Eye of Vengeance Read Free Page A

remember that one. You did one of your big Sunday pieces on him, right?”
    Nick smiled at her institutional memory. Computers don’t make people smart, people make people smart.
    “That’s the one,” he said and then lowered his voice. “He might have just been shot to death over at the jail. Can you send the stuff straight over to my queue? I’m going over to get some confirmation.”
    Lori was tall and thin, with long feathered blond hair and blue eyes. Nick had always liked her because she was bright and eternally positive. After the accident, when he’d come back to work, he’d been drawn to her. It was that positive force, he told himself. She came over to the counter that fronted her room of computers and bookcases and fact books and jotted down the name.
    “It shouldn’t take me too long, Nick. You want all the court stuff too, right?”
    “Yeah, anything you can find,” he said, thanking her and turning to go.
    “Good luck,” she said, watching him walk away. “On the confirmation, I mean. If it’s the guy I’m remembering, nobody’s gonna be shedding any tears.”
    Nick waved over his shoulder and went straight to the elevators. On the ride down he recalled a line that an old-timer homicide detective had delivered to him when he was just starting out: “Even the bad guys got a mom, kid.”
    Somebody’s always going to cry.

Chapter 3
    O ut on the street, Fort Lauderdale’s morning commuter traffic was still heavy. The main county jail was only a few blocks away on the other side of the river. Nick decided it was easier to walk. He’d stopped being in a hurry to crime scenes years ago. He’d gone to enough of them to know that the bodies would still be there, as if he needed to see another body. The immediate area would be cordoned off by the responding officers, so you weren’t going to beat them before the yellow tape went up and get some kind of close-up and personal view. And if friends and neighbors and possible eyewitnesses were what you were after, they’d all still be hanging around, at least the ones willing to talk or wanting to be quoted.
    He climbed the pedestrian stairway of the Andrews Avenue Bridge. From the top he could see a television news truck already pulled up onto the sidewalk three blocks to the south. When he got down and made it within a block of the rear entrance of the seven-story jail, he slowed and started observing. Camera guys were up against the chain-link gate to the sally port, trying to get shots through the wire mesh. They would consider themselves lucky if they could get a telephoto of a blood pool or, even better, a shot of the medical examiner guys picking up the body and loading it into their black van. The newspaper’s camera guys would be doing the same, afraid somebody else might get a shot they didn’t have even though they knew no photo editor was going to put fresh blood on the front page. But better to be safe and get the gore shot than have some boss ask you why you didn’t get it.
    Bridge traffic going north was backed up, the omnipresent rubberneckers slowing to see what they could see and tell everybody at the office when they got in. Nowadays, they’d probably call it in on their cell phones: Hey, Jody, I’m down on Andrews and there’s a bunch of cops and television guys. What’s up? Did you hear anything? I mean, wow, the traffic, ya know? It was the electronic version of the backyard fence, instant and without boundaries.
    Oh, and Jody? Tell the boss I’m gonna be late, OK?
    As Nick approached the growing bubble of press, he recognized the TV reporters from Channels 7 and 10. They had done lots of crime scenes together over the years. It was a fraternity of odd undertakers.
    “Matt. How’s it goin’?” Nick said to the Channel 10 guy.
    “Hey, Nick,” he answered, nodding in the direction of the gate. “They got somebody down at the bottom of the steps to the back door. Gotta guess that it’s a prisoner or they wouldn’t