Vengeance Road. Rick Mofina

gone. His ultimatum kept him going. The ultimatum he’d given himself after they’d lowered his parents’ caskets into the ground eleven months ago.

       Time was running out.

      Who knows? Maybe the story he needed was right here, he told himself while navigating his way closer to the scene, near Ellicott Creek.

      It was on the fringes of a lush park.

      Flashing emergency lights splashed the trees in blood red as he pulled up to a knot of police vehicles.

      Uniformed officers were clustered at the tape. Gannon saw nothing beyond them but dense forest, as a stone-faced officer eyed his ID tag then assessed him.

      “It’s way in there. There’s no chance you media maggots are getting any pictures of anything today.”

      The others snickered.

      Gannon shrugged it off. He’d been to more homicides than this asshole. Besides, guys like that never deterred him. If anything, he thought, tapping his notebook to his thigh, they made him better.

       All right, pal, if there’s a story here, I’m going to find it.

      After some thirty minutes of watching detectives in suits, and forensics people in overalls, walk in and out of the forest, Gannon was able to buttonhole a state police investigator with a clipboard heading to his unmarked sedan.

      “Hey, Jack Gannon from the Buffalo Sentinel. Are you the lead?”

      “No, just helping out.”

      “What do you have?”

      Gannon stole a glimpse of the data on his clipboard. Looked like statements.

      “We’re going to put out a release later,” the investigator said.

      “Can you give me a little information now?”

      “We don’t have much, just basics.”

      “I’ll take anything.”

      “A couple of walkers discovered a female body this morning.”

      “Is it a homicide?”

      “Looks that way.”

      “What age and race is the victim?” Gannon asked.

      “I’d put her in her twenties. White or Native American. Not sure.”

      “Got an ID?”

      “Not confirmed. We need an autopsy for that.”

      “Can I talk to the walkers?”

      “No, they went home. It was a disturbing scene.”

      “Disturbing? How?”

      “I can’t say any more. Look, I’m not the lead.”

      “Can I get your name, or card?”

      “No, no, I don’t want to be quoted.”

      That was all Gannon could get and he phoned it in for the Web edition, putting “disturbing scene” in his lead. In the time that followed, more news teams arrived and Lee Watson, a Sentinel news photographer, called Gannon’s cell phone sounding distant against a drone.

      “What’s up, are you in a blender, Lee?” Gannon asked.

      “I’m in a rented Cessna. The paper wants an aerial shot of the scene.”

      Gannon looked up at the small plane.

      “Watch for Brandy Somebody looking for you,” Watson said. “She’s the freelancer they’re sending to shoot the ground. Point out anything for her.”

      When Brandy McCoy, a gum-snapping freelancer, arrived, the first thing Gannon did was lead her from the press pack and cops at the tape to the unmarked car belonging to the investigator he’d talked to earlier.

      The detective had gone back into the woods. His car was empty, except for his clipboard on the passenger seat. Gannon checked to ensure no one could see what he and the photographer were doing.

      “Zoom in and shoot the pages on the clipboard. I need the information.”

      “Sure.”

      Brandy’s jaw worked hard on bubble gum as she shot a few frames then showed Gannon.

      “Good,” he said, jotting information down and leaving. “My car’s over here, come on.”

      Twenty minutes later, Gannon and Brandy were walking to the front door of the upscale colonial house of Helen Dodd. She was a real estate broker, and her friend, Kim Landon, owned an art gallery in Williamsville, according to the information Gannon had gleaned from the police statements.

      Gannon thought having Brandy accompany him would help. Barely out of her teens, she was nonthreatening, especially with that sunny gum-chewing smile.

      As they reached the door, it opened to two women hugging goodbye.

      “Excuse us,” he said. “I’m Jack Gannon, and this is Brandy McCoy. We’re with the Buffalo Sentinel. We’re looking for Helen Dodd and Kim Landon?”

      Surprised, the two women looked at each other.

      “Would that be you?”

      Kim nodded. Helen was uneasy. Both women looked as though they had been crying. Gannon didn’t want to lose them.

      “Can we talk to you a bit about this morning?” he asked.

      “How did you get this address?” Helen Dodd wanted to know.

      Gannon said, “Well, we just came from the park, talked to police sources and stuff. We understand you found the woman.”

      Awkward silence followed until Brandy punctuated it with a prompt.

      “It must’ve been terrible.”

      Kim resumed nodding.

      “It was horrible,” Kim said.

      “May I take notes?” Gannon asked.

      “I don’t know.” Helen eyed their press tags. “You’re going to put this in the Sentinel?”

      “Yes, for the story we’re doing,” Gannon said.

      “For as long as I live, I’ll never forget it,” Kim started. “At first we thought it was a joke. When you see something like this, it makes you appreciate what’s important. It was just so horrible. I mean, neighbourhood kids play in that park.”

      “I hope they catch the monster who did it,” Helen said. “I’m calling my home-security company to make sure they keep an eye on my house.”

      “Can you walk us through how you found her?” Gannon asked.

      “We take a regular morning walk in that area and spotted it. Her,” Kim said. “At first she looked like a mannequin, entangled in shrubs and small trees. We didn’t get too close once we realized what it was.”

      “Can you tell me exactly what you saw?” Gannon asked.

      “We’d heard stories about what happens in there at night, which I never believed until now. We saw condoms and hypodermic needles,” Kim said.

      “She was in a shallow grave,” Helen said. “We saw dark hair, an arm bent over a head in a swimmer’s posture, like she was breaking the surface of the earth.”

      After they finished, Gannon dropped Brandy off at the scene to keep vigil until they removed the body.

      He had to get back to the newsroom.

      This was shaping up to be a grisly homicide, he thought, settling in at his desk. While eating a club sandwich from the cafeteria, he checked regional and state missing-person cases posted online, using the detective’s description of a white or Native American woman in her twenties as his guide.