The Scarecrow

He put the name into the search engine and soon a new thrill blasted through him. Jack McEvoy had no blog or any profile on Facebook or anywhere else that Carver could find. But his name scored numerous hits on Google. Carver had initially thought the name was familiar and now he knew why. A dozen years earlier McEvoy had written the definitive book on the killer known as the Poet, and Carver had read that book-repeatedly. Check that, McEvoy had done more than simply write the book about the killer. He had been the journalist who had revealed the Poet to the world. He had gotten close enough to breathe in the Poet’s last breath.

Jack McEvoy was a giant slayer.

Carver slowly nodded as he studied McEvoy’s book jacket photo on an old Amazon page.

“Well, Jack,” he said out loud. “I’m honored.”

Angela Cook’s dog did her in. The dog’s name was Arfy-according to a five-month-old entry in her blog. From there it took Carver only two variations-for fitting it into the six-character password requirement-to come up with Arphie and to successfully log onto her LATimes.com account.

There was always something oddly tantalizing about being inside another person’s computer. The mercurial addiction of invasion. It gave him a deep tug in the guts. It was like he was inside another’s mind and body. He was them.

His first stop was her e-mail. He opened it up and found that she kept a clean board. There were only two unread messages and a few others that had been read and saved. He saw none from Jack McEvoy. The new messages were a how-are-you-doing-out-there-in-L.A. from a friend in Florida-he knew this because the server was Road Runner in Tampa Bay-and an internal Times message that appeared to be a terse back-and-forth with a supervisor or an editor.

From: Alan Prendergast ‹ AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com›

Subject: Re: collision

Date: May 12, 2009 2:11 PM PDT

To: AngelaCook@LATimes.com

Hold tight. A lot can happen in two weeks.

From: Angela Cook ‹ AngelaCook@LATimes.com›

Subject: collision

Date: May 12, 2009 1:59 PM PDT

To: AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com

You told me I WOULD write it!

It looked like Angela was upset. But Carver didn’t know enough about the situation to understand it, so he moved on, opening up her old mail folder and getting lucky. She had not cleared her old mail list in several days. Carver scrolled through hundreds of messages and saw several from her colleague and cowriter Jack McEvoy. Carver began with the earliest one and started working his way forward to the most recent messages.

Soon he realized it was all innocuous, just basic communication between colleagues about stories and meetings in the cafeteria for coffee. Nothing salacious. Carver guessed from what he read that Cook and McEvoy were strangers until quite recently. There was a stiffness or formality to the e-mails. No shorthand or slang employed by either. It appeared that Jack didn’t know Angela until she had been assigned to the crime beat and he was assigned to train her.

In the last message, sent just a few hours before, Jack had sent Angela an e-mail with a proposed summary for a story they were working on together. Carver eagerly read it and felt his concerns about detection ease with every word.

From: Jack McEvoy ‹ JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com›

Subject: collision slug

Date: May 12, 2009 2:23 PM PDT

To: AngelaCook@LATimes.com

Angela, this is what I sent Prendo for the futures budget. Let me know if you want any changes.

Jack

COLLISION-On April 25th the body of Denise Babbit was found in the trunk of her own car in a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. She had been sexually assaulted and asphyxiated when a plastic bag was pulled over her head and secured with clothesline. The exotic dancer with a history of drug problems died with her eyes wide open. It wasn’t long before police traced a lone fingerprint left on her car’s rearview mirror to a 16-year-old drug dealer and gangbanger from a South L.A. housing project. Alonzo Winslow, who grew up fast in the projects, not knowing his father and rarely seeing his mother, was arrested and charged as a juvenile with the crime. He confessed his role to the police and now awaits efforts by the state to prosecute him as an adult. We talk to the suspect and his family as well as those who knew the victim, and trace this fatal collision back to its origins. 90 inches-McEvoy and Cook, w/art by Lester

Carver read it again. He felt the muscles in his neck start to relax. McEvoy and Cook didn’t know anything. Jack the giant slayer was climbing the wrong bean stalk.

Just as he had planned it. Carver made a mental note to check back to read the story when it was published. He would be one of only three people on the planet to know how wrong it was-including that poor soul Alonzo Winslow.

He killed the list and brought up Cook’s sent messages. There was just the overlap of the back-and-forth with McEvoy and the missive to Prendergast. It was all pretty dry and useless to Carver.