Buried (Hush collection)

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.