The Scarecrow

Inever left my hotel room Saturday, even when some of the reporters on the weekend shift called and invited me over to the Red Wind for cocktails after work. They were celebrating another day on the front page with the story. The latest report being on Alonzo Winslow’s first day of freedom and an update on the growing search for the trunk murder suspect. I didn’t feel much like celebrating a story that was no longer mine. I also didn’t go to the Red Wind anymore. They used to put the front pages of the A section, Metro and Sports over the urinals in the men’s restroom. Now they had flat-screen plasma TVs tuned to Fox and CNN and Bloomberg. Each screen adding insult to injury, a reminder that our business was dying.

Instead I stayed in Saturday night and started working my way through the files, using Rachel’s notes as a blueprint. With her in Washington and off the case, I felt uncomfortable leaving the profiling to nameless, faceless agents on the task force or as far away as Quantico. This was my story and I was going to keep out in front on it.

I worked late into the night, pulling together the details of two dead women’s lives, looking for the commonality Rachel was sure was there. They were women from two different hometowns who had migrated to two different cities in two different states. As far as I could tell, they had never crossed paths, except on the outside chance that Denise Babbit had gone to Las Vegas and happened to catch the Femmes Fatales show at the Cleopatra.

Could that be the connection between their murders? It seemed far-fetched.

I finally exhausted that pursuit and decided to approach things from a completely different angle. The killer’s angle. On a fresh sheet of Rachel’s notebook paper, I started listing all the things the Unsub would have needed to know in order to accomplish each murder in terms of method, timing and location. This proved to be a daunting task and by midnight I was spent. I fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bedspread, the files and my notes all around me.

The four A.M. call from the front desk was jarring, but it saved me from my recurring dream of Angela.

“Hello,” I croaked into the phone.

“Mr. McEvoy, your limo is here.”

“My limo?”

“He said he was from CNN.”

I had totally forgotten. It had been set up by the Times’ media relations office on Friday. I was supposed to go live to the nation on a weekend show that ran from eight to ten on Sunday mornings. The problem with that was, it was eight to ten East Coast time, five to seven West Coast time. On Friday the show’s producer had been unclear where in the show they would go to me. So I had to be ready to go live at five.

“Tell him I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

I actually took fifteen, dragging myself into the shower, shaving and getting dressed in the last unwrinkled shirt I had in the room. The driver didn’t seem concerned and drove at a leisurely pace toward Hollywood. There was no traffic and we were making good time.

The car wasn’t actually a limo. It was a Lincoln Town Car sedan. A year earlier I had written a series of stories about a lawyer who worked out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car while a client who was working off his fees drove him around. Sitting in the backseat now on the way to CNN, I got to like it. It was a good way to see L.A.

The CNN building was on Sunset Boulevard not far from the Hollywood police station. After passing through a security checkpoint in the lobby I went up to the studio where I was slated to be remotely interviewed from Atlanta for the weekend edition of a show called CNN Newsroom. I was led by a young person to the greenroom, and I found Wanda Sessums and Alonzo Winslow already there. For some reason I was shocked by the idea that they could have gotten up so early and beaten me-the professional journalist-to the studio.

Wanda looked at me like I was a stranger. Alonzo barely had his eyes open.

“Wanda, you remember me? I’m Jack McEvoy, the reporter? I came to see you last Monday.”

She nodded and clicked an ill-fitting pair of dentures in her mouth. She had not worn them when I visited her at home.

“That’s right. You the one who put all the lies in the paper about my Zo.”

This statement perked Alonzo up.

“Well, he’s out now, right?” I said quickly.

I stepped over and offered my hand to her grandson. He hesitantly took it and we shook but he seemed confused by who I was.

“Glad to meet you finally, Alonzo, and glad you’re out. I’m Jack. I’m the reporter who talked to your grandmother and started the investigation that led to your release.”

“My grandmother? Motherfucker, what you talking about?”

“He don’t know what he talkin’,” Wanda said quickly.

I suddenly understood the error of my ways. Wanda was his grandmother but had been playing his mother-Moms-because his real mother was on the street. He probably thought his real mother was his sister, if he knew her at all.

“Sorry, I got confused,” I said. “Anyway, I think we are being interviewed together.”