Oregon Hill Read Online Free Page B

all,” Grace Montross said, “he didn’t kill anybody.”
    Well, not on purpose.
    I tell Custalow I’m going upstairs to have a sandwich and a beer, and he says he’ll be awhile. I leave them there, standing, smoking and staring at something neither of them really knows how to fix.
    I get a call on my cell phone as I’m taking the elevator up. It’s Jackson, my editor.
    “Better get over here a little early, Willie,” he says. “Wheelwright wants to get the team moving on this.”
    “The team? Have I been drafted, Enos? Is Wheelie going to give me a signing bonus.”
    “The Isabel Ducharme team.”
    It must grind Jackson’s gears to have talk like this, but he’s got more bills than me, and so he’s a team player. He acts as if I’m wearing a wire when I ask him to tell me what he really thinks of the new world order, whose goal seems to be to save money on newsprint by reducing our circulation to zero.

    It’s a ten-minute walk to the paper. I get there at 2:10, which is ten minutes later than Wheelwright wanted but fifty minutes earlier than the time at which they start paying me.
    Wheelie glances at his watch and gives me a look. I tell him traffic was a bitch.

    The “team” consists of me and Jackson, who’ll be the team leader, Sally Velez, who’ll be the “first-read” word editor, a photographer who seems to be picking his nails with a folded-up piece of paper, a designer, an artist (gotta have locator maps), a representative of our crack online operation, and two other reporters, Sarah Goodnight and Mark Baer. Baer has been here for five years. His hobby is sending out résumés.
    I can’t help but notice that only three of the ten people in the room are reporters, but that’s the way it goes lately.
    We should be talking to friends of Isabel’s, Wheelie says, and “working the traps” with the police, who would dearly love it if we went away until they call a press conference and announced that they’ve caught the killer. We should talk to shrinks, find out what would make someone do something like this. We should run a story on being safe on college campuses. We should feed it all to our Web site as soon as we get it. The Web guy nods enthusiastically at this.
    Don’t get me wrong. I really, really want to catch this guy. But it makes me a little queasy how Wheelie’s eyes gleam. Newspaper people are as bad as cops about the tragedy turn-on. Worse, because we don’t actually accomplish anything, don’t catch anybody. We just go by afterward, like the guy said, and shoot the wounded.
    He says someone needs to check into the girl’s background: “You know. Did she sleep around. Was she a party girl?”
    I suggest, maybe with more irritation than was intended, that we should at least wait until we have some idea of what happened before we paint poor Isabel Ducharme as the town slut.
    Wheelie stares at me. Jackson, standing behind him, gives me the “shut up” look.
    “This is news,” he informs me. “We need to give our readers as complete a picture of who the victim was as we can.”
    I think of Andi and hold my tongue, for once.
    So, we divvy it up. Sarah will try to round up a shrink for a thumb-sucker on why psychopaths are psychopaths. Baer will go on campus and harass students, maybe find out who eighteen-year-old Isabel Ducharme has been screwing. I’m supposed to find somebody to talk about how not to get your head cut off. That and keep in touch with the cops.
    I don’t mention the phone number I was able to parlay out of the name Andi gave me. I’d like to make that call myself.

CHAPTER THREE

    Thursday
    I wake up about ten. The message light on the phone is blinking.
    “Willie? Pick up if you’re there. I know it’s early, but they caught him.”
    Jackson.
    A couple of the copydesk guys came by after work last night and helped me finish off the majority of a half-gallon of Early Times. I’d savored the idea of going back to sleep for another hour or so. Not to