By the skin of my teeth.
That was the phrase Stephen Malik had been using in reply when sympathetic friends and colleagues asked him how he was holding up, or whether he was hanging on, or if, as of that day, he still had a job at the Tribune. He’d been saying it for so long, in fact, that it had ceased to be an honest answer. If it was true one was holding up or hanging on or keeping one’s job by the skin of one’s teeth, it’s assumed one could not do so indefinitely. In Malik’s case, however, everyone agreed that his era at the Tribune was in its final hours. A Web site dedicated to journalism gossip had a regular feature called “Malik Watch.” Several times a week, it published an anonymous quote from inside the newsroom detailing a grievance against the managing editor, or a rumor about his replacement. Unidentified sources spied the Tribune publisher courting candidates for the job at pricey restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami.
But still he remained. He remained although he’d run out of excuses he could sell even to himself. Maybe I really am the wrong man for this job, he thought. He was ready to leave. He had rehearsed his farewell newsroom speech, decided on a graceful, gracious exit with nothing but kind words for the filthy saboteurs upstairs who had recruited him and then plotted against him. He and his wife had discussed retirement in the north, Wisconsin or maybe the Upper Peninsula, to a small town with a weekly paper, because seeing a daily on his doorstep every morning would be painful for a time. He had once loved this business so much.
It was amid such an atmosphere, on a sunny spring day, that he found Sally Barwick lurking outside his office. He invited her in and shut the door.
“Stephen, I’ve been keeping something from you. From everyone here.”
He expected she was going to tell him about her gaming. It was something, at this point in his free fall, that he couldn’t care less about. “What’s that?”
“I’ve been working on a story for a couple months. I haven’t told you or anyone else about it. Now it’s almost got me killed.”
Not what he thought. “Are you talking about this business with the lawyer? The creep who was stalking you?”
She considered the accuracy of that statement. “Actually, I was sort of stalking him. At first, anyway.”
“What? This Coyne guy? The one you took out the restraining order against?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you talking about?”
Fidgeting, Sally realized she was sitting in the chair she hated, the most uncomfortable chair on the 400 block of North Michigan Avenue, and she wondered why she hadn’t chosen another of the three in this office. “Sam Coyne attacked me because I’ve been trying to prove he’s the Wicker Man.”
“Jesus, Barwick.” He snickered because it had to be a joke.
“I’m serious.”
For a moment, Malik’s own troubles seemed not worth worrying about.
Sally began describing her case, trying to flatten her voice so the parts that were true sounded as sincere as the parts that weren’t. “I received an anonymous tip about six months ago. The caller said I should look into Sam Coyne. He didn’t say why. I did, and I didn’t find anything, but I did notice he was a gamer. Like me.”
“Shadow World?”
“Right.”
“When I didn’t run anything about him in the paper, my tipster called back. He said to check out Sam Coyne inside the game. So I did.”
“You were investigating Coyne’s life, inside a video game? How would you do that?”
“Same way you’d investigate him out here. Shadow World has records, and sources, and streets and alleyways.”
“So what did you find?”
“That Coyne is a killer.”
“Inside the game?”
“Right. He kills other players in the game, all female, and in ways remarkably similar to the Wicker Man.”
Malik had a bad feeling, the kind he usually had right before he had to fire someone. “Which is sick, but not illegal.”
“But then I checked Coyne’s killing in the game against the Wicker Man’s killings out here.”
“And?”
“When Coyne is killing in Shadow World, it’s like the Wicker Man doesn’t even exist out here. All quiet.” This wasn’t exactly true, of course, but Sally didn’t want to go into Justin’s theories explaining the anomalies in his chart.
“Proves nothing.”
“True. So I called a cop I know from the Wicker beat, a detective in homicide, and I casually dropped Coyne’s name.”
“What did he give you?”
“A long, long silence.”
“So you still got nothing.”
“So I call him every day for two weeks. And he tells me, way off the record, that Coyne is a person of interest in the Wicker investigation.”
“Along with how many other interesting persons?”
“God, I don’t know, Stephen. None that also turned up in an independent investigation by the city’s top newspaper.”
“What do you want to do?”
“What do you think? I want to run with the story.”
“With what story, Sals?” He moved his hand in the air, typesetting a mock front page. “Reporter Accuses Man She Has Personal Beef with of Being Infamous Serial Killer.”
“It’s a good thing you don’t write headlines,” she said with a friendly snort. “And I’m not accusing him because he attacked me, he attacked me because I accused him. I want to run with the story that Sam Coyne is a suspect in the Wicker Man killings.”
This is a joke, Malik thought. “With all the problems I’ve got, what makes you think I want to take on the entire partnership of Ginsburg and Addams in a libel suit?”
“It’s only libel if I’m wrong about Coyne. And I’m not wrong.”
“So you actually think he won’t sue?”
“No, I’m betting he will. I’m betting, in the course of the widely publicized civil trial and the ensuing high-profile police investigation, that we’ll discover evidence proving he’s a killer. The Tribune will get credit for capturing one of the most notorious serial murderers in American history, and your job will be saved in the process.”
“Sweetheart, if I went along with a stunt like that they’d have my office cleaned out before you could mix strawberries in your morning yogurt.”
“It’s risky, I know. But risky journalism wins awards.” She added, “And saves jobs.”
“It’ll be the newspaper world’s first posthumous rehire,” Malik said. “If the Trib ’s lawyers don’t kill me, or that serial killer of yours doesn’t slit my throat, my wife will shoot me dead. We’re a newspaper, not a clearinghouse for personal vendettas.”
“So we’re just supposed to sit around and let a killer walk the streets?”
“What killer, Sally? It’s like I don’t even know you. Bring me evidence. Solid reporting. Show me this guy is who you say he is and not just a big jerk.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. But he’s smart. He might have killed twenty people, and he hasn’t left any evidence behind yet. We have to smoke him out. Or smoke out someone close to him who might know the truth.”
“Fine. Bring me something besides anonymous sources.”
Sally inhaled a lungful of stale, recirculated air. “Coyne tried to break into my house, Stephen. While I was inside. There’s only one reason why he’d do that: because he suspects I’m on to him.”
“I trust your instincts, Sally,” Malik said. “Bring me an actual story and I’ll print it. But I won’t go to press on your theories and cross my fingers they’ll be proven true.”
At lunch, from her desk, Sally met Justin at the Shadow Billy Goat.
“It was worth a try,” Sally said. She didn’t tell him she knew he’d been regenerated from one of Sam Coyne’s cells – almost like a plant clipping, Sally thought in her most cynical moments. Justin would be horrified if he knew she’d found out, and after her confrontation with Coyne (which she had described to him minus that most important detail), her sudden change of heart on Justin’s Wicker Man theory needed no explanation.
“Yep,” Justin said.
“We’ve got to catch Coyne in the act, somehow. In real life this time. I think it’s the only way.”
“I graduate in a couple weeks,” Justin said. “I’ll have some time after that. Maybe stake him out for real. I’m getting my license this summer, too.”
Barwick said, “You’re graduating? I had no idea. Congratulations. Where are you going to school next year?”
“I’m not. Taking a year off. My grades and SATs are good enough to get me in just about anywhere I want. But I’m too young for college.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Read,” Justin said. “The stuff I want to read. Not the books they give you in school. Maybe go see my dad.”
Sally tried to remember those late-night conversations through the computer and across the car seat outside Coyne’s Shadow apartment. “In New Mexico, right?”
“Right. Spend some time thinking about who I am. Who I’m supposed to be. What I’m supposed to do. I need to pursue that. This other stuff – school – gets in the way.”
“What? You mean, like, find yourself?” She couldn’t disguise a laugh.
“Something like that.”
“I don’t know that we’re supposed to do anything, Justin. Except be.”
“Maybe you’re not,” he said.
Barwick couldn’t tell if the remark was meant to be insulting or if it was just self-absorbed. She decided generously on the latter.
Back in his office, with a day’s worth of stories and assignments to approve, Malik began looking up everything he could on Samuel Coyne of Ginsburg and Addams. He found pictures of the man in a tux at charity dinners, and some for-the-record denials on behalf of his clients in the business page archives. He looked a little bit like a handsome asshole. Not at all like a killer. But then, what’s a killer look like before you know he’s killed? Coyne didn’t look like a murderer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t one. Only that Malik had been unconvinced.
The Wicker Man, he thought. Is there any way she could be right?