Looking around later in the newsroom, Tommy saw that nobody was within earshot as she dialed the familiar number. It was a pager and she could only leave her number and wait for a return phone call. It was the code they’d rearranged. She knew he would call back right away. She only called him for really important things.
Years earlier, when she was in grad school, Tommy had gone on a ride along with Officer David Daniels. For some reason, they’d hit it off. She suspected it was because Daniels had lost a daughter her age the year before. His daughter had been beaten to death by an abusive boyfriend hooked on crank.
Sometime during the ride along, Daniels had extracted Tommy’s sad story from her. She was surprised. She only usually told people she had grown to trust. But something about the officer’s willingness to share his grief about his daughter had prompted her to honestly answer his questions about her life and family.
They’d remained in touch over the years and when Tommy became a photojournalist at the Twin Cities News, Daniels had sent her a card congratulating her. He was the only person in her life who had done so.
Not long ago, Tommy accompanied Cameron Parker on assignment to the police station while he was investigating a gang murder. It was the first time she’d seen Daniels since grad school. To her surprise, he ignored her completely and pretended he was just meeting her.
Later that day, he called her on her cell phone and told her he had some information on the murder. The gang member who was shot was, in fact, the son of a prominent politician. Daniels told her it was best if they always pretended they didn’t know each other in public so nobody would suspect he was her source. She fed the information to Parker, who wrote an award-winning story about it. Despite Parker’s continual begging, Tommy had refused to give up her source.
She quickly found out that Daniels was willing to help her on more than just the one story. If he felt something was unjust and that the public needed to know a large fact that would blow the case out of the water, or even a small important detail, he gave Tommy a call.
Today, he told Tommy that the protesters were right: police didn’t have squat. Investigators were at a loss. Jackie Chandler appeared to have no enemies. It was looking more and more like she was the victim of a random assault; an attack by a stranger.
Not only would it be a harder crime to solve, but the idea that a stranger attacked a woman for no apparent reason sent fear coursing through the community in waves.
For the past two weeks, along with sporadic protests at the police station, TV crews had sometimes camped along the Sunset Hill walking path waiting to pounce on random walkers and joggers. Women gave on air interviews saying there was no way on God’s green earth they would ever walk alone again. Nearby businesses instructed their employees to undertake the “buddy system” if they were going to continue walks and jogs on the two-mile cemetery loop.
Meanwhile, Jackie Chandler’s coworkers had T-shirts made with her face and the words “Justice for Jackie” printed on them as they walked the cemetery loop each lunchtime looking for clues.
Tommy took pictures of it all, arriving early in the newsroom and staying late, hoping to keep her beloved job.