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“So where is he?” Joy said, looking as exasperated as any boss would concern an employee who had failed her, and whose tardiness could be taken as an insult.
Amanda, sitting across from Joy in their Chronicle division newsroom, lifted both hands about shoulder height in the universal sign of “I don’t know, but I am upset, too.”
Jimmy McKenzie, Jimmy Mack, as he was known by his fellow officers on the St. Isidore force was unconscionably late.
“Maybe we'll be lucky, and he won't show," Joy said tapping her pen in a quick rhythm on Amanda's desk.
Again, Amanda raised both hands in a sign of submissive agreement.
"Maybe he fell down and hurt himself," Joy said. "Jimmy McKenzie has been nothing but trouble for the Swingin' Izzy P.D.," Joy added. "Have you checked out the old stories I sent you about him?"
Amanda raised her eyebrows to confirm that she had read what her boss had sent to her email at 3 a.m.
"Suspended for drunk driving. Accused of hitting a prisoner," Joy said, counting the infractions off on the fingers of her right hand with the index finger of her left.
“And, now it’s 2:30 p.m.,” Amanda noted in a gesture of support and understanding.
The four interns were busily looking online for anything they could find on this woman that old man Shapiro had deemed to be the division’s highest priority, Janice Underwood.
Even though the eager beavers who looked to Amanda as a role model of what was possible for an intern at the St. Isidore Chronicle were typing as fast as they could, the little basement newsroom sounded nothing like its fictional TV and movie counterparts.
Now those offices were newsrooms, Amanda thought. Big, clanging, news wire machines that spit out news from around the globe, typing it automatically on long, winding reams of yellowish paper.
Hard-bitten, grizzled newspaper people, men, and women, slamming their fingers into the keyboards of manual typewriters, pounding out the stories that a city would read the next morning.
Cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke filled the air. Amanda wrinkled her nose at that, but it was part of the ambiance, no?
Her fantasies were not much like reality. But at least they were doing, if not God’s work, then the public’s work, the people’s work.
“Have we found anything yet?” Joy said.
Amanda took a deep breath. It was never easy to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear, especially someone who wore their angriest emotions close to the surface.
She just shook her head. The team had failed, so far, to find any common thread between the half-dozen women who had been found dead in the trees of St. Isidore Park.
She and Joy had gone out knocking on doors, talking to as many surviving family members and friends as they could.
They all had similar histories. Who wouldn’t in a town this size? They all went to St. Isidore High School. Again, who didn’t?
But beyond the obvious connections, there wasn't any straight line that ran from dot to dot to dot.
We have to be missing something, Joy thought. It has to be hiding in plain sight, and we just can't see it.
Amanda could tell Joy was boiling inside. Her boss was like a volcano just looking for a place to explode. It was probably the one thing, other than her beautiful black eyes, Amanda thought about at night when she was alone.
She would have to hold that thought.
Amanda and Joy jumped together when they heard the “ding” of the hallway elevator.
Perhaps the great Jimmy Mack had arrived.
Amanda went back to her desk.
Joy hurriedly took a “I’m busy, please don’t bother me” posture as she opened her laptop and went to the Chronicle’s online morgue to look for stories of disappearing women.
This damn thing isn’t working, Joy thought, which really was not helping her draft the picture she was trying to paint.
As quietly as they had been working, when one intern after another stopped what he or she was doing, it became even more still in the division’s basement space.
Jimmy Mack had arrived.
As the 6’3”,250-pound man with unruly white hair pulled back in a pony tail and puffing out of his bare forearms. He had a stomach that could have had its own nickname. Jimmy's belly was barely contained by his official St. Isidore P.D. blue polo shirt that hung outside a pair of khaki pants that should have been retired a month ago, interns stopped to look. And to smell.
“He stinks,” Amanda mouthed silently to Joy after the force of nature known as Jimmy Mack had moved by her desk.
Joy forgot about her subterfuge of appearing to be too busy to be interrupted.
Even if he hadn’t been wearing a Glock in a belt holster and a gold detective’s badge on a chain around his neck, the dimmest bulb in this journalistic Parthenon known as the St. Isidore Chronicle would have known, this guy is a cop.
“And you are?” Joy's neck hurt. She had to tilt her head back so far to see Jimmy's face that Joy felt like her head was banging off her back.
Jimmy Mack just looked down the 12 inches difference in their height and smiled.
“Detective Jimmy McKenzie reported as ordered, ma’am,” he said.
Joy looked past this behemoth of law enforcement locked eyes with Amanda, and together they raised their eyebrows.
“You’re late.”
Jimmy Mack looked down and smiled.
“Well, sit down.”
Jimmy Mack stood. He looked around the newsroom, paying special attention to the girls, as he thought of them, the young women as they thought of themselves.
And then, as slowly as possible, making it painfully obvious what he was doing was his idea, and his alone; Jimmy Mack sat down.
“Well, thanks for coming in,” Joy said. “You know what we are doing?”
“Yes,” Jimmy Mack nodded and smiled.
“You can help us find out what has been happening to these women?”
“Absolutely,” Jimmy Mack said. His giant white eyebrows came together between his eyes as he put both ham-like hands, with index fingers the same length as the pinkies, and said,
“I have always known what’s been happening in the forest. I know what has been happening to those women and who has been doing it.”