“Should I just go?”
Kaiser smiles. “Yep. Take off. I’m going to abuse my authority for a minute.”
He opens his door and begins marching down the block like a military officer on a mission. Though I’m tempted to watch the confrontation, I exit the car and trot up to the door of City Hall. Lincoln Turner has a big chip on his shoulder and a lot of nerve, but something tells me Kaiser can handle him. For the first time since arriving at the sheriff’s office, I think about Annie and my mother hiding out at Edelweiss. They’re probably mad with worry by now, and as much as I’d like to check on Caitlin at the newspaper, I know she can take care of herself. I need to hug my daughter, and I need sleep. Tomorrow’s battles will be here all too soon.
CHAPTER 12
IN THE END, Caitlin decided to enter the Examiner by her usual route, the employees’ door at the rear of the building. If Billy Byrd had a deputy lying in wait, Jordan Glass was ready to snap fifty pictures of the arrest with her motor-drive Nikon. As Caitlin walked through the rear parking lot, noting the familiar cars of her reporters, she spied the door that had been locked against her by one of her own staff. Without warning she flashed back to the kidnapping with a clarity that made her pulse pound and her breath go shallow. She saw Penn being held on tiptoe with an arm around his throat and a pistol to his head. Then came a rush of images from all that had followed, from the basement, and the fire.
How close we came to dying, she thought, touching her burned cheek for the first time since the lake. And if I had died, the child I’m carrying would have died with me, and no one would have known—not unless they discovered it in the autopsy. Caitlin had only known about the baby herself for twenty hours or so, and she’d only told one soul on the planet about it: Tom Cage, via text message. Tom hasn’t even seen that message, she thought. He doesn’t have his cell phone on. If he did, they’d have caught him by now. Killed him, probably. In fact, he could be dead already. As much as Caitlin blamed Tom for the events of the past days, the thought of him lying facedown in a ditch somewhere stopped her breath in her throat.
Sensing her distress, Jordan took Caitlin’s hand and squeezed, bringing her back to the present. As her heartbeat slowed, Caitlin started toward the door again. A Natchez Police Department squad car was parked in the handicapped space to the right of it, exhaust rising from its tailpipe. Caitlin waved at the young cop behind his fogged window glass, thinking of the officer who had probably been murdered by Brody Royal’s men. She’d known him only as a prone form lying on the floor of the van that had carried them to Royal’s house. Stopping at the back door, she raised her hand and turned the knob. Against all logic, it opened.
“I called ahead, remember?” Jordan said, sensing her confusion. “One step at a time, girl.”
“Thanks.”
THE EXAMINER BUILDING SEEMED eerily quiet as Caitlin and Jordan moved up the back hall, but the moment Caitlin walked into the newsroom, the place erupted in applause. She raised her hands to quiet the grinning staff, but new people kept coming in from other rooms, photographers and service people and even one of the advertising girls. They were obviously happy to see her alive, and she was glad to be that way, so she let the clapping go on for a bit.
They were a young group, she realized. Almost no one over thirty. For many years the Examiner had served as a sort of farm program for the larger papers in the Masters chain, but during her tenure as publisher Caitlin had changed that. She’d managed to assemble a bright cadre of journalism majors from all over the country, most from top schools. She paid them well and did her best to keep them busy. Whenever she’d lost one to a larger paper, she somehow managed to replace him or her with someone of equal talent. This eclectic group she had supplemented with some of the brightest liberal arts graduates from Natchez, kids who’d wanted to return to their hometown after college.
Now they stood before her, gathered between the computer workstations that lined the walls, fourteen kids with all the talent in the world and a desperate hunger to work on something important. They’d known since Tuesday that something big was afoot. The initial attack on Henry and the burning of the Beacon had galvanized them into action, and Henry’s backup files had given them something to sink their teeth into. But according to Jamie Lewis, the assassination attempt on Henry in the hospital—followed by the attack on Penn and Caitlin—had stunned them into a kind of paralysis. They’d read about attacks on reporters in places like Colombia and Myanmar, but murderous attacks on journalists in America seemed incomprehensible. The discovery that the Examiner’s press operator had disappeared after probably assisting in Caitlin’s kidnapping only added to their collective sense of shock. Yet not one had refused to come in when Jamie called in the middle of the night; indeed, few had left the building during the past forty-eight hours, except to catch four or five hours of sleep.
Caitlin looked at each face in turn: taut lips, worried eyes, the young men with arms folded across their chests, the women biting fingernails, everyone gathered closer together than they normally would. The silence truly was eerie, and then she realized why: the computers had been shut down. She couldn’t remember ever having heard the newsroom so quiet. I must have, she thought, during electrical storms. But of course then there was the drumming of rain and the roll of thunder. Now there was absolute silence—the silence of expectation.