Baiting & Fishing Read online

Chapter 3

  A few days later, Ray turned in two stories. One was about the arrest of what appeared to be a serial rapist. Ray liked police stories that gave him the opportunity to have a continuing story on which to report regularly. It gave him the chance to get his byline in the paper on a daily basis, keeping his name in front of the reading public. That was important – or had once been important – in the newspaper business. Ray preferred not to think about the diminution in importance of newspaper bylines.

  He also liked crime stories because they were easy to write. Over the years he'd written many such stories and he had most of the the ones from the last twenty years saved in his word processor. Since crime stories were frequently very similar, he often recycled his articles, having convinced himself that copying his own articles didn't constitute legal plagiarism. He could occasionally crank out a 2500 word article in under an hour, depending on how much old material he was able to use. His editor had never caught on to his recycled articles.

  The second article he turned in was a long feature article for Sunday's local pages about the closing of what was nearly the last old tourist motel on Siesta Key. Years ago, Ray had appointed himself the unofficial eulogist for old Sarasota landmarks being torn down as a result of “progress”. He hated watching the demise of the pre-Disney Florida he loved. He had a scrapbook filled with articles and a shoe box full of photos. He planned to turn those articles into a book ... someday. His working title was Paradise Lost, Redux. He was in no hurry to start writing it because he was depressed enough.

  Having submitted those two articles, Ray had lived up to his obligations to the paper for the month, other than the follow up reports on the rapist. He was a friend of the detective heading up the investigation. He would check in with his buddy every day or so. That story would be easy.

  He decided to resume his research on the Wilson saga. His contract with the paper gave him latitude to pick his own stories and the freedom to spend the time necessary to digging up information on stories that might or might not pan out. That was perhaps the one compensation of his longevity with the paper. Occasionally a senior editor would ask him to look into something in particular. He always did some investigation in response to those requests. He did not always write anything about what he learned. The previous management of the paper was very good about that. They were newspaper people who knew he had great instincts. The editorial staff had known him well enough to know his instincts were usually right. The new management was a corporation that was more interested in having employees who did what they were told than in telling good stories. Ray, and nearly everybody else at the Times, assumed that his days were numbered.

  Ray was not one for worrying about the future. He lived very much in the moment. His current moment found him in the morgue at the Times. The paper had most of the last five or six years' worth of articles stored digitally in searchable databases accessible from every workstation in the building. To access older articles, reporters still had to go to the morgue and dig out roll after roll of microfilm. Few reporters actually did much in-depth research any more. Those that did bitched about what a chore it was. All but Ray. He loved spending hours alone in the morgue.

  He was vain enough that, in addition to whatever subject he was researching, he allowed himself to be sidetracked, looking up articles he had written. Over the years, he found that he had at least one article in most of the old issues he reviewed. He liked to read his old stuff. He remembered most of his “big” articles, but a lot of his smaller news pieces caught him by surprise. He generally liked what he saw, except for his really early work. Reading the articles he wrote in the first ten years or so of his career was painful, but he forced himself to do it if for no other reason than to remind himself how far he had come.

  Even though Steve Johnston had told him not to worry about the fall of Techtron in his research, he knew he needed to have a general sense of the time line and who was involved, if for no other reason than to learn which bad guys had gone to jail so he would know who he could ignore when he started digging deeper. He spent several hours poring over the stories, jotting notes and making hrmphing noises in his throat. Every now an then he would nod vigorously and write something down in red ink. After what seemed to Ray to be only a few minutes, the archivist came over to him and said, “Ray, we'll be closing in fifteen.”

  He looked up, somewhat bleary, but with eyes wide in surprise, “You're kidding!?”

  She laughed and patted his shoulder, “No, I'm not. You need to get up and stretch, Ray.”

  He stood up and discovered that all his joints were stiff and sore. He wouldn't have time for a run at the beach before dark, so he headed for the gym. He hated going to the gym, but he kept a membership because of days like today, when he worked until after dark, or those days when it was too stormy to run outside. With his sedentary job, he tried to get in at least a couple of hours of running a day, usually outside. He only resorted to the gym when it was unavoidable.

  Almost from the second he walked into the gym, he considered leaving. The place was overrun by high school cheerleaders. It was August. Football season was fast approaching. He guessed the cheerleaders were training for the upcoming season.

  Cheer leading was different now than it had been when he was a kid. Unlike the little tarts he remembered, who simply jumped around on the sidelines shaking their pom-poms to distract the adults and jiggling other parts of their anatomy for the benefit of the adolescent boys, these girls were actual athletes who did some pretty amazing gymnastics. Their moves could be impressive on the sidelines of a football game, but he wasn't happy with the giggling and talking in the gym. He hated talking in the gym. Just as he started to fume, silence fell.

  Five boys – obviously football players – walked out of the weight room and hopped on exercise bikes directly in front of the cheerleaders on their elliptical machines. Ray smiled to himself thinking that perhaps things hadn't changed so much after all. The good thing was that the girls were finally quiet. The bad thing was the boys were talking and showing off for the benefit of the girls. Ray was both amused and annoyed to find that, in addition to the usual smell of sweat and disinfectant, the place reeked of teen-agers in heat. He reminded himself once again he'd been meaning to turn his spare bedroom into an exercise room for years. Maybe the time had come to do it.

  When he got home, he stood at the sink and ate half of a Cuban sandwich left over from lunch the day before, washing it down with fat-free buttermilk from the carton. Unlike the stereotypical bachelor pad, Ray's home was immaculately clean, thanks to the worlds greatest cleaning lady, who came in once a week to scrub it from top to bottom. Ray helped his own cause by being borderline obsessive about neatness. The cleaning lady charged him less than she charged most of her other clients because she did not have to pick up after him.

  Ray loved the sense of order he found in his home. All too often the world outside seemed to be chaotic and downright terrifying. Inside his house, where everything was clean, neat and well-organized, he felt safe.

  He did not mind straightening up or occasionally cleaning up messes in between Elena's visits. He hated, however, to wash dishes, so he used as few as was possible, hence his tendency to eat out of the container while standing at the sink, or, more often, to eat out altogether.

  When he had finished his “dinner”, he took a pitcher of tea, his cell phone and his spiral notebook to the screened porch. As he had gone through the Techtron stories, he had made a list of the reporters he knew who had filed stories on the subject. Even though he worked for a small paper in a backwater market, he had been in the business forever and he knew a lot of people. He started making calls.

  Each call ran along the same pattern. They started with reporter chit-chat and personal “catching up”, then Ray turned to the reason for the call. Next he had to spend several minutes convincing the other reporter that he did not have any new information he was about to spring on the world, scooping
everybody. He explained that he was doing a feature article on Marcella Wilson because she had recently and publicly taken up residence in a posh section of Sarasota. After putting up with some taunts about how far he had sunk to be doing celebrity bios, which made him grit his teeth, each of the reporters agreed to tell him what they knew about the case that didn't make it into the papers. Ray took notes, asked questions and thanked his friends. Each and every conversation ended with a brief discussion of the prospects for the local college team in the upcoming football season.

  By the time he finished with the California reporters on his list, it was 1:00 a. m. He glanced over his notes, jotted a few things in red in the margins and went to bed.

  He had a hard time falling asleep. He had not turned up one bit of evidence to support his theory that Wilson was anything other than what he appeared to be. Ray could not shake the feeling that didn't mean there wasn't something there. He just needed to keep digging.