Crime Beat (5 page)

“You guys are great with your chili cook-offs down at the volunteer fire department, but just stay out of the way when the big stuff hits, okay?”

“Moretz is as good as anyone at the
News & Observer
,” I said. “Just because we’re a tri-weekly doesn’t mean we’re something for the puppy to pee on.”

Kavanaugh laughed, sounding like a barking seal. I let my anger simmer a little. If I wasted time on a pissing match, I might miss something we could use in the follow-up.

Luckily, one of the detectives came toward us, ducking under the crime tape. The detectives on the Pickett County force wore uniforms, unlike on the television shows, though the SBI agents wore plain clothes. Kavanaugh rushed toward him with surprising grace, another bottom feeder at the news trough.

“Anything new?” she asked.

The detective shrugged. “Sheriff will issue a statement once we figure out jurisdiction.”

“Did you find the murder weapon?”

“No.”

“Ruling on cause of death?”

Kavanaugh was spitting out questions faster than I could write down the detective’s responses. The detective shook his head. “You’ll have to wait for the report.”

“So the county is handling it?” I said.

“It’s complicated,” the detective said. “State has a conservation easement on the property but technically it belongs to the county.”

“Which means we’ll be getting stonewalled by at least two agencies,” Kavanaugh said.

The detective grinned and gave a shrug of helplessness. He was smart enough to shut up, just like most cops. It was a wonder they ever solved any crime, much less a big one.

They’d come to treat the press as adversaries, giving only the minimum required by public-records law. The game had been going on for centuries. Personally, I blame Gutenberg.

For every person who believed in the free flow of information, there was another person who feared information. And some pundits felt controlling information would be the next step in creating a totalitarian world government.

That was too big for me to wrap my head around. All I needed was enough to make it look like the
Picayune
was doing its job.

“Did you confiscate the paddle as evidence?” Kavanaugh said, seemingly without moving her lips.

“What paddle?” the cop answered.

“The murder weapon.”

The cop glanced behind me, looking for a higher-ranking officer. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

Kavanaugh scratched in her notebook with a pencil. I could see the angle. Mention the paddle and let the reader make the logical leap.

I wasn’t about to be left out. “A canoe would normally have two paddles, wouldn’t it, Lt. Mathis?” I said, reading the brass pin on his chest.

Mathis frowned at me, “No comment” written in the hard, cold lines of his face. Kavanaugh didn’t have an ounce of feminine sparkle, but apparently I was even less worthy of a response.

“We gave your reporter all we had,” the cop said.

“We can help if you give us a description of any vehicles or persons of interest.” I looked at Kavanaugh, smirking a little at the one advantage we held over the big papers.

“Check with the sheriff. We’re done here.”

As he wandered back to the crime scene, oblivious of any evidence he might be grinding into the mud and leaves, Kavanaugh finished her notes.

“Guess we’ll have to wait for the official report, huh?” I said, trying to be friendly.

“Yeah, right,” she grunted.

Yeah, right. She had a pencil. I had Moretz.

5.

Sycamore Shade was buzzing about the latest murder. Our publisher upped the run by an extra thousand copies, and they flew off the racks. The network news crews came up a day late, but all they got was boring B-roll of the lake and a couple of people-on-the-street interviews, the typical shocked reactions of people who always expected the worst but still managed genuine surprise when it occurred.

Kavanaugh filed twelve inches in the
News & Observer
, with little more than name, rank, and serial number, though the paddle was a nice touch. It didn’t take much imagination to picture a serene canoe ride turned deadly.

But so far nobody had worked a suspect into the picture, although popular opinion clearly favored a love triangle gone bad.

While the sheriff issued his standard “Ongoing investigation” blather, Moretz had worked behind the scenes to get an exclusive interview with the dead woman’s sister. Somehow he’d even talked her into a photo where she sat on a sofa, clutching snotty tissues and a framed portrait of the victim. Front-page gold.

After the follow-up paper hit the street, I IM’ed Moretz and asked him to come by the office. Even though his cubicle was next door, I had to pretend to be cutting edge and not just yell for him. That’s one of the challenges of the newspaper business, embracing technology while pretending tradition is so important.

He poked his head in, impatient. “Yeah, Chief?”

“You’ve only been in the area a couple of months, and you’re getting all these locals to trust you. Whatever you got, you better bottle it and sell it to journalism schools.”

“Just doing my job.”

I slapped the fresh edition on my desk. “This is better than a job.”

“All I did was write down what happened and what people said. The credit goes to the murderer.”

I looked at him with narrowed eyes. Journalists had little room for sentimentality, but we also pretended to care about our public. We didn’t show any more callousness than was necessary.

“I know we’d all rather publish happy endings,” I said. “But we didn’t create human nature.”

His dark eyes seemed to absorb the fluorescent lights of my office and the room grew a shade darker. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn the temperature fell by several degrees. “If we could just tell the story of the human heart, I think we’d all be better off.”

I chuckled, but it was strained. “Yeah. Every journalist is a novelist waiting to happen, right?”

“I hear what you’re saying. Give the public what they want.”

“Yeah.” His grammar was technically incorrect, because it should have been “what
it
wants,” but his face was so blank and weird I didn’t dare correct him, even in jest.

“They wanted murder and they got it.” Monotone.

“Nice timing,” I said. “You show up and suddenly we get a crime spree.”

He approached my desk but didn’t sit in the little interrogation chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said. You’re scooping everybody—Frank Comstock at the radio station, reporters from the dailies, even the local gossip bloggers.”

I lowered my voice, though the newsroom was empty except for a few press operators banging around on the machinery in the back. “I think this stuff’s been going on all along, but nobody’s ever reported it.”

Moretz recovered a little and almost smiled. “Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it really fall?”

“Something like that. Or the sound of one hand clapping.”

He squinted. “You lost me.”

“You’ve been pushing it hard, John. Why don’t you take a day off?”

“News never sleeps. Besides, I’m still on employee probation.”

“Don’t worry about the paperwork. I’ll move your hours around.”

Our human-services director had taken passive aggression to an art form, to the point where everyone was afraid to speak to her, much less ask about benefits, retirement funds, or how many sick days we had left. We just filled out all the proper forms and made sure everything looked good on paper, then went ahead and did whatever worked best for the team.

I wasn’t that lenient with the other reporters, whom I barely noticed these days. I was hoping Moretz’s performance would inspire them to mediocrity if not greatness, but apparently they’d been all too happy to take a back seat and slack off even more.

“I can’t afford to take time off,” Moretz said.

“You’ll be paid. You’re on salary anyway.” Reporters sign special contracts acknowledging they might have to work crazy hours because of the nature of the job. Plus, contract workers are incredibly easy to terminate.

“It’s not the money. It’s this murder case. I think the cops are keeping something from us.”

“We do what we can do as the Fourth Estate. We’re making sure our public officials are serving the public.”

“That’s what doesn’t pass the smell test. A murderer loose in this little community, and we seem to know more about it than anybody, including the police.”

“Cops may look dumb, but they have a ton of resources. Sure, they hardly ever solve a breaking and entering, but once a case hits the front page, they make an arrest or else.”

The police scanner in the newsroom squawked and Moretz cocked an ear, hungry for an emergency. The static-filled stream of English interrupted by numeric code revealed the cops were 10-20ing for a late lunch at Aunt Annie’s, a greasy spoon where it was still okay to flirt with the waitresses and run a tab if you were a regular. Moretz deflated a little at the lack of crime, like a junkie watching the empty needle pull away.

“Okay,” Moretz said. “I’ll work from home. I have a few calls to make, anyway.”

He paused at the door. “But text me if anything develops.”

“Sure,” I said, an odd sense of relief washing over me. I had the feeling that if I followed him out of the parking lot, he would dissipate once he left the property, as if he only existed when he was chasing a story.

The phone rang, my direct line, which meant the caller was one of the Big Fish. “Hello, this is Howard,” I said in the guarded voice that most people initially took as a recording.

“Sheriff Hardison,” came the equally guarded reply.

“Hello, Sheriff, how can I help you?”

“This story of yours that just ran in the paper.”

I glanced at the edition splayed across my desk: the heartbroken sister, the 40-point headline
No Leads Yet In Murder
, and a thumbnail mug of Hardison just to remind everyone who was in charge of the mess. “Yes, sir?”

“That reporter of yours put in about how the sister told about the victim’s boyfriend. Things were said we hadn’t been told about.”

“According to the story, Jennings wasn’t a boyfriend, just a guy she’d dated a few times in the summer.”

“Same difference. Any man sniffing around a sweet young thing that turns up dead is a person of interest.”

I hated the phrase “person of interest.” It had been created to give the government permission to hassle people without the formality of calling them “suspects.” But it wasn’t the time, place, or opponent for fighting that particular battle. I borrowed a phrase from Moretz. “My reporter just wrote down what she said.”

“That’s the problem. She never bothered mentioning such a boyfriend to us when we interviewed her. Makes us look like a bunch of dumb-hick ‘Walking Tall’ wannabees.”

“Sheriff, Moretz invited you to go on the record with any comments. And you have my direct number.”