Crime Beat by Scott Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page A

at the scene?” I asked, mentally crossing my fingers as Moretz jogged into his cubicle.
    “None so far.”
    “What else you got?” He’d texted me a couple of details, but his style was to downplay everything until he had enough facts to tell a story.
    “I overheard Hardison tell the SBI that the same person had killed all three people, but one of the suits said serial killers tended to use the same modus operandi ,” he said, bustling into his cubicle and dumping his laptop on his desk. “Because it was so close to the first scene, the SBI thinks this one was either a copycat or else a bait and switch.”
    “What, a killing to throw the cops off the trail?”
    “No. Like maybe the first two murders were committed to cover this one up.”
    “Did you get this on the record?”
    He slid behind his desk and opened his laptop. “No, Chief, but I heard it with my own ears, and that’s good enough for me.”
    I had been pushing Moretz, but some little niggling whisper of the word “ethics” echoed around in my skull. After laying out the obits and then the comics page, where the Peanuts strip was the usual jumble of panels apparently tossed together at random, I needed a cold slap in the face.
    “John, we can’t just run with an overheard conversation,” I said. “Do they have a suspect?”
    “A dozen or so. Shumate is one of the Wade Murphy heirs.”
    “Murphy? The metal furniture guy?”
    We’d written several business features on the successful local factory, which used patented designs to create a high-end brand of decorative tables, chairs, sconces, fireplace accessories, wine racks, chandeliers, and other things normal people didn’t need.
    The spin on the story was always how Murphy’s American ingenuity had bucked the trend that had sent most other manufacturing jobs overseas. But it looked to me like he’d employed the solid American ideals of exploiting your workers, producing on the cheap, and getting accountants to make everything look good on paper.
    Either way, he’d achieved enough wealth to open three regional factories and was the fourth-largest employer in the county, behind the school system, the hospital, and the county government. And wealth meant motive for murder.
    “That’s the one,” Moretz said.
    The coincidence was a little much. “Didn’t you interview Murphy a couple of days ago for that economic-development piece?”
    “Yeah. He wants the county to buy a parcel for a business park. Save infrastructure costs, he said, and encourage a whole new class of entrepreneurs.”
    “I didn’t see that story in the news folder.”
    “I haven’t filed it yet.”
    We’d have to spike it. We couldn’t run a puff piece while the man’s niece was spread out on the medical examiner’s gurney. Still, I hated to waste the entire interview.
    “Did he happen to say anything prescient?” I asked.
    “Prescient?”
    “Ominous. Like seeing the future.”
    Moretz clicked open the file and scrolled through his notes. “Hmm. ‘You can’t just respond to future conditions, you have to create future conditions.’ That was a jab at the commissioners for cutting the planning department’s budget.”
    I shook my head. “No go. What else?”
    “How about ‘Success is built on tradition, and if you take away tradition, you might as well knock the legs off this chair I’m sitting in’? That was general advice to budding entrepreneurs.”
    “Run with it. But let me think about the conspiracy angle. I don’t want to be irresponsible and let our readers assume somebody killed Loraine Shumate for money.”
    “Chief, you can’t tell people what to assume.” Moretz was already typing, half ignoring me.
    I tried to picture the headline. Woman Found Dead At Lake .
    No sizzle, no sales. At first glance, it would appear to be a drowning. No, that wouldn’t help the publisher pay off his Porsche.
    I had to admit, Heiress Killed In Possible Plot was a grabber. We’d have a lot of gaps, such