The Killing Room

FORTY

Shane watched the police activity from the coffee shop across the street. There were a half-dozen sector cars ringing the old church, a gathering of rubberneckers. Shane hadn’t gotten the details over police radio — you rarely did, you were lucky to get the nature of the complaint and an address — but he knew this had to be the discovery of another body. You didn’t call out the cavalry over some kid breaking and entering for a place to hit the pipe.

But more important than the sector cars was the Ford Taurus that had arrived, and was now parked fewer than fifty feet away from where Shane stood. A PPD detective car parked outside the crime scene tape. A car that had brought detectives Byrne and Balzano.

Their presence here told him pretty much all he needed to know.

Cyn was on assignment up in Cheltenham, some kind of water main break. That was okay. This one Shane wanted all to himself. He had become so prolific at one-man-banding a story that he would defy any field reporter, anywhere in the world, to tell the difference with an on-air piece. He could even edit on the fly on his MacBook Pro if he needed to.

This was the kind of investigative piece that would land him in Anderson Cooper’s chair.

As a pair of CSU vans arrived at the scene, and the patrol officers in the street made the gathering crowd part for them, Shane saw his opportunity. He put up the collar on his coat, exited the coffee shop.

When he got near the car he dropped his shoulder bag — ostensibly by accident, if anyone was watching — and put the small magnetic tracking device inside the right rear fender. He stood up, dusted off his pants, glanced around. No one had seen him.

Perfect.

The car was, of course, a departmental car, and didn’t belong to either Jessica Balzano or Kevin Byrne, but Shane knew that detectives tended to sign out the same cars over and over again. This allowed them to keep some of their personal gear in the trunks. The tracking unit was a little pricey, and Shane had already lost one, but the monthly fee for tracking via GPS was only $19.95. As long as his laptop could get a satellite signal, he could track the device anywhere in the world.

Shane had gotten shut out of the story featuring Byrne doing his Hulk act on that punk dealer, and it wasn’t going to happen again. True, he’d gotten the exclusive with the kid’s cell-phone footage, but he could have had crystal clear video if he’d been a little better at his surveillance technique.

He now had his DV camera with him, battery charged, with a second fully charged backup battery in the trunk.

When this story broke big — and he had the feeling that was going to happen very soon — he would be there.