Buried (Hush collection) Read online

  He explained.

  “Ah, a construction worker just called our tip line. He said that he’d seen someone who looked like Ethan Hawke. You behind that?”

  “I encouraged him.”

  “You going to give me the witness’s name?”

  “No.”

  Fitz braced for a fight.

  “Okay. We’ll find him.” She thanked him and hung up.

  Jail was not, apparently, looming large.

  Once in his office, he spread all his notes out. He began to plan a profile piece. The theme would be a serial killer (well, kidnapper, thus far) whose motive was publicity.

  Odd reason to commit such terrible crimes.

  But then, Fitz thought, what was normal when it came to taking a life?

  He would, as he’d told Peter Tile, find some experts and get their opinions: a criminal-psychology professor, a homicide investigator in the Sheriff’s Department.

  Another idea occurred. He would look over other stories about crimes around the same time and in the same place as the kidnapping; maybe the Gravedigger had made some other attempts to capture the media’s awareness, which might have failed to generate the attention he craved. But he could have been caught on security tape or seen by witnesses.

  He reviewed the coverage in the local Maryland papers around the time of the Shana Evans kidnapping: domestic batteries and one parental abduction; a bystander killed in a gang-shootout cross fire; a food processing plant under investigation in a salmonella outbreak; your typical robberies; a hate crime or two; a serial killer preying on prostitutes (his MO was very different from the Gravedigger’s); a brutal assault at a rally outside the national political debates; a West Virginia businesswoman killed in a mugging outside a restaurant not far from her motel.

  As for the kidnapping of Jasper Coyle, Fitz had only to skim recent or planned Examiner stories: the governor’s interview; the coal-company executive’s death, thanks to the timid guardrails on Route 29; the downtown renovation project; the meth and opioid crisis; a domestic murder; and another parental kidnapping in a custody dispute. Some minor police blotter pieces like DUIs, vandalism and low-level drug busts.

  He snagged a piece of 8 ½ by 11-inch paper from the printer and charted these stories. Visual aids helped him focus.

  Fitz gazed at it for a while. But none of the pieces had the Gravedigger’s signature. Either they involved no crime at all, or known or local perps were the ones involved.

  Dead end. Still, though, his reporter’s instinct told him there was more to the kidnapper than what appeared; he couldn’t dismiss the idea of publicity as a motive.

  He’d have to think about it.

  And think he would.

  But not quite yet.

  The police scanner crackled, made him jump. “Be advised, all units, we have probable location of Jasper Coyle. Proceed to corner of Thirteenth Street and Arthur Road.”

  12

  The backhoes and jackhammers sat idle.

  Worried the machinery might entomb Jasper Coyle with brick and stone, the authorities had the rescue workers dig by hand.

  Fitz jockeyed for position among the other journalists, print and broadcast, behind the yellow tape barricading off the construction site where an old building was being demolished.

  This was an old portion of town, filled with redbrick and limestone buildings dating back at least one hundred years. A grassy park was across the street, with an ancient cannon pointing westward, a direction from which no enemy had ever approached the town of Garner.

  City Hall and other administrative offices were nearby, as was police headquarters. A full complement of law enforcers too—city, county, state and fed, all under the calm direction of Special Agent Sandra Trask.

  A supervisor called to one enthusiastic pick-axer, “Careful. If he’s down there, we don’t want to knock something down on him.”

  The worker shot back, “If he’s down there, he needs fucking air.”

  Fitz approached a broadcast reporter he knew, a veteran ABC and NBC reporter now with National Public Radio. Fitz had little use for TV journalism, now that Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were gone, but he respected NPR for the depth it brought to stories. He asked the man how they’d found Coyle.

  “Well, that’s a story and a half,” the man said, laughing. He explained:

  Agent Trask had given a statement about cracking the code. A woman in the Shetland Islands, the United Kingdom, who was “rather addicted to crosswords,” had figured out the limerick.

  There once was a man with a car.

  Whose trip didn’t get very far.

  Not one single mile,

  Oh, my what a trial!

  He’s trapped somewhere under the bar.

  Mrs. Sophie McMillan, eighty-seven, was quoted as saying: “I noticed he said the bar, not a bar. A bar would be like a bar where people drink or a bar like a girder for building. But I thought the bar meant the law. Barristers and solicitors, as we say over here. And then there was the word ‘trial.’ So I decided that that poor bloke was buried under a lawyer’s office or courthouse.”

  Investigators had located a courthouse from the early twentieth century, presently being torn down. Nearby a team found footprints that matched those of the Gravedigger and a hose disappearing underground. Rescue excavation began immediately.

  Mrs. McMillan had heard about the puzzle on an Australian website devoted to games and puzzles. Fitz supposed that the only way she’d have seen it was because of Dottie Wyandotte.

  Potentially, forty, fifty million . . .

  Dust from digging wafted his way. Coughing, lozenge. Coughing, lozenge.

  Then, heads turning to the site, the collective sound of human voices rose. No discernible spoken words, just a murmur of an emotional reaction at the discovery of a missing human being. Or a corpse.

  Medics ran forward, carrying a stretcher.

  A moment later they surfaced, bearing a pale and bloody but very much alive Jasper Coyle.

  13

  Fitz wrote and filed the piece about the rescue.

  He’d managed to get a short one-on-one with Special Agent Trask and, in a scoop, had also interviewed the limerick solver.

  “The trick is to keep an open mind,” the elderly woman had said in her melodious accent. “Don’t start solving the puzzle right away. Let it sit. Sometimes your first impression locks your mind; you can’t get past it.”

  Not a bad rule for life, Fitz reflected.

  He dug through the drawer and withdrew his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He found a chipped ceramic mug. On the bottom was dried coffee crust. The restroom and watercooler were inconveniently three minutes away. He poured a slug of the honey-colored liquor in. He sipped.

  No harm to the flavor.

  The Gravedigger story was by no means finished and he had the motive angle to explore. Not knowing this continued to bug him. Why was the last of the five Ws—the questions that every piece of hard news was supposed to answer: who, what, when, where . . . and why.

  But the hour was late; he was tired. He’d continue working from home. He stuffed all the notes and printouts of the Gravedigger case into his leather bag, a gift from Jen forty-three years ago. His birthday. A group of friends and family over. She’d made Guinness beef stew and soda bread, his favorites. They had sung songs until all hours, a challenge because the piano’s middle C and the nearby F were not working. Also, a G in the upper atmosphere made an unearthly sound.

  A good night.

  A happy night.

  Taking another hit of whiskey, he noted a light across the newsroom. It came from a cubicle, occupied, he could tell, because of the moving shadows. Picking up the bottle and mug, he walked across the newsroom and through the glass doors of the ExaminerOnline.

  Dottie Wyandotte was leaning forward toward her massive monitor. Why didn’t staring at the busy surface all day make her dizzy? Maybe it did.

  Every so often her fingers, with their black-tipped na
ils, would move in a frenzy on the keyboard.

  “What’s one of the most common punctuation mistakes?” he asked.

  Her head rose fast, surprised someone was present. She looked up at Fitz. Her face was unsmiling, her expression neutral. She was still angry.

  The only thing I don’t need is your condescension . . .

  “Come on,” he rasped. “Give it a shot.” Coughed for several seconds.

  She looked at the screen, tapped return and sent something somewhere. “My sister’s five years younger. I don’t think she’s ever apologized in her life, not to me. And she’s got a long list of things to apologize for. What she does is she ignores me for a day or two or three and then calls and says something out of the blue. Completely irrelevant. ‘You hear about the new farmers’ market?’ ‘Jim and I are going to see Hamilton!’ That’s what passes for an apology to her.”

  “I’m sorry. Not about your sister. About what I said.”

  Now, looking his way. Her eyes still weren’t smiling, but the edge had softened. And quite the edge it had been. Impressive. Like his, when he was confronting a corrupt politician or philandering CEO.

  He asked, “You drink whiskey?”

  She said nothing for a moment. Then, glancing at the bottle: “Does it have wheat in it?”

  “Does it have . . . what?”

  “Wheat. I’m gluten intolerant.”

  “Whiskey’s made out of corn.”

  “Corn’s okay,” Dottie said. “Is it all corn?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe rye.”

  “Can’t do rye. Mostly I drink cosmos. Gluten-free vodka.”

  “That’s a liquor? That they make?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, whiskey is all I have.”

  “I’ll stick with this.” Lifting a Starbucks cup. “Nothing wrong with chamomile and whiskey.”

  “Just not together.”

  They tipped mug and cup toward each other, then sipped.

  “You might’ve been the one who saved him,” Fitz told her.

  “How’s that?”

  “The woman who solved the riddle? She was overseas. Maybe one of your forty to fifty million.”

  “Really?”

  He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or not. Looking at the four studs in her cheek, he tried again to figure out what constellation they might represent. Came up with nothing. He’d never done science writing.

  “You wrote that story fast,” she said.

  “Had to make the deadline. Seven p.m.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The print edition, the Examiner? Always been the rule. The copyeditor needs the copy by seven p.m. You get it one minute late and it’s bumped to day after tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s the rule. Nobody’s ever missed it.”

  She seemed perplexed; with online publication, of course, you didn’t have to worry about typesetting and printing and getting the papers to the trucks and to newsstands and doorsteps. You hit the return key and, poof, there it was, for the world to read.

  “Coyle’s okay?” she asked.

  “Okay-ish.”

  “Not a word that you’d use in a story.”

  “Only in a direct quotation.”

  Dottie gave a smile. “‘Quotation.’ A noun referring to a direct statement attributed to a speaker. The word ‘quote’ is a verb.”

  He nodded, acknowledging she was correct. He poured another whiskey and downed it.

  She was sipping her tea. “I knew who you were before I joined National Media.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “A professor at Northwestern? She mentioned you. She told us to read some of your pieces.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I didn’t look up baby goats in pajamas.”

  “You should. They’re really cute. Why do you hate us?”

  “Us?”

  “Online, new media?”

  Fitz set down his drink and popped a lozenge. “Because it doesn’t play by the rules. Real journalists dig, they background, they research. They’re fucking pains in the ass, hounding subjects for statements. They get double attribution—at the minimum—talk to multiple sources . . . They report facts. Not alternative facts, not sort-of, kind-of facts.”

  He was riled up. But no stopping now.

  “The social media mafia? No time for mining. They pass off rumors and opinions as news. Half the time they just plain make shit up. And people believe it because it’s in their feed. I read it, so it has to be true.” He lifted the mug and he drank. “Fake news used to be an oxymoron. If it was reported, it couldn’t be fake.”

  “Oh, excuse me, Fitz.” Dottie was laughing. “You think this is new? What about yellow journalism? The 1890s, William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer competing for newspaper circulation in New York? Look at the lies they published.”

  She had him there. The two publishers lowered their papers’ prices to a penny, to reach as many people as possible, and then slapped outlandish—and completely false—stories on yellow newsprint to draw attention. Historians still believed that phony dispatches from Hearst’s journalists in Cuba started the Spanish-American War.

  Fitz parried: “It’s just so much easier to spread lies when you can reach, well, forty or fifty million people by pushing a button.”

  She said, “It’s not the medium. Men still shave but they don’t use straight razors. We still listen to music but not on eight-track tapes.”

  “How do you know about eight-tracks?”

  “I walked down to the public library and looked it up in the Encyclopædia Britannica.”

  He snorted a laugh, coughed a bit.

  “You okay?”

  “Pollen.” Another sip of whiskey got downed. After a moment he said, “I miss the . . . relationship.”

  “Relationship?”

  “A newspaper—a paper newspaper—is like a friend knocking on your door and sitting down with you at the breakfast table or desk. It’s a traveling companion when you’re on the train or plane. It’s a thing you can touch, you can hold, you can smell. It’s big, it’s real. That’s what I miss. Okay, enough crap. ’Night.”

  He started back to his office.

  “Wait.”

  Fitz turned.

  “What’s the mistake?” Dottie said. “The punctuation?”

  “Oh. Using an apostrophe s for the plural; it’s always for the possessive. Never for plural. Irks me to see sentences like ‘There were three Frank’s at the party,’ Frank apostrophe s.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He cocked his head. “What?”

  “You can use apostrophe s for the plural.”

  “No, you can’t,” he grumbled. Now that the apology was a matter of record, he could be curmudgeonly.

  She said, “Dot the i’s. Without the apostrophe the word becomes is and the reader’s confused. Do’s, the same thing. Do’s and Don’ts.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “This make me a young whippersnapper?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “Fitz, you can’t drive,” Dottie said. “I’ll get you an Uber.”

  “The hell’s an Uber?”

  He tried, but he just couldn’t keep a straight face.

  14

  Once home, Fitz walked into his den, which he’d turned into an office. The ten-by-ten-square-foot room was more congested than his space at the Examiner.

  He cleared the top of his desk—no easy task—then dropped into the creaky chair and happened to glance up at his wall, covered with clippings of articles he’d written over the years, encased in cheap plastic frames.

  City Councilman Indicted in Money Laundering Scheme

  Organized Crime Figure Linked to High-Tech Entrepreneur

  Sex Trafficking Ring Brought Down

  There were many more. He’d been an investigative journalist for more than forty years.

  He smiled to himself at
that thought: his journalism professor—the J-School at University of Missouri—had given him a failing mark for writing, “He had been a professor for over ten years.”

  “Mr. Fitzhugh. It should be ‘more than.’ When you have individual items, the adverbial phrase is ‘more than’; when you have a single quantity, ‘over’ is proper. ‘He did well over the course of his tenure as professor.’ Though I would recast the sentence to say, ‘During his tenure as professor, he did well.’”

  Ah, the battles we writers fight . . . All in the name of helping our readers best understand what we’re saying to them.

  Now, let’s look at what makes you tick, Mr. Gravedigger. What is your why?

  He opened Jen’s bag and extracted his notes, spread them out on the desk before him. To a bulletin board next to his desk he pinned the chart he’d created earlier, when he was exploring his publicity theory.

  Stories around the Time and Place of the Gravedigger’s Kidnappings

  Kidnapping One—Shana Evans

  ● Domestic batteries and one parental domestic abduction.

  ● Gang shootout, bystander killed in cross fire.

  ● Food processing plant investigation—salmonella outbreak.

  ● Four robberies, all drug related.

  ● Graffiti on synagogue; LGBTQ activist assaulted; hate crimes.

  ● Serial killer preying on prostitutes (MO was different from the Gravedigger’s).

  ● Assault and battery at rally outside the national political debates.

  ● West Virginia businesswoman killed in a mugging outside restaurant.

  Kidnapping Two—Jasper Coyle

  ● Interview with governor.

  ● Coal-company manager’s death—defective guardrails on Route 29.

  ● Downtown renovation project.

  ● Local meth cooker rivalry.

  ● Domestic homicide.

  ● Miscellaneous minor police blotter stories.

  ● Parental kidnapping in a custody battle.

  Fitz glanced at the whiskey bottle sitting on a table nearby, beside a relatively clean glass. But he wanted no more. He needed to think straight and there was still much research to be done.