Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King

e-mail notice popped up on his screen, pulling him back to the work. He opened it with a click and saw it was from the city editor: Come in and talk when you get a chance.
    Right. When I get a chance. It was a polite order and he knew it.
    Nick scrolled down through the rest of his messages. Some he recognized as reader comments. The one he was looking for, the information from the library on similar shootings of inmates from around the nation, was down the list.
    He ignored the rest and called it up. Lori had left a note up top: I came up with a few sniper-type shootings. Hope some of these help. I put the Florida events first instead of doing them by time line. I also searched for stories where both inmates and former felons were shot and killed on the outside. I might have generated a lot of drug killings, but I stuck them on there anyway.
    Nick checked the size of the file. Huge. He shook his head and looked at the time Lori had sent him the message: past eleven last night. She’d put in some overtime, and he’d have to take her to lunch or at least order her some flowers or something. But before the thought turned into action, his eye caught a name in the first batch of pages he scrolled through: Dr. Markus Chambliss.
    Nick scrolled through the accompanying story, pulled from the archives of a newspaper over on the west coast of Florida.
A prominent San Sebastian physician and former medical examiner, who had once been the target of a police investigation into the death of his wife, was found dead of a single gunshot wound Tuesday, Hillsborough County police said.
Dr. Markus Chambliss, 58, was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car about nine AM in the driveway of his home in Tropical Park. Police declined to say whether they considered the death a homicide or a possible suicide. Chambliss had lived in the quiet suburban home for more than a year, moving there with his girlfriend from northern Florida’s Dixie County, where he had once been a suspect in the death of his wife of 26 years, Mrs. Barbara Chambliss.
    How the hell did I miss this? Nick thought as he checked the date of the story. Four months ago. The story had run in the St. Petersburg Times. Nick closed his eyes. You’re slipping, man, he thought. Two years ago that never would have gotten by you. Two years ago nothing got by you when it came to work. He went back to the file and moved down to subsequent stories by the west coast newspaper.
    A few years ago Chambliss had been the subject of one of Nick’s own big Sunday profiles. When the stories had first broken on the M.E. suspected of killing his own wife, Nick had talked his editors into letting him travel to north-central Florida to do a story on what was already being called the perfect murder.
    Chambliss was described as a respected member of the community and a doctor whose reputation was beyond reproach. That’s always a clue, Nick had argued at the time. Human beings are always fallible, and he had learned long ago that when you started digging, you could find something on everybody. Now, whether it was illegal, immoral or unethical was in the sorting, but no one was as perfect as the superficial stories first tell you. The editors relented and Nick went and dug. With the help of a contact he had in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, he was able to get the inside information.
    Chambliss had called 911 on the morning of his wife’s death, telling a dispatcher that he discovered that his wife had passed away during the night. A rescue squad had responded and they did little more than confirm that Mrs. Chambliss was indeed dead. Knowing the medical examiner on a professional basis, they did not question his request to transport his wife to his office. The doctor did the autopsy himself and ruled his own wife’s death as heart failure from natural causes. Case closed. Burial set for the next day. Grieving to begin.
    The local cops probably would have let it go. But the FDLE