Vengeance Road

Enthralled by life’s daily dramas, he read the Buffalo Evening News and the Buffalo Courier-Express. And when the Courier-Express folded, he read the Sentinel, which rose from its ashes.

And he dreamed about seeing his own stories in print.

When his parents worked late, his big sister, Cora, would take him to the library and get him books by Jack London, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.

“This is what a future reporter should be reading, Jackie,” she’d said.

Cora was five years older than him and nurtured his dream. She convinced their parents to buy him a secondhand computer and encouraged him to write. They were as close as any brother and sister could be. But their age difference would have a bearing on their relationship and eventually Cora grew apart from him and her family.

She changed.

It hit him the night police brought her home after she’d got drunk with friends who’d stolen a car. She’d grown into a different person, one who argued constantly with Mom and Dad. So many nights were filled with screaming, slamming doors, heart-breaking silence and tears. Cora started taking drugs, which led to more arguments until the day she ran away.

All she’d left was a note saying she could no longer stand living under “their fascist rules.”

She was seventeen.

Friends told his parents Cora had gone to California with an older guy who was a heroin addict. When his father got an address, he flew to San Francisco and looked for Cora.

It was all in vain.

They never saw her again.

They hired private detectives, flew to cities when they had tips. It was futile. He ached for her to come home.

Then his anguish turned to anger for what Cora had done. Later, there were times he’d search for her on online databases. He even asked police friends to do whatever they could.

Not much came of it.

Cora was out of their lives.

Or dead.

Accept it and leave the past in the past, he’d always told himself.

Miles and time swept by as he searched the night for answers.

He drove through older neighborhoods; the best and the worst of Buffalo. Here were the abandoned factories, the shut-up mills and forgotten stores, reaching from the wasteland of the rust belt like a death grasp. And here were the new bohemian communities that resurrected historic, near-dead buildings and revived the never-say-die attitude of Buffalo.

After Cora left, he’d worked brutal summer shifts on assembly lines in Buffalo factories to put himself through college because his parents had spent nearly all they had looking for her.

When he found time, he reported for the campus paper, and freelanced articles to the Sentinel and the News.

All the while, he yearned to escape Buffalo for New York City and a job with a big news outlet. After he graduated from college, he worked at small weeklies then landed an internship with the Buffalo Sentinel. Impressed by his determination, the paper gave him a full-time reporting job.

The Sentinel would be his stepping stone out of Buffalo.

Then, while dispatched to cover a shooting in Ohio, he’d met Lisa Newsome, a reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was a sharp-witted, brilliant writer. He remembered the way her hair curtained over her eye when she wrote the stories she’d cared about.

She told him that she’d fallen for his edgy charm and “that Matt Damon thing you got going in the looks department.” She wanted him to move to Cleveland and work at the Plain Dealer, or she’d offered to move to Buffalo because she yearned to have kids and settle down.

He didn’t, so they broke it off and Gannon threw all he had into his reporting.

Two years back, his talent was tested when a charter jet en route to Moscow from Chicago plunged into Lake Erie a quarter mile off Buffalo’s shoreline. Some two hundred people died.

While the world press speculated that the cause was terrorism, Gannon found a Russian-speaking man in the Sentinel‘s mail room. They worked the phones and the Internet, locating the pilot’s brother who was living in St. Petersburg, Russia. Turned out the brother had received the last e-mail the pilot had sent but refused to share it. “Think of the dead, their families deserve to know the answer. Think of the dead, their ghosts will haunt you,” Gannon and the Russian-speaking Sentinel worker kept telling the brother before convincing him to give them the final e-mail. It detailed the pilot’s plan to commit suicide by crashing his jet because his wife had left him for a woman.

The story was picked up around the world.

It led to Gannon’s Pulitzer nomination. He didn’t win the prize, but he got a job offer in New York City with the World Press Alliance, the global wire service.

His dream had come true.

Then fate intervened.

About a week after the offer came, his mother and father were driving to see an old friend about another tip they’d had about Cora’s location. Even though she’d be close to forty years old, Gannon’s mother and father refused to give up searching for her.

“She may have children, we have a right to find her,” his mother said.

They never made it. A construction worker who’d spent the afternoon in a bar slammed into their car.

They both died instantly.

Gannon blamed Cora.

It was a horrible time.

Gannon was in no shape to do anything and declined the New York offer. Why didn’t he leave afterward? Maybe he stuck around to be closer to the memory of his parents. Maybe he thought Cora would miraculously appear. Even now, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. In the end, the New York job never materialized.

So where did he go from here?

He eased his Pontiac Vibe to a stop at the edge of a park alongside Ellicott Creek. As the Vibe’s engine ticked, he sat behind the wheel staring into the night.

Everything he was, everything he dreamed of, was on the line.

In his heart he knew he was not wrong on his reporting of Detective Karl Styebeck’s link to Bernice Hogan’s murder. Call it fate, destiny or a cosmic force, but something had guided him to that meeting-room door that day at Clarence Barracks and pointed to Styebeck.

But all he had left were more unanswered questions about the case.

There was only one thing he could do now.

He reached to the floor behind the passenger seat for his lantern flashlight. It had a new six-volt battery and an intense-focus beam. The light was strong.

He left his car and headed for the woods. If he was going to search for more answers, the shallow grave where they’d found Bernice Hogan’s corpse was the place to start.

16

Jolene Peller’s body swayed rhythmically to the low drumming of big wheels rolling at high speed.