Victim's, Inc.

by A. R. Licht

  “I’m not his mom. If he wants to come, its up to him.”

  “Oh, I’m already there,” Waylon said, grinning.

  They took a cab over to the Deschutes Brewery, a twenty minute ride across town. Kate enjoyed

  the mountain scenery, the snow capped peaks, the mountain pines. The town itself had an old

  world charm to it. After seeing the mountains in North Carolina, Kate decided that the Cascades

  were her favorite. There was something about them that captured the imagination.

  “So election season starts up next year, who is betting that Sarah Palin runs?” Waylon said.

  Sienna, still dressed to the nines, was tapping on her phone screen, “I think Hilary will.”

  “She ran eight years ago and lost, I doubt she’ll win this time,” Waylon said.

  “I think a minority should run,” Kate said, still looking out the window.

  “What do you mean by minority?” Waylon said, his tone dangerous.

  “I’ve never seen a Hispanic or Latino run for office and win,” Kate said.

  “Are you Hispanic or Latino?” Sienna said, eyebrows raised.

  “No, I’m as white as they get. I’m just surprised you don’t see more of it.”

  “Maybe I should run for president,” Waylon said, leaning back next to Sienna who sat between

  them.

  “Maybe I should,” Sienna said, then laughed.

  “I’d vote for you,” the cab driver said, glancing back at them in the rearview mirror.

  Sienna flipped him off but he didn’t see it.

  Kate paid for the cab fare and they went inside the building with a brick front. The aesthetics were pleasing, giving it a cozy atmosphere with an open floor-plan. It was divided into two levels, the main floor lower than the sides. They were greeted by a hostess who led them to a table next to a large window, where the lights of town twinkled beyond as the sun disappeared behind the trees.

  “I don’t see a pool table,” Kate said.

  “Oh, I don’t think they have those here,” Sienna said, picking up the drink menu. “They have

  amazing burgers though. You should try one, Kate.”

  “I’m vegetarian, do they have a veggie patty burger?” Kate said.

  “That’s right, I forgot. Hmmm. No, I don’t see one. That’s too bad. They have the best patties,

  with mushrooms. The flavored cheeses are excellent with onions.”

  The waitress came by and introduced herself. She brought water, then took their drink orders.

  “Sienna, here, talked too much about your burgers, I think I’m going to order mine now. I’m

  hungry,” Waylon said, setting down the menu.

  “I’ll get one too,” Sienna said and placed her order.

  Kate looked through the menu and finally settled for a salad with salmon.

  The drinks came, a sampler of sorts placed on boards with indents for each glass. The waitress

  gave a run down on the different kind of beers, from the amber to the dark. When she left, Kate

  took a sip of the dark ale and winced.

  “Whew! That’s strong.”

  “So what did you think of your first real story?” Sienna said.

  “Well, compared to the plane crash, I think it was a lot easier. They wouldn’t allow me to get

  near anyone that might give a great sound bite here.”

  Waylon downed a glass and said, “That’s how it usually is, Kate. They are mum on everything,

  you have to fight for the details.”

  “But they weren’t like that in Alkin,” Kate said.

  Sierra nodded, “It’s a small town. They do things differently.”

  Kate narrowed her eyes in thought, “But the FBI was involved, if anything it should have been

  the same as here with all of the investigations going on. I mean, they even gave us a sheet with

  the list of victims on it.”

  “Yeah, its not usually like that, I thought it was strange too,” Waylon said and belched.

  “Disgusting,” Sienna said, sipping on a sample.

  “Excuse me,” Waylon said, leaning his elbows on the table. “Anyway, I kept thinking it was

  strange how orchestrated everything seemed. It was so easy to get the shot, and to get the

  interviews. How often are you able to get that kind of answers you got, Kate?”

  Kate shrugged, “I’ve only done a small amount of reporting in Baltimore before ANB hired me.

  The interviews I did were usually about an arts and crafts show or about the morning traffic. Simple things. I really couldn’t say.”

  “Well from what I’ve seen,” Sienna said, “it ebbs and flows. Sometimes you hit pay dirt and

  sometimes you have to find a different angle. Like what you did with that official, Kate. He

  couldn’t talk about the ongoing investigation so you drew attention to something else the viewers

  would be concerned about and put a positive spin on it. I was stuck with sticking to the details and trying to show how the community was concerned about the cleanup. You know, how they were effected by it with their homes and businesses because that plane wiped out a few of them.”

  Kate was stunned. She hadn’t thought of that angle, Jack might not like what she’d done. She

  knew she had been walking a fine line, possibly even angering the company that owned the

  airplane that crashed, or the airline that had supplied the crew. Tomorrow she’d set out to talk to

  families and the towns folk.

  “Was it easier than normal for you to get information in Alkin, Sienna?” Kate asked.

  Sienna made a face, then saw the waitress. “Food’s here!”

  Chapter 10

  Baltimore, Maryland- April 13th

  Jack is furious. Kate hadn’t seen him in person since he hired her, she’d forgotten how

  intimidating the man can be.

  He is a fit fifty-something with eyes that penetrate your soul. Jack Cassel has worked for ANB

  for thirty years, starting from the bottom, working his way up through the ranks. He is pacing

  behind his desk in Baltimore as he talks.

  “You made light of a tragedy. A hundred deaths right there, you were cracking jokes!”

  “Jack, I didn’t know he was going to do that. I thought he was going to answer in an official way,

  he seemed keen to when we chatted just before I went live.”

  “I heard your shirt was unbuttoned and that is why he spent so much time looking at your chest.”

  Kate colored but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t intentionally done it, but can she explain

  that when he has already made up his mind?

  “What’s worse, you made it sound like flying is dangerous. I’ll be surprised if I don’t hear about

  a lawsuit. Then you go around interviewing people the next day with red eyes. Were you hungover, Kate?”

  “I... I was really tired.”

  “That is how this job works. You rush rush rush, scurry for knowledge, dig up the truth and give

  it to the people. It's not easy, in fact most times it is thankless. You work long hard hours. If you

  aren’t cut out for this, let me know now.”

  “No! I love it! I really like my job. I’m just getting used to it. Please, give me time to adjust. I’m

  learning. I won’t make another mistake like I did with the official.”

  Jack stops pacing to think, then said, “I think you need a break. Something smaller for the time being. There's a strike going on in Illinois at a company that makes combines for farmers. I think I’ll send you there if it hasn’t resolved in a few days.”

  “But, that’s not fair!”

  “It’s more than fair. You’re still green, as you just reminded me. You have to put in the hours.

  Everyone starts somewhere, Kate. Maybe I started you on the big stuff too soon.”
<
br />   Kate bit down on her bottom lip to keep herself from saying something that might get her fired.

  “Oh,” Jack said, as an after thought, “Lose that lipstick. You look like a high-end escort.”

  “But, Sienna-“

  “No buts. And that Sienna girl, she’s just watching her back. You were taking her ratings, she

  wanted to knock you back a few pegs. You let her. That means I don’t win when you don’t win. Get back out there and ignore Sienna. She’s an old pro.”

  Kate wanted to cry with shame on her drive home the twenty-five minute drive to Essex. She didn’t feel like telling anyone in her family about being reprimanded. Especially not after the dinner where they’d all celebrated her success.

  She turned on the TV in her apartment, which was a mistake. There had been a tornado in Kansas

  that raged across three counties before finally dying out. All of the big names were out there

  doing coverage and she was here, stuck at home. Waylon was filming some guy who had taken

  her place. She watched the guy talk, listened to his word choices and thought out loud, “I could do that better. He should have stood at the end of the street and shown more of the debris.”

  She flipped channels after a while, saw a few of the victim's families from Alkin talking about gun laws and their outrage of how the boys had easily obtained grenades. She watched for a while. When she grew tired of it, she fired up her laptop and scanned the news looking for anything about the strike in the midwest. She found a few boring tidbits, but nothing worth prying in to.

  Something Waylon had said prickled at the edge of her mind. He’d never seen it so orchestrated

  before.

  Kate cast her mind back to the moment she’d arrived on scene in Alkin. To the sound of sirens,

  the distant gunfire from an automatic weapon. There were spans of time between magazines, with firing and reloading. The officer being shot, the wheel chair that he was put in while they rolled him down the hill.

  There hadn’t been any blood. Just a coat held over his arm, pressed there to keep the blood from

  flowing. What had his expression been? It had stood out in her mind at the time because the

  officer didn’t seem upset or scared. No apparent pain. At the time, she’d written it off to shock

  and maybe the pain hadn’t hit him yet. But Kate had also been distracted with her first broadcast which hadn't happened yet, a bundle of nerves.

  Where had they taken him in the wheel chair? She’d made the assumption that an ambulance had been waiting farther back from the police tape.

  Then, when she’d seen him in his home after, she specifically remembered him asking her to

  promote his donation site.

  She pulled the site up now, out of curiosity. She wondered how much he made. Had it been

  enough to cover his medical bills? But, wait, wouldn’t the police department or the city have

  picked up the tab for him? Maybe he intended to pay them back so he wouldn’t be a burden on

  the city finances.

  There was no meter on the site announcing how much money had been raised, but there was a

  picture of him in the hospital bed. His wife standing next to him, three other officers standing at

  his left side. All of them turned toward the camera with smiles.

  The paragraph below explained how he had been shot while on duty, then detailed his

  surgery, his recovery process. Wonder how he is doing now? Would he have to undergo physical therapy once he’d healed enough?

  She scrolled down to the bottom of the page, not looking for anything in particular, just bored. It

  is so irritating that Jack is punishing her for something beyond her control. How was she

  supposed to know that man would actually tell a dirty joke on air? Or even go so far as to make a

  second joke? If anything, he should be fired for his insensitivity.

  She pulled up the donation sites that pertained to the massacre, as a whole, and scrolled through

  them.

  They had added photographs of each of the victims. For the first time she saw Joleen Berkus’

  face. Shimmery brown hair, vivid blue eyes. Healthy smile, her skin aglow. Her age is listed

  as twenty-six.

  She thought of Abby again and shivered.

  There were links to some of the victims Facebook pages. Kate clicked Joleen’s. Her profile

  picture is the same as the picture used on the donation site. It looked like a family member had

  cleaned the page from personal posts. People from all over the world were leaving

  comments talking about her death, how it had affected them. Many of the comments wishing

  her family all the best in their time of loss.

  She scrolled to the bottom, to the part where it shows the timeline of the page. Her date of birth,

  where she’d gone to school and when. But then she noticed something interesting.

  The page had been made only a day before her death.

  Joleen had set up a social media page, perhaps with the intention of keeping in touch with loved

  ones knowing that the birth of her child was imminent. Perhaps she had made it just for little

  Sarah as Terry had said he planned to name his little Sprout.

  Kate clicked the back button and chose another Facebook profile. It took her to Linda Auge’s

  page. Her baby, Shawn, had been in the nursery the morning of. Her mother, Alison Nichols had

  been in the room with her when they were faced with death.

  The profile picture matched that of the donation site, probably that is where the donation site

  took the photos from. She read through a few comments, one of which was an outpouring of

  sadness for the loss of three generations.

  At the bottom of the page, there again, it showed that it was created the day before.

  “That’s odd.”

  She backed out and went through three more pages before she became convinced that something

  was wrong.

  There was the strong possibility that the pages had been set up because of the donation site-

  giving patrons a way to reach out to the victim’s family. A way to show their grief and that they

  share in it.

  But what was troubling was that they were created before the shooting and not after, and on the same day before the donation site was made.

  That thought gave her pause. When was the donation site created? She scrolled through the page,

  searching for a way to find out. There was a navigation menu both at the top and on the bottom

  but nothing showed dates.

  She found the ‘contact us’ page and shot off an email asking if they wouldn’t mind sharing with

  her the time stamp of when the page was created.

  That night she slept fitfully. She dreamt of the plane wreckage, the body parts, the blood. She

  could almost taste the blood in the air, feel the heat waves of the fires burning.

  She woke in a sweat, the moon high in the sky, stars like a geode had exploded in space. The city

  below motionless, the blue dark interrupted by grey ocean waves tumbling in.

  Bend, Oregon may have spoken to her soul, but Essex was her blood. She loved it here. She found great peace in standing on the balcony, breathing in the briny air, hearing the salty foam crash upon the rocks and sand. The only thing she could liken it to was the womb, hearing her mother's steady heartbeat.

  She noticed the file she’d left open next to her laptop earlier. The plans of the hospital sticking

  out. The diagram they’d given her in the tent with arrows showing where the patients had been, where and how the shooters had moved through the building room by room.

  Somehow they’d missed the bathrooms but they had remembered the elevator right next to it, destroying it with a hand
grenade.

  How had the boys obtained those grenades?

  She pulled up the search engine on her laptop, entered ‘grenade laws.’ A lawyer’s site asked

  the question ‘Is it legal to own hand grenades?’ She clicked on it. She scrolled through the

  FAQs about what grenades are, the laws passed in the thirties and on through the sixties, landed on a more recent paragraph. Hand grenades are only legal in the military sense. Citizens are not

  permitted to possess them.

  She searched how to get grenades. Thousands of results came back telling her how to make her

  own or how to repurpose one.

  She typed in, ‘purchase a hand grenade.’ Only three pages came up, each link she clicked,

  redirected to a page telling her she did not have access or that the page could not be found.

  She sighed, got up and made coffee. Restless, she checked the time. Jack wouldn’t be in the

  office for another six hours. She grabbed her jacket.