Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King Page A

heard of the case and said, Whoa. For a man to do an autopsy on his own wife and make an evaluation of death by natural causes might have seemed all right for the rural areas of Dixie County, but that’s not the way it worked in Tallahassee. They sent an investigator to town, and Nick had a direct line to the guy. Within a day, Nick was told about a phone records request and the discovery that Chambliss had made three calls during the night to the number of a woman who was quickly determined to be the good doctor’s mistress. When she was interviewed, her story was way too well rehearsed, and the FDLE was suspicious enough and powerful enough to have an independent autopsy ordered. A team was called in and the pathologists found a suspicious injection point on Mrs. Chambliss’s thigh that was fresh. When questioned, the doctor said that he had given his wife, a diabetic, an injection of insulin at the time she went to bed. Some insulin was found in the house, but because Chambliss had already done an autopsy, had already drained his wife’s blood and filled her veins with embalming fluid, the concentrations of insulin—which can be deadly on its own in high amounts—or any other chemicals could not be ascertained. The perfect murder? Possibly.
    Nick did the initial stories, reporting the inconsistencies, and then kept track of the ongoing investigation while also interviewing the doctor’s grown son and daughter and the doctor’s girlfriend. The affair had been long and ongoing. Within two months of his wife’s death, the doctor moved into a townhouse with the girlfriend. A special prosecutor from outside the county was assigned to the case. Phone records and financial statements threw red flags all over the field. But the doc sat back and maintained his innocence. Eventually, Chambliss was indicted on circumstantial evidence, and even though both of his children were convinced he had killed their mother and testified as witnesses for the prosecution, the jury could not be convinced to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He walked.
    Nick had reported and written the stories straight up. He too was convinced of Chambliss’s guilt, but he left the opinions to the columnists, and the readers, who sent him outraged messages about how the guy got off the hook.
    Nick scrolled down Lori’s list of follow-up stories. The cops had originally let loose that they were considering the doctor’s shooting death a suicide, but crime scene technicians came up with proof that the bullet that killed Chambliss was fired from outside his car and that a high-powered round had penetrated the glass and had struck the doctor in the temple, killing him instantly. No further stories were in the collection that Lori had dug up.
    Nick sat back and stared at the screen. He didn’t like coincidences. They always made you start spinning off in areas that led to useless dead ends that were mostly a waste of time. But just like the cops, you had to do it so you wouldn’t get your ass in a sling for not being thorough. Maybe it was Sergeant Langford’s reference to “one of your stories” when he I.D.’d Ferris yesterday morning that made it more nagging. He started searching through his contact numbers for his FDLE source on Chambliss when his phone rang.
    “Nick, could you come in to my office for a minute?”
    Deirdre. She didn’t have to say who was calling. Nick stood and took up an empty reporter’s notebook to carry into her office. He knew it looked like he was a secretary answering the call to dictation. That’s why he did it. On his way across the newsroom someone called out his name.
    “Yo, Nicky.”
    He looked in the direction of the voice, where Bill Hirschman, the education reporter, was standing under one of the ceiling-mounted televisions tuned to the local news. On-screen was videotape from a position high in the sky over the Broward County Jail. The cameraman had zoomed down onto a rooftop that was empty except