Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series

by H. Laurence Lareau

  “I just talked with Jerry,” she said. “He wants us to try to interview the parents.”

  ***

  He had composed the shot to show the viewer how a bicyclist felt riding along the busy street’s painted parking-spot lines. Cars and trucks whizzed loudly through the frame, close enough to the camera that Jake could hold it loosely and let their wind-wakes buffet the image. Sporadic raindrops and spray from the cars spattered the lens and filled in for the tears Jake was too shell-shocked, angry, and in denial to shed.

  Saturday morning had begun simply, with Karli and Jake filling in for vacationing colleagues. That had been okay with both of them: Saturdays were usually easy, feature-heavy and news-light. This story hadn’t seemed like much when the assignment editor called on the radio and sent them to the address.

  A car accident with injuries, so possibly newsworthy; more so if there were some traffic backups or if the injured had to be transported by helicopter or extracted from the wreckage with the jaws of life.

  But when they got to the scene, they knew this day’s story was going to be different. They’d seen the newspapers strewn along the roadside and the bent bicycle. The ambulance crew didn’t show the intensity and urgency they usually had when they were busy saving someone’s life.

  Karli quickly confirmed that the story was out of the ordinary when she spoke with the police officer in charge of the scene. She spoke with him for a long fifteen minutes while Jake shot as much video as he could. He crowded the taped-off areas for close-ups of the mangled bicycle, crouched low and placed his camera on improvised supports to frame fluttering, rain-spattered newspapers in the foreground of his shots, and felt a deepening sense of foreboding with each new composition.

  With the eye that wasn’t glued to the viewfinder, Jake saw Karli talking to a reluctant-looking woman with a nondescript terrier on a leash and a plastic bag weighed down with fresh dog poop in her hand. Jake grabbed his gear and slowly walked over to their conversation. Rather than setting up his tripod right away, he bent to make friends with the dog while he eavesdropped.

  “I don’t want to say anything bad about anyone, but I saw that man just staring at the cell phone on his steering wheel the whole time,” the gray-haired lady was saying, a distinct trembling in her voice. “It was horrible. I even yelled at him when I saw what was going to happen, but he didn’t hear me.”

  Jake wiped the dog slobber off his hand and moved to set his tripod up and mount his camera. Karli had asked the woman, who was obviously badly shaken by having seen an accident, if she would repeat herself on camera. Jake heard the deep reluctance and turned his back so as separate himself and his equipment from the woman’s attention. After a long five minutes during which Jake ran out of things to fiddle with, Karli finally coaxed the reluctant woman—who admitted that she’d walked away from the scene so she wouldn’t have to talk to the police—to do an interview on camera.

  After they’d finished with the reluctant witness’s interview, the woman obviously considered Karli to be her new best friend. The woman’s emotions were still fragile and unsettled, but Karli managed to extricate herself elegantly from the conversation with a hug and a promise to call the woman if she needed to talk any more.

  As they walked back to the news car, Karli briefed Jake on what she’d learned from the police. Her face was stony as she spoke and didn’t betray her usual eagerness for the story.

  “This is big,” Karli had told him, anxiety making her usually rock-solid voice shake a little. “A twelve year-old paperboy was killed here by that guy in a pick-up truck we just heard about. The cops say that the kid was riding on the right side of the road, wearing a helmet, doing everything right. But the guy just crashed into him—which is consistent with the texting—pinned him against a parked car, and killed him. I asked the cops if it was a case of the rain making the kid hard to see or something, but they say they don’t think so. And they already have their accident reconstructionist out here taking pictures. He said he didn’t see any evidence that the truck swerved—either to avoid the accident or to avoid something else and then into it.”

  Jake looked back over the scene and wondered if he could capture some video that told the different story better. “Were you able to get the name out of them?” he asked.

  “Not for the record, no, because they’re still trying to notify the family. But the kid’s name was Darrin Anderson.” As Karli spoke the name, Jake heard a roaring pressure in his ears and her face blurred and twisted as though he’d spun the focus element on his camera’s lens. But he was looking right at her, with his own eyes.

  “Darrin Anderson?” Jake sagged hard against his tripod, his eyes dropping from Karli’s face to look at a place completely out of focus. The shock of hearing Darrin’s name had thrown him completely into himself and out of the conversation with Karli.

  ***

  Jake met the boy when he had done a presentation at Darrin’s elementary school three years ago, explaining how karate’s discipline could help people cope with different challenges and demonstrating some of the training exercises from his studio. Afterwards, a teacher had taken Jake aside and introduced Darrin as a student who might enjoy karate. Jake knew what the introduction meant: Here’s a kid who needs something durable in his life, something that’s his. Teachers were often good at identifying kids whose challenges made karate a good fit.

  So Jake had invited Darrin to train at his studio. His parents drank all their money, so Darrin emptied garbage cans, swept the mat, and cleaned the gym mirrors in trade for the classes, uniforms, and equipment. After six months of unabated enthusiasm, Darrin’s face lit up with joy as Jake handed him a key to the studio—along with a talk about the key being a sign of trust and something that he should not share with anyone else. Monday through Thursday after school, Darrin had ridden his bicycle from school to the studio, where he let himself in, did the chores, and then did his homework while he waited for the training to start.

  And so it had gone for nearly a year. Then Darrin had gotten the idea that a paper route could earn him enough money both for karate and also for necessities that his parents couldn’t provide. Jake had encouraged Darrin to pursue the job, believing that work and its rewards were important in forming a person’s identity. And since Darrin had so little natural support in discovering who he would become, Jake believed the job was that much more important.

  So Darrin had become a paying student—though Jake had given him deep discounts on gear and continued to pay tournament entry fees Darrin didn’t even know about. Jake had even talked to a dentist about braces for Darrin and had arranged to pay for them, keeping just enough of a bill that Darrin rode his bike every two weeks to the orthodontist’s office to pay $20 from his newspaper earnings and was none the wiser. Darrin still had his key, but the paper route kept him busy enough that he had to stop training on Tuesdays so he could stay on top of his school work. Jake required his students to bring in their report cards, and there were lost privileges for those who didn’t earn straight As. To make up for the lost day, he usually let himself into the studio on Saturdays to train alone.

  And Darrin had steadily improved as he grew and hardened into what would have been an awkward, floppy-footed adolescence. He was no natural athlete, but he was a sponge for karate. Jake recalled how he took the mat by storm every night, drilling every exercise as close to perfection as he could take it. Nor was there any grim determination to his training. It was all play for him—safe play in familiar surroundings with people he came to know and trust. Everyone in the dojo knew to expect Darrin to make them bust up laughing. He delighted in all the mistakes he and everyone else made while learning new skills or working on basics, and laughter was one of his best tools for creating openings in sparring sessions. Even senior students had trouble countering his techniques when he caught them mid-guffaw.

  Darrin regularly competed in tournaments, and he did well though not spectacularly. He was much more interested in the cam
araderie than he was in winning the competitions. He relished the time he spent with Sensei Jake and the other karate students, including the endless hours in his teacher’s pick-up truck criss-crossing Iowa’s corn and bean fields. And Jake had come to love the earnest boy less as a karate student than as the younger brother he’d never had.

  Darrin had wanted to come in today and work on his new weapon routine—a choreographed exhibition of skill called kata in Japanese.

  He was using one of the oldest weapons in the human arsenal for it, a stick. Most Asian martial arts taught the use of the bo staff, a weapon essentially the same as the quarterstaffs used in Robin Hood stories. Jake had done quite a bit of research to identify and plan the training for Darrin’s new bo kata. He wanted it to be good enough to take to the late-January national karate tournament in Chicago. He and Darrin had both been excited to start the training and ultimately to go to a tournament with elite competitors from across the nation.

  But Jake had been forced to cancel today’s training session because he’d been called in to work at Three NewsFirst. And Darrin had begun his Saturday morning paper route later than usual because he didn’t need to rush in to the studio.

  And now Darrin was dead. And Jake knew it was his fault.

  ***

  Karli’s voice came back through Jake’s fugue-state recollections: “I just talked with Jerry,” she repeated. “The cops told the family, and he wants us to interview the parents.”

  “You’ll need a different shooter then,” Jake replied, still looking at his viewfinder. “I’m not doing it.”

  From the corner of his eye, Jake saw the surprise in Karli’s raised eyebrows. And then he saw a conflict playing out across her face. They both knew they should go knock on the door and try to get an ambush interview. Jake had his own reasons for refusing, but he didn’t understand what would make Karli hesitate.

  “I’m not doing it either, Jake.” Karli turned and began walking back to the news car. “Let’s go.”

  Jake glanced over at the newly arrived crews from the competing stations. The most recent arrival was busily shooting a minimum of footage from the scene, and the other had just begun an interview with the police officer in charge. It would be standard for each of the crews to go to the bereaved parents’ house to try to interview them, and he was sure the competition would do just that.

  But what, he wondered, packing his gear into the car, would move Karli to skip the obligatory grieving-family ambush and not press him to back off his refusal? The feisty reporter he’d come to know would never back away without a reason, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Puzzled and relieved, he got into the driver’s seat and saw Karli staring into the distance as she composed the next sentence to write in her reporter’s tablet. “Where to?” he asked.

  She gave him directions. Still numbed by his own staggering grief and loss, Jake drove carefully and quietly to Darrin’s house. Karli told him to stay in the car, then walked to the house’s front door, slid something through the mail slot, and walked straight back to the car.

  Jake was emotionally spent. Just as he was about to say he couldn’t focus one more frame, Karli saved him the trouble: “Let’s go back and put this story together.”

  The Six O’Clock Newcast

  Three NewsFirst Newsroom

  Saturday, October 5

  Karli sat at her newsroom desk, watching News Director Jerry Schultz, Assignment Editor Vince Guzman, and Producer Holly Cacciatore as they in turn watched three monitors—Three NewsFirst and its two major competitors—at the same time.

  The three had come in to the newsroom on Saturday—even though it was their day off—as soon as the story had broken. They knew it was the kind of story that could change which station was number one in the ratings—it was that big.

  Because it was that big, Karli was furious that Jake was nowhere to be found. He had just vanished after they’d returned to the station, and she was left without the photog who knew what shots he had taken and where they were. That slowed the editing considerably. Mary Rose had taken over for him in the edit suite, where she and Karli had found that they worked together quite well, if without the speed that went with knowing the footage.

  Now Mary Rose’s blue and platinum hair hung over the viewfinder while Karli sat at her desk in the newsroom, reviewing notes and waiting to hear her cue from the anchor on set in the next room. “...Karli Lewis has the story.” Overlapping the cue was the director’s voice in her earpiece: And take Mary Rose’s camera.

  Karli looked into the camera as though it were her best friend. Her deep, feminine alto opened the story gently: “An area family is grieving the loss of 12 year-old Darrin Anderson tonight.” A close-up still photo of the boy’s face and braces-tinseled smile dissolved to an exterior shot of his parents’ house.

  “The house where he grew up is darkened as family members try to cope with their sudden loss, caused when he was struck and killed this morning while delivering his papers.” Flashing emergency response lights reflected off the front of a pick-up truck. A bent bicycle lay beside the road, damply fluttering newspapers scattered around it.

  Her story went on to describe the results of the police investigation: Darrin had been riding appropriately on the correct side of the street and wearing a helmet. The pick-up had driven directly into him without braking or swerving. Karli’s own investigation had yielded an exclusive interview with a witness who’d been walking her dog and had seen the driver texting right into the crash.

  After tossing the story back to the anchors, she watched Jerry closely as he swiveled his decrepit office chair first toward one, then another of the monitors where each station’s story was also wrapping up. The competition both finished with the reporter knocking on the Anderson house’s front door and being asked to please go away. Three NewsFirst did not run a similar shot.

  Karli’s palms slicked with nervous sweat. She was acutely aware that she had not tried to ambush the family into an interview, even though it was an expected part of the coverage. But no family, she thought, needed to deal with the loss of a child while fending off persistent news vultures who came to pick at the fresh corpse. Not only did she not want to intrude on the family’s grief, she didn’t like the image of herself in a vulture suit, turning death into ratings.

  Jerry plucked the pen from his shirt pocket and turned his chair around as the anchors filled the screen to lead into the next story. “If you didn’t get anything, I don’t suppose it’s any great loss to leave out the family turning you away. There’s emotional impact in that moment, though, that the others used to close the story.” Jerry chewed thoughtfully on his pen, looking off into space and considering how the story would work best. “Maybe we should put it into the next show’s version,” he said, turning suddenly and intensely to meet Karli’s eyes. “What do you think?”

  Where the hell is Jake when I need him? Karli thought, wiping her hands on her crisp Ann Taylor shirtdress. He didn’t want to do that useless doorstep interview, either—heck, he flat-out refused—but he sure isn’t here to help explain why. He is a monumental jerk for bailing on a big story like this. Yet she wanted to deflect attention from the matter much more than she wanted to throttle Jake and then try to explain their choices. “Let me work on some bigger parts of the story, Jerry,” Karli responded. “The eyewitness is exclusive and she’s way more important than a non-reaction from the family. So I think we should do a reconstruction animation to show what she saw, from her point of view. I’ll work with one of the studio crew to get that done in time for the show.” Karli had made her decision back at the scene: it would be indecent to try an ambush interview on the grieving family’s doorstep. Now she was simply trying to get Jerry to focus on the more important aspects of the story. “What else do you have going on this?”

  Vince Guzman, Three NewsFirst’s grizzled assignment editor, was in his late 60s but still had the urgent energy and chronically rattled air of a man who had spent his entir
e adult life listening to police scanners and working on two or more deadlines a day. He was of medium height, with salt-and-pepper hair and the rasping voice of a lifelong heavy smoker. He looked up from his computer screen and took his boss’s unspoken cue to respond. “Sophia is on I-35 right now on the way to interview a professor from Iowa State who does a lot of work on traffic engineering,” he said, an unlit and eagerly anticipated cigarette held between his lips and beating out the rhythm of his speech like a conductor’s baton. Sophia Refai was the exotic weekend news anchor, and an experienced reporter. Her parents had moved to California from the Middle East, and she always carried her heritage with her in smoothly dark glamor and sophistication. She was perfectly capable of disarming a reluctant academic on a Saturday for an interview; that angle was in good hands.

  Vince looked back at the monitor. “You might need this background for your part of the story, Karli. The metro’s streets are not safe for bikes and pedestrians. The City has started spending some money on a few multipurpose routes, but the other cities are lagging. One of the City’s traffic engineers is my next-door neighbor, and I buttonholed him today off the record. He told me that the street the boy was killed on is a perfect example of outdated, mid-20th century engineering principles. But that’s off the record. Sophia should be able to get some sound bites out of that professor saying that the recent resurfacing and repainting of the street was completely wrong.

  “Oh, and for your animation,” he interrupted himself, “have Mary Rose press the buttons for you—she’s fast and good at that kind of work.”