Maryanne Winslow mouthed the words “Thank you” and walked the children away, still holding their arms up over their heads so they had to skip and hurry to stay on their feet.
Rickles sighed and leaned back into the couch. He was staring absently at the TV when he said, “I keep meaning to ask you about the gun.”
“Hm?” Kellaway asked. The back of his neck prickled.
“Just I did a search, and you don’t have any guns registered to you in this state.” Rickles scratched an eyebrow, didn’t look at him. “That might be a problem, you know.”
“Oh. It’s registered to Falcon Security. It’s their gun. You want me to see if I can get someone to find the paper on it? They’re based in Texas. It might be registered there, or maybe—”
But Rickles didn’t care and wasn’t listening. He swatted Kellaway’s shoulder in excitement and leaned forward. On the TV there was a shot of the Miracle Falls Mall, the entrance to its parking lot blocked by a police cruiser.
“It’s the new national normal,” intoned a deep male voice. “You know the story. A disgruntled employee walks into her workplace with a gun and a heart full of malice and begins to kill. But what happened next, at this shopping center in St. Possenti, Florida, will surprise and inspire you.”
“Here we go,” said Rickles. “I’ll tell you what, boy. I do like to see myself on TV. Hey. Did you get a call from Bill O’Reilly’s people?”
“Yeah. And 20/20.”
“We going to do them, too?”
“I guess.”
“Good,” Rickles said, and sighed. “I have days when I think about being killed in the line of duty, and you know what haunts me? The idea that I’ll miss all that sweet, heartbreaking coverage when I’m gone.”
“What if you die in your own bed at seventy-five after an early-morning screw?”
“I’d rather get blown away,” Rickles said, and took another pull on his beer. “I’d prefer to die a legend, but I doubt I’ll be that lucky.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,” Kellaway said.
July 11, 10:00 A.M.
WHEN JAY RICKLES TOLD KELLAWAY that he had once stocked his office with black faces to put a black journalist at ease, he was guilty of exaggeration. He hadn’t really planted his window washer at a desk and told him to pretend to be a detective. The window washer was Cambodian and wasn’t even working that day.
But it was true that Shane Wolff, an IT guy from Atlantic Datastream, had been in the office on the morning Lanternglass arrived to interview Chief Rickles about the tragic death of an unarmed black youth in 1993 at the hands of the police. Shane was usually at the St. Possenti Police Department two or three times a week, to rebuild their office network, which was still improbably running Windows XP. And it was also true that Rickles had planted Shane at an empty detective’s desk, close to the front door, so Aisha Lanternglass would spot a black man in a tie as soon as she walked in.
At the time Lanternglass had nodded to Wolff, and he had mildly nodded back, and from that moment on they had studiously ignored each other. She knew him right away, of course, would’ve known him even if he didn’t also service the computers at the Digest. Wolff and Colson had gone to school together, had dated some of the same girls. But it wouldn’t have served to acknowledge him openly. As it happened, Shane Wolff’s frequent jobs for the St. Possenti police were his highest-paying gigs. First the cops paid him—and then Aisha did, if he came across anything she could use.
On Thursday, Wolff showed up at the Digest just as Aisha was finishing her morning workout. She was running steps, two flights up and then back, forty-eight steps in a complete circuit. She kept her free weights tucked in the shadows under the staircase. There was no space for them in the four-room apartment she shared with Dorothy, and Tim Chen didn’t mind.
“How many times do you go up and down?” Shane asked her, his voice echoing in the concrete stairwell.
She trotted to the bottom of the steps. “Fifty rotations. Almost done. Five left. Are you crying?”
Shane Wolff leaned into the open metal door that led to the parking lot. He didn’t look like a tech nerd. He was six foot three, maybe two hundred pounds, his neck as thick as his head. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming and tragic.
“It’s the smoke. I drove through a big cloud of it on the way here. I’ve never used my windshield wipers to brush away sparks before. They had me over to the PD yesterday to scrub the hard drives in Vice. About once a week, they go looking for online porn and find Russian malware instead. Anyway, while I was over there, I saw the ballistics report on the mall thing.”
She started running upstairs again. Her calves throbbed. “Hold that thought. I’ll be back.”
“Hey,” he said. “Is that good for your glutes? All those stairs? Must be.”
She hesitated, almost missed a step, kept going, didn’t answer him.
Tim Chen was waiting for her at the top of the steps. He had pushed open the Digest office’s fire door and sat on the landing, leaning against it, with Aisha’s battered old MacBook in his lap. He was editing her piece.
“I gotta cut these two paragraphs at the end,” he told her in a remote, distracted sort of way. “You’re five hundred words over, and this stuff isn’t important.”
“The hell I’m five hundred words over.” She slowed at the landing, put her hands on her knees, and inhaled deeply. Lanternglass craned her head to see what he was cutting. “Oh, come on, Tim. Don’t cut that. Why would you cut that?”
“You make it sound like Kellaway got kicked out of the army. He didn’t get kicked out. He served his country for a full tour in Iraq. Then he came home and stopped a mass shooting.”
“He was AdSep’d, administratively separated. That’s kicked out.”
“Don’t you have terrible things to do to your body?” Tim asked.
“Jesus,” she said, and trotted away down the steps.
Wolff watched her approach, his reddened eyes streaming. He looked like a mourner at the edge of a grave.
“Okay,” she said. “Give it to me. ‘Sources close to the investigation say . . .’”
“Becki Kolbert shot Roger Lewis three times with a .357 Mag. The first one nailed him in the chest while he was facing her. He turned to run, and she tagged him in the back and the left buttock. At that point Becki Kolbert probably tried to leave the office and was surprised by Mrs. Haswar. The way it looks, she slew the baby and Yasmin both with just one shot, right to the center mass.”
“‘Slew’? That’s a very Old Testament way of putting it,” she said. “Maybe you should be a writer.”