Mauser bolted out of his chair and threw on his coat. Denton followed, confused. “Thanks, Ray, I’ll buy you a beer next time I’m in town.” He hung up.
“What is it?” Denton asked. Mauser sprinted to their car, Denton chugging behind him. “Joe, what happened?”
“Call the Chicago PD. Get them to halt all transportation that’s left the city in the past six hours. I want any buses or trains searched. Have them station cops at O’Hare as well as all bus and train terminals. I’ll call Lambert International and get a plane on standby.”
“You want to clue me in to what the hell’s going on?”
“We found Parker,” Joe said, gunning the engine. “And now he’s wanted for three murders.”
29
The Amtrak train hurtled along on tender rails. My stomach churned, every muscle in my body thanking me for this brief respite. Then I caught sight of my reflection in the train’s window.
Jesus H. Christ. Amanda sure had a vivid imagination.
I admired the fake gold running from my right nostril to my right ear, the long, blond wig covering all but a sliver of my brown sideburns. All kidding aside, I looked like the love child of Joey Ramone and a rodeo clown. Completing my getup was a pair of tattered black jeans covered with glitter pen scribblings, written to the gods of whatever ’80s hair bands Amanda worshipped. I wore a black T-shirt with a red A in the center. The word below it read anarchy.
Amanda wore black lipstick, dark enough to make people think she’d been seriously making out with a chocolate bar, and her mohawked hair had enough gel to sate the cast of Friends for another ten seasons.
Right.
On a train that was otherwise packed, nobody was sitting within ten feet of us. Amanda was scribbling in a familiar notebook.
“You said you left that at home,” I said.
She shrugged. “I lied.”
She closed the pad and stuffed it into the nylon fanny pack we’d bought at Union Station for $1.99. Nothing said “you don’t want to talk to us” more than a fanny pack. I shook my head at the wad of twenties inside.
“I still can’t believe you stole that guy’s wallet.”
“I didn’t steal his wallet,” she said defensively. “I borrowed it. Besides, did you see that Rolex? Trust me, Henry, we need the money a whole lot more than he does.”
I hoped Mr. Rolex would understand that logic.
I looked past Amanda, saw a conductor collecting tickets. He was overweight, blue hat sitting awkwardly on his head, midsection resembling a stuffed mushroom. Smiling as he clipped tickets.
Then I looked at Amanda, her silly makeup unable to obscure her natural beauty, the softness of her eyes. She knew the truth about me, about Henry Parker, and deep down I knew I’d never lie to her again.
On an adjacent seat I noticed a discarded Chicago Sun-Times. I picked it up, figured it would keep my mind off the mound of shit that was suddenly my life. Most of the news was locaclass="underline" a three-alarm fire at a nursing home in the North Shore, a Cook County bowling alley under investigation for ties to organized crime. Then, on page three, I saw a column that would have made me lose my lunch if I’d eaten any.
The author was Paulina Cole. Her byline read Special to the New York Gazette.
The headline was The Art Of Deception.
The subtitle read The Truth About Henry Parker.
I read on.
Henry Parker came to New York with a journalistic pedigree any young reporter would kill for and an eye most people would die for. And suddenly, two days ago, somebody did. And now one of the most-watched man-hunts in New York City history is still in progress. And the questions remain.
The noble profession of journalism has taken its lumps in recent years, mainly from rampant plagiarism scandals that have tried in vain to discredit the rest of us, who are hardworking and honest, who make our livings with a clean conscience and have weathered this ship through the turbulence of the past few years.
But at the same time, the media glorifies these alleged villains, giving them even more access to the fame and fortune they so desired, despite working in a vocation where the noblest of writers desire none. Several of these literary desperados inked book deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars within weeks of their scandals, had movies made about their transgressions and had more ink spilled on their scandals than most wartime atrocities.
You might say we don’t have our priorities straight. That we foster this culture. But hopefully once the dirt is uncovered in this sordid mess, we can go back to healing that rift.
Those of us who knew Henry Parker can scarcely believe this shocking turn of events. Yet it should come as no great surprise that the evolutionary leap in journalistic crime has finally reached a fatal precedent. We can only hope this tragedy, which has an entire city-nay, a country-up in arms, reaches a swift resolution. We can only blame Henry so much.
As the media and the ever-adoring public deifies its journalists, crowning them with the same mantle of celebrity bestowed upon those in other forms of entertainment, it should come as no shock that the crimes inherent in those mediums have cross-pollinated this world.
And so I’ve been forced to ask myself this question, a question that strikes at the very heart and soul of this nation, and the news which serves as its souclass="underline" Was this violent, uncaring gene embedded in Henry Parker’s DNA from the moment he was born, or was it this world that drove a good man bad?
I let the paper fall from my hand. Suddenly I felt cold, dizzy. Amanda picked up the paper and read Paulina’s column. Then she crumpled it up and threw it into the aisle. My head pounded. It took all my strength to hold in the wretched sorrow that filled my chest like a lead balloon.
“Don’t listen to a word of it,” she said. “You know the truth. I know the truth. And soon everyone will.”
“It’s not that,” I said, my voice weak. “Things like this don’t go away. I worked with Paulina. I don’t buy this ‘me against the world’ b.s. She’s trying to make a name for herself off this mess, and pretending she’s doing something noble.”
“And there’s nothing you can do about it right now. So don’t waste your energy.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s just…this is my life. How can I ever go back there after this?”
“We’ll find a way,” Amanda said. “People need heroes right now. They don’t realize that when all this is over, it’ll be you, not Paulina.”
I couldn’t help but smile at Amanda.
“You have no idea how ridiculous you look,” I whispered.
“Look who’s talking. You know punk went out of style when we were in high school,” she said.
“I’d be hurt if I didn’t know you picked this stuff out.” I looked at the spiral notebook peeking out of the fanny pack. “Hey, can I ask you a kind of personal question?”
“Of course,” she said. Her eyes were dubious.
“Why do you write what you do in those notebooks?”
Amanda looked at me for a moment, our eyes locking, then she turned away.
“Why do you want to know that?”
I paused as an elderly couple inched past, watching us like we were disrupting their peaceful earth just by existing.
“When we were at your house,” I said, “I went into your room when I thought you were in the shower. I noticed the trunk under your bed, and…I don’t know. I just couldn’t help myself. I read them. I read about all those people you’d met, everything you wrote about them.”
“You read them,” she said, more a statement than a question. I nodded, guilt burning through me like hot coal.
I said, “Take curiosity and turn the volume to eleven, and that’s what’s inside me. So I’m sorry. But I need to know.”
She said nothing, her mind somewhere else. I paused, trying to find the words.
“I’ve been around every kind of journalist imaginable, from people who take the most detailed records to people who claim they have a dictaphone in their head. But I’ve never seen anything like that. Why do you keep records of everyone you meet?”