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.”
Supporting? He had something.
“What’s going on?”
“That’s all I know. Did you try ECSO?” said the woman who answered for Ascension Park.
A deputy with the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said, “Yeah, we’ve got people there, but the SP is your best bet.”
He called the New York State Police at Clarence Barracks. Trooper Felton answered but put him on hold, thrusting Gannon into Bruce Springsteen’s “The River.”
Listening to the song, Gannon considered the faded news clippings pinned to low walls around his desk, his best stories, and the dream he’d pretty much buried.
He never made it to New York City.
Here he was, still working in Buffalo.
The line clicked, cutting Springsteen off.
“Sorry,” Felton said, “you’re calling from the Sentinel about Ellicott Creek?”
“Yes. What do you have going on out there?”
“We’re investigating the discovery of a body.”
“Do you have a homicide?”
“Too soon to say.”
“Is it a male or female? Do you have an ID, or an age?”
“Cool your jets there. You’re the first to call. Our homicide guys are there, but that’s routine. I got nothing more to release yet.”
“Who made the find?”
“Buddy, I’ve got to go.”
A body in Ellicott. That was a nice area.
He had to check it out.
He tucked his notebook into the rear pocket of his jeans and grabbed his jacket, glancing at the senior editors in the morning story meeting in the glass-walled room at the far west side.
Likely discussing pensions, rather than stories.
“Jeff, tell the desk I’m heading to Ellicott Creek.” He tore a page from his notebook with the location mapped out. “Get a shooter rolling to this spot. We may have a homicide.”
And I may have a story.
3
Gannon hurried to the Sentinel’s parking lot and his car, a used Pontiac Vibe, with a chipped windshield and a dented rear fender.
The paper was downtown near Scott and Washington, not far from the arena where the Sabres played. The fastest way to the scene was the Niagara leg of the New York State Thruway to 90 north.
Wheeling out, with Springsteen in his head, Gannon questioned where he was going with his life. He was thirty-four, single and had spent the last ten years at the Buffalo Sentinel.
He looked out at the city, his city.
And there was no escaping it.
Ever since he was a kid, all he wanted to be was a reporter, a reporter in New York City. And it almost happened a while back after he broke a huge story behind a jetliner’s crash into Lake Erie.
It earned him a Pulitzer nomination and job offers in Manhattan.
But he didn’t win the prize and the offers evaporated.
Now it looked like he’d never get to New York. Maybe this reporter thing wasn’t meant to be? Maybe he should do something else?
No way.
Being a reporter was written in his DNA.
One more year.
He remembered the ultimatum he’d given himself at the funeral.
One more year to land a reporting