This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2020 by Gunner Publications, LLC

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542021234

Cover design by Shasti O'Leary Soudant

I

JULY 13

1

The ancient Radio Shack police scanner uttered its shattering-glass static, then the woman’s voice reported, “Be advised, all units. Report of a possible one-three-four. Hawthorne Road, Seventeenth block.”

The bulky, wrinkled man in a bulky, wrinkled beige sports coat and brown slacks, also creased, stopped keyboarding. He’d learned the police codes years ago. A 134 was a kidnapping. He now leaned forward over his desk at the Fairview Daily Examiner as if to better hear the transmission. The backs of his fingers brushed a stubbly white goatee, thicker by far than his black-and-gray head hair.

He hadn’t heard a 134 call in Fairview County for ten years and that had been a false alarm.

“Central, four-one-two responding.” A male, matter-of-fact voice. These communiqués were among deputies in the County Sheriff’s Office, the biggest law enforcement operation in Fairview County and the one he monitored most frequently.

“Copy, four-one-two.”

“Suspect on scene?”

“Nothing further, four-one-two.”

“Roger.”

A woman’s voice, a different one: “Central, four-three-eight responding. Domestic?”

The majority of kidnappings were one parent snatching a child from the other. So sad, so common.

A pause.

“Central, do you copy? Domestic?”

“Don’t know at this time, four-three-eight.”

“Roger.”

Edward Fitzhugh pulled from his pocket a four-by-five spiral-bound notebook, swollen from ink and age. He flipped it open, saw that most of the pages were filled and exchanged it for a new one. He gripped a pen.

Come on, more details . . . I want details.

“Central, four-one-two on scene. No sign of suspect. No reporting witness. But we have . . . There’s a car with the door open. There’s a . . .” A long pause. “On the windshield there’s a note.”

“You said ‘note,’ four-one-two?”

“Affirmative. It’s got some writing and it’s signed the ‘Gravedigger.’”

“Holy crap,” one deputy muttered.

Four-three-eight, the woman, said, “Gravedigger? What’s that mean?”

After a few moments, Dispatch said, “All units, be advised, supervisor en route. FBI too. Secure the scene.”

“Roger, Central,” came 412’s uncertain voice.

Well, interesting, Fitz thought.

What’s that mean?

Well, for one thing: that there’s a serial killer in town.

2

Cold, completely dark.

Cold.

The smell of mold and wet stone.

Cold.

The middle of summer in hot, humid New York State, yet he was freezing.

Lying on the concrete floor, Jasper Coyle remembered walking back to his car, then the stunning blow to the head from behind. Then pressure on his neck, an injection. Jesus, me? Really? Why?

Blackness, as the drugs stole consciousness.

Now swimming to a kind of waking state, Coyle stood. He sagged to his knees. Controlled the nausea. Don’t puke. He didn’t.

Then to his feet once again and inching forward through the dark, shuffling so he didn’t trip, his arms before him so he didn’t gig himself in the eye with a piece of wood or metal jutting from the walls.

He made a circuit, twice. A square room, about twenty by twenty, brick walls. He smelled fuel oil, so it might at one time have held a tank, or possibly the furnace itself. He located a thick wooden door. It was sealed fast and the knob was missing. Pounding did nothing but hurt both hands.

Save the bones, he thought. He moved on.

Coyle was light-headed. The air was thin and getting thinner with every breath.

Another trip around the chamber, hands higher on the walls, probing. He found a garden hose dangling from the ceiling. He snagged it, sniffed. Air. Glorious air. He put his lips on the end and inhaled, his lungs screaming at the effort.

The reward was a series of staccato, tiny breaths, tasting of rubber.

The air was something. But it wouldn’t keep him alive. He needed more.

Then he sensed, more than saw, a slight lightening of the dark at the far end of the room. He made his way to it and ran his palms over the brick. Yes, some faint illumination was trickling through tiny cracks in the mortar.

On his hands and knees, he searched for something that might make a tool. He found fragments of brick. Okay. That might work. He then shuffled blindly to where he thought the hose was—it took him five frustrating minutes to find it. Another painful suck of air. He returned to the dim glow of illumination and began to dig away at the grout. A chip flew off. Another.

Could he break through?

And even if he did, was there a way to escape on the other side?

Coyle had other questions. But the obvious ones—what had happened to him and who was behind it—he didn’t bother to ask.

The blow to the head, the drugs, being trapped underground?

Jasper Coyle knew exactly what was happening to him. He read the papers, he watched the news.

3

The scanner transmissions about the Gravedigger had petered out.

The deputies would be on the scene, where, if they used radios, it was on a walkie-talkie frequency; scanners didn’t pick them up. This always irritated Fitz, who like all good journalists was a voyeur at heart and lived to eavesdrop. As for the feds, they seemed to converse via exotic megahertz inaccessible to the common man and woman.

He turned the volume down and sat back in the creaky chair, coughed for a moment and dabbed his mouth.

Fitz’s office was probably a fire hazard. It certainly would have been if he’d been allowed to smoke—a habit he’d given up eight months and four days ago. Paper was everywhere: copies of the Examiner, of other newspapers, a lot of “Times”—New York, LA, the -Picayune, the Financial—also the Journal and the WaPo. Local and regionals too. Other countries were heard from, as well. The Guardian, the Standard, the London Times, Le Monde, though he did not read French. El Pais. His Spanish was passable. Garner had a large Latino community and it was one of his beats.

These stacks showed an interesting trend. The newspapers from past years were much thicker than those that had hit the stands recently. This was true around the world.

His credenza was filled with awards from journalist societies, and a real, honest-to-God Pulitzer, shared with several others, for uncovering a massive kickback scheme whose tentacles extended from Massachusetts through northern Virginia. Also on display: pictures of his son and the young man’s wife and their teenage boy. Pictures of Jen too, of course, from their early married days until a year before the end, when she didn’t want photos.

On a corner table sat a dilapidated Underwood, a decoration only. Fitz was unapologetically old-school but he recognized that journalists needed tools that were up to date, just as surgeons and pilots did. After all, the typewriter was state of the art in its day. He wrote on a laptop and he got some preliminary information for his stories from Google and Wikipedia and other sites before he began the real reporting—calling, and often hounding, sources and unearthing official records.

It was the screen of this Dell that he was now staring at. A decision had to be made. Fitz scrolled through the stories he’d completed and sent to his editor in chief.

—The county board had approved a downtown renewal project for Bronson Hills. The money would, the county supervisors hoped, bring new life to that economically challenged former mill town. Realistically? The cash would probably be gone in a year and the cosmetic changes would have drawn zero new businesses, residents or customers. Fitz interviewed spokespeople from both views. He was a reporter, not an op-ed writer.

—The charismatic and progressive New York governor—and presidential hopeful—was in Garner for fundraising rallies. Fitz would vote for John Heller but he hadn’t softballed the profile, asking about some #MeToo incidents and uncomfortable statements he’d made about women’s right to choose and gay marriage. Still, the boyish man fielded all the questions with grace and patience, downplaying pain from recent dental surgery.

—A coal-company executive died when his car plummeted into Henshaw Falls, an eighty-foot drop. Fitz covered the accident, but expanded the story and interviewed executives at the man’s company: What was he doing in Fairview County? There were some mineral reserves underground, Fitz knew. There’d been mining here in the 1800s. They denied they were thinking of an operation here and Fitz’s research found nothing to suggest that wasn’t true. He did, of course, raise the question of why the inadequate guardrails on Route 29 had yet to be replaced.

Several other pieces were in the works:

—The gift that keeps on giving journalistically: the opioid, fentanyl and meth crisis, particularly acute in the northern part of Fairview County.

—A sampler of domestic crimes, drug busts, DUIs, robberies. All fodder for the police blotter—one of the most popular columns among readers around the world since the newspaper was invented.

These stories were all his. He was virtually the only hard news reporter left on the paper.

Fitz rose stiffly and walked through the newsroom. I’m getting close to waddling, he reflected. But he didn’t straighten his posture or speed up his gait. At some point you just don’t care.

The Fairview Daily Examiner’s editorial offices occupied the second floor of an old building in downtown Garner. The windows overlooked Schoharie Park, a pleasant rectangle of hilly grass and gardens from which, on dark nights, you could see the lights of Albany.

Fitz’s office was in the paper’s original editorial department, all scuffed and musty and filled with dented and scraped oak furniture. If that side of the floor was early twentieth century (one might say nineteenth), the other half was entirely up to date; it was where the sister operation, ExaminerOnline, was produced. Fitz disapproved of making two words into one when there was no earthly reason to do so. This portion of the paper was glitzy, filled with glass and metal and walls with splotchy art in pink and red and purple. The online staff was small and its monitors were big.

Fitz walked into the EIC’s office, which was, tellingly, smack in the center of the newer—and posher—operation.

Gerry Bradford was not Examiner born and bred, nor suckled by any traditional paper. A year ago, the descendants of the family that had founded the Examiner in 1907 decided finally to get out of the money-losing operation and sold it to a large chain. National Media Group brought in Bradford, after careers in social media and companies that existed mostly for email but that also reported news.

Bradford was a handsome, dynamic fellow, sharp as could be. The tall, lean man, who could be a fashion model for athletic gear, was a decent and balanced administrator, even if he was too easily cowed by those up the corporate food chain. Still, Fitz, who’d never been cowed by anything in his life, cut Bradford some slack, given he’d been transported from Silicon Valley to Garner, a town of thirty-two thousand, where cows grazed within fifteen minutes of downtown and one could choose among competing pancake breakfast fundraisers every Saturday.

Bradford’s office was far less cluttered than Fitz’s. Understandable. He probably had just as many copies of newspapers and magazines, and clippings thereof, but they resided in hard drives the size of small Bibles.

“Fitz. Liked your pieces. The governor’s always newsworthy. And the guardrails? Need to get those fixed. I sent ’em on to Dave, as is.”

Theoretically Bradford had the authority to rewrite Fitz’s every word. He never had. Dave, the managing editor, occasionally did polish Fitz’s prose. He was an old newspaper man, and that had bought him the right to fiddle.

Bradford asked, “What’s up?”

“Got a story. Want to follow it,” Fitz said. His voice was raspy. “Put the drugs and crime pieces on hold.”

Bradford was squeezing a pen, though the only things here he could write on were Post-it notes and someone’s résumé. “What?”

“The Gravedigger. He got somebody here.”

Bradford ran a hand through his dark, trimmed hair. Frowned. “Sounds familiar.”

“That kidnapping outside of Baltimore ’bout three weeks ago.”

“Oh, he left a puzzle for the cops to solve. Jesus. He’s here? Garner?”

“Right.”

“Who’d he kidnap?”

“I don’t know yet. Just happened.” Fitz dropped into an orange vinyl chair across from Bradford. He’d once written a piece about a fast-food restaurant in a mixed-race neighborhood, a town nearby; all the furniture and walls were bright orange. That color, it turned out, tended to irritate people and, in a dining establishment, that meant they’d be less likely to stay long. Some restaurants did this to improve turnover of customers; this owner was unwisely vocal to an ex about wielding the hue to keep minorities (not the owner’s actual word) from hanging out. Fitz’s exposé earned him a statewide journalism award.

“And you want to cover it.”

Of course “I want to cover it.” He coughed once, then again. “Hate this pollen.”

“It’s bad this year. This is the third victim?”

Fitz said, “The second. Wasn’t a serial kidnapper until today. If it’s the same guy. There’re lots of copycat crimes.”

Bradford looked at his computer, typed. “Already on CNN, MSNBC, Fox.” He squinted. “Nobody’s saying what clue he left this time. You have any idea?”

Fitz shrugged. “There was a note at the scene. Don’t know the details.”

The pen got mauled a bit more. “That meth piece . . . It’s an important one.”

“The drugs aren’t going anywhere. It can wait.” Fitz sounded impatient because he was. The broadcasters were already on top of the Gravedigger story. Their antenna trucks would have landed on the beaches of the crime scene. Fitz wanted to get the hell there himself.

“Hm. You know, Fitz . . .”

Here it comes.

“They don’t really like independent coverage on stories that’ll run national.” The “they” being the Examiner’s new owners. “We can pick it up from the feeds.”

In Fitz’s day, when newspapers ran stories that somebody else had written they came from the wire.

It had been a cheat then, it was a cheat now.

“The big boys and gals’ll be all over it,” the editor continued.

“There’ll be local angles, Gerry,” Fitz pointed out. “The victim’s local. The turf is local. Witnesses’ll be local.” Fitz stifled a cough and mouthed a lozenge. Cherry. He liked cherry best.

“I don’t know.”

“Gerry, make it my swan song. Who doesn’t love those? What drama, what pathos, hardly a dry eye in the house. My retirement present. Look at the money you’ll save not buying me that gold Rolex.”

The editor tapped his pen on a Post-it. Fitz said nothing. He stared at his boss the way he gazed at reluctant interviewees. Ask a question and look at ’em until they squirm and talk. A technique as old as journalism itself.

Finally: “I can’t pay mileage. And the photographer’s with the governor all day.”

Which, to Fitz, was as good as his saying “Go get the story. I’m behind you a hundred percent.”

4

Swan song . . .

National Media Group had looked at bottom lines, as companies named National Media Group will do, and decided that the print edition of the Examiner had to go—dwindling circulation and ad revenues, high overhead.

The noble newspaper was shutting down in less than a month—this, the paper that had not only reported in depth about local matters and New York State politics, but had had its own reporters covering D-Day, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Nixon’s resignation, the Iranian hostages, the Iraq War, the elections of Obama and of Trump.

Soon to be no more.

And with the paper and ink edition gone, all original hard news reporting would end too. Of the paper’s two full-time reporters, one would be going to online and Fitz would be retiring.

The ExaminerOnline would still run news but—as Bradford had just mentioned—only from the national feeds and in limited amounts. Most of the website’s stories would be what National Media was known for: OOMC, vocalized as “Oomec.” It stood for “Original Online Media Content”: bastard quasi-journalistic/quasi-entertainment web stories and blogs and, for listeners, podcasts and internet radio talk shows (like reality TV, obscenely cheap, wildly popular and extremely profitable).

To Fitz, OOMC articles were mostly time wasters, junk food. Oh, some blogs and podcasts featured solid investigative reporting, but to read or listen to them steadily, you’d think the world was populated with stabbed spouses, missing children and wrongfully convicted felons whom the bloggers were on hell-bent missions to free.

Most OOMC run by ExaminerOnline and its sister outlets was about influencers (whatever they were), TV personalities, actors, famous chefs, stand-up comics, outlandish artists, fashion designers, athletes, musicians, the rich . . . basically any manner of celebrity, provided they were hugely popular or sexy or had either spoken up for a good cause (LGBTQ and animals were winners) or misbehaved in a tasty, but misdemeanorly way.

OOMCs . . . Christ . . .

So, retirement.

Maybe he’d write his memoir. Maybe teach. Maybe fish.

He stared at the scanner again, waiting for any juicy reports from the front.

Nothing. Radio silence.

With some effort, breathing hard, he bent over and dug for his dusty digital camera in his bottom desk drawer—in his more than three decades working for the paper, he’d never had to take his own cuts. He found the small Nikon behind a sloshing Jack Daniel’s bottle. The battery was dead. He plugged in the charger cable.

The scanner spoke. A special agent with the FBI’s VCTF—Violent Crimes Task Force—would soon be setting up a mobile command center near the kidnapping site. After this tease, it fell silent.

He stared at the camera. The battery indicator remained bar-less. His phone’s camera? No, not enough resolution. Should just buy a new camera on the way. But they weren’t cheap . . .

“I asked. We can’t do it.” A woman’s voice startled him.

He glanced at his doorway.

Kelley Wyandotte—she went by the anachronistic “Dottie”—was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, less than half Fitz’s age. She was a staffer with ExaminerOnline. Her business card described her as a “Senior Content Editor,” and her job was to spawn OOMC. If anyone could tell him what an influencer was, it’d be she. He had no desire to ask.

Fitz was concentrating on the camera, willing it to charge. And on the police scanner, willing it to speak. In response to her comment he muttered, “Ridiculous.”

He wanted to say, “Bullshit,” but that would be like dressing down somebody else’s child. Just didn’t feel right. Fitz hardly knew her. Like the editor in chief, Dottie was new to the organization; she’d come from Manhattan.

Her complexion ghostly, Dottie had short spiky brunette hair, wore black tights and, it seemed, three tank tops. Her ears sported a half dozen rings and her tats were quite well done, notably the butterfly on her neck and a scorpion on her forearm. Four studs pierced her left cheek, perhaps in the shape of some constellation. He’d tried to imagine her at a White House press briefing.

One bar on the camera battery. Charge. Please charge.

“You asked?” he queried.

“I just said I did.”

There was asking and then there was asking.

Their dispute: Until the print edition shut down, the ExaminerOnline published the same stories as in the traditional paper. But two of his pieces had been buried in the back of the online site. One was about the county’s new domestic abuse shelter; people needed to see the piece, and the online edition went to many more readers than the print. His stories were also infested with links to sites only tangentially connected to the shelter piece and served no purpose, Fitz could see, except to generate revenue.

Angry, he’d complained to Dottie. She’d explained, astonishingly, that algorithms decided which stories would run and where. “News aggregators do it all the time,” she’d added, as if perplexed he didn’t know that. “Look at your inbox for the news feeds you subscribe to. Why do you think you get some stories and not others? Why are some at the top, others at the bottom?”

His feed was called a newspaper, the inbox was his front doorstep and he got every damn word that was fit to print.

She now added, “Placing a story manually would damage the optimal targeted impact model.”

That pushed him over the limit. “Bull . . . shit.”

“Say what you like, you saw Gerry’s memo? Readership is up twenty-seven percent since the merger.”

Lions don’t merge with gazelles.

Fitz was going to argue, or complain, or just be snarky—she’d met his “bullshit” with a steely glare—but by now the camera battery registered two intrepid bars. Good enough. He unplugged the device and pocketed it, along with two notebooks.

Anyway, why bother to battle? In a few weeks, he’d be gone.

Happily retired.

Writing memoirs, teaching, fishing.

Those days couldn’t come fast enough.

5

She was a stocky woman in a navy-blue pantsuit and a white blouse buttoned to the neck. Practical flats, like the shoes that Jen wore every day of her adult life. Dark. Always dark.

Fitz watched the woman through the open side door of the forty-foot mobile command center, FBI and VCTF printed on the white sides in dark-blue ink.

With dry blonde hair, cut shoulder-length and sprayed insistently into place, she was on her feet, bending over a desk in the middle of the MCC. She held two phones. One she was speaking into via hands-free, the other bore a text she was reading. Simultaneously she was studying a map, probably of downtown Garner. Fitz snapped a few pictures.

They were in a strip mall on Hawthorne between Sixteenth and Seventeenth, near the site of the kidnapping. Through trees and abundant shrubs, Fitz could see gowned crime scene officers at work.

Roughly twenty reporters had gathered, Fitz in the front. The on-air men and women were the attractive ones, nightly-news ready. The others were more casual about their dress, and some bellies curled over belts, some hairdos needed coiffing, some shoes could have benefited from polish.

The MCC was like a long and narrow police station, only the furniture was bolted to the floor and the seats featured belts. One wall was filled with the electronic gear that’s absolutely necessary to solve crimes—at least, according to TV shows in which mobile command centers figure.

He snapped away with the low-end camera.

The woman now stepped outside and was joined by the Fairview County sheriff and the Garner police chief, two middle-aged white men so similar in their solid appearance that they could have been related. The trio faced the reporters, squinting. The July sun was fierce.

“Good afternoon. I’m Special Agent Sandra Trask with the joint Violent Crimes Task Force of the Bureau.” She introduced the others, though there was no doubt who was in charge.

Fitz had heard of her. She was based out of the VCTF headquarters in Manhattan, seventy miles south. He noted that she, unlike insecure law enforcers Fitz had known, introduced herself by her first name and not just her last. Cops without confidence wore their titles like the shields around their necks.

Two more pictures, then he grew frustrated and pocketed the camera. He replaced it with a notebook, which felt much more comfortable in his hand, and started to speed-write—his own version of shorthand.

“Between twelve thirty and one thirty this afternoon, a thirty-seven-year-old male, Jasper Coyle, resident of Garner, New York, was abducted at his parked vehicle on Hawthorne Road, near Seventeenth. The perpetrator left behind a note and identified himself as the Gravedigger, the same as a kidnapping near Baltimore in late June of this year. Just like in that incident, the note included a clue as to the victim’s whereabouts. Presumably—given the perpetrator’s name and his MO—it’s underground somewhere.

“There were no witnesses to the first taking, in Maryland, and that victim couldn’t provide a description. But someone saw him here. The witness described him as over six feet, blond, pale complexioned. Wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt, sunglasses. That was all the information he gave us. It was an anonymous call from a pay phone.”

“Copycat?” someone called.

Fitz thought: Of course not. The FBI would know by now that the handwriting matched that from the note in the first kidnapping.

“No, the handwriting matches that from the first abduction.”

“What’s the clue?” another reporter called.

Trask nodded to a young male agent, who began distributing sheets of paper. Then she said, “It’s a limerick.”

6

In the Gravedigger’s Maryland kidnapping, three weeks ago, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Shana Evans was knocked unconscious, drugged and placed in a three-foot-wide drainage tunnel under a highway. The Gravedigger had piled rocks at the entrances. She’d screamed and screamed, she later told the cops, but cars passing overhead were too loud for anyone to hear her. The risk wasn’t that she’d suffocate, but that she’d drown in a storm if the tunnel flooded.

To find her, the police had to decipher a curious sentence:

Recklessness Times 7 Mean Mayhem That We Overcome

Figure it out, save the victim.

XO, the Gravedigger

Finally, a concerned citizen cracked it. The first letters of the phrase spelled out “RT 7, MM Two”: she was at Route 7, mile marker 2.

There they found and saved Evans, largely unharmed, but traumatized by having to fight off several angry, and hungry, rats.

Fitz now looked down at the Coyle abduction clue.

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.

Figure it out, save the victim . . .

XO, the Gravedigger

So, the victim was buried within a mile or so of the point of abduction—a huge area to comb, especially challenging when looking for someone hidden underground. As for the other lines in the clue, Fitz could not decipher them.

The reporters peppered Trask with more questions: about fingerprints (none), about Coyle’s family (he was unmarried), about the anonymous witness (still unidentified), about CCTVs downtown (none—Fitz had a laugh at that one), the number of officers on the case (twenty-five and counting), canvassing for other witnesses (yes, but no luck so far).

Finally Special Agent Trask ended the press conference. “There’ll be an update later. But, for now, I’d like to ask you please to get that limerick out to as many people as possible on your broadcasts and in your newspapers. We’ve sent it to Quantico and are having forensic linguists look it over.” As cameras and microphones hovered, she added, “And I hope you all try your hand too. We’ll have to assume that Mr. Coyle doesn’t have long to live.”

7

Brick against brick was pointless.

Like trying to cut paper with paper. Jasper Coyle, sweating, had made very little headway, other than removing small chips of mortar . . . and breaking the terra cotta ax he’d found earlier.

Brick dust coated his mouth but he didn’t want to spit. Conserving moisture. He was already furiously thirsty. He needed a better tool. He was reluctant to turn away from the brick wall; he found comfort in the slivers of illumination coming through the cracks in the mortar.

On hands and knees once more, patting the ground. Ten feet, twenty . . . He didn’t know.

Finally: ah, yes!

His hand landed on a piece of rock, not brick. Solid and heavy—about five pounds, he estimated, like the dumbbells he held when jogging on the treadmill during his early-morning workouts at Fitness Plus. A good size for pounding and, better yet, the right shape; one end was sharp, like the end of a pickax.

Thank you, God, he said silently to the entity whose existence he’d given up acknowledging years ago.

Maybe that would change.

Coyle made his way back to the wall and once again began chipping away, as splinters and then chunks of mortar loosened and dropped to the floor. The tool was better but it was still a slow process. He had to run one hand over the target, then move the appendage away before the blow. He did this ten or so times, using all his strength. Then he’d pause, suck air from the hose, and return to the digging, a nineteenth-century coal miner. The final brick grew loose, like a seven-year-old’s baby tooth.

Coyle was growing increasingly faint. Slamming rock into mortar used up more air than he was taking in.

Please, just let me last long enough to get a few bricks out. Light meant air. Air meant survival.

Breathe less, breathe less, he told himself.

He did, but this only made him delusional, even giddy. He remembered when he’d met a young woman at Fitness Plus. Side by side on the treadmill, they’d chatted and laughed. Coyle had asked her out afterward. At the restaurant—one of Garner’s nicest, prime rib the specialty—he’d swallowed water wrong and got the hiccups. He’d gone to the restroom and, in a desperate attempt to rid himself of the spasms, held his breath for as long as he could.

And promptly passed out in the stall.

Quite the first date . . .

Coyle found himself laughing out loud at the memory.

He said to himself, Don’t be an idiot. Laughing uses air.

Keep . . . digging.

Was this really that psycho he’d read about in Maryland, the Gravedigger? His name, the crime he’d committed seemed like the stuff of a horror movie or Stephen King novel. Why go to all the trouble to kidnap me and then leave clues? Since this was the second time the man had struck, Coyle knew he’d been selected by coincidence. No better reason than that. Dying for a cause or for a reason like being a witness to a crime, well, tragic as that may be, it was better than dying for no reason.

The headline would read: “Body of Random Victim Found.”

Okay, enough. Get this body out of here!

After ten minutes, refreshed by a hit of the sour oxygen from the garden hose, he swung particularly hard and knocked the brick clean through to the other chamber.

Light filtered in—very dim, but because his eyes were so unaccustomed, he was nearly blinded. Air flowed in too. It stank of mildew and fuel oil but it was a blessed relief.

He rested for a moment, forehead against the brick, mouth open, inhaling deeply. Then, energized by the thought that freedom was within grasp, he began the demolition once more.

8

For an hour or so, Fitz wandered the kidnapping scene and interviewed anyone who would talk to him—mostly deputies he knew from his crime beat in Fairview. They didn’t provide much new information. He did, however, get one federal agent, speaking off the record, to say that the FBI’s behavioral experts had yet to come up with a profile for the Gravedigger. “On these facts, as presented, this individual does not fall into any of the generally recognized categories of serial perpetrators.”

Fitz loved cop-speak.

He then returned to the office to write up the piece. He hunt-and-pecked the twelve-hundred-word story and sent it to Gerry Bradford, who’d forward it to the managing editor. From there the story and the cuts (the photos were not bad) would go to the copyeditor for final edits, layout and writing the heds and cutline under the pictures.

No goddamn algorithms involved.

The copyeditor didn’t need to send Fitz the heds for approval but did this time.

“Gravedigger” Kidnaps Second Victim in Garner

Insurance Manager Abducted on Hawthorne Road

Clue Left at Scene Holds Answer to Victim’s Whereabouts

Fitz scanned the heds. The top line seemed to indicate that the perp had kidnapped two victims in Garner. He made the correction and sent it back:

“Gravedigger” Kidnaps Second Victim, in Garner

The comma meant that he’d taken a second victim, who happened to live in Garner, while the first was kidnapped somewhere else.

How Fitz loved the rules of grammar and punctuation and syntax. They were to him like pets, companions. Fitz thought of the dogs—the cairn terriers that he and Jen had for years. (He’d quietly slipped their collars into her coffin at the funeral home viewing.)

Out of his hands now, the piece made its way to production for printing and to online for posting.

Fitz gave it a few minutes, then turned to his computer and called up the ExaminerOnline. He hit Control-R to refresh the page. He was loaded for bear, to use a cliché he would never allow in his writing. To his surprise, his story appeared right up front. No influencers, no celebs. A few pop-ups but, in truth, he couldn’t complain about that; journalism had always relied on advertising for survival. Reader subscription revenue was never enough.

He was about to log off, but changed his mind. He scrolled through blogs and stories and posts. He reached into his lower desk drawer, found the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, poured himself some and tossed it down. Scanning the stories. Reading, sometimes quickly, sometimes in depth.

OOMC . . .

He stood up and wandered from the old part of the editorial floor to the new. Dottie Wyandotte was at her computer. She worked nearly as many hours as he did. His coughing fit startled her.

“Sorry,” he said.

She lifted a no-worries hand.

“I saw my story. Where it ran in the online. You overrode the algorithm?”

“The software wanted a banner on the front page, linking to page two. I thought the whole article should be above the fold.”

Fitz was surprised she’d used a term from traditional publishing—it meant the top half of the front page, where a story would be seen when the newspaper, folded in half, sat on the newsstand. The most important stories in any newspaper appeared above the fold.

“Thanks.”

“I had to move your other stories down,” she said. “The governor’s profile and the guardrails on Route 29.”

“Not a problem. Serial killers take priority.”

The young woman lifted a palm at this truism. She had a tattoo of Chinese characters on two fingers. Tiny, perfect letters. What did they mean?

Fitz said, “Have a question.”

“Hm?”

“The sidebar?” Fitz had written a short, boxed article to accompany the main one. It included the Gravedigger’s limerick and a request for readers to try to decipher it.

She glanced at the lower part of the screen. “That. Yes.”

“Can you get it to other places?”

“Places?”

“Other, I don’t know . . .” He coughed. Did the lozenge thing. He waved at her computer, irritated that he didn’t know the lingo. “Other sites, feeds, platforms . . . whatever they’re called. I want as many people as possible to see it. Not just us, not just CNN, Fox, the traditional media.”

“National Media’s part of ICON.”

Fitz had no clue, as he was sure his blank expression revealed.

“You know, the Integrated Content Outlet Network.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Think of it as reverse RSS and information aggregation,” Dottie said.

Blank just got blanker.

“How’s this? Imagine a really, really big mailing list to media—all kinds of media: traditional, alternative, blogs, websites, social media feeds, Twitbook, the whole shebang.”

“Okay.”

He watched her pull up his sidebar, copy it and load it onto a website. She hit a button.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“That’s it.”

“You’ve sent it to . . . whatever you’ve said before?”

A nod.

That was easy. “How many people’ll see it?”

She replied. “Impossible to say.” Fitz’s face must have registered disappointment. She added, “But potentially forty, fifty million.”

He blinked. “What?”

She cautioned, “That’s monthly traffic, of course.”

Fitz had hoped for another fifty thousand views.

“Appreciate it.”

He read what was up on her screen, a piece about a rap singer’s “fashion statement.” The man—he believed it was a man—seemed to favor very high heels.

“You said ‘above the fold.’ You go to journalism school?”

“Northwestern.”

It was a good school.

“I read some of your blogs. You know your chops. You can write.”

She shrugged.

“You know the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which.’”

Without an instant’s hesitation: “‘That’ is restrictive and necessary for the sentence to achieve the writer’s meaning. ‘Which’ is nonrestrictive and adds parenthetical information to the sentence.”

“It’s like music, your writing. Your phrasing, your syntax are beautiful.”

Dottie said, “Star Wars Yoda, a butcher of syntax is.” Drawing a rare smile from his bearded face.

He scanned the monitor again. A dozen windows were open. Made him dizzy.

She said, “I heard you’re retiring?”

A tip of his head.

“To do what?”

He thought:

Not writing a damn memoir, which would be like swimming in quicksand.

And not teaching students, because students irritated him.

And definitely not fishing, which was both barbaric and boring.

“Don’t know.”

His eyes were on the screen. “Is this satisfying?”

“What?”

“Writing this stuff.”

“Stuff.”

“Oomec. Or whatever you call it.”

“Me? I call them articles or pieces or stories or blog posts. I’m big enough to step over corporate crap.”

But not too old to kiss the ass of algorithms.

“One of your pieces? It was almost poetic. Really. It was about animal videos on YouTube. Monkeys in costumes. Baby goats in pajamas.” He’d tried to rein in his tone. He guessed he wasn’t successful.

Her eyes were cold. “You ought to check them out. They’re cute. Oh, and that piece had three hundred thousand views.”

He decided not to back down. Fitz noted other ExaminerOnline staffers nearby. The oldest appeared to be twenty-five. He leaned down so no one else would hear. “Don’t you want to do real reporting?” he whispered. “You don’t need this.”

“Oh, don’t know why I would, Fitz. After that YouTube piece ran? I got a gold star pasted on my forehead by my boss and an extra helping of kibble at dinner. The only thing I don’t need is your condescension.” She spun her glitzy chrome chair toward the monitor and began to keyboard at the speed of light.

II

JULY14

9

He awoke, trading pure dark for lesser dark.

Trading peaceful oblivion for despair.

Jasper Coyle recalled where he was.

Shivering, he crawled to the hole he’d pounded in the brick and peered into the other room. All he could see was another brick wall about fifteen feet away. But there would have to be a door or window, because of the light.

Get back to work.

Six bricks were done.

The more bricks Jasper Coyle removed, the more easily the surrounding ones could be pounded out.

He had air but the thirst was growing worse.

Though the chamber was cold, he was sweating from his effort. Dry-mouthed, he found his muscles cramping and he grew disoriented even with the air streaming in from the next room. That had to be the thirst.

What if he found standing water there? Would it be safe to drink? The smell, though. The fumes. Any puddles would be contaminated with oil, or diesel. But they’d rise to the top, wouldn’t they? Maybe he could swipe the surface and suck up a fast sip or two before the toxic scum flowed back.

Or would the water itself be tainted? Would he poison himself and die, screaming in agony?

What the hell’re these crazy thoughts?

Forget water. Dig.

Another brick down, then another.

Almost big enough.

Coyle, slim by nature and slim from exercise, thought: Go for it. Hands and arms first through the hole, then the head. If you could get your shoulders through an opening, he’d heard, you could squeeze your body through too. A little squirming, pushing.

But what if you got stuck?

The worst way to die.

Panic rose.

No . . .

He managed to tamp down his horror.

Concentrate . . . Push, push.

Then finally he tumbled into the next room, and collapsed on the floor, breathing hard. He rolled onto his back and looked toward the light, a horizontal slit high in the brick wall—like a narrow cellar window. Now he just needed to find a door . . .

He rolled to his feet and looked around.

Oh, Jesus Christ! No, no!

Jasper Coyle had just escaped into a fucking jail cell.

The chamber was small, about fifteen by fifteen. Brick on three walls, thick iron bars on the fourth. The window? It measured eighteen inches across and six inches high.

He staggered to the door and found what he knew he would: a rusted lock, frozen tight.

Dropping to his knees, Coyle uttered a low howl.

He rose and stumbled back to the wall he’d broken through, reached in and retrieved his caveman ax. He’d remove more bricks; light would flow into the first room and maybe he could see a way of working open the wooden door he’d found yesterday.

He began pounding.

One brick out, then another.

A third.

Which is when the entire wall collapsed, bricks the color of dried blood cascading down upon Coyle, compressing his lungs, breaking bones. He struggled for breath.

He gave a futile scream, soft as a whisper. Complete darkness returned.

10

Pounding pavement.

Trying to find the anonymous witness Trask had mentioned.

Hard work. Pain radiated through Fitz’s feet and legs. His breathing was labored, and the damn coughing gripped his chest from time to time.

Journalism is a young man’s game.

He laughed. A young person’s game, picturing Dottie Wyandotte’s tattoos and piercings.

Baby goats in pajamas . . .

Then he forgot his body’s complaints. The hard work paid off.

He found a contractor working on a building directly across from where Coyle’s car had been parked. The tradesman was on the job the day of the kidnapping but hadn’t been back to the site since, so the investigators hadn’t spoken to him. He hadn’t seen the Gravedigger or Coyle but he had seen a man sitting outside a café for an hour or so around lunchtime. He pointed out the table; the man lunching would have had a good view of Coyle’s car.

Had this contractor seen the witness who’d called 911? Maybe, maybe not. But something definitely worth following up on.

Fitz asked, “Did he look like anyone famous, an actor, a politician, musician?”

This was Fitz’s form of the Identi-Kit—the device used by police to render images of suspects based on witnesses’ observations.

“Oh, I’m not sure . . .” Then he was frowning. “Well, there’s an actor . . . Yes, you know . . . Training Day. The movie?”

Fitz had never seen it.

“I can’t think of his name . . . The young guy.”

Fitz looked up the movie on his iPhone.

Ethan Hawke.

The worker looked at the screen. “Yeah, yeah, that’s him.”

He downloaded the picture, thanked the man, and suggested he contact Special Agent Trask.

Back to pavement pounding. A cough. Lozenge. They didn’t do much good. But they tasted nice.

Up and down the street, showing his press credentials and flashing the picture of the actor. No sightings.

Around noon, though, Fitz got a lead: a hot dog vendor glanced at the red carpet photo and said that he’d seen him going into a nearby hotel—and just a half hour ago.

Which meant it was time for coffee.

Fitz knew desk clerks wouldn’t give him any information; they might even call the police, reporting that a fat, balding old man in a dusty, wrinkled suit was asking about guests—which had happened several times during his career. So he’d simply surveil. He bought a large Starbucks, black, and wandered into the lobby, sipping coffee and browsing the gift shop and pretending to talk into his cell phone, looking for the Hawke look-alike.

When he had no luck, he sat on a couch that overlooked the lobby. And waited.

Years ago, Fitz had been told he resembled a spy. He was doing a story on a former CIA officer who had become a thriller writer. The man had said that the best assets—the name for undercover agents in the field—were nondescript, never flashy, dull, actually. They blended into the woodwork. Fitz would be a good one, the former secret agent had said.

He wasn’t sure whether he should consider that a compliment or not.

Time passed. The coffee grew cold, as Fitz would eye the lobby and check on his phone for updates on the case, of which there were none.

At around two p.m., the elevator door opened and Hawke—as he thought of him now—passed through the lobby. Fitz took a last sip of coffee and rose, never looking the fellow’s way. The man was focused and walked in a determined manner. He radiated the confidence of a successful salesman or public relations man. His suit was expensive and cut perfectly (amusing Fitz, who had to debate long and hard about splurging on a suit at Macy’s).

Fitz didn’t approach the man now; he needed more information: his name, a license plate, the identities of other people he might meet. If Fitz approached him, he might bolt, check out of the hotel and be gone forever.

He was hoping the man didn’t take a cab or car service. Long gone were the days when you jumped in a yellow taxi and shouted, “Follow that car!” If those days ever existed at all.

But Hawke just kept striding down the street, as if on the way to close a big sale. He kept looking at his phone. His body language suggested he wasn’t reading texts but was following a pedestrian route on Google Maps.

Breathless, Fitz struggled to keep up.

Fifteen minutes from the hotel the man glanced up and noted a dive of a bar. He stopped.

Please let this be where he’s headed. I can’t take much more.

And, yes, Hawke turned inside.

Fitz rested for three minutes or so, extracted a fisherman’s cap from his inside jacket pocket and pulled it on—every inch the spy. He stepped inside and, eyes on the floor, made his way to a table directly behind where the man sat at the bar. Fitz ordered a bourbon from the server, a slim gray-haired woman. Hawke ordered a cola.

Next steps? Try to steal the name from his credit card receipt? Listen carefully when the person he was meeting arrived?

Just a name, all I want is a name . . .

The man made a call on his mobile. He tilted his head, as one does when the callee picks up.

“Is he available, please? . . . Well, tell him it’s Peter Tile.”

Ah, striking gold . . .

After a brief conversation about some travel plans to Ohio, Tile disconnected. Fitz picked up his drink and joined him.

“Peter Tile?”

The man blinked, frowning.

Fitz showed his press credentials and explained who he was. “I know you were the witness who told the Violent Crimes Task Force about the Gravedigger’s second victim.”

This was a bluff, of course.

But when the man blurted, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the performance fell flat.

Tile knew this himself, it seemed, and appeared dismayed. “How?”

“Talked to some people who saw you at the site of the kidnapping around the time it happened. I followed you here and heard you on the phone just now.”

The man’s lips tightened. “Look, mister, I have a family. That psycho’s still out there.”

Fitz lifted a hand. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble. I haven’t told the police or anyone else.”

“I’m not saying anything to the press. I told the cops everything I know. It was all over in ten seconds. This guy’s getting in his car and somebody comes up and hits him over the head and drags him into the bushes, then leaves a note on the windshield. There’s nothing else.”

“You’re in a hotel. You’re not from here.”

“No. I’m . . . I’m here on business.”

Fitz smiled at the evasion. “You know, Mr. Tile, I’ve been interviewing people for close to forty-five years. And one thing I’ve found is that there’s always something else, some little fact, a tidbit that people can remember about an incident.”

“Well, there is nothing.”

“Tell me again what happened. You’re obviously a Good Samaritan. You wanted this guy caught.”

“Yeah, right, you have my name,” he said bitterly. “You going to threaten to release it publicly if I don’t help?”

Fitz responded immediately. “I have never once revealed the name of a source who wanted to stay anonymous.”

This was true and Tile apparently sensed the sincerity. He sipped the soda and wiped his hand on a bar napkin. He seemed calmer. “God, I’m claustrophobic. I don’t even want to think what that guy’s going through. Underground. What’s his name again?”

“Jasper Coyle.” Fitz did the silence trick again.

“He was white, tall, blond hair. Jeans and a dark shirt. Sunglasses.”

“What kind?”

“Sunglasses? I don’t remember the brand or anything. Who knows anyway?”

“What did he do, exactly?”

“Coyle was walking to his car and this man steps out of the bushes and hits him over the head.”

“With what?”

Tile paused a moment. “It’s funny, you know. I didn’t think about what he used before. But I can kind of picture it now. It was dark, maybe cloth, almost like a sock. There was something in it.”

Fitz had once written about guards abusing prisoners. One of their tricks was to fill a sock with bolts or washers or coins and use that as a cudgel. It hurt like hell, but left no marks. Maybe the Gravedigger had done jail time.

Tile’s eyes were focused on a stain on the table. Then he blurted, “Oh, wait. He’s left-handed.”

Memory is such an odd creature.

“Definitely left-handed.”

Fitz took his notebook out slowly, as if approaching a dog he didn’t want to spook. He opened it and jotted down the two new facts. “Go on.”

“Then he took something out of his pocket, a plastic tube. It’d be the needle, the syringe, you know. I read he injected them with a drug.”

“That’s right. Which pocket?”

“What?”

“Of the jacket?”

“Oh. Inside.”

“What color was it?”

“The jacket? Light blue.” Then he laughed as if surprised that he hadn’t remembered earlier.

More jottings.

“Did it seem that they knew each other?”

“No.”

“Did he struggle pulling Coyle into the bushes?”

“No, not at all. Didn’t think about that either. He was really strong. Probably works out. Or has some job that keeps him in good shape.”

Another note.

Tile closed his eyes, as if he were witnessing the incident once more. Then he said, “Really that’s about it.”

“You did fine.”

Tile asked, “Why do you think he’s doing this?”

“Always the key question. Motive.” Fitz finished the bourbon. “I’ve done a few serial killer stories. I’ve never seen anybody like this one. Men kill for sex. Women for money. He doesn’t want either.”

This individual does not fall into any of the generally recognized categories of serial perpetrator . . .

Fitz continued: “I’ve got a theory he’s doing it for the publicity.”

“Publicity? You mean like he gets off being on the news?”

“Maybe. A kidnapping’s going to get a lot of attention in the first place. But he wants more, so he leaves clues that get the whole country focused on him. I’m going to check with some criminal psychologists, some cops. See what they think.” He closed the notebook. “I’d encourage you to talk to the police.”

“No way. You’ll tell them what I told you, that’s enough.”

“Your choice.” Fitz paid. He rose to leave and handed Tile one of his business cards.

“They might subpoena you for my name,” Tile muttered darkly.

“Then I’ll refuse.”

“You’ll be in contempt. You could go to jail.”

“Then I go to jail.”

11

On the way to the Examiner, Fitz called the FBI and was patched through to Special Agent Trask. He gave her the new information.

“You found the witness?” Her voice was higher than he remembered. Maybe she was surprised. She didn’t seem like a woman who reacted to the unexpected. “How?”

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 nails, 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.

But then: What the hell? He dug through two drawers until he found a pack of Marlboros. He tapped one out, lit it and gazed at the chart, then flipped through his notes. He smoked half the cigarette down, amused that he didn’t cough once.

What’s your motive? What’s your why?

He thought of the British woman who’d solved the Jasper Coyle kidnapping limerick.

The trick is to keep an open mind. Don’t start solving the puzzle right away. Let it sit . . .

Which is exactly what he did.

Scanning the chart. Publicity as a motive?

That made no sense.

Another drag . . .

Or did it?

“Oh my God,” he whispered. Then barked a sharp laugh. He believed he had the answer. It would take some work to verify, but that was a reporter’s job, after all. He booted up his computer.

Pounding the digital pavement.

A nice turn of phrase. He’d share it with Dottie.

An hour passed, two hours. Hunched over the computer keyboard, index digits hard at work. Fitz thought of Dottie’s fingers, tipped in ebony nails, flying over the keys. He wished he’d learned to touch-type.

Around two a.m., he paused, as he felt cool air stirring at his feet. Had a door blown open?

No, he’d locked them all, he was sure.

He typed a few more keystrokes, hit return, then logged off and rose, turning.

Standing in the doorway to his office were two men. One was Peter Tile, from the bar that afternoon. The other he didn’t recognize: a big, swarthy man with a belligerent face. Both were wearing blue latex gloves. Tile held a large plastic gas can. The other man, a pistol, with a silencer.

Fitz sighed. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and took it from his lips, stubbing it out in a crystal ashtray with a chip in the side. A present from Jen years and years and years ago.

III

JUNE 20, THE PRIOR MONTH

15

After a long day of negotiating deals and writing memos and revising spreadsheets and wrangling conference calls, all she wanted was a bowl of soup and a chardonnay.

Crab soup, of course. She was in Maryland. What other kind would you have?

Elly Morgan made her way through the serpentine path that connected her wing of the motel to the main building. She was lucky to have gotten the room; there’d been a political debate this evening and most of the hotels and motels were booked. She’d probably heard about the debate but had paid no attention. The thirty-year-old brunette thought the constant barrage of cable news totally sucked. She and her boyfriend leaned toward artsy British shows on Netflix and, for dessert, Pixar and superheroes. (Who didn’t just love laser eye beams blowing up buildings?)

The election was in November. She’d focus around Halloween.

Now, after a ten-hour day, Morgan wanted a fast, peaceful meal.

Crab soup.

She walked into the outdoor bar, done up in a sort of faux New Orleans style. Mardi Gras beads dangled. A mural depicting an eerie papier-mâché masked man with a leering smile covered one wall. The music, however, was Top 40. Very disorienting. The place wasn’t crowded at all. The hour was ten, past regular dinnertime. She saw a couple in the corner, in their thirties. Eyes locked. The world outside their love—or lust—didn’t exist. Two men were at another table, watching a game. The younger, in a suit and tie, resembled an actor she couldn’t place. The other, big and unsmiling, wore jeans and a leather jacket over a T-shirt.

A table or the bar itself? she debated. One thing she knew from traveling: the emptier the dining room, the slower the service. She walked to the bar and sat. She and the bartender exchanged smiles and nods.

Morgan had ordered a white wine at lunch, but only to keep her businessmen customers happy. She’d sipped only teaspoonfuls during the meal (they’d had martinis and Manhattans).

Now, she went for her first real drink of the day. A nice Alexander Valley Chardonnay. It was crisp and oaky. She began to relax, finally. She looked over the menu. Yes! They had the lovely soup. She ordered.

A man sat down at the bar, to her left, leaving a tactful stool between them. He ordered a vodka and diet Sprite—an odd and wholly unappealing combination—and examined the menu.

A minute or two later: “So how you doing tonight?”

She glanced the man’s way. He was in an athletic jacket with the collar turned up. He wore a baseball cap, the logo of the New York Mets. His glasses were tinted. His hair, beneath the hat, boyishly mussed. He seemed familiar. Maybe she’d seen him last night when she arrived after the long drive from West Virginia. No, from somewhere else, though probably he simply fell into that generic good-lookin’-fifty-year-old demographic. Her sister had joked they were the number one male presence on Tinder.

She sighed. But Southern born and bred, Elly Morgan was polite to her core. “Pretty good.”

“You here on business?”

“I am, yes.” Her territory included retail stores from Pennsylvania down to North Carolina. She was on the road every few weeks, and the number one rule she’d learned was never, ever ask anyone—a man especially—a question that might elongate the conversation.

“Can I ask what line?”

“Wholesale cosmetics.”

“Ah.”

She sipped wine, pulled out her phone, and studied her screen. She wished she could call Josh. But he was on an airplane. Maybe she’d try her sister.

“I’m just in town for a thing here tonight,” the Mets fan went on. “But I got around during the day. I like college towns. Pretty interesting place. There’s a Civil War memorial. Did you know that Maryland never seceded from the Union but it was the only state that officially had federal and Confederate troops?”

She didn’t. She didn’t care.

He ordered another drink.

Without looking his way, Morgan sensed he was studying her. She regretted not changing from the tight-fitting silk blouse. In the meetings she wore, as she always did, a loose jacket. She had a voluptuous figure, and she knew he was focused on her chest.

She hit a recent call button.

“Hi, this is Karen. Please leave a message.”

So, sis wasn’t going to help her out.

“Voice mail,” the man said. “Curse of existence.”

Apparently the volume was high enough so he could hear. Rude to comment. Also, she had no clue what his comment meant.

He leaned a bit closer and she felt his arm brush her elbow.

“Excuse me,” she said and turned his way.

He backed off. “Sorry. Just was going to ask if you wanted a better drink. My treat.”

Better drink?

“Wine can be so boring. You don’t look like a boring girl.”

That’s it.

“Could I get that soup to go?” she said to the bartender.

“Sure.”

The Mets Man apparently got the message. He finished his drink and paid cash. He rose, said, “Have a good night now.”

Polite Morgan nodded distantly.

He wandered off.

Stay?

No way. Sharks circle back on their prey.

In five minutes the soup had arrived. She signed the check and stood, ignoring the gaze of the man seated to her right. Was he eyeing her figure too?

She ignored him. How tiring this all was. She knew it had happened from the beginning of time, men and women, but now, still, in the #MeToo era? Did some men simply not get it?

Walking back to her wing, over sidewalks surrounded by flowering trees, she smelled the enticing aroma of the soup and she thought: Calm down, girl. You’re tired, you’re stressed from the negotiation, you miss Josh. Don’t overreact. Looking over her body was wrong, it was an assault in a way, but it wasn’t terrible. The incident hadn’t become ugly. It was one of the thousands of incidents just like it that she’d had to endure, being a woman in . . . No, not just in the business world, but anywhere.

She’d had to endure, being a woman. End of story. She should—

“Look, I’m sorry.”

Morgan gasped.

Mets Man had been on an intersecting sidewalk. He stepped in front of her.

She had to stop.

“I was out of line. And—”

“You’ll excuse me. I’m going to my room.” She fished her phone from her pocket. He noticed this.

He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered. He held up a hand. “Look. I’m not dangerous or weird.”

The jury’s still out on . . .

“I just find you extremely attractive. You’re my type. And I think I’m not so bad to look at myself. And there are some other things about my life that are . . . appealing.”

“I’m talking to management.” She turned, her heart pounding hard. When’s the right time to scream?

“Wait,” he commanded and grabbed her arm.

“The fuck are you doing?”

“Just calm down. Let’s have a drink and—”

“Are you crazy?”

He gripped her harder.

She swung a fist at his mouth and collided solidly. She was the daughter of factory workers and had put herself through college doing the same kind of labor.

“Oh, Jesus, you fucking bitch!”

Now, time to scream.

She inhaled deep. But before she could cry out he tackled her hard, driving a shoulder into her solar plexus. She fell to the ground, pain radiating from her gut to the bridge of her nose. Tears streamed.

Oh, Josh . . . Josh . . .

She grappled with the phone. Mets Man ripped it from her hand.

“Why did you do that?” he whispered. “It could have been so good. Why?”

She tried to crawl away, but the blow had virtually paralyzed her.

He seemed disgusted, as if this were all her fault. He shook his head and looked around.

For what?

No, no . . .

He was plucking a large rock from a garden beside the sidewalk. He walked slowly to her. Elly Morgan closed her eyes. She was numb. She could think of nothing, she could hear nothing, she could sense nothing . . . except the aroma of the soup, crab soup, lovely soup, spreading in a pink pool only inches from where she lay.

“What . . . My God. What’ve you done?”

As he looked down at the body of the young woman, her head bloody and crushed, Peter Tile was aware of a scent: Maryland crab chowder. A dish he would never eat again in his life.

“It was an accident.” His boss doffed his Mets cap and wiped his brow.

“It wasn’t an accident. You fucking killed her. And you’re still fucking holding the murder weapon.”

His boss looked down at the bloody piece of stone. He dropped the hunk of jagged granite, now rich with DNA and fingerprints. He whispered, “She was going to—”

“Stop you from raping her? The hell did you think she was going to do?”

“It just got out of hand. She was flirting.”

“I was in the bar. We both were. We were watching you. You came on too strong.”

“She hit me.” He pointed to his jaw. “I think I lost a tooth.”

Tile looked up and down the sidewalk. No one present. And no security cameras. One of the reasons Tile had picked this hotel.

Tile took a deep breath. He made a phone call.

“’Lo?”

“Head to the South Wing. Now. We’ve got a problem.”

Sixty seconds later, Eddie Von appeared. He was five-ten and stocky, muscle-stocky. His thinning black hair was combed back with sweet-smelling lotion. He was blunt in appearance and blunt in manner. His dangling hands drew naturally up into fists.

“Shit,” he grumbled. Not horrified, just thinking of how to deal with this inconvenience.

Tile: “Get her into the bushes.”

Tile and Von gripped her feet and tugged her out of sight. Tile picked up the bloody rock with an untucked tail of his dress shirt and dropped it beside the body.

“What are we going to do?” His boss wiped his brow once more. “You have to figure this out. You have to do something.”

He was furious with the man, but, yes, Peter Tile absolutely did. It was his job to make sure that nothing—even murder—was going to derail the career of the man standing before him: John C. Heller, governor of the state of New York, and the man virtually guaranteed to lead his party to victory in the presidential election in November.

IV

JULY 15, PRESENT DAY

16

At eight a.m., Dottie Wyandotte walked into the Examiner newsroom and could see something was terribly wrong.

Police were in Gerry Bradford’s office and the editor in chief’s face was stricken. He’d misbuttoned his shirt. Five staffers were standing together, their arms crossed or dangling at their sides, their faces dismayed. Pam Gibbons, Dottie’s assistant, had been crying.

Bradford looked toward her and rose, saying something to the police. He stepped outside and walked to her.

“What?” she blurted. “Tell me.”

“It’s Fitz. He was killed last night.”

“Oh, God. No, no!” Dottie’s hands were shaking. She set down her Starbucks tea, sloughed her computer bag, let it slide to the floor. Tears welled.

Gibbons noticed her boss and made a beeline. They embraced.

“Pam.”

The women separated and, lassoing the emotions, Dottie said in a low voice, “What happened?”

Bradford nodded to the police. “They said it was meth cookers. That story he was working on? They shot him . . . And then burned his house down, destroyed all his files, notes, contacts. They found meth on the front doorknob and stair railing. A fentanyl patch by the curb. I mean, they’ll investigate, but we knew those tweakers were dangerous. He was . . .” Bradford’s thought caught. “Fitz was dead before the fire. You want to sit down?”

“No.”

“Fuck. I can’t believe it.”

The first time the pristine editor in chief had ever used an obscenity, to her knowledge.

“He has family,” she said.

“A son. They called him, the police did. He and his wife’re on their way here.”

Dottie had noted a picture of Fitz, his wife and an athletic-looking teenage boy. It was in the center of the wall behind his desk here. She could turn and look at it now. She didn’t.

“Dottie?” Bradford asked.

She looked up from the floor.

“Did you know that he had cancer?”

“Fitz?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t. But the coughing. And the lozenges. I should have guessed.”

“No, that was pollen. He was allergic. It’s pancreatic. It’d spread. I just thought I’d tell you. Not that it makes any difference.”

“Not a bit of difference,” Dottie said angrily.

Bradford nodded. “I better go back. They have some more questions. They’ll want to talk to you too, the police.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“I’ll come up with an obit. We don’t have anything in the morgue on him.”

The “morgue”—the file cabinet, or digital folder, containing obituaries written about individuals while they were still alive. Upon their deaths, the articles would be updated and dropped into the paper.

She nodded, numb, and started back to her cubicle.

Bradford said, “Oh, Dottie?”

After a moment, she looked up.

“Corporate wants a piece on influencer animals.”

“Animals?” she asked, not comprehending.

“They liked your last piece, on the body painting. You know Christiana, the supermodel, LA?”

Fitz was dead. A man she’d just been talking to last night. Sipping chamomile and whiskey.

Just not together . . .

“Dottie?”

Her attention returned. “Animals?”

“She’s got a cat. He’s got his own blog and YouTube channel. Christiana does the voice-overs but the cat’s in the video with the products and people she’s promoting. Millions of hits. And millions of dollars. There’ll be others out there.”

“Influencer animals?”

“Right. Chet Grant wants you to do a series.”

Head of OOMC at the company. Not the boss of bosses but close.

“And they need the first piece ASAP. Chet’s worried about losing the exclusive. Apparently the subject’s trending.”

“All right,” Dottie said. “I’ll get on it.” Numb, she turned toward her computer.

Bradford started back to his office. He paused. “It’s not trivial.”

She gazed at him quizzically.

“What we do,” he continued. “The pieces aren’t trivial. They make people smile. Millions of people. Nothing wrong with that.”

“No. Nothing wrong at all.”

17

In his Albany hotel room, Peter Tile poured a drink for himself and for Eddie Von, the swarthy, blunt triggerman who had shot Edward Fitzhugh to death last night.

The hour was early but they were sipping scotches. Because why the fuck not?

The two men, collectively, were the Gravedigger. The bigger of the two, the stronger, an ex-soldier, Von was the actual kidnapper. Tile was the tactician, had come up with the clues about where the victims were held, and, as the anonymous witness, convinced the world that the Gravedigger was over six feet tall, pale, a full head of blond hair, and left-handed—virtually the opposite of Von.

The man now asked, “You going to need me for any more of these jobs?”

“No. Nothing like this is ever going to happen again.”

“Oh” was Von’s disappointed response. His accent was flat, midwestern. Tile recalled he’d been in the National Guard in Indiana or Illinois. He’d been dishonorably discharged.

The television news was on. The big story on the local station was last night’s raging fire in a suburban neighborhood of Garner. It had been at the home of a veteran reporter with the Fairview Daily Examiner, Edward Fitzhugh, whose body had been discovered inside. No one knew at this point what the cause was.

A knock sounded on the door. Tile and Von eyed each other. Von’s hand went to his back waistband, where his gun resided. Tile looked out the peephole and shook his head. Von stood down.

Tile opened the door and let John Heller inside. He nodded to the two men. Then he strode to the minibar, fixed a vodka and diet Sprite and drank it down fast. He noted the story on the TV. He said to them, “Good job.”

Governor Heller had a problem.

Himself.

Married and a father of two, Heller had a roving eye. When he was on the road, he might spot a young woman at a rally or a hotel bar, buy her drinks—plenty of drinks—and “help” her back to her room, with his bodyguards making certain no one was around to see.

Infidelity and public office were hardly an uncommon occurrence but this politician was running for president. Peter Tile, Heller’s minder and fixer in chief, couldn’t care less about the morality of it all; he was, however, determined to end up in the West Wing, with a real job title and a fat salary; his boss’s bad behavior simply could not make the news and derail their mutual ambitions. He spent a good portion of his time tactically planning these liaisons.

Then, disaster.

Drunk and apparently irritated at her rejection, Heller had snapped and beaten Elly Morgan to death in Maryland.

Full crisis mode.

Eddie Von had staged her death to look like a mugging gone bad and dumped the body elsewhere. He’d pitched the bloody rock into a deep river nearby. This wasn’t enough, however. Not for Tile. The debate was being held in a small and largely crime-free college town outside Baltimore, and Tile knew the press would jump all over the story. It was on the record too that Elly was a guest at the motel where the governor was staying. Also known was the fact that the governor himself had had past “incidents” with women—and a legendary temper.

If the press put those strands together, Heller might end up in a homicide investigation.

How could Tile prevent that?

An idea occurred to him: What if there were a crime in the vicinity that was so sensational that stories about the mugging would be buried in the press?

Tile liked the idea. But what kind of crime? He’d then laughed to himself.

Buried . . .

So he and Von created the Gravedigger. Von snatched a random victim and hid her in a drainage tunnel, leaving a puzzle as to her whereabouts. They had no intention of letting her die and, if the police hadn’t figured out the clue, Tile would have made an anonymous call reporting her location. The plan worked perfectly. For several days, the media was consumed with the idea of unraveling the Gravedigger’s puzzle. The story dominated the headlines, and the death of the West Virginia woman was hardly reported.

Tile thought they were home free. But then Morgan’s boyfriend—Josh Marcus, a coal-company manager—decided to play fucking detective. He was probably suspicious: Why was his girlfriend mugged around midnight, behind a restaurant at which she hadn’t eaten, miles from her motel?

Typically, at the motels and hotels Heller stayed at, Tile would spread thousands around the staff to downplay the governor’s presence, citing “security concerns.”

But apparently he’d failed to dispense alms to everyone.

Marcus learned from some employee that the night she’d died she’d been in the bar talking to Heller. He’d called the governor’s mansion asking if he could meet with the man himself. Probably Marcus didn’t suspect Heller at that point but legitimately hoped that he could provide some information about her plans that night. No one called Marcus back, and when he learned the governor was in Garner for fundraisers, he drove up there to get answers to his questions. He met with Tile, who sensed that by now, yes, he was a risk.

He’d had to die too.

Von staged the fatal car accident on Route 29. Once again, since the reporting about his death might lead someone to make the connection to his girlfriend Elly’s, and to the fact that the governor was present at both times, the Gravedigger struck again, this time kidnapping Jasper Coyle.

Sure enough the second abduction consumed the media, even more than the first incident; the Gravedigger was now a serial kidnapper—junk food for the media. Marcus’s car accident story, as well as the coverage about the governor’s fundraiser, went to the bottom of the news pile.

But then Edward Fitzhugh showed up. The reporter had actually managed to find out about Tile’s presence at Coyle’s kidnapping, where he’d been acting as lookout for Von. Tile had checked out the old journalist. A Pulitzer winner, the man was known to be a dogged investigative reporter. With some persistence, he could probably connect the dots: Heller’s presence in the towns where Elly Morgan and Josh Marcus had died, and Tile, with a connection to the governor, being at one of the kidnappings.

Now the journalist was gone, his files destroyed.

Crisis averted.

Heller was staring out the window. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. I didn’t want anybody to die. You do know that, Peter, don’t you?”

“I do, John. But—”

The governor held up a hand. “No, no, you don’t have to worry. It’s over with. I promise. No more women.”

“It has to be,” Tile said.

The governor nodded. “I’m done. What are the next steps?”

“Me? I’ll make some anonymous calls that the Gravedigger has been seen on the West Coast and the story’ll go away. And you? We’ve got a rally tonight. Start working on your speech.”

18

Dottie Wyandotte stared at her computer screen until she could sit no longer.

She had to rise and, working up her courage, she walked into Fitz’s office. It smelled of tobacco—not smoke, just the tobacco. Whiskey too.

She opened desk drawers. Found a pack of cigarettes and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

You drink whiskey?

Does it have wheat in it? . . .

She replaced them and flipped through some of his notebooks. Set these back on the desk too. In the corner of his office was an old typewriter. She’d never used one. Dottie walked to it now. She hit several keys. The o worked and the m but not the e; she believed he’d told her that that letter was the most used in the English language. She looked at the armatures. Some of the letters, at the end, were clogged with ink from striking the ribbon year after year. Maybe she’d go on eBay and buy one. It would make a nice objet d’art in her tiny apartment.

Dottie walked back to Gerry Bradford’s office. He looked up. Dottie reflected that he was a younger version of her banker father.

“I’m not writing the piece.”

“The animal influencers?” He was frowning.

“There’s another story I want to do.”

“What is it?”

“I see it as a memorial to Fitz. An homage, you could say.”

He hesitated; she knew he would.

“Well, corporate really wants it. And they want it right away.”

“Give it to somebody else.”

“They want you. You’re the best writer on the team.”

Bradford glanced at his phone, as if debating calling corporate for their okay. Or to ask for help. Then his eyes returned, taking in the four studs in her right cheek. They represented the four corners of the earth—to which she intended to travel someday. She’d never told anyone this.

She said nothing but just stared.

Bradford sighed. “We’ll go with the Fitz story.”

V

JULY 22

19

For the past week, Dottie Wyandotte had played real reporter.

Pounding the pavement—and learning she wasn’t in as good physical shape as she’d thought. Up stairs, down stairs, walking next to contacts as they strode quickly or, in one case, jogged along the sidewalk.

She talked to sources Fitz had spoken with, to sources he had intended to speak with, to sources whose identity she dug up on her own. Dottie found herself out of shape in this area too; her Northwestern J-School skills were rusty. Those talents weren’t really necessary when your piece is about teenage makeup choices or the best keto diet recipes for beef. (And you don’t need to ferret out sources when they come to you, in droves, kissing ass and hoping for free publicity.)

Soon she hit her stride.

Taking dictation was tough for her, but she was a whiz at hitting “record” on her iPhone app. And, back in the office, Dottie proved equally talented at plugging in yet another program to transcribe the words of the various interviewees.

Now, at last, she was writing the Fitz story itself, following the journalistic rule of the inverted pyramid. A story should start with the most important facts in the lede.

She smiled to herself remembering a journalism professor at Northwestern: “The first paragraph of a news story leads, as in being the first. But it’s spelled ‘l-e-d-e.’ Why? To avoid confusion with the word ‘lead,’ pronounced ‘l-e-d.’ In the old days, my days, the molten metal was used to set type for the printing presses.”

After the lede, the paragraphs appeared in descending order of importance, down to the “cut-off ’graphs,” those containing material that was perhaps interesting but unnecessary.

Yesterday, late, she’d finished the piece and, following protocol, sent it to Gerry Bradford. He gave her no reply then.

She’d wakened this morning early and gone right to her computer. Still nothing from the EIC. Now, in the ExaminerOnline office, close to noon, she could wait no longer. She strode into his office. He was reading something on the screen. Was it her article?

No. The OOMC piece about a celebrity coming to town.

“Who’s this guy?” Bradford nodded at his display.

“No idea. If he’s a YouTube sensation, he’s got the shelf life of yogurt. So run the story fast.”

Bradford sat back. And looked over his shoulder.

Dottie turned.

Two men, in suits and ties, walked through the doorway.

“Gerry,” the taller of the two said. Dottie sensed he was in charge.

Bradford introduced them. The tall one was the president of the Examiner’s owner, National Media Group. This was the boss of bosses. The other was the chief general counsel for the company. They’d flown here from New York. Even though they could have driven.

The president looked her over, not interested in the studs or ink. “So this is the girl that doesn’t like animals.”

The general counsel said, “Sounds like the title of a bestselling thriller.”

Neither Bradford nor Dottie smiled or otherwise reacted.

A moment passed. The president said, “Why don’t you sit down, Ms. Wyandotte. There’re a few things we need to discuss with you.”

20

No spectacle on earth is more exhilarating than a national political party convention.

The coming together of enthusiastic men and women selecting the candidate who will lead their party to victory in November.

Peter Tile was standing in the wings, staring out at the crowd and listening to the pulsating cheers of the audience, as Governor Heller and other officials whispered among themselves nearby. These were the committee chairwoman, the campaign director, the governor of Ohio, where the convention was being held, and others with no role other than kissing ass and hoping for jobs in the administration.

Tile couldn’t be critical; he’d been there himself.

All was calm on the Fitzhugh front. The case, handled by the Fairview County Sheriff’s Office, was largely closed. It seemed that the killers were indeed a pair of meth tweakers living outside Garner. Three days ago they’d died, ironically, in a fiery explosion in their trailer, as will happen when the dire ingredients required to make that terrible drug are present. The gun and gasoline can traced to Fitzhugh’s death were found in their backyard.

As for any evidence Fitzhugh may have marshaled that could point to Peter Tile himself and to a connection between the governor and the deaths of the couple from West Virginia, it had all been destroyed in the conflagration of the reporter’s house. The man’s laptop and desktop computers had gone missing, presumably fenced by the tweakers.

He looked over the convention floor. The chairwoman, a dull, somber senator from California, was at the podium and calling each state to announce their votes.

As the tally progressed, the crowd was reacting as if their vote were the final draw in a million-dollar hand of celebrity poker.

“The great state of Washington, which has raised the minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour and has more sunshine than people give it credit for . . .”

Laughter.

“Washington casts its 107 delegate votes for Governor . . . John . . . Heller!”

The applause and shouts erupted again. Feet stamped too.

Tile glanced toward the governor and noted a young woman had caught his eye. The smile on her acne-dotted face grew broader, wide eyes wider. The gaze lasted only a few seconds. It was Heller who’d looked away first.

I promise. No more women . . .

People can change, of course. The events of the past month had been dreadful, terrible. There had been mistakes made, crimes committed, lies told. There’d been death. But now, looking at the energy of the candidate’s followers, knowing the man’s brilliant policies and how he could steer the country on a prosperous course, Tile felt that the team’s decisions were the right ones. The governor would emerge as one of the best presidents in years.

Tile examined the convention floor.

Soon West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming had their say—procedurally required but mathematically unnecessary; the Heller tipping point had arrived before the S and T states. Amid the stomps and claps and hoots and shouts, the chairwoman banged the gavel and recognized the senator from New York, a young Latina standing on the floor at her delegation. “Madam Chairwoman,” the senator said, “I move that the convention nominate . . . Governor John Heller . . . to be our candidate . . . for the next . . . president of the United States!”

Tile’s ears ached from the thunder. But what a pleasant pain it was.

My God, life didn’t get any better than this.

Heller strode onto the stage, looking every inch a president—the Kennedy mode, of course, not Gerald Ford or either Bush. The governor wore a beautiful Italian suit, cut perfectly, and a starched white shirt that glowed, reflecting flares of red and blue when the spots swept over him. Hands raised on high. Smiling, nodding.

Finally, quiet—if not silence—descended and he stepped to the podium. Behind him on the jumbotron words coalesced from spiraling pixels:

A NEW BEGINNING . . .

Peter Tile felt that was exactly what he was looking at. Heller’s past was being scrubbed. He, and the country, were moving on to great things.

Tile along with him.

“My fellow citizens . . . delegates . . . colleagues . . . distinguished officeholders . . . my . . . dear . . . friends.”

That last word spawned a paroxysm of cheers.

When it died down: “I accept the nomination that you have so generously bestowed upon me!”

Again, cacophony.

Tile wished he’d brought his earplugs, but then wondered what the Secret Service would make of that; they were for use when he was on the shooting range.

“We stand on the verge of change in this country,” Heller continued. “Momentous change. Yes, it’s time for a new beginning in our great nation.”

Now, though, the applause and the cheering were more subdued.

Tile looked out over the floor. Something odd was happening. Many delegates were looking at their phones. Then most of them were. Soon instead of shouts and cheers, the hall was awash with the rising and falling sound of murmuring voices.

Heller stopped speaking and stared, frowning, into the crowd.

Tile’s own phone began vibrating. He pulled it from his pocket. He noted that Heller’s coterie were looking at their own mobiles.

A terrorist attack? That would play well for him, bad for the incumbent. They could spin the current president’s neglect of security.

Heller gave up. He strode offstage.

Tile looked at his news feed. He felt the gut punch.

Heller walked up to him and grabbed the phone. He read. Then whispered, “No . . . no . . .”

In the ExaminerOnline office, Dottie Wyandotte was scrolling through her article, which she’d uploaded not long ago. It was front and center on her monitor.

Above the fold.

Even if there no longer was one, not in the digital age.

Her story was front and center too in the New York Times, L.A. Times, the WaPo and Journal and about a thousand other publications and news feeds throughout the world.

Serial Kidnappings, Homicides Linked to Heller Campaign in Sexual Assault Cover-Up

Reporter for This Newspaper Was One of Alleged Victims

By Kelley Wyandotte, Examiner Staff Writer, Based on Reporting by Edward Fitzhugh

Dottie read through the article yet again. She couldn’t help herself. She was looking for any grammatical mistakes. Punctuation errors. Problems with syntax.

Yoda, a butcher of syntax is . . .

Nope. Looked pretty clean to her. Thank God. The last thing she wanted to do was offend Fitz, assuming—as she occasionally did about departed loved ones—that he was looking down from on high somewhere.

All the whichs had commas, all the thats did not. And there was not a single apostrophe s committing the crime of pluralizing a word.

Then she turned from the monitor, sat back and read once again the email that Fitz had sent her the night he died. According to the time stamp, and the police account of the chronology of his death, he’d sent it a few minutes before he was killed.

Hey, Whippersnapper:

Nice chatting tonight. Haven’t had a good conversation like that for a long time. Have been doing some research, using this thing called the internet. You should try it. It’s great. For instance, I just learned that distillation removes the gluten protein from whiskey, so you’re good to go.

I’m going to need some help with my story. You’re spritely. I’m old. You’re smart and I’m slow. Let’s do this one together, what do you say?

Here’s the gist:

Trying to find out what makes the Gravedigger tick, I’ve been looking at all the news stories around the time and places of the attacks. I found two deaths the day before each kidnapping. Death one: a businesswoman from West Virginia was beaten to death. Number two: my own story about the coal-mining exec killed in a car accident outside of Garner. Took me a minute to get the connection between them: COAL industry worker and woman from WEST VIRGINIA. Yes, they lived together. Told you I’m slow.

One more bit of info: Guess who else was nearby when those two deaths occurred: the right honorable John C. Heller, known for bad behavior with the opposite sex and temper tantrums. He was staying at the same hotel as the West Virginia woman.

If I’m right and not suffering from conspiracy-itis, Heller made a move and killed her when she resisted, and her boyfriend drove to Garner to ask questions. He was murdered too. To bury any stories that might connect Heller with the victims, somebody created the Gravedigger to dominate the news. My vote is Peter Tile, the “witness” I found. I looked over a couple hundred campaign photos and saw someone looking suspiciously like him lurking near Heller.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But then again who’d expect baby goats to be prancing around in pajamas?

The conversation Dottie had had with the corporate executives of National Media Group in Gerry Bradford’s office hadn’t lasted long.

The president of the company: “Ms. Wyandotte, are you confident that your reporting of this story is solid?” Gerry Bradford had sent copies of the inflammatory piece to Them. Fitz had told her that’s how he thought of their overlords. Capital T Them.

“Yes, I am.” She ran through her prior week of twelve-hour days and nights. The exhaustive details: the subjects she’d interviewed, the places she’d examined and photographed firsthand.

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 . . .

Amen, Fitz.

The president had continued, “Because if you’re not confident this story will withstand scrutiny, then there’s . . .” He turned to the chief general counsel. “What’s the legal term?”

“We call it the fan and the shit rule.”

She’d said firmly, “It’s solid. I want to run with it. And now.”

The president looked at Bradford, who said, “I’ll stake my job on it.”

The man had debated a moment longer, looking her over carefully. Still no interest in the studs or ink. She held his eyes as easily as she’d held her boss’s.

Then, abruptly: “Okay. Publish.” A glance toward his general counsel, a nod and the two men had disappeared as silently as they’d arrived.

Now, Dottie heard the chime of her computer, signifying another incoming email. She was getting a lot of requests for statements. The bulk were asking if she would comment on the National Committee’s removal, for cause, of John Heller from the ballot, as it had the power to do, under the rules.

This amused her. Why would she comment to another publication when she was covering the story herself? She had a series of appointments lined up: cops and witnesses and lawyers to interview.

First, though, she had a stop to make: St. Michael’s cemetery. She’d cry, she’d pay respects, she’d pray. But she wouldn’t stay long. There was much work to do. It would be a horse race, but there was no other choice. The print edition of the Examiner was still alive, for the time being, and Dottie Wyandotte knew that to make the deadline she had to get her copy in by seven p.m.

A rule that had not once been breached in the 113-year history of the newspaper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Gunner Publications

Jeffery Deaver is the international bestselling author of more than forty novels, most recently The Goodbye Man. His novels and short stories have won the Thriller Award, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and more. Deaver’s books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into twenty-five languages.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

I JULY 13

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II JULY 14

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10

11

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III JUNE 20, THE PRIOR MONTH

15

IV JULY 15, PRESENT DAY

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17

18

V JULY 22

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20

About the Author