Free Hush by Anne Frasier

more
bullshit.
    "What about the FBI?" someone asked.
    "The FBI's Chicago field office is involved
in the case," Max Irving said.
    "Any plans to bring in other agents?"
    "Not at this point. We have our own excellent
profiler, Special Agent David Scott, who has been instrumental in
the apprehension of several criminals over the last four years,"
Irving told them. "He has a remarkable success rate."
    "But he's only one man. What about his
caseload?"
    The reporter, Victoria Price-Rand, had
brought up an ongoing problem. Everyone in the police department
and FBI was overextended. Last Max heard, Agent Scott was juggling
150 different homicide cases. Max himself was overseeing about the
same number. Too much crime, not enough law enforcement, not enough
crime labs, not enough manpower. And it was only going to get
worse. DNA labs could now process results in as quickly as two
weeks, a vast improvement over the time it used to take, but
technicians were so backed up that it could still take months to
get results.
    And to get an FBI agent sent down from
Quantico—well, the only way that would happen was if this last case
could be linked to the Madonna Murders.
     
    Two hours later, Alex Martin sat in the belly
of the newsroom, fingers flying over his keyboard, typing up his
condemning piece on Superintendent Sinclair, getting more pissed as
he wrote. Around him, other reporters sat in front of computers,
keys clicking, phones ringing, printers spewing out stories that
were coming in off wire services.
    Journalists just getting out of college
always imagined themselves doing human-interest stories. Or
commentary. Or starring in a column dealing with life, the United
States, the world. A column where the person would become famous
and readers would wait in anticipation for the next
thought-provoking article.
    Those were the kind of things journalists
dreamed of. That and of course a billion-dollar career writing more
than one Great American Novel. Nobody ever said, I'm going to cover
high school basketball. I'm going to write obituaries—which were
tough as hell to do. Alex knew that for a fact because that's where
he'd started out. And nobody said, I'm going to go to college,
major in journalism, so I can hang around police stations, so I can
sift through daily logs of domestic arguments, public intoxication,
traffic arrests, and report it. Day after day after day.
    Wouldn't win a Pulitzer that way. No, to win
a Pulitzer, you had to dig and dig, you had to uncover everything
you could uncover, expose every corner to light.
    He was paying his dues, he knew that, but he
wanted a story. A real damn story. He also knew that wasn't going
to happen either, because cops had their favorite reporters, guys
they'd worked with for years. Those were the ones who got the
stories, those were the ones who got the exclusives. Not somebody
like him. That much was made obvious when Sinclair ignored him in
front of his peers. It was hard enough to earn the respect of
fellow reporters without someone publicly humiliating you like
that.
    And so he typed, hitting the keys with hard,
angry strokes, wondering if he'd ever get a decent story, if he'd
chosen the right career. But with four years of student loans
hanging over his head, he had to stick with it. Even if it wasn't
right. Even if he'd made a mistake. That was the heartbreaking
thing about college. You had to make a choice—a guess, really—
about what you wanted to do with the rest of your life. It was a
roll of the dice, because there was a big chance you could be
wrong, a very big chance. And unless you were independently
wealthy, once it was done, it was done.
    More and more, Alex was thinking he'd made a
mistake. And that was a hard thing to deal with. That feeling of
knowing you didn't belong somewhere, that
what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here feeling of mounting desperation.
    Alex gave his story a file name: Abraham
Sinclair.
    He was still staring at the article when his
desk advisor stopped