Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King Page B

for four figures, three men standing, one seemingly crouched over. As the shot pulled in closer, Nick saw himself bent, face down into the roof gravel, his butt still up in the air and posing in all its breadth for the camera.
    “Not your best side, Nicky,” Hirschman said. “Is that textbook investigative reporting or what?”
    Nick just shrugged and smiled. “No stone unturned,” he said to the other reporter.
    Hirschman laughed. The city editor wouldn’t.
    Deirdre did not look up from her screen, as usual, until Nick was seated.
    “Good morning, Nick. Nice job on the shooting this morning. We really kicked the Herald’s ass on that identification.”
    Nick nodded and said nothing. He did not read the competition’s stories until he’d come in and gotten some phone calls out and seen what his own story might have stirred up overnight.
    “The other editors really liked your detail on the caliber of the bullet and the placement of the wound. Good stuff.”
    She didn’t say she liked it. She said the other editors, Nick thought, catching her words, studying them like some paranoid. Is she still pissed?
    “So what are you thinking about for the follow today?” Deirdre said, moving on. “Are they going to give you anything on the shooter? Do you think they’re going to go after someone connected to the dead girls’ family? I mean, they gotta be looking for motive, right?”
    “I’m trying to track down the mother of the girls through her attorney,” Nick said. “It’s been a while, but he might still have a line on her. Research also ran her name through the Florida driver’s license database, but it still comes up with the same address she had back when the girls were killed, and we already know she hasn’t been living there. But I can’t see where this woman takes three years to learn how to fire a high-powered weapon and then stakes out the killer of her daughters and drops him with a single shot from the top of a building and then somehow disappears without leaving a trace behind. And that’s even going on the supposition that Ferris was the target, which no one in law enforcement has yet to state.”
    Nick always tried to rattle off the steps he’d taken in reporting and the lines of inquiry he’d already thought out when Deirdre called him in to ask questions that were already obvious to him. It usually stopped her. Today it didn’t. She leaned back in her swivel chair and laced her fingers. Nick knew the move as a sign of trouble.
    “I want to ask one thing, Nick.”
    He tried not to show any emotion in his face or body language that would say, Oh, Christ, here it comes. But he was lousy at controlling it.
    Still, he stayed silent, not falling into the old question for a question, not responding by saying, Yeah, and what’s that?
    Instead he waited her out.
    “You got the caliber of the gun, Nick, the .308, which you knew was a high-powered rifle round. You were the one up on the roof, and nice close-up, by the way.”
    He nodded, wanting to match the grin she was trying to give him, but too obstinate to do it. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
    “So why is it that the Herald used the word sniper in their headline and in the body of their story and we never even mentioned it?”
    She dug the Herald out from under the pile on her desk and held up the front page: SNIPER KILLS CHILD MOLESTER ON WAY TO COURT
    Nick tried to keep a dry, unflappable look on his face.
    “Attribution?”
    Deirdre flipped the paper over and skimmed through the story like she was trying to find the line Nick knew was not there. If someone with any authority had called the shooting the act of a sniper, it would have been in the first paragraph of his story. No one called it that, even if it was true.
    “Did they contribute that characterization to any source or member of the law enforcement team that’s investigating?” he said. “I honestly didn’t hear the spokesman or the detective in charge or the