NOWHERE TO RUN

A killer armed with a vial of anthrax and the will to use it stalks the corridors of the New York Broadcast Center of homicide-prone KEY News (Nobody Knows, 2002, etc.).

If the premise trades on terrorist-inspired paranoia, imagine how it feels to KEY News medical producer Annabelle Murphy, already nursing her firefighter husband Mike through the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that’s laid him low ever since 9/11, when she sees her wayward charge, self-aggrandizing KEY News medical correspondent Dr. John Lee, brandishing a test tube full of white powder on the morning news—her morning news—and hear him claim it’s anthrax he’s gotten in an unspecified way anybody could imitate. The police naturally descend and the switchboards go berserk. By the time Dr. Lee’s white powder turns out to be confectioner’s sugar, Annabelle’s old flame, book-news producer Jerome Henning, is already dead of anthrax, along with Clara Romanski, his inoffensive cleaning woman. The vituperative tell-all that Jerome had been penning casts clouds of suspicion on all the Key to America newsroom coworkers whose peccadilloes he was about to expose. Executive producer Linus Nazareth never acknowledged Jerome as ghostwriter of his own upbeat tome. Entertainment editor Russ Parrish had let Jerome hook him on coke. Randy business correspondent Gavin Winston likes his dates young, fresh, and vulnerable. Ambitious lifestyle correspondent Lauren Adams doesn’t mind sleeping her way to the top. As Clark ladles out the suspicion, the killer, seen far too often in strenuously unrevealing close-up, moves on to a third victim en route to a fourth—Annabelle herself, who’ll be attacked while the building is under a long-portended police lockdown.

No detection—the vital clues all come flocking unbidden to Annabelle in the nick of time—but the dexterity in keeping so many guilty-looking characters afloat at once and the revelation of a truly surprising killer make Clark’s sixth dispatch from KEY News her best.