Vengeance Road Read Free Page B

as Gannon was giving his story a final read through, polishing here and there, his line rang.
    â€œHi, Jack, it’s Brandy.”
    â€œHow you doing there?”
    â€œThe medical examiner just moved the body. I got some good shots and sent them in to the photo desk.”
    â€œThanks, I’ll have a look.”
    After he’d finished his story Gannon joined the night editor at the photo desk where he was reviewing the news pictures with Paul Benning, the night photo editor.
    â€œIt’s all strong.” Benning clicked through the best frames as he worked on finishing a milk shake.
    Here was the sharp overview showing a brilliant yellow tarp isolated like a flag of alarm amid an all-consuming forest, Gannon thought.
    Here was the medical examiner’s team, grim-faced with a black body bag strapped to a stretcher, loading it into a van.
    Here were Helen Dodd and Kim Landon, tight head shots, shock etched in their faces. Here was Kim, looking off, eyes filled with worry.
    â€œGo back to the aerial,” Gannon said.
    Benning sucked the remnants of his shake through a plastic straw.
    â€œYou see something?
    â€œMaybe. Can you blow it up?”
    Benning enlarged it.
    Click after click drew them closer to the tarp and a fleck of white near the left edge. Click after click and the fleck grew, coming into focus as a hand.
    The woman’s hand, reaching from the tarp.
    Reaching from her grave, as if seizing him in a death plea to tell the world who did this.
    Before they did it again.

4
    S ome thirty-six hours after it had been removed from its shallow grave, the body was autopsied at the Erie County Medical Center, on Grider Street off the Martin Luther King Expressway.
    Death was classified a homicide.
    Using fingerprints and dental records, the dead woman’s identity was confirmed as being Bernice Tina Hogan, aged twenty-three, of Buffalo, New York. The facts of her death were summarized in a few sentences in a police news release.
    Nothing about the pain of her life, Gannon thought as he worked on a long feature about her. After her name had been released, some of her former classmates had contacted him at the paper.
    â€œBernice had a hard life,” one friend told him.
    Bernice never knew her real parents. She’d been told she had some Native American blood, maybe Seneca, and had been raised, for a time, on a reservation. Maybe Allegany, or Cattaraugus. She wasn’t sure. Bernice had never been sure about much in her short life, her friends told him.
    Some sent him photos.
    She stood stiff and shy in obvious embarrassment; a heavyset girl with low self-esteem who’d been abused by her foster father, who also beat her foster mother.
    At first she’d overcome it all. Bernice did well in school, going on to study nursing at Buffalo State, nearly graduating before she was drugged and raped at a party.
    â€œAfter that happened she was so brokenhearted. It was like she just gave up. She began missing classes,” one friend said.
    Bernice had grown addicted to crack. Few people knew that she’d slipped into prostitution as she descended down a path that ended in a makeshift grave under a thicket of twisted maple near Ellicott Creek.
    Gannon wanted to talk to Bernice’s family, but no one knew who her foster mom was, or where she lived. So he made a lot of calls over the next few days until he got a lead.
    â€œYou didn’t get this from me, but her name is Catherine Field,” a source at the city’s Social Services and Housing Department told him.
    Catherine Field was a widowed fifty-nine-year-old diabetic who lived alone on welfare in an older section of the city west of Main. Gannon had gone to the address several times but in vain.
    No one was home.
    But he refused to give up trying to find her.
    Maybe today would be different, he thought as once again he rolled by the home where Catherine had raised Bernice. It was a small two-story frame house built