Hubbard nodded, "Okay: the new victim's name was Adam Rice, the kid's name was Josh, and Adam's mom's name is Laurina Rice. She's listed…"
"What about a wife?"
"I heard she died a while back, but I don't know the details…"
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER two minutes, and then Ignace folded the notebook and said, "Bob, I owe you. I truly do."
"Well, I'll tell you what I want. Write this down in your fuckin' notebook. There's a new restaurant named Funny Capers in Uptown. I want a story about it. A good story. What a happenin' place it is. Like that. They got music on Friday and Saturday nights."
"Girlfriend? Or investment?" He'd opened the notebook again and was taking it down.
"A friend of mine," Hubbard said. His eyes flicked away.
"If I need some last-minute comments on the place, can I call you at home?"
Hubbard flinched. "Jesus Christ, don't do that."
Ignace said, "One more thing. We got no art for this murder. Suppose we went with a graphic of a straight razor. I mean, would that be fucked up? Are they saying razor, or could it be a box cutter or something?"
"Fuck, I don't know, I guess a razor would be all right," Hubbard said. He ducked down a bit, to look through a bookshelf, looking for anyone who might know him. "Do what you want-and give me that Xerox." He took the Xerox back, stuffed it into his jacket pocket. "Wait five minutes before you come out. Read something, or something."
"It's a library, Bob, they might get suspicious."
"Okay, go look at blow jobs on the Internet. Just give me five minutes."
RUFFE'S RADIO WAS RUNNING hard on the way back to the paper: I shall not be moved; that's what Ignace said, just before he led the attack on the hijackers. Tragically…Is that a cashmere sweater? It's eighty degrees out here…Wonder if alpaca comes from alpacas? Four-wheel drift; could you do that in a Jeep?…
He took the elevator up to the newsroom, bustled back to his desk. Most reporters dreaded calling survivors in a murder or tragic acci-dent. Ignace didn't mind. He called Laurina Rice first, got a sober, cold-voiced woman, and asked, "Laurina?"
"Laurina is…indisposed," the cold-voiced woman said. Ignace recognized her immediately: the officious neighbor or relative who was "protecting" somebody the media might want to talk to. "May I tell her who called?"
"I just heard about Adam and Josh, and I really need to talk to her," Ignace said. Then he pulled out a reporter's cold-call trick, an implication of intimacy with the target. "Is this Florence?"
"No, no, uh, just a minute."
Most people involved in tragedies want to talk, Ignace had found, if only you could get through to them. He waited ten seconds, and then had Laurina on the line: "Laurina: I'm terribly sorry about Adam and Josh…"
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, they wouldn't even let me see them…"
"Do they know when it happened?" Ignace asked.
"They think yesterday…uh, who is this?"
"Ruffe Ignace from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. We're alerting people around the state that we have this monster loose…"
"He is! He is! He's a monster."
She began sobbing and Ignace noted in Gregg, "Weeping, sobbing, disconsolate…"
"People tell me that Adam and Josh were wonderful people, no bother to anyone," Ignace said. "They can't figure out who would do this. Do the police think anyone he knows…?"
"No, they told me this man is a monster, that he killed a woman in the Twin Cities…"
"A beautiful young girl named Angela Larson from Chicago," Ignace said. "She was just trying to work her way through college."
"Oh, God. And with Adam, after the tragedy last year…"
"Tragedy? The police didn't tell me about a tragedy." A disapproving tone, as though secrets had been withheld.
"His wife was killed in an awful, awful accident," Rice said. "Adam was a widower and poor little Josh lost his mother…"
"Did little Josh ever talk to you about her?"
"You know, just last Christmas, he said that he would give up every gift he had if he could have Mommy back. He was so sweet, and smart! He was my only grandchild, I'll never have a grandchild now."
She was rolling. Once you got an interviewee rolling, you tried not to interrupt. With an occasional prompt, or short sympathetic question, Ignace had pumped her dry in twenty minutes. He even had the detail about the tire swing hanging from the oak tree out on the lawn.
"But they didn't let you see them…"
"Only their faces. The sheriff told me I didn't want to, but they came out with him in that black bag and I marched right up and I said, 'I want to see my grandson! I wouldn't take 'No.' So they unzipped it and let me look at his face…"
"What did you think when you saw his face? What was your reaction?"
"Oh my God…" The bawling started again, and Ignace took it down in Gregg…
HE WAS BUZZING when he hung up, Ruffe's Radio: There you go, Ooo, the thing about Ignace is, he's smarter than any reporter in the Twin Cities. You know he used to be an Olympic acrobat… Wait, do they have acrobats in the Olympics? Maybe it's gymnastics. Some hot chick with the big boobs on ESPN: Tell me, Lord Ignace, how does it feel to be knighted by the queen…?
He was buzzing because he had the story. Whatever else might happen, he had the basic facts, he had the color. He didn't even need the cops, but he'd have to call them anyway. Because Sloan thought he was asshole, and Hubbard had warned him away from Davenport, he started with the sheriff.
Nordwall didn't want to talk, but Ignace said, "First of all, Sheriff, this is public record, the basic facts. You really do have an obligation to warn people about this guy.?
That got him the basics. Then he said, "The stuff that I got from the survivors, let me just give it to you quick, just to make sure there isn't anything terribly wrong. I want this to be accurate-you don't even have to tell me anything else, but just if this is right."
He then gave Nordwall everything that Hubbard had given him, plus everything that Laurina Rice had given to him, plus some bullshit that he made up. That got the sheriff rolling, and when they were done, he had a front-page story nailed down.
He talked to his team leader, who in olden says would have been called an assistant city editor, and she talked to the metro editor, and then the team leader came back and told him they would take everything he had, don't worry about length.
A photographer was dispatched to Mankato to get a shot of an empty tire swing, and a graphics artist starting pulling up Internet images of straight razors. Ignace spread his notes over his desk, marked some of them with a red felt-tip.
Hubbard: he owed him. No question about it.
HE COULDN'T FIND SLOAN. He had stolen an internal police department phone book, with home phone numbers for all the cops, but nobody answered when he called Sloan's home. He left a message with the answering service, said briefly what he wanted, and hung up. He toyed with the idea of calling Davenport, thought about Hubbard's warning, and decided against it.
Besides, there was an old newspaper maxim that he was happy to honor: too many facts could ruin a perfectly good story. Nobody could complain that he hadn't done the work-he'd talked to the principal law-enforcement officer of the county where the murder happened, he had talked earlier in the week to Sloan about the Angela Larson murder, he had comments from survivors. He didn't need Davenport.