Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(59)

“This stuff is from GT23,” I said. “Says it right here on the tube.”

“Not a surprise,” Rachel said.

“There’s nothing else here,” I said. “Just a dead guy and that’s it.”

“We still have the rest of the house to check,” Rachel said.

“We don’t have time. We have to get out of here. Whoever did this probably spent all night searching the place. Whatever was here is gone and probably so is my story.”

“It’s not about your story anymore, Jack. This is bigger than your story. Check the printer.”

She pointed behind me. I turned and went to the printer in the corner. The tray was empty.

“Nothing here,” I said.

“We can print the last job,” Rachel said.

She stepped over and looked at the printer. Still wearing a single glove, she pressed the menu button on the printer’s control screen.

“Little-known fact,” she said. “Almost all modern printers print from memory. You send the job from your computer, it goes into printer-buffer memory, and then it starts to print. It means the last job is in memory until a new job comes in.”

She clicked on the “Device Options” tab and chose the “Print Memory” option. The machine immediately started humming and was soon printing pages.

We both stood there watching. The last job was a big one. Many pages were sliding into the tray.

“The question is who printed this,” Rachel said. “This guy or his killer?”

Finally the printing stopped. There were at least fifty pages in the tray. I made no move to grab the stack.

“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked. “Take the printouts.”

“No, I need you to take them,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a reporter. I can’t just come into some dead guy’s house and take printouts from his computer. But you can. You don’t have to live by the same standards I do.”

“Either way it’s a criminal act and that trumps your journalistic ethics.”

“Maybe. But just the same, you can take the pages and then give them to me as my source. Then I can use them—stolen or not—in a story.”

“You mean like we did before and it cost me my job?”

“Look, can you just take the pages, and we can talk about this later? I want to either call the police or get the hell out of here.”

“All right, all right, but this buys me into the case.”

She scooped the thick sheaf of documents out of the tray.

“It’s not a case,” I said. “It’s a story.”

“I told you, it’s more than that now,” she said. “And I’m totally in.”

“Fine. Split or call it in?”

“Your car’s been sitting out there for at least a half hour. It was most likely seen by a neighbor and if not, there are probably cameras on every house. Too risky. I say we secure the documents and call it in.”

“And we tell them everything?”

“We don’t know everything. This is going to be Burbank PD, not L.A., so they won’t connect the dots to the other murders. Not at first. I think you run your original cover story about researching DNA data protections and say you followed the bouncing ball to this guy and this lab and here you are.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m your girlfriend and I just came along for the ride.”

“Really? My girlfriend?”

“We can discuss that later too. We need to find a place to hide the printouts. If they’re good, they’ll search your car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I would if it was my call.”

“Yeah, but you’re better than everybody. I have so many files and other junk in the back of my Jeep they won’t know what it is if they look.”

“Suit yourself.”

She handed me the stack of documents.

“Then, as your source,” she said, “I am officially giving these to you.”

I took the stack.

“Thank you, source,” I said.

“But that means they’re mine and I want them back,” she said.





27

After camouflaging the printouts in the paperwork debris that monopolized the back seat of my Jeep, I dialed 9-1-1 on my cell and reported finding the body to the Burbank Police. Ten minutes later a patrol car arrived followed by a rescue ambulance. I left Rachel in the Jeep and got out. After showing my driver’s license and press pass to an officer named Kenyon, I assured him that the RA and its EMTs were not necessary.

“They respond on all death calls,” Kenyon said. “Just in case. Did you go inside the house?”

“Yes, I told the dispatcher that,” I said. “The door was open and something seemed wrong. I called out, rang the doorbell, nobody answered. So I went in, looked around, continued to call out Hammond’s name, and eventually found the body.”

“Who is Hammond?”

“Marshall Hammond. He lives here. Or lived here. You have to ID the body, of course, but I’m pretty sure that’s him.”

“What about the woman in the Jeep? Did she go in?”