Free Crime Beat by Scott Nicholson

mileage out of the con game, and now we can go back to cranking copy and selling papers. You’ll still be a celebrity until they make an arrest. And, who knows, this might make your career. Word gets around in this business, and somebody will probably steal you away in six months.”
    “I like it here,” Moretz said.
    I waved my hand. “We’re a dying breed. Print journalism is going the way of vinyl albums and disco. You’ll be off blogging or doing an Internet podcast somewhere, the next Julian Assange.”
    “If print is dying, what are you doing here, then?”
    That was a bigger question than anyone could answer. But this was my one shot at a surge, and though the Picayune was a small-town paper, I wanted a single success to cap off my obituary.
    I’d proofed enough obits to know that most people didn’t accomplish anything significant, and there were no Lifetime Achievement Awards for being a decent human being. If you wanted to be remembered, you had to make your moment.
    I finally came up with a suitable answer. “I’m doing the best I can, that’s what I’m doing here.”
    “The best you can do is second best.”
    The scanner crackled and a call for an accident with possible injury came through. Moretz grabbed his laptop and camera. “With any luck, I’ll give you some fresh meat for the front page,” he said.
    As he brushed past, I said, “Who told you about me and Kavanaugh?”
    “I have my sources.”
    He hurried away, and I kind of missed the old days when he’d called me “Chief.”

 
    14.
    I was mad at Kavanaugh, but once you’ve been to the trough, it’s hard to keep your nose out of it. She was over at my place, filling me in on the Jennings interrogation. In trade, I filled her whiskey glass.
    “You think he did it?” I said, flopping beside her on my shopworn couch.
    “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said. “It’s what Hardison thinks. But, personally, it sounds like Jennings was nowhere around when Shumate got it.”
    I put an arm around her, testing things. Plus it was November and getting cold. “When are they pulling you back to Raleigh?”
    She shrugged, but not hard enough to shuck my embrace. “They’re thinking of setting up a mountain bureau. Our readers like this little hillbilly crime beat.”
    “Incest and moonshine, huh?”
    “Hooks them every time. And don’t forget dogs. That ‘unsung hero’ piece was pretty schmaltzy, Howard.”
    “Come on. The way you’ve been glorifying Hardison, you have no room to talk.”
    “He’s the story. If this turns out to be a real serial killer instead of a string of coincidences, we need a tentpole. Right now, it’s Hardison. I could run with Jennings, but I get the feeling Hardison is just stabbing in the dark, especially after the Moretz fiasco.”
    I didn’t say anything. The liquor kept my mouth busy.
    “But if we get a real suspect, then the suspect becomes the tentpole and we get a ton of inches out of the creep—his damaged childhood, his connection to the victims, the public outrage at the monster in our midst. Then we get to trial and we focus on the attorneys. If we’re lucky, there’s a death sentence and we fill up the editorial page with that whole circle-jerk moral debate.”
    “Sounds like enough to build a career.”
    “Or write a true-crime book.”
    “But we’re not even sure this is a serial killer.”
    “That’s the whole problem. The SBI hasn’t pulled rank because there isn’t a compelling link, and Hardison doesn’t have anything but some fingernail clippers, a couple of random suspects, and a size-nine footprint.”
    I raised one of my dirty L.L. Beans. “That’s about average for a man, so that narrows it down to three billion suspects.”
    “If you stretch it far enough, you could tie that first murder, the Hanratty case, into it, and you’d have it tied into a neat ball.”
    “But that one’s totally different. A male victim, a death by gunshot wound. The others were