Vengeance Road (2 page)

W
hat was that?

The next morning, Jack Gannon, a reporter at the
Buffalo Sentinel,
picked up a trace of tension on the paper's emergency scanners.

An array of them chattered at the police desk across the newsroom from where he sat.

Sounds like something's going on in a park
, he thought as a burst of coded dispatches echoed in the quiet of the empty metro section.

Not many reporters were in yet.

Gannon was not on cop-desk duty today, but he'd cut his teeth there years ago, chasing fires, murders and everyday tragedies. It left him with the skill to pluck a key piece of data from the chaotic cross talk squawking from metro Buffalo's police, fire and paramedic agencies.

Like a hint of stress in a dispatcher's voice, he thought as he picked out another partial transmission.

Somebody had just called for the medical examiner
.

The reporter on scanner duty better know about this.

For the last two weeks the assignment desk had promised to keep Gannon free to chase a tip he'd had on a possible Buffalo link to a woman missing from New England.

He needed a good story.

But this business with the police radios troubled him.

Scanners were the lifeblood of a newspaper. And no reporter worth a damn risked missing something that a competitor might catch, especially in these days of melting advertising and shrinking circulation.

Did anyone know about this call for the medical examiner?

He glanced over his computer monitor toward the police desk at the far side of the newsroom, unable to tell who, if anyone, was listening.

“Jeff!” He called to the news assistant but got no response.

Gannon walked across the newsroom, which took up the north side of the fourteenth floor and looked out to Lake Erie.

The place was empty, a portrait of a dying industry, he thought.

A couple of bored Web-edition editors worked at desks cluttered with notebooks, coffee cups and assorted crap. A bank of flat-screen TV monitors tilted down from the ceiling. The sets were tuned to news channels with the volume turned low.

Gannon saw nothing on any police activity anywhere.

He stopped cold at the cop desk.

“What the hell's this?”

No one was there listening to the radios.

Doesn't anyone give a damn about news anymore? This is how we get beat on stories.

He did duty here last week. This week it was someone else's job.

“Jeff!” he shouted to the news assistant who was proofreading something on his monitor. “Who's on the scanners this morning?”

“Carson. He's up at the Falls. Thought a kid had gone over but turns out he dropped his jacket in the river. Carson blew a tire on his way back here.”

“Who's backing him up?” Gannon asked.

“Sharon Langford. I think she went to have coffee with a source.”

“Langford? She hates cop stories.”

Just then one of the radios carried a transmission from the same dispatcher who'd concerned Gannon.

“…copy…they're rolling to Ellicott and the park now…ten-four.”

Calling in the M.E. means you have a death. It could be natural, a jogger suffering a heart attack. It could be accidental, like a drowning.

Or it could be a homicide.

Gannon reached down, tried to lock on the frequency but was too late. He cursed, returned to his desk, kicked into his old crime-reporter mode, called Buffalo PD and pressed for information on Ellicott.

“I got nothing for you,” the officer said.

All right. Let's try Cheektowaga.

“We got people there but it's not our lead.” The officer refused to elaborate.

How about Amherst PD?

“We've got nothing. Zip.”

This thing must have fallen into a jurisdictional gray zone, he thought as he called Ascension Park PD.

“We're supporting out there.”

Supporting? He had something.

“What's going on?”

“That's all I know. Did you try ECSO?” said the woman who answered for Ascension Park.

A deputy with the Erie County Sheriff's Office said, “Yeah, we've got people there, but the SP is your best bet.”

He called the New York State Police at Clarence Barracks. Trooper Felton answered but put him on hold, thrusting Gannon into Bruce Springsteen's “The River.”

Listening to the song, Gannon considered the faded news clippings pinned to low walls around his desk, his best stories, and the dream he'd pretty much buried.

He never made it to New York City.

Here he was, still working in Buffalo.

The line clicked, cutting Springsteen off.

“Sorry,” Felton said, “you're calling from the
Sentinel
about Ellicott Creek?”

“Yes. What do you have going on out there?”

“We're investigating the discovery of a body.”

“Do you have a homicide?”

“Too soon to say.”

“Is it a male or female? Do you have an ID, or an age?”

“Cool your jets there. You're the first to call. Our homicide guys are there, but that's routine. I got nothing more to release yet.”

“Who made the find?”

“Buddy, I've got to go.”

A body in Ellicott. That was a nice area
.

He had to check it out.

He tucked his notebook into the rear pocket of his jeans and grabbed his jacket, glancing at the senior editors in the morning story meeting in the glass-walled room at the far west side.

Likely discussing pensions, rather than stories.

“Jeff, tell the desk I'm heading to Ellicott Creek.” He tore a page from his notebook with the location mapped out. “Get a shooter rolling to this spot. We may have a homicide.”

And I may have a story.

G
annon hurried to the
Sentinel
's parking lot and his car, a used Pontiac Vibe, with a chipped windshield and a dented rear fender.

The paper was downtown near Scott and Washington, not far from the arena where the Sabres played. The fastest way to the scene was the Niagara leg of the New York State Thruway to 90 north.

Wheeling out, with Springsteen in his head, Gannon questioned where he was going with his life. He was thirty-four, single and had spent the last ten years at the
Buffalo Sentinel
.

He looked out at the city, his city.

And there was no escaping it.

Ever since he was a kid, all he wanted to be was a reporter, a reporter in New York City. And it almost happened a while back after he broke a huge story behind a jetliner's crash into Lake Erie.

It earned him a Pulitzer nomination and job offers in Manhattan.

But he didn't win the prize and the offers evaporated.

Now it looked like he'd never get to New York. Maybe this reporter thing wasn't meant to be? Maybe he should do something else?

No way.

Being a reporter was written in his DNA.

One more year.

He remembered the ultimatum he'd given himself at the funeral.

One more year to land a reporting job in New York City.

Or what?

He didn't know, because this stupid dream was all he had. His mother was dead. His father was dead. His sister was—well, she was gone. His ultimatum kept him going. The ultimatum he'd given himself after they'd lowered his parents' caskets into the ground eleven months ago.

Time was running out.

Who knows? Maybe the story he needed was right here, he told himself while navigating his way closer to the scene, near Ellicott Creek.

It was on the fringes of a lush park.

Flashing emergency lights splashed the trees in blood red as he pulled up to a knot of police vehicles.

Uniformed officers were clustered at the tape. Gannon saw nothing beyond them but dense forest, as a stone-faced officer eyed his ID tag then assessed him.

“It's way in there. There's no chance you media maggots are getting any pictures of anything today.”

The others snickered.

Gannon shrugged it off. He'd been to more homicides than this asshole. Besides, guys like that never deterred him. If anything, he thought, tapping his notebook to his thigh, they made him better.

All right, pal, if there's a story here, I'm going to find it
.

After some thirty minutes of watching detectives in suits, and forensics people in overalls, walk in and out of the forest, Gannon was able to buttonhole a state police investigator with a clipboard heading to his unmarked sedan.

“Hey, Jack Gannon from the
Buffalo Sentinel
. Are you the lead?”

“No, just helping out.”

“What do you have?”

Gannon stole a glimpse of the data on his clipboard. Looked like statements.

“We're going to put out a release later,” the investigator said.

“Can you give me a little information now?”

“We don't have much, just basics.”

“I'll take anything.”

“A couple of walkers discovered a female body this morning.”

“Is it a homicide?”

“Looks that way.”

“What age and race is the victim?” Gannon asked.

“I'd put her in her twenties. White or Native American. Not sure.”

“Got an ID?”

“Not confirmed. We need an autopsy for that.”

“Can I talk to the walkers?”

“No, they went home. It was a disturbing scene.”

“Disturbing? How?”

“I can't say any more. Look, I'm not the lead.”

“Can I get your name, or card?”

“No, no, I don't want to be quoted.”

That was all Gannon could get and he phoned it in for the Web edition, putting “disturbing scene” in his lead. In the time that followed, more news teams arrived and Lee Watson, a
Sentinel
news photographer, called Gannon's cell phone sounding distant against a drone.

“What's up, are you in a blender, Lee?” Gannon asked.

“I'm in a rented Cessna. The paper wants an aerial shot of the scene.”

Gannon looked up at the small plane.

“Watch for Brandy Somebody looking for you,” Watson
said. “She's the freelancer they're sending to shoot the ground. Point out anything for her.”

When Brandy McCoy, a gum-snapping freelancer, arrived, the first thing Gannon did was lead her from the press pack and cops at the tape to the unmarked car belonging to the investigator he'd talked to earlier.

The detective had gone back into the woods. His car was empty, except for his clipboard on the passenger seat. Gannon checked to ensure no one could see what he and the photographer were doing.

“Zoom in and shoot the pages on the clipboard. I need the information.”

“Sure.”

Brandy's jaw worked hard on bubble gum as she shot a few frames then showed Gannon.

“Good,” he said, jotting information down and leaving. “My car's over here, come on.”

 

Twenty minutes later, Gannon and Brandy were walking to the front door of the upscale colonial house of Helen Dodd. She was a real estate broker, and her friend, Kim Landon, owned an art gallery in Williamsville, according to the information Gannon had gleaned from the police statements.

Gannon thought having Brandy accompany him would help. Barely out of her teens, she was nonthreatening, especially with that sunny gum-chewing smile.

As they reached the door, it opened to two women hugging goodbye.

“Excuse us,” he said. “I'm Jack Gannon, and this is Brandy McCoy. We're with the
Buffalo Sentinel.
We're looking for Helen Dodd and Kim Landon?”

Surprised, the two women looked at each other.

“Would that be you?”

Kim nodded. Helen was uneasy. Both women looked as though they had been crying. Gannon didn't want to lose them.

“Can we talk to you a bit about this morning?” he asked.

“How did you get this address?” Helen Dodd wanted to know.

Gannon said, “Well, we just came from the park, talked to police sources and stuff. We understand you found the woman.”

Awkward silence followed until Brandy punctuated it with a prompt.

“It must've been terrible.”

Kim resumed nodding.

“It was horrible,” Kim said.

“May I take notes?” Gannon asked.

“I don't know.” Helen eyed their press tags. “You're going to put this in the
Sentinel?
”

“Yes, for the story we're doing,” Gannon said.

“For as long as I live, I'll never forget it,” Kim started. “At first we thought it was a joke. When you see something like this, it makes you appreciate what's important. It was just so horrible. I mean, neighbourhood kids play in that park.”

“I hope they catch the monster who did it,” Helen said. “I'm calling my home-security company to make sure they keep an eye on my house.”

“Can you walk us through how you found her?” Gannon asked.

“We take a regular morning walk in that area and spotted it. Her,” Kim said. “At first she looked like a mannequin, entangled in shrubs and small trees. We didn't get too close once we realized what it was.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you saw?” Gannon asked.

“We'd heard stories about what happens in there at night, which I never believed until now. We saw condoms and hypodermic needles,” Kim said.

“She was in a shallow grave,” Helen said. “We saw dark hair, an arm bent over a head in a swimmer's posture, like she was breaking the surface of the earth.”

After they finished, Gannon dropped Brandy off at the scene to keep vigil until they removed the body.

He had to get back to the newsroom.

This was shaping up to be a grisly homicide, he thought, settling in at his desk. While eating a club sandwich from the cafeteria, he checked regional and state missing-person cases posted online, using the detective's description of a white or Native American woman in her twenties as his guide.

So many of them fit the general description, he thought, wondering if there was any chance this was linked to that tip he wanted to chase about a missing woman from Vermont or Connecticut. He stared into their faces, reading their information.

Was he staring at the unidentified victim near Ellicott Creek? Who was she? And how did her life come to an end there? She was someone's daughter, maybe someone's wife or sister?

He was pierced by a memory of his sister, Cora.

And what became of her life?

He couldn't dwell on that now and forced himself back to his story.

“Do we have any idea who she is?” Tim Derrick, the assignment editor, had a habit of sneaking up behind reporters and reading over their shoulders.

“Not yet.”

Gannon clicked onto the latest news release from the investigators. He touched his pen to the words “unidentified female, in her twenties.”

“She was sort of half buried in a shallow grave,” Gannon said.

“Cripes,” Derrick said. “Well, we've got strong art from the air and the walkers. Front will take your story. Give us about twenty-five inches or so. Make sure the Web people get it.”

“Sure.”

Derrick patted Gannon's shoulder.

“And nice work.”

“Hey, Tim. Anything more to the rumors going around about more cuts?”

Derrick stuck out his bottom lip, shook his head.

“The way things are in this business, those rumors never go away.”

A few hours later, as Gannon was giving his story a final read through, polishing here and there, his line rang.

“Hi, Jack, it's Brandy.”

“How you doing there?”

“The medical examiner just moved the body. I got some good shots and sent them in to the photo desk.”

“Thanks, I'll have a look.”

After he'd finished his story Gannon joined the night editor at the photo desk where he was reviewing the news pictures with Paul Benning, the night photo editor.

“It's all strong.” Benning clicked through the best frames as he worked on finishing a milk shake.

Here was the sharp overview showing a brilliant yellow tarp isolated like a flag of alarm amid an all-consuming forest, Gannon thought.

Here was the medical examiner's team, grim-faced with a black body bag strapped to a stretcher, loading it into a van.

Here were Helen Dodd and Kim Landon, tight head shots, shock etched in their faces. Here was Kim, looking off, eyes filled with worry.

“Go back to the aerial,” Gannon said.

Benning sucked the remnants of his shake through a plastic straw.

“You see something?

“Maybe. Can you blow it up?”

Benning enlarged it.

Click after click drew them closer to the tarp and a fleck of white near the left edge. Click after click and the fleck grew, coming into focus as a hand.

The woman's hand, reaching from the tarp.

Reaching from her grave, as if seizing him in a death plea to tell the world who did this.

Before they did it again.