Fremont reported for his noon-to-eight shift having already read the Tulio murder story produced by the Sun’s cop shop reporter.  The initial details were straightforward – police confirmed that Tulio had been shot at long range, probably from a high-rise parking structure a dozen streets away from the restaurant. The bullet had gone straight through him and came to rest in the cellulite-laden thigh of a nearby socialite, who had survived. No immediate suspects, investigation ongoing, police would not rest until the perpetrator was brought to justice … blah, blah, blah.

Fremont’s computer alerted him to a new email.

Hey Nick,

If you want to understand why I killed Carmine Tulio, look into what happened to Bob and Nancy Taylor, 1773 El Dorado Street, Vallejo.

Mercury
Final Justice

He poked around on Google, printed out the email and looked up to see Alan Shipman, the city editor, heading into a conference room. He followed him inside, where Allison Springdale, the managing editor, was waiting.

“Alan and I are just about to plan out tomorrow’s paper, Nick,” Springdale said. “You have something really important?”

“You decide,” Fremont said, handing her the email.

Springdale scanned the email, passed it over to Shipman and motioned Fremont to a chair.

“When did you get this?” she said.

“Just came in.”

“What do you think?”

“Could be some wingnut, could be the guy.”

“Who’s Mercury?”

“I looked it up. Mercury appears in Roman mythology as the messenger of the gods and someone who transports lost souls into hell.”

“A crazy then. Great. Why did he email you?”

“No idea. Maybe he’s seen my byline is all I can think of. I handled that triple homicide in Glendale last week. Maybe he saw that?”

Springdale frowned and looked over at Shipman, who shrugged.

“Lot of fruitcakes come out of the woodwork on something like this,” he said. “No way to know. Nick, I assume you’ve read the Tulio story. Any thoughts?”

“Yeah. The shooter fired only once, so Tulio was almost certainly the target. That means the guy followed him to the restaurant, sized up the situation, and was able to find a good spot, set up, do him and get out quickly. To me, that says military, probably sniper training.”

“Could be,” Shipman said, “although the cops say there are multiple suspects.”

“Lot of people hated the guy,” Springdale said. “Gibraltar Securities peddled high-risk securities that generated big commissions for the firm, and Tulio’s sales force also had been pushing crypto-currencies and other exotic stuff. It was an easy sell – Bitcoin is up something like seven-hundred percent in the last few years. Plenty of people wanted in, and Tulio got rich. Meanwhile, the customers lost their shirts when the whole thing blew up and Gibraltar declared bankruptcy.”  

Fremont shook his head.

“Why do all these assholes need so much money anyway? What does it do for them? You can only eat one steak at a time. So, maybe the shooter is a veteran who got burned?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Springdale said. “Lots of Gibraltar’s employees lost their jobs when the company went under, and Tulio was being sued by the Feds and dozens of his former business associates.”

“That’s true – lawyers feasted on him the last couple years,” Shipman said. “He had just settled a huge lawsuit – apparently he was crowing about that at lunch. He’d been laying low, but I guess he figured it was safe to come out now.”

“So what about a full profile as a second-day story?” Springdale said. “We don’t speculate, but we paint a picture, let people draw their own conclusions, bring readers up to date on what Tulio’s been doing lately, end it with whatever we get from the cops? That should work.”

Shipman frowned. “No offense, Fremont, but you know anything about investments?”

“Working here, we never could afford any,” Fremont said, drawing a sour look from Springdale. “All that never mattered much to me anyway. Laura handled our money. I know something about murder stories though – isn’t that what we got here?”

There was silence, broken after a few moments by Springdale, who relished any opportunity to demonstrate the pecking order at the Sun.

“That’s what we’ve got for now anyway. We do a bigger profile on Tulio – one of the business reporters will dig up background on Gibraltar, plus I’m sure there’s plenty in the files. We don’t want to get into high finance here. Lay out the guy’s history, get some cop quotes about what’s required to shoot someone at that distance – maybe some off-the-record speculation that it could be somebody military if you can get it – and finish with police are asking anyone who might have noticed something unusual to get in touch.”

Fremont nodded and left.