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photographer, Casey Leiber, I waved her over and speed-dialed city editor Carrie Sullivan.
    “Newsroom. This is Carrie.”
    “Got a big one, boss. Can you take some dictation and get this posted ASAP?”
    “Go,” she said, opening a new Word document on her note-covered, coffee-stained computer.
    This called for old-school journalism, not at all the normal procedure these days. But Carrie, twenty years younger than me and just five years out of journalism school, lived for moments like this. In the Internet era, print remained a passion for the fast-tracking daughter and granddaughter of two of Nashville’s finest newsmen of the previous generation.
    I’d known Carrie all of her life, dating back to when I began working for her dad as a young reporter. Harry Sullivan took me under his wing, seeing a fire in me, I guess, that matched his own. We broke some great stories and I spent many a weekend at my boss’s house playing cards and watching ballgames like a surrogate son since Carrie was an only child. After Harry retired, I tried my hand at editing when the time came, but soon returned to reporting.
    So Carrie trusted me enough that when I called in with “a major breaking news story,” she believed me.
    “Hang on,” I said, then lowered the phone.
    “What’d you get?” I asked Casey. “Something good, I hope.”
    “I like this one.” She thrust the digital camera at me.
    “Me, too. Okay, get something to the paper as quick as you can and then we’re going hunting.”
    I paused to collect my thoughts while Casey went inside to transmit her photos.
    “I’m back, Carrie, with a wild one here. Seems our Mister Stone has gone off the deep end. Casey’s about to send some art from his press conference. Get this up as quick as you can, and I’ll start writing as soon as I get a police statement.”
    “I’m ready,” Carrie said, having already typed in my byline.
    “Open paragraph. Grieving husband Jackson Stone swore revenge Friday against the man who brutally murdered his wife Angela ten days ago. Period. New paragraph.”
    A sucking gasp. “Oh, wow. Okay, go.”
    “In making his first public statement since this crime sent shockwaves through an outraged community comma Stone’s vow for vengeance at the East Nashville precinct appeared to shock police officials comma his lawyer and family members. Period. New paragraph. Quote. I don’t want justice comma I want revenge comma close quote said Stone comma who then described in detail how he would kill the perpetrator if he found him before the police could. Period. New paragraph. Stone then abruptly left without taking questions. Period. Close.”
    It had been y ears since I last dictated a story, and it felt good. And I deemed the effort well worth it if we posted our story online before the TV guys hit the air at six p.m. I glanced at my digital sports watch. Five-forty.
    “Great job, Gerry. Try to find a friend, family member, or someone who can reach him, get some police reaction, not just the official line but the guys on the street, if possible. Then we’ll update online and come back with the print version. I need everything by eight o’clock.”
    I sprinted toward the parking lot and Patrick Stone.
     
     

8
    Back at the office, Carrie Sullivan’s brain cranked into overdrive as she looked over my dictation one last time before sending it to the online editor to post. In the next-to-last sentence, she inserted the word “graphic” between “in” and “detail” to give it more oomph, then wrote the headline that she wanted used by the online people. After a couple of tries, she settled on “Stone-cold killer? Husband says he’ll hunt down wife’s killer” and then deleted it. She’d used “killer” twice and dismissed “Stone-cold killer” as too trite for a news flash of this magnitude. She rewrote it to say “Husband Jackson Stone vows to avenge wife’s death” then deleted it, and wrote “Angela Stone’s husband vows