore the editorial revolt on my own doorstep. I have to take
some
action.”
“This is crap!”
“We’ve got no choice. You can’t just come out and deny you’re paying an informant. That would be a lie.
And we can’t reveal that you’re working with the FBI, or your informant will stop calling, and we’ll have blown everything we’ve tried to accomplish. Or worse, if your informant feels like you’ve double-crossed him, you might be putting your own
life
in
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James Grippando
danger. For better or worse, we’ve got to ride this out to the end.”
“Aaron, this is my reputation we’re talking about.
Doesn’t thirteen years count for anything?”
“Of course it does. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. If anyone but you had come up with this proposal I would have killed it immediately. And if it were anyone but you, I wouldn’t be giving him a chance to redeem himself.”
“
Redeem
myself? I must be missing something.”
“I’m going to allow you to continue your coverage of the serial killings, even though you’re on probation. The only condition is that I handle all inquiries about alleged payments to confidential sources. I’m not asking you to lie—just refer all questions to me.”
“How do I justify that?”
“Tell the truth. It’s an ongoing story, and you’re concerned that any comments could jeopardize your relationship with your informant. The
Tribune
is handling the matter internally for now, and you’re confident that your name will be cleared in the end. Period.”