Reaction Shot (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 9)

by Patricia McLinn

  I shook my head with a modicum of effort. “Not me. Must have been Iris.” After several sustaining sips, I belatedly asked, “Eggs? Didn’t think I had any.”

  “Iris.”

  “Ah.” More coffee, and I added, “Oklahoma!, really?”

  He shrugged, a faint grin fanning creases from his eyes. “She picks up the music at the library. We had to talk about I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No, but I preferred that talk to the one about Molasses to Rum from 1776.”

  I grimaced. “Explaining the slave trade. Tough.” Another sip from my mug brought another thought. “I wonder if she knows about Sweet Charity. Great songs.”

  He frowned at me suspiciously. Apparently his education in musicals was coming from Tamantha’s explorations of them and she hadn’t reached that one yet.

  “Hey, big spender, spend a little time with me,” I filled in.

  Realization flooded his eyes. “Don’t you dare, Elizabeth.”

  I widened my eyes in utter innocence, then ruined it by spluttering into my coffee.

  As I raised my head and met his eyes, my breath stuttered.

  We remained like that. This morning, last night, his arranging a sleepover for Tamantha for our not-going-to-happen date, shimmering between us.

  My phone rang.

  Grateful or disappointed or both, I reached for it. Gesturing a slightly apologetic acknowledgment of interrupting … something … after I’d clicked to answer.

  Tom tipped his head, accepting the inevitability rather than my apology.

  “Hello? Elizabeth?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “It’s Jerry. From the station. Did you see the footage? Thought I’d hear from you.”

  “Sorry. We went from one thing to another all day and into the night. We did look at the footage on Jennifer’s phone — and thanks for sending it out with her — but, honestly, Jerry, we didn’t see anything remarkable.”

  “I wondered…” Before I needed to ask what he’d wondered, he continued, “Okay, then you’ve got to come in here and see it on the screen. Tell me then there’s nothing remarkable and I’ll quit bugging you.”

  Even if I hadn’t owed him the courtesy as a colleague, I was curious now.

  Jerry was not the flight of fancy type. Being the main studio camera operator, put him in contact day after day with Thurston at his most dictatorial, because there was a camera involved, a nice big camera he considered all his. Jerry held onto his sanity by being unflappable. Stolid, even.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good. I won’t rest easy until you see this and see what I see.”

  I hung up.

  “Jerry. From the station,” I explained.

  “Figured.”

  “Wants me to come in and look at footage on the monitor there. Us. You want to come? I’m going to call the others…”

  “Need to get Tamantha squared away.”

  “Of course. I’ll just…” I lifted the phone.

  He nodded and took the egg pan to the sink.

  * * * *

  During the short drive to the station after calling Jennifer, Mike, and Diana, it hit me what an odd time it was for Jerry to be there.

  He’d worked the Ten last night and would do both newscasts today. To be there at this time of the morning made for a short night last night and a long day today.

  Diana was leaving her truck when I pulled in to the KWMT parking lot behind Jennifer, arriving to work her scheduled shift. Before I was out of my vehicle, Mike arrived in his posh SUV.

  Diana headed toward the main doors, then waited there for the rest of us to catch up.

  She pointed. “Isn’t that Thurston’s car?”

  The red sedan was distinctive enough to be sure it was. Thurston at work this early was odd enough to disbelieve our eyes.

  “What would he be doing here now?” Mike asked.

  “I was wondering—” I noticed Jennifer had also been about to speak, but I’d started first and she didn’t interrupt. “—the same thing about Jer—”

  I broke off because Diana, the first to pass the exterior set of double glass doors into the vestibule before the interior set, had stopped abruptly.

  “Something’s up.”

  Past her shoulder, I saw Thurston, red-faced and waving his arms, shouting into the newsroom bullpen from the spot where the hallway led to his private office. The scattering of staffers at their desks or transfixed in transit to somewhere all stared at him, motionless.

  “If Thurston catches wind that we’re looking into York’s death, he’ll delay and derail us any way he can,” Mike said. “I watched the Ten last night—”

  He meant he’d recorded the newscast on his home setup. I used to do that for every newscast at my stations until I came to KWMT. Couldn’t take the punishment of watching that much Thurston. But it was smart of Mike to do it. To check on Pauly, his stand-in last night for the sports segment, and to critique himself on a regular basis.

  It was part of why he was getting better and better.

  “—and you would not believe how he botched it.”

  I would believe it. I also agreed with Mike about Thurston trying to delay and derail us. “Let’s hold up out here and see if it blows over.”

  “You mean if he’ll blow over. He’s such a blowhard, shouldn’t take long,” Jennifer muttered.

  It didn’t.

  With a final, dramatic gesture, and his voice loud enough that we heard the climactic “…jobs will be lost!”

  He spun on his heel — actually a little farther around than he wanted, because he had to backtrack a step to start down the hall.

  Diana eased one of the interior doors open and when we heard the emphatic slam of the door to Thurston’s inner sanctum, we entered.

  That slam released the newsroom from its spell, so our entry was covered by conversation, movement, and laughter. A lot of laughter, though kept at a level that would not penetrate Thurston’s office.

  “What’s going on, Audrey?” Diana asked the assignment editor/producer as she passed us going the opposite direction.

  “An impressive Thurston hissy fit, even by his standards.” She was gone before we could get more from her.

  Leona D’Amato, the reporter with the Cottonwood County’s society beat, came within reach. I held onto her arm.

  “What was Thurston’s hissy fit about?”

  “Didn’t you hear? This was Act Two. In last night’s Act One, he screamed at Les for most of the time between the Five and the Ten.”

  “What about?”

  A lot of times he screamed about me, not a fact I’m ashamed of. But I hadn’t even been in the office.

  More important, as far as he knew, I didn’t have any interest in the murder of Furman York. Thurston claimed rights to all lead stories. Then he failed to report them halfway decently. Heck, he often failed to pronounce the names right.

  If he’d gotten out of his cushy office and gone to the scene yesterday, he would have known I was very near this big story. That couldn’t explain these hissy fits, though, because Thurston didn’t do on-the-scene reporting. Remember? Too hard to keep his hair perfect in Wyoming’s windy outdoors.

  “About how Les had to fire anyone who has sent or in the future sends Thurston clips of those robotic camera bloopers. Too bad you missed it. Thurston was practically foaming at the mouth.”

  “Robotic camera bloopers?” I asked innocently.

  Not innocently enough.

  “You set him up?” Leona’s question held no criticism. Possibly a bit of approval.

  “Mmm. I might have let him set himself up.”

  “Even better.” Definitely approval.

  Quickly, I explained the background of yesterday’s studio showdown, when she’d been out of the newsroom.

  “If Thurston gets vindictive, throws his weight around and gets anybody fired…”

  I absolutely didn’t want to contribute to others losing their jobs.

  “He
can try. He won’t succeed. That’s why it bothers him so much. The videos must have started right after you left. By the time I came in before the Five yesterday, they’d found the easy videos of the robotic camera goofs and were competing to find more — bonus points for any not previously seen. Then they emailed him using really bad spoofed email addresses, like Hiring@TopTenStation.com. What idiot would think that was a legit email and open it expecting to find info on a job?”

  “Thurston,” Diana said.

  “Exactly. The emails kept flowing in and with Les not here yesterday — again. Has anyone else noticed our fearless leader is here less and less?—”

  I had. Nods from Diana and Mike said they had, too. There was no time to discuss that detour before Leona resumed.

  “—Thurston went for the direct attack. Came flying out of his office, pushed aside that sweet news aide, Dale, then started ranting at everyone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he would not stand for being attacked this way. That he knew who was sending these demeaning emails — not clear if he meant demeaning to the robotic cameras or him and, besides that, he has no clue who’s sending the emails. He’d be shocked that some of his sycophants have been the most prolific. Nice to his face, kick him in the behind when he turns around. Anyway, he was threatening jobs again, this time saying he’d fire them personally. Maybe he got confused in all the excitement and forgot he doesn’t have hiring and firing authority.”

  “The man’s a maniac,” Mike said.

  “True. Right now, though, he’s a maniac with a hot interview.”

  “Who?” Mike, Diana, and I chorused.

  “Norman Clay Lukasik.”

  While the rest of us still tried to catch our breath at the idea of Thurston with that hot interview, Leona added, “Probably the biggest name in lawyers between east LA and west Chicago. And you know it’s his foreman who — oh, of course you know. On the case already?”

  No need to answer what she clearly knew. Instead, I got out, “Thurston got an interview with Lukasik? He called Lukasik and—”

  “No,” Jennifer interrupted. “Lukasik called him. I started to tell you before. Dale emailed me last night. I didn’t read it until this morning.”

  Poor Dale. Forever yearning after Jennifer, who remained apparently unaware that her fellow news aide’s epistles with news and information he thought she might be interested in were his version of love letters. Which she left languishing in her inbox overnight.

  But I was less focused on Dale’s unrequited adoration than the news that Norman Clay Lukasik had called Thurston.

  Thurston thought he’d achieved a coup, scheduling the interview.

  I’d bet Lukasik got what he wanted out of it, though.

  I patted Jennifer’s shoulder as she dropped her belongings at the desk where she’d be working. “Don’t worry. We’ll tell you all about it if there’s anything to tell from what Jerry wants to show us. Stick with your work. Don’t get in trouble. We might need you later.”

  “Are you kidding? I want to see this, too. Give me half a second to get things rolling.”

  “C’mon,” Mike called from the open door of the editing booth. “Jerry’s waiting.”

  We crowded in.

  Actually, crowding would have been two of us. We packed in.

  Jerry had me sit a little to the left. “Same angle you were at during the interview.” Diana sat to the right. Mike was in back and hanging over us for a clear view. Jerry reached in for the controls.

  The door started to open, eliciting, “Occupied” from all of us.

  The door continued opening. As much as it could. Jennifer squeezed in sideways. “They won’t miss me for a few minutes, especially since I transferred calls to my cell. Pretty dead this hour, anyway.”

  Jerry took over. “Okay, I’ll start it with your last question, Elizabeth. It’s all reaction shot. That’s how we’d set it up and it kept rolling.”

  I would have fidgeted in impatience if there’d been room. We knew all this from what we’d seen on Jennifer’s phone.

  Admittedly, everything was much clearer in this size. Against the scarf-softened background, Odessa Vincennes’ face held center stage. It had been a postage stamp on the phone screen. Now it was slightly larger than life.

  My voice came on, asking Odessa how the group selected and verified material to include in the alerts. Her response. Me beginning to ask for the study. The door opening. Jerry saying the light was on. My starting to tell Mike I was conducting an interview.

  Then him saying, “There’s been a shooting at Tom’s grazing association.” His footsteps as he crossed the studio to me. “Not Tom. It wasn’t Tom. It was the foreman from another ranch. Guy named Furman York. Looks like murder.”

  In the footage there was a beat of silence.

  In the editing booth it was followed by varied sucked-in breaths, then Mike’s soft whistle.

  When the footage ended, we all stared at the screen a moment longer.

  “The Lady of Shalott,” Diana murmured.

  “That’s exactly what I said.” Jerry spoke with justifiable vindication.

  “You’re a Tennyson fan?” I asked absently, my brain processing what we’d seen.

  “Me? Nah. It’s my wife quoting something about the Lady of Shalott all the time.”

  “The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott.”

  “That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

  “Your wife’s the Tennyson fan?” Diana asked.

  “Nah, not her, either. But she sure does like Agatha Christie and books like that. There’s one about a mirror cracking and that’s where she learned that bit. Real taken with it, she is. As I said, she says it a lot. This—” He gestured toward the screen. “—is the first time I saw what it meant.”

  A shiver went across my shoulders. As if that motion had been the start of turning toward Jerry, I did that and said, “Let’s see it again.”

  We watched it five more times.

  “It’s weird. Mike says there’s been a murder, there’s some reaction at the start, and then her face like … empties,” Jennifer said.

  “Can you stop it on that first expression, Jerry?”

  He did.

  I understood why we hadn’t seen it on Jennifer’s phone. It was all in the eyes.

  Odessa’s overall expression was one of surprise.

  Almost as if her brain said that was what was called for and produced it.

  But her eyes… Her brain didn’t rule her eyes.

  Diana nodded. “That moment at the start… I keep thinking of the word beatific.”

  “Like beautiful?” Jerry asked. I thought Jennifer shot him a glance of gratitude that he’d asked the question.

  “No. It’s supremely happy. I associate it with angels. A sort of exalted happiness.”

  Looking at the screen, I said, “This is not angelic. More… triumphant?”

  “Exalted triumph. Yeah,” Diana said.

  “What’s even creepier is the next part. Jer?” Mike invited him to advance a few frames.

  He did and stopped precisely on a sharp, clear view of eyes without expression, without life.

  “It’s like someone unplugged her,” Jennifer said.

  “Good one,” Mike said. “What do we know about her?”

  “Not much. She was sent by the group raising money for consumer alert flyers to be distributed to the elderly in the county, along with meals and other assistance. It was an info interview on that effort. I researched the group and the program behind the fund-raising, didn’t look into her.”

  “Think we should?”

  “It might be a sidetrack, but if only for our satisfaction, let’s find out more about this woman. Her background—”

  “On it,” Jennifer said.

  “—history, where she’s from, if she has any connection with Furman York or murder or … well, anything that might explain that reaction.�
��

  “And what she drives,” Diana inserted. I raised an eyebrow at her. She answered with, “The vehicle at the grazing association I thought I remembered from here. A long shot, maybe—”

  “Got it,” Jennifer said. “This is more like it. Instead of boring Furman York.”

  We started to stir. We’d have to unpack carefully and in the same order we’d packed to get out of here.

  “Thank you, Jerry. Especially for your persistence.”

  He winked at me. “You can pay me in brownies and coffee.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  None of us said anything until we were in the parking lot.

  At best, newsrooms are hotbeds of eavesdropping. KWMT-TV’s newsroom had the deeper drawback of the shadows of Thurston Fine and Les Haeburn.

  The camaraderie in the bullpen had risen exponentially in the past year, while Fine retained several adherents. More dangerous were the ones who presented themselves as part of the new attitude, while scuttling back to report to Fine, huddling under the shreds of his patronage.

  Haeburn?

  He had no adherents. He had only Fine.

  Or Fine had him.

  Hard to tell.

  One theory was that Haeburn did whatever Fine wanted — or mostly did — because he intended to attach himself to coattails as Fine ascended.

  I found that theory deeply flawed, because I couldn’t imagine any decent station manager not seeing through Fine’s fatuous exterior right to his fatuous interior.

  No, if Haeburn had a brain, he’d attach himself to Mike’s coattails, because he had talent, ambition, and the right amount of connections — enough to open doors, not so many that he was dismissed when he got inside the door.

  However, Haeburn didn’t have a brain.

  Which left the theory that he took the easy way out by letting Fine have his way.

  We stood in the parking lot, our clothes and hair streaming before a brisk west wind, to discuss.

  Not much of a discussion.

  “Strange reaction.”

  “Could be nothing, but…”

  “Need to find out more about her before writing it off completely.”

  “So, what’s next?” Jennifer asked.

  “I have to work,” Diana said.

  Mike gusted out, “Suppose I should, too. Hey, aren’t you scheduled now?” he belatedly asked Jennifer.