She needed more coffee, and when she got up to go to the vending room, she saw that George Fintel had evidently awakened and staggered home. She hadn't heard him leave. Tommy was gone, as well. She was alone.
She got another cup of coffee, and it didn't taste as bad as it had before. The brew hadn't improved; her sense of taste had just been temporarily damaged by the first two cups.
Eventually Newsweb located eleven stories in March through May that fit her parameters. After examining the printouts, Holly found only one of them of interest.
On May 15, in Atlanta, Georgia, a blue-eyed Jim had entered a convenience store during an armed robbery. He shot and killed the perpetrator, Norman Rink, who had been about to kill two customers — Sam Newsome, twenty-five, and his five-year-old daughter Emily. Flying high on a cocaine, Ice, and methamphetamine cocktail — Rink had already killed the clerk and two other customers merely for the fun of it. After wasting Rink and assuring himself that the Newsomes were unhurt, Jim had slipped away before the police arrived.
The store security camera had provided a blurry photograph of the heroic intruder. It was only the second photo Holly had found in all the articles. The image was poor. But she immediately recognized Jim Ironheart.
Some details of the incident unnerved her. If Ironheart had an amazing ability — psychic power, whatever — to foresee fatal moments in the lives of strangers and arrive in time to thwart fate, why hadn't he gotten to that convenience store a few minutes sooner, early enough to prevent the deaths of the clerk and other customers? Why had he saved the Newsomes and let the rest die?
She was further chilled by the description of his attack on Rink. He had pumped four rounds from a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun into the madman. Then, although Rink was indisputably dead, Jim reloaded and fired another four rounds. “He was in such a rage,” Sam Newsome said, “his face red, and he was sweating, you could see the arteries pounding in his temples, across his forehead. He was crying a little, too, but the tears… they didn't make him seem any less angry.” When done, Jim had expressed regret for cutting Rink down so violently in front of little Emily. He'd explained that men like Rink, who killed innocent people, brought out “a little madness of my own.” Newsome told the reporter, “He saved our lives, yeah, but I gotta say the guy was scary, almost as scary as Rink.”
Realizing that Ironheart might not have revealed even his first name on some occasions, Holly instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for stories in which “rescue” and “saved the life” were within ten words of “blue.” She had noticed that some witnesses were vague about his physical description, but that most remembered his singularly blue eyes.
She went to the John, got more coffee, then stood by the printer. As each find was transferred to hard copy, she snatched it up, scanned it, tossed it in the wastecan if it was of no interest or read it with excitement if it was about another nick-of-time rescue. Newsweb turned up four more cases that indisputably belonged in the Ironheart file, even though neither his first nor last name was used.
At her desk again, she instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for the name “Ironheart” in the national media.
While she waited for a response, she put the pertinent printouts in order, then made a chronological list of the people whose lives Jim Ironheart had saved, incorporating the four new cases. She included their names, ages, the location of each incident, and the type of death from which each person had been spared.
She studied that compilation, noting some patterns with interest. But she put it aside when Newsweb completed its latest task.
As she rose from her chair to go to the laser printer, she froze, surprised to discover she was no longer alone in the newsroom. Three reporters and an editor were at their desks, all guys with reputations as early birds, including Hank Hawkins, editor of the business pages, who liked to be at work when the financial markets opened on the East Coast. She hadn't been aware of them coming in. Two of them were sharing a joke, laughing loudly, and Hawkins was talking on the phone, but Holly hadn't heard them until after she'd seen them. She looked at the clock: 6:10. Opalescent early-morning light played at the windows, though she had not realized that the tide of night had been receding. She glanced down at her desk and saw two more paper coffee cups than she remembered getting from the vending machine.
She realized that she was no longer wallowing in despair. She felt better than she had felt in days. Weeks. Years. She was a reporter again, for real.
She went to the laser printer, emptied the receiving tray, and returned with the pages to her desk. Ironhearts evidently were not newsmakers. There were only five stories involving people with that surname in the past six months.
Kevin Ironheart — Buffalo, New York. State senator. Announced his intention to run for governor.
Anna Denise Ironheart — Boca Raton, Florida. Found a live alligator in her family room.
Lori Ironheart — Los Angeles, California. Songwriter. Nominated for the Academy Award for best song of the year.
Valerie Ironheart — Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Gave birth to healthy quadruplets.
The last of the five was James Ironheart.
She looked at the heading. The story came from the Orange County Register, April 10, and was one of scores of pieces on the same story that had been published statewide. Because of her instructions, the computer had printed out only this single instance, sparing her sheafs of similar articles on the same event.
She checked the dateline. Laguna Niguel. California. Southern California. The Southland.
The piece was not accompanied by a photograph, but the reporter's description of the man included a reference to blue eyes and thick brown hair. She was sure he was her James Ironheart.
She was not surprised to have found him. She had known that with determined effort she would locate him sooner or later. What surprised her was the subject of the piece in which his full name appeared at last. She expected it to be yet one more story about snatching someone out of death's grasp, and she was not prepared for the headline:
LAGUNA NIGUEL MAN WINS SIX MILLION LOTTO JACKPOT.
2
Having followed the rescue of Nicholas O'Conner with his first untroubled night of sleep in the last four, Jim departed Boston on Friday afternoon, August 24. Gaining three hours on the cross-country trip, he arrived at John Wayne Airport by 3:10 P.M. and was home half an hour later.
He went straight into his den and lifted the flap of carpet that revealed the safe built into the floor of the closet. He dialed the combination, opened the lid, and removed five thousand dollars, ten percent of the cash he kept there.
At his desk, he packed the hundred-dollar bills into a padded Jiffy envelope and stapled it shut. He typed a label to Father Leo Geary at Our Lady of the Desert, and affixed sufficient postage. He would mail it first thing in the morning.
He went into the family room and switched on the TV. He tried several movies on cable, but none held his interest. He watched the news for a while, but his mind wandered. After he heated a microwave pizza and popped open a beer, he settled down with a good book — which bored him. He paged through a stack of unread magazines, but none of the articles was intriguing.