Due Justice

Chapter 26

Tampa, Florida

Saturday 4:45 p.m.

January 23, 1999

Dog tired, preoccupied, ready for a break that included a tall glass of something very cold, I called to George when I entered our flat. “Are you home?”

“In here,” he called back from the living room.

I lifted my foot to step across the threshold and stopped abruptly, foot still in the air, when George yelled, “Bup, bup, bup!”

Across the divide, George stood hands on hips, feet braced, iced tea in hand, examining his efforts. A carpet of black ink on 8 ½ x 11” white recycled copy paper, twelve by sixteen feet, placed in the center of the living room reached almost to the threshold. He had moved the furniture aside to accommodate his giant newspaper article mosaic as it grew beyond Harry and Bess’s favorite rolling rug.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“This stuff is fascinating. I started laying your articles out chronologically on the kitchen table, but I ran out of room, so I moved them to the floor.”

“Okay. But what is it?”

“A chronological display of everything you pulled off the computer.”  He said this with more pride than the accomplishment seemed to warrant.

I’m sure I seemed less than grateful for his creation, because that’s how I felt. I needed a shower to get the sand out of my hair, and a fresh set of clothes.

“I can see what you’ve done here, but so what?  I’ve read those articles until I can practically recite them verbatim. They don’t solve Morgan’s murder or tell me where Carly is.”

He smiled, unperturbed. “You may be the lawyer, Willa, but you have no head for numbers and you’re missing the obvious. Read these in the order they were written, not in the order they were printed, and they give you a more accurate picture. This way, it’s easier to see that one reporter is responsible for more than half the stories, too. And guess who that reporter is?”

George seemed so proud, I was sure the author must be a Pulitzer Prize winner, at least.

“I give up.”

“Robin Jakes,” he said, looking like the cat who’d consumed second helpings of Big Bird for lunch. “Look here,” he said, pointing again and again. “And here. Here. Here. See?”

How did I not notice that? Because I skipped the fluff like dates and bylines and headed to the meat, that’s why. Bad habit.

Robin Jakes is a good friend of ours from Detroit. A perfect resource; one that never would have occurred to me.

“That’s not all. Look at the development of these articles,” he maneuvered around the edges of his paper carpet; coaxed me onto the floor with his enthusiasm and an insistent pull on my leg.

“George, I looked at the ‘development’ of those articles until 3:30 in the morning. If I could see some ‘development’ in them, I would have noticed it already.”

“You don’t have to be so testy. I’m only trying to help you. Look, early on, the articles are excessively sympathetic to ‘the plight of the women victims of our male-dominated society which makes breast implants a desirable commodity’. But as time progresses, the articles get less sympathetic and more scientific, see?” He gestured to the relevant papers to demonstrate. “In the next group, they’re discussing recent science and point out how that science supports the manufacturers, not the victims.”