Home > Buried(9)

Buried(9)
Author: Jeffery Deaver

Mrs. McMillan had heard about the puzzle on an Australian website devoted to games and puzzles. Fitz supposed that the only way she’d have seen it was because of Dottie Wyandotte.

Potentially, forty, fifty million . . .

Dust from digging wafted his way. Coughing, lozenge. Coughing, lozenge.

Then, heads turning to the site, the collective sound of human voices rose. No discernible spoken words, just a murmur of an emotional reaction at the discovery of a missing human being. Or a corpse.

Medics ran forward, carrying a stretcher.

A moment later they surfaced, bearing a pale and bloody but very much alive Jasper Coyle.

 

 

13

Fitz wrote and filed the piece about the rescue.

He’d managed to get a short one-on-one with Special Agent Trask and, in a scoop, had also interviewed the limerick solver.

“The trick is to keep an open mind,” the elderly woman had said in her melodious accent. “Don’t start solving the puzzle right away. Let it sit. Sometimes your first impression locks your mind; you can’t get past it.”

Not a bad rule for life, Fitz reflected.

He dug through the drawer and withdrew his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He found a chipped ceramic mug. On the bottom was dried coffee crust. The restroom and watercooler were inconveniently three minutes away. He poured a slug of the honey-colored liquor in. He sipped.

No harm to the flavor.

The Gravedigger story was by no means finished and he had the motive angle to explore. Not knowing this continued to bug him. Why was the last of the five Ws—the questions that every piece of hard news was supposed to answer: who, what, when, where . . . and why.

But the hour was late; he was tired. He’d continue working from home. He stuffed all the notes and printouts of the Gravedigger case into his leather bag, a gift from Jen forty-three years ago. His birthday. A group of friends and family over. She’d made Guinness beef stew and soda bread, his favorites. They had sung songs until all hours, a challenge because the piano’s middle C and the nearby F were not working. Also, a G in the upper atmosphere made an unearthly sound.

A good night.

A happy night.

Taking another hit of whiskey, he noted a light across the newsroom. It came from a cubicle, occupied, he could tell, because of the moving shadows. Picking up the bottle and mug, he walked across the newsroom and through the glass doors of the ExaminerOnline.

Dottie Wyandotte was leaning forward toward her massive monitor. Why didn’t staring at the busy surface all day make her dizzy? Maybe it did.

Every so often her fingers, with their black-tipped nails, would move in a frenzy on the keyboard.

“What’s one of the most common punctuation mistakes?” he asked.

Her head rose fast, surprised someone was present. She looked up at Fitz. Her face was unsmiling, her expression neutral. She was still angry.

The only thing I don’t need is your condescension . . .

“Come on,” he rasped. “Give it a shot.” Coughed for several seconds.

She looked at the screen, tapped return and sent something somewhere. “My sister’s five years younger. I don’t think she’s ever apologized in her life, not to me. And she’s got a long list of things to apologize for. What she does is she ignores me for a day or two or three and then calls and says something out of the blue. Completely irrelevant. ‘You hear about the new farmers’ market?’ ‘Jim and I are going to see Hamilton!’ That’s what passes for an apology to her.”

“I’m sorry. Not about your sister. About what I said.”

Now, looking his way. Her eyes still weren’t smiling, but the edge had softened. And quite the edge it had been. Impressive. Like his, when he was confronting a corrupt politician or philandering CEO.

He asked, “You drink whiskey?”

She said nothing for a moment. Then, glancing at the bottle: “Does it have wheat in it?”

“Does it have . . . what?”

“Wheat. I’m gluten intolerant.”

“Whiskey’s made out of corn.”

“Corn’s okay,” Dottie said. “Is it all corn?”

“I don’t know. Maybe rye.”

“Can’t do rye. Mostly I drink cosmos. Gluten-free vodka.”

“That’s a liquor? That they make?”

She nodded.

“Well, whiskey is all I have.”

“I’ll stick with this.” Lifting a Starbucks cup. “Nothing wrong with chamomile and whiskey.”

“Just not together.”

They tipped mug and cup toward each other, then sipped.

“You might’ve been the one who saved him,” Fitz told her.

“How’s that?”

“The woman who solved the riddle? She was overseas. Maybe one of your forty to fifty million.”

“Really?”

He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or not. Looking at the four studs in her cheek, he tried again to figure out what constellation they might represent. Came up with nothing. He’d never done science writing.

“You wrote that story fast,” she said.

“Had to make the deadline. Seven p.m.”

“What do you mean?”

“The print edition, the Examiner? Always been the rule. The copyeditor needs the copy by seven p.m. You get it one minute late and it’s bumped to day after tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s the rule. Nobody’s ever missed it.”

She seemed perplexed; with online publication, of course, you didn’t have to worry about typesetting and printing and getting the papers to the trucks and to newsstands and doorsteps. You hit the return key and, poof, there it was, for the world to read.

“Coyle’s okay?” she asked.

“Okay-ish.”

“Not a word that you’d use in a story.”

“Only in a direct quotation.”

Dottie gave a smile. “‘Quotation.’ A noun referring to a direct statement attributed to a speaker. The word ‘quote’ is a verb.”

He nodded, acknowledging she was correct. He poured another whiskey and downed it.

She was sipping her tea. “I knew who you were before I joined National Media.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“A professor at Northwestern? She mentioned you. She told us to read some of your pieces.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t look up baby goats in pajamas.”

“You should. They’re really cute. Why do you hate us?”

“Us?”

“Online, new media?”

Fitz set down his drink and popped a lozenge. “Because it doesn’t play by the rules. Real journalists dig, they background, they research. They’re fucking pains in the ass, hounding subjects for statements. They get double attribution—at the minimum—talk to multiple sources . . . They report facts. Not alternative facts, not sort-of, kind-of facts.”

He was riled up. But no stopping now.

“The social media mafia? No time for mining. They pass off rumors and opinions as news. Half the time they just plain make shit up. And people believe it because it’s in their feed. I read it, so it has to be true.” He lifted the mug and he drank. “Fake news used to be an oxymoron. If it was reported, it couldn’t be fake.”

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