Thank you for seeing me privately, Nate.
Certainly, please come in. Right this way. Fowler led him to a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a fireplace and a grandfather clock. Can I get you a coffee or anything?
No, thank you, this wont take long.
I want to assure you that nothing you say leaves this room.
As I mentioned in my call this morning, your reporter, Gannon, ambushed me. I tried to reach you before the story ran.
I was traveling. It was unfortunate for both of us. My apologies.
This story has hurt me and my family, Nate.
I understand, given your outstanding reputation.
As you know, I have confidential informants on the street. Rumors get started and make their way into investigations. Things get misconstrued, things get leaked and fiction becomes fact. The truth is, Im assisting the state police with the Hogan homicide. I can understand how a reporter trying to find a good story could get carried away.
It happens, yes.
I want you to know I had nothing to do with the homicide. Its ridiculous.
Today the New York State Police publicly disputed our report on you. And given the circumstances under which our story made it into print, I think a full retraction and apology is necessary.
Thank you.
Additionally, well find the source of this injurious information. I trust that would be useful to you?
Relief spread across Styebecks face.
That would be helpful.
You dont deserve this, Karl. Youre a hero in the eyes of this community. A great number of people admire you. I enjoy the charity work we do together and want to maintain our relationship.
As Styebeck stood to leave, his attention went to the woman whod entered the room.
Karl, this is my wife, Madeline, with the State Attorney Generals Office.
Yes, weve met at functions. Styebeck shook her hand.
Maddy, Fowler said, I was just telling Karl how I value our relationship.
He thinks the world of you, Detective. She smiled. Did he tell you hes willing to underscore that point at your fund-raiser this week?
No. That would be appreciated.
In fact Fowler put his hand on Styebecks shoulder as they walked to the door and this is confidential, please. But Im considering a run for public office and would like to know that I can count on your support.
I see Styebeck hesitated. I dont really get involved in politics.
I understand completely, Karl, Fowler said. Not asking you to do or say anything. Just think about it. Besides, Im taking steps to ensure this unfortunate matter will blow over.
I need for that to happen.
Now, Fowler said, I know it seems the obvious move for me would be to fire Jack Gannon.
I didnt want to raise that, or my legal options, here.
Right. Just so youre aware, I cant fire him. Gannons Pulitzer caliber, one of my best reporters. I almost lost him once. And while hes a zealous crusader, the fallout at the paper if I terminated him now would cause me too much grief with the news guild, just as were positioning to sell the paper. Thats confidential.
Of course.
Ive pulled Gannon off this story and suspended him. One wrong move on his part and hes gone. That should keep him out of your business. Hows that sound, Karl?
That sounds fine, Nate.
The men shook hands at the door then Styebeck got into his car.
Unseen, in the park across the street, Jack Gannon watched Styebeck leave Nate Fowlers house.
15
Gannon couldnt believe this.
Why was Karl Styebeck visiting Nate Fowler?
He doubted they were discussing their charity work.
Gannon walked from the park to his car then roamed the city, chewing on what hed just witnessed, wondering where, or if, it fit with the latest aspects of the story. There was the mystery truck, the argument Bernice Hogan had had with another woman before she vanished, and the state police discrediting his reporting on Styebeck.
And now Styebeck pays Fowler a late-night visit.
Piece by piece a picture was emerging. Something large was percolating beneath the surface, but he didnt know what it was.
Was a cop suspected of murder being protected?
All right, better let things simmer, he told himself as he got to Cheektowaga, one of Buffalos first suburbs. He lived in Cleveland Hill, a working-and middle-class neighborhood of proud, flag-on-the-porch homes built after the Second World War.
Mostly Polish-American families lived here, going back two and three generations. But he hadnt gone very far either. Hed grown up on the fringes of Cleveland Hill, near the Heights, a rougher district.
Buffalo was his home. A place he loved.
It was also his prison, he thought as he pulled into a parking space at the building where he lived, a tired-looking apartment complex built in the 1960s. He grabbed his bag, got his mail and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor.
His building had more good tenants than bad. There were a few noisy neighbors and a few creeps. And sometimes the halls were heavy with the smells of exotic cooking. But generally people left him alone.
He liked that.
His apartment had a large, sweeping view. The wind often charged off Lake Erie and rattled his windows, but it was warm in the winter.
He sat on his couch and sorted through his mail. There were mostly bills, then a letter from Ron Cook, an old reporter friend, whod quit his job at the Detroit Free Press to teach English in Addis Ababa.
Buddy, heres an application if youre looking for a career change and an escape from the snow!
Gannon pondered the idea for a moment, but he had too much going on here to give it serious consideration.
No, thanks, Ron.
Then he came to a letter from the lawyer handling his parents estate, reminding him that the anniversary was coming up for payment on the unit where hed stored their belongings. Did he want to pay for another year, or did he have other plans for his familys property?
Hed deal with that later.
He tossed the letters on his coffee table, opened his bag, and had started reading the file Mary Peller had given him on her missing daughter when his cell phone rang.
Gannon.
Its Fowler. Weve got a substantial retraction going in tomorrows edition. In thirty minutes we start rolling it off the presses.
You didnt call to tell me that.
Give me your source and Ill kill the retraction.
Gannon said nothing. Now more than ever he didnt trust his managing editor.
Jack, give me your source and we can all have our lives back.
Does Bernice Hogan get her life back? Why does Styebeck get a free ride?
The police have publicly pissed on your story and the Sentinel today. You were wrong. We have to swallow that and move on.
I was not wrong. And I cant give up my source.
Think about what youre risking. Your job is hanging by a thread, Gannon. Youve got about twenty-nine minutes to think it over.
I was not wrong. And I cant give up my source.
Think about what youre risking. Your job is hanging by a thread, Gannon. Youve got about twenty-nine minutes to think it over.
Gannon didnt call.
He took a hot shower, dressed and got into his car.
Freeway traffic was light as he glided along Interstate 90.
He left the interstate and got on Genesee. As he headed into the heart of the city, Buffalos skyline rose before him: the HSBC Center, the Rand Building and City Hall.
He found himself at the Sentinels loading docks, an area bordered by a chain-link fence that trapped stray papers and flyers. The air smelled of newsprint and exhaust as trucks and vans performed a marshaling ballet in and out of the ten bays, laden with damp copies of the first edition.
He was watching an act in the swan song of the newspaper industry, an industry in which hed invested everything.
But he was not giving up.
He parked and went to the gate. Holding up a dollar bill, he flagged down a van departing for its route.
Sell me a copy?
The driver had a scar on his cheek. He snatched Gannons buck then reached to his passenger seat, grunted and handed him a fresh copy of the Buffalo Sentinel.
The retraction was there on the front page, framed in a shaded box with a different font. He scanned, Sentinel offers its apology
Uncorroborated information
Erroneous reporting
Taken action
Suspended The words landed like punches until he heard a clank down the street at a row of newspaper boxes.
A carrier was loading a box for the Buffalo News. Gannon went over and bought a paper. The News had clobbered him with their front-page coverage, giving him his comeuppance in a column under the headline:
The Pulitzer Finalist Who Got It Wrong
The item pontificated about the journalistic failing of rushing to be first at the expense of getting it right. Gannon lowered the papers, like flags of defeat.
What happened?
Less than twenty-four hours ago he owned the news in this town. Now his world was collapsing.
He nearly vanished in the dust that swirled around him as the delivery trucks thundered by. A cold wind kicked up from Lake Erie and he retreated to his car and drove away, traveling back through his life.
Being a reporter was all hed ever wanted to be.
He was a blue-collar kid. His mother worked long hours as a waitress, while his father worked hard shifts in a factory on the lakeshore that made rope. Both of them were newspaper readers, a trait theyd passed on to him.
Enthralled by lifes daily dramas, he read the Buffalo Evening News and the Buffalo Courier-Express. And when the Courier-Express folded, he read the Sentinel, which rose from its ashes.
And he dreamed about seeing his own stories in print.
When his parents worked late, his big sister, Cora, would take him to the library and get him books by Jack London, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.
This is what a future reporter should be reading, Jackie, shed said.
Cora was five years older than him and nurtured his dream. She convinced their parents to buy him a secondhand computer and encouraged him to write. They were as close as any brother and sister could be. But their age difference would have a bearing on their relationship and eventually Cora grew apart from him and her family.
She changed.
It hit him the night police brought her home after shed got drunk with friends whod stolen a car. Shed grown into a different person, one who argued constantly with Mom and Dad. So many nights were filled with screaming, slamming doors, heart-breaking silence and tears. Cora started taking drugs, which led to more arguments until the day she ran away.
All shed left was a note saying she could no longer stand living under their fascist rules.
She was seventeen.
Friends told his parents Cora had gone to California with an older guy who was a heroin addict. When his father got an address, he flew to San Francisco and looked for Cora.
It was all in vain.
They never saw her again.
They hired private detectives, flew to cities when they had tips. It was futile. He ached for her to come home.
Then his anguish turned to anger for what Cora had done. Later, there were times hed search for her on online databases. He even asked police friends to do whatever they could.
Not much came of it.
Cora was out of their lives.
Or dead.
Accept it and leave the past in the past, hed always told himself.
Miles and time swept by as he searched the night for answers.
He drove through older neighborhoods; the best and the worst of Buffalo. Here were the abandoned factories, the shut-up mills and forgotten stores, reaching from the wasteland of the rust belt like a death grasp. And here were the new bohemian communities that resurrected historic, near-dead buildings and revived the never-say-die attitude of Buffalo.
After Cora left, hed worked brutal summer shifts on assembly lines in Buffalo factories to put himself through college because his parents had spent nearly all they had looking for her.
When he found time, he reported for the campus paper, and freelanced articles to the Sentinel and the News.
All the while, he yearned to escape Buffalo for New York City and a job with a big news outlet. After he graduated from college, he worked at small weeklies then landed an internship with the Buffalo Sentinel. Impressed by his determination, the paper gave him a full-time reporting job.
The Sentinel would be his stepping stone out of Buffalo.
Then, while dispatched to cover a shooting in Ohio, hed met Lisa Newsome, a reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was a sharp-witted, brilliant writer. He remembered the way her hair curtained over her eye when she wrote the stories shed cared about.
She told him that shed fallen for his edgy charm and that Matt Damon thing you got going in the looks department. She wanted him to move to Cleveland and work at the Plain Dealer, or shed offered to move to Buffalo because she yearned to have kids and settle down.
He didnt, so they broke it off and Gannon threw all he had into his reporting.
Two years back, his talent was tested when a charter jet en route to Moscow from Chicago plunged into Lake Erie a quarter mile off Buffalos shoreline. Some two hundred people died.
While the world press speculated that the cause was terrorism, Gannon found a Russian-speaking man in the Sentinels mail room. They worked the phones and the Internet, locating the pilots brother who was living in St. Petersburg, Russia. Turned out the brother had received the last e-mail the pilot had sent but refused to share it. Think of the dead, their families deserve to know the answer. Think of the dead, their ghosts will haunt you, Gannon and the Russian-speaking Sentinel worker kept telling the brother before convincing him to give them the final e-mail. It detailed the pilots plan to commit suicide by crashing his jet because his wife had left him for a woman.