Vengeance Road Read Online Free Page A

anything.”
    â€œCatherine, I identified myself as a reporter. I’ve been taking notes. This tragedy is already public. Now, did Bernice say anything about anyone possibly harming her?”
    â€œI’m not supposed to say anything. They told me not to talk to the press.”
    â€œWho?”
    Catherine stood.
    â€œPlease, you can’t print anything. You have to go.”
    â€œWait, who told you not to say anything?”
    Several moments passed.
    â€œAt least tell me who told you not to speak to the press about your daughter’s murder.”
    She looked at him long and hard.
    â€œThe police.”

5
    T wo days after her corpse had been identified, Bernice Hogan’s shy smile haunted Gannon from the Sentinel ’s front page.
    Her picture ran under the headline:
    Murder of a brokenhearted woman
    Nursing student’s tragic path
    Here was a troubled young woman whose life held promise. A woman who, despite the cruelty she’d endured, had been striving to devote herself to comforting others. His compassionate profile was longer than his earlier news stories and contained information unknown to most people, including his competition.
    Not bad, he thought, sitting at his desk, rereading his feature in that morning’s print and online editions.
    Tim Derrick swung by, drinking coffee from a mug bearing the paper’s logo.
    â€œNate likes what you did,” Derrick indicated the corner office of Nate Fowler, the paper’s managing editor, the man who controlled the lives of seventy-five people in editorial. Invoking his name gave currency to any instructions as quickly as it made people uneasy.
    Fowler was not a journalist. He was a Machiavellian bureaucrat and Gannon did not mesh with him as well as he did with the other editors.
    â€œDid he say anything else?” Gannon asked.
    â€œHe wants you to stay exclusively on the murder story, do whatever you can to make sure we own it. He said we need hits like this to boost circulation and stay alive.” Derrick pointed his finger gunlike at Gannon’s old Pulitzer-nominated clips and winked. “And if anyone’s going to take it to the end zone, it’s you.”
    Gannon was not so optimistic.
    He needed a strong follow-up today but faced a problem.
    The New York State Police led the Hogan investigation and he didn’t know the lead detectives. He looked at their names on the last news release, Investigators Michael Brent and Roxanne Esko.
    He’d put in calls to them but none were returned. He could go around them, but it meant asking sources to go out on a limb by leaking information to him.
    He had sources everywhere: the Buffalo homicide squad, Erie County, Amherst, Cheektowaga, the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, pretty much every agency in the region.
    But nobody was saying much.
    Maybe it went back to what Catherine Field had said about the police telling her not to speak to the press. At first he hadn’t been concerned because detectives often asked relatives of victims not to speak to reporters, especially during the early days of an investigation.
    But now, as he sat at his computer searching for a new angle, he wondered if it was a factor here. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing something.
    â€œThat Hogan case is sealed, man,” one source had told him. “But I heard that some of the people close to it wererattled by what the guy had done to her. I heard that it pushes the limits of comprehension.”
    Another source said that a number of law enforcement agencies were called in to help, possibly because of the area where she was found, and possibly because of other complications.
    â€œI’ll tell you something nobody in the press knows,” the source said. “There’s a closed-door case-status meeting with a lot of cops from a lot of jurisdictions. It’s been going on all morning out at Clarence