Vengeance Road

All of her senses were screaming.

Her fingers probed the earth but she was unable to find her bag. Frantic, she clawed the dirt for her pepper spray, a rock, a branch.

Anything.

Her pulse galloped, she didn’t breathe. After several agonizing moments, everything subsided. The threat seemed to pass with a sudden gust that rustled the treetops.

Oh, thank God.

Jolene collected herself to resume looking for Bernice, when she was hit square in the face by a blazing light.

Squinting, she raised her hands against the intensity. Someone grunted, a shadow strobed. She ran but fireworks exploded in her head, hurling her into nothingness.

2

What was that?

The next morning, Jack Gannon, a reporter at the Buffalo Sentinel, picked up a trace of tension on the paper’s emergency scanners.

An array of them chattered at the police desk across the newsroom from where he sat.

Sounds like something’s going on in a park, he thought as a burst of coded dispatches echoed in the quiet of the empty metro section.

Not many reporters were in yet.

Gannon was not on cop-desk duty today, but he’d cut his teeth there years ago, chasing fires, murders and everyday tragedies. It left him with the skill to pluck a key piece of data from the chaotic cross talk squawking from metro Buffalo’s police, fire and paramedic agencies.

Like a hint of stress in a dispatcher’s voice, he thought as he picked out another partial transmission.

Somebody had just called for the medical examiner.

The reporter on scanner duty better know about this.

For the last two weeks the assignment desk had promised to keep Gannon free to chase a tip he’d had on a possible Buffalo link to a woman missing from New England.

He needed a good story.

But this business with the police radios troubled him.

Scanners were the lifeblood of a newspaper. And no reporter worth a damn risked missing something that a competitor might catch, especially in these days of melting advertising and shrinking circulation.

Did anyone know about this call for the medical examiner?

He glanced over his computer monitor toward the police desk at the far side of the newsroom, unable to tell who, if anyone, was listening.

“Jeff!” He called to the news assistant but got no response.

Gannon walked across the newsroom, which took up the north side of the fourteenth floor and looked out to Lake Erie.

The place was empty, a portrait of a dying industry, he thought.

A couple of bored Web-edition editors worked at desks cluttered with notebooks, coffee cups and assorted crap. A bank of flat-screen TV monitors tilted down from the ceiling. The sets were tuned to news channels with the volume turned low.

Gannon saw nothing on any police activity anywhere.

He stopped cold at the cop desk.

“What the hell’s this?”

No one was there listening to the radios.

Doesn’t anyone give a damn about news anymore? This is how we get beat on stories.

He did duty here last week. This week it was someone else’s job.

“Jeff!” he shouted to the news assistant who was proofreading something on his monitor. “Who’s on the scanners this morning?”

“Carson. He’s up at the Falls. Thought a kid had gone over but turns out he dropped his jacket in the river. Carson blew a tire on his way back here.”

“Who’s backing him up?” Gannon asked.

“Sharon Langford. I think she went to have coffee with a source.”

“Langford? She hates cop stories.”

Just then one of the radios carried a transmission from the same dispatcher who’d concerned Gannon.

“… copy … they’re rolling to Ellicott and the park now … ten-four.”

Calling in the M.E. means you have a death. It could be natural, a jogger suffering a heart attack. It could be accidental, like a drowning.

Or it could be a homicide.

Gannon reached down, tried to lock on the frequency but was too late. He cursed, returned to his desk, kicked into his old crime-reporter mode, called Buffalo PD and pressed for information on Ellicott.

“I got nothing for you,” the officer said.

All right. Let’s try Cheektowaga.

“We got people there but it’s not our lead.” The officer refused to elaborate.

How about Amherst PD?

“We’ve got nothing. Zip.”

This thing must have fallen into a jurisdictional gray zone, he thought as he called Ascension Park PD.

“We’re supporting out there.”