The Will Of The Wisp. Joseph Sr. Cairo

shook his head. “You started out this conversation telling me I was a pretty boy. You’re very beautiful . . .”

      “More beautiful than your girlfriend, Esther?”

      Now she was asking for it. “You’ll forgive me Miss Compton, but I was going to say that you’re beautiful, but that I find you distant, cold and frankly unreachable.“

      “Perhaps that’s what defines beauty, Mallory.”

      Mallory smirked. “You’re a far cry the girl on the screen, back in my office. The New York scene has changed you.”

      “And just who am I then?”

      “Your passion is buried in your past. You’ve cut off your past and . . .”

      “ . . . lost my passion. It’s so refreshing to meet someone that thinks he can re-ignite it.”

      “Let’s change the subject, shall we? I want your impression of what happened eight years ago in North Dakota. And I don’t mean the song and dance account in the papers.”

      “Sure Mallory, let’s get down to business. But first I want your investigation to be featured on Tunnel Vision. You’ll take a cameraman with you, and I want you to prepare a piece. My associate producer . . .”

      “I won’t be needing his help, thank you.”

      “This is your shot, Mallory. A chance to crack the Network. You’ve got the looks, the voice, the manner . . . “

      “To be a talking head?”

      “To try to make a difference in this godforsaken industry. If you bring something to the table, I’ll guarantee you creative freedom. Are you the kind of man who wants to make a difference, or not?”

      Mallory nodded cynically as he gently gnawed at his bottom lip. Things were starting to get serious. “All due respect, Miss Compton, I’m not sure the world is worth it.”

      “I’m here strictly as an emissary for my fiancée, Douglas Abbott. I don’t really care what you do, whether you accept the offer or not. But if your answer is yes, don’t ever take that patronizing tone with me again. You can save that for your girlfriend. And let’s make one thing perfectly clear. This is not a date. It’s a business meeting.”

      The guitarist had gotten to the last refrain: “you’d better look hard and you’d better look twice, . . .”

      “Talk to me about the Stallings kidnapping.” Mallory’s voice was stirringly conciliatory.

      “My first network feed. What the hell ever happens in North Dakota anyway? I’m a farm girl from outside Fargo. My father was a Scotsman, my mother an Irish Catholic. That pine ridge region is as foreign to me as the surface of the moon.”

      “Who lives up there.”

      “Dutch, Germans. Cattle farmers mostly. Some dairy farms.”

      “How did the Stallings blend into the community?”

      “Pretty well, I guess.”

      “What about Dr. Stallings?”

      “I liked him.”

      “He’d had affairs?”

      “One that I know of . . . Reverend Robert’s wife. She was an ex-prostitute. The good reverend had seen fit to reform her. She hated him for it. Did everyone in town. No one took it seriously. It had nothing to do with the case.”

      “What else? There must be something else you can tell me.”

      “Nothing, Mallory, not a thing. Those people up there walk around with stars in their eyes. The wind drives them crazy.”

      A young man wearing black jeans and a black nylon button-down with a massive forehead crowned by a thick widow’s peak filled in with thick curly black hair, approached Melissa holding up a page from his sketchpad. “It would give me great pleasure, mademoiselle, if you would accept this portrait,” he told her. It was as if a spotlight had been trained on the TV siren. Everyone turned to witness her reaction. The guitarist walked over strumming Tenth Avenue Freeze Out. Mallory was impressed with the kid. He had chutzpa and the sketch was a real work of art. The French kid had captured her frankness, her pensive quality, her brooding indifference.

      “Thank you,” Melissa responded warmly.

      Three short cracks. Like taps on a table. But coming from across the room. A blood-curdling scream. A woman dressed in a Monique Lhullier gown with an open back near the condiment table dropped her tray of sautéed vegetables. Three children from among the class of sixth-graders lay on the floor, stricken by gunfire. “Robert!” a grey- haired women screamed from the end of the long table at a spiked hair youth standing on his seat. More fire. The kid shot the teacher in the chest. She fell backward from the force of the bullet. Then two more shots. Two boys sitting at the next table fell like ducks in a shooting gallery.

      “Get down,” Mallory yelled to Melissa. He swiveled out of his chair and started running down the horizontal conduit toward the youth. He was too far away. The kid calmly reached into his bag for another magazine. Click. The old cartridge fell to the floor. Click. The new one was in. By now the realization of what was unfolding had permeated the room. Pandemonium. Children running, screaming, crying. Adults frozen, helpless, gawking in disbelief. Mallory had fifty feet to go by the time the kid reloaded. The kid grasped the gun with both hands, took a shooters stance, and fired multiple shots at the charging detective. Mallory leapt behind a table, swiveled quickly on his back, and came up firing his Colt 9000 in a rapid barrage. The gun discharged like a cannon, compared to .22 caliber the kid was firing. The twelve-year-old took it right between the eyes and flew backward landing against the wall under a print of Manet’s, The Winter Festival, his brains splattering all over the painting.