“Wilbanks,” I said, still in disbelief. They say journalism makes you a cynic, and politics ups the ante and calls your bluff. But Wilbanks was such a cheerful, imp-faced fellow, the sort who could play Santa Claus if given a cotton beard.
I couldn’t picture his offspring being anything less than civic-minded and square. Then again, they said a preacher’s daughter never waited until marriage, and I’d known at least one who’d lived down to that reputation.
“I’ve got it nailed,” Moretz said. “The only question is whether I’ll get access to the videos that were seized. They should be considered public record if they’re described on the warrant.”
“We can’t publish anything like that.”
Moretz cocked a Banderas eyebrow and said, “It’s not for the paper.”
“Oh. Okay. How many inches can you give me?”
“Fifteen, and probably a mug shot. I’ll try to round up a backstory, maybe interview one of the girls’ moms.”
A vic family interview. A gold mine for any media outlet. Facts were facts, but nothing spoke to the public like an outraged person who didn’t have a clue. Just look at the popularity of so-called “reality shows.”
We needed the frame to tell us what part was the entertainment. The real point was, “Give me your pain and your tears.”
I clicked through the stories that the other writers had filed. Humane Society rummage sale, local Democratic Party fundraiser, arrival of Girl Scout cookies. Without Moretz, the paper would be oatmeal without the sugar.
The mayor, perversion, and self-righteous indignation issued from every pulpit and public agency in the community ensured an ongoing story with lots of angles.
And so it went. Every few days, it seemed a new atrocity occurred. On Thursday, Moretz filed a story on a case of autoerotic asphyxiation that the cops weren’t sure was so “auto,” but were merely calling a “suspicious death” for now.
Though we didn’t report suicides, there were only so many terms you can use to couch “accidental hanging,” and we could report the sheriff’s quote that the death was “under investigation.”
It’s the kind of copy where you avoid titillation and prurience at all costs, knowing most of the audience will strain their necks reading between the lines and talking about the things they know they shouldn’t talk about. Makes for cheap thrills and higher circ.
On Saturday, two drowned teenagers were found in the Unegama River. The speculation was the first was swept away and the second died trying to save the first, though no one was willing to say which victim was which.
In such a circumstance, there was only one thing to do: declare both of them heroes who no doubt died valiantly and nobly trying to save each other.
And once the toxicologist’s report came back with no drugs or alcohol involved, then the story was golden and gallons of memorial ink flowed. Moretz was on the scene both for the body search and the subsequent mourning ceremonies at the high school.
Other crime increased as well. Smash-and-grabs, lock bumping, shoplifting. The crime report had crept from page two into a jump to page eight each week. Though crime stats peaked, arrests were down, and Moretz bled a few great interviews with the sheriff, complete with a hangdog mug shot that simultaneously glowered from the page at any would-be perps and reassured voters that everything possible was being done and that, possibly, mistakes had been made and procedures would be reviewed and officers would be held accountable.
We were riding the mayor’s case with every issue, and our editorial section expanded to three pages because of all the outraged letters from readers. The mayor was under pressure to resign because of his allegedly perverted son, but so far he’d resisted, issuing a statement that he couldn’t abandon the office while crime was rampant.
We even ran a special series on our little crime wave, with the church page full of rants about the breakdown of the traditional family and some sidebars comparing our death rates to those of surrounding counties.
The parent company had to upgrade the press because we were rolling out twice as many copies. Ad sales were booming. The publisher, a walrus-faced guy who had married into the company, emerged from his corner office like a bear emerging from hibernation and promptly bought a new Porsche.
4.
Just when things couldn’t get any better, Moretz brought in the Rebel Clipper’s first corpse. No one knew it was the first victim of a serial killer, of course, and the Clipper moniker came later, after a certain grooming implement was linked to the crime.
The body was found under a canoe at the state park, near the dock where rangers rent boats by the hour for tourists who want to skim the lake. The corpse was female, early 20’s, partially nude. Raccoons had nibbled at some of the soft bits. Apparently someone had beaten her with the business end of a paddle.
Moretz captured the horror in all its pixilated glory. He must have gotten there shortly after the 9-1-1 call, before the wall of yellow tape shut the public off from its Constitutional right to be nosy.
In a stroke of luck, he’d been out on assignment in that end of the county, covering a storm-water violation where a farmer had dug in the creek without a permit, turning the water brown and annoying the summer tourists who demanded a pristine view from the safety of their motor vehicles.
“An early Hanukkah present, Chief,” said the e-mail that accompanied the attached story file. Moretz knew I was a lapsed Catholic masquerading as a Taoist. At that moment, though, I would have become a Satanist if the Big Red Dude would keep me supplied with front-page dynamite.
We had to downplay the gruesome details, of course, which was a blow to my ego because the sensational nature of the story brought reporters from several of the regional dailies. They had no such shackles, and somehow the fact that they were delivering news to tens of thousands of people made them less responsible than the Picayune, which purported to care about its community.
The cynic in me, which runs about half an inch beneath the surface no matter where you scratch, would call it the cheeseburgerization of media, the sizzle without the steak, the ratings rush.
The murder was big enough that I visited the scene myself, but there was little left to see besides a few investigators working the scene. The park was state property, so the SBI had a couple of agents complicating things.
The lake was ringed by forest, creating a wonderful spot to kill someone, even if I did say so myself. Simply slash-and-hack, gouge, or strangle, and then you could either row along the shoreline into one of the little coves, hop on a mountain bike and head down one of the rugged trails, or simply slip into the dense woods and hoof it to the highway three miles south.
It was cold and the regional reporters only hung around long enough to get a useless quote before heading for the warmth of the local bar. One of them stuck around, though, buried in a coffee-stained trench coat.
Her name was Kelsey Kavanaugh, clearly a name fit for an on-air television reporter, except she wasn’t cute enough. Her face was like a block of wood that had received a few half-hearted hatchet blows.
I’d met her at a press association awards banquet, back when I’d earned a third place for a feature on literacy. My story was about an eighty-three-year-old woman who’d learned to read and had finally gotten her community-college degree. It was the kind of feature that tugged heartstrings and helped us all overlook the unfair, patriarchal society that had so long prevented her from getting an education.
Kavanaugh had nabbed both a first and a second in spot news, which usually meant crime or disaster coverage. We’d sat at the same lunch table and she’d spoken of her ambition to work for Fox News.
Ambition is ugly in anyone, especially a reporter. Or maybe I was just jealous, because she might just pull it off.
Kavanaugh was smoking a cigarette well away from the scene, tapping a little composition book against her sturdy hip.
“So, Howard, you got some action in the sticks,” she said.
“People are
people everywhere. And a certain percentage is psycho.”
One thick eyebrow lifted. “You think this is a psycho?”
I backpedaled fast. “Probably a domestic. Jilted lover, somebody cheating, the usual.”
“Ordinary murder, huh?” Kavanaugh grimaced. The setting sun through the trees made her teeth orange, and the air was heavy with October mist.
“Sure. We get them here in Sycamore Shade, same as the big city.”
“I noticed. Lots of other stuff, too. I flipped through the reports down at the station.”
“A rash, for sure. Plus we’re doing a lot more investigative reporting, so from the outside, it looks like there’s something in the water and our people are going bonkers.” I was freezing but didn’t want to appear wimpier than her, so I left my jacket open. I turned and watch a couple of cops circling the perimeter.
“This reporter of yours. Moretz. He’s got a lot of hot clips.”
“With good editorial direction, reporters really have an opportunity to shine,” I said, a line I’d heard in journalism school that sounded like I was patting myself on the back.
“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 ma
chinery 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.
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