Missing Mark (19 page)

“But, Noreen, she had things she was looking forward to,” I said. “Like the blooming of the corpse flower. She wouldn’t have killed herself before experiencing that.”

Noreen gave me the same kind of look I probably gave Mrs. Lefevre when she first mentioned the corpse flower, so I explained what a botanical treasure we had in our viewing area. And Noreen waved her hand and told me to go tell the assignment desk the news.

Sitting in my office, I called Nick Garnett because I needed someone to talk to who wouldn’t dismiss my homicide theory simply because the local authorities did.

He had just gotten back to Minnesota and was rushing to find his car in the sprawling airport parking garage. He didn’t have time to get together just then, but I asked him to keep his ears open for any buzz.

“It’ll be tough, being a Wisconsin case,” he said.

Cops are territorial, not just about their turf or snitches but about their information as well. Two departments, working the same case, fighting for jurisdiction, don’t necessarily share data with each other, much less with outsiders.

“But I’ll see if I can find someone who knows someone who knows something,” he said. “Just for the record, Riley, suicide cases typically cause more problems for cops than homicide cases.”

“So you think she probably did kill herself, huh, Nick?”

“I didn’t say that. And also, just for the record, suicidal women don’t generally shoot themselves in the head. That’s a macho thing. The ladies, they go more for pills or hanging.”

I tried shutting that image out of my mind.

Garnett and I also made plans to meet for a movie the next night to hash over the shooting, hash over the missing bass, and hash over our lives.

We’d often met in movie theaters over the years to hand off documents clandestinely. Now that he wasn’t a homicide detective, we didn’t have to sneak around, but we both fancied ourselves film aficionados.

“Don’t worry, Riley,” he said, “it’s not like it’s a date.”

But it would be the first time we’d be alone together in a social setting since last fall when our friendship nearly took a dive. Perhaps that’s why he was so quick to establish boundaries. I felt a tinge of regret at his choice of words, wondered where that sentiment came from and why.

“You don’t worry me any,” I answered before saying goodbye.

I had plenty of real worries. Even though Noreen had again nixed the missing-groom story, I needed to get some things straight in my own mind. I stuck my interview of Mrs. Lefevre in a tape deck, shut my office door, and hit Play. I wanted to watch it before erasing it.

I got to the part where I pressed her about why she hadn’t called the police earlier when her son went missing. I watched her cry. And then I almost cried when Noreen knocked on my door and Miles held out his hand for the now controversial videotape.

“It’s better if this video doesn’t exist,” he said.

I handed it over, but I made one last pitch to save it. I reminded him of our policy to keep everything from our news-gathering process for investigative stories, because the station stands a greater risk of being sued in those reports. Notes. Tapes. Documents. Miles had always maintained that these items would prove, to a jury if necessary, how thoroughly we check each story before airing it.

“There’s an exception to every rule,” he said.

“And besides that,” Noreen added, “our save policy only applies to stories we air, and we’re not airing this one.”

Miles took the tape, about the size of a deck of cards, and he and Noreen turned and walked down the hall.

For about ten minutes I pouted at my desk with the door shut. Then I e-mailed Xiong to run a criminal background check on Jean Lefevre. Within minutes it came back—clean—except for a huge stack of parking violations, still unpaid. That proved how little effort the police put into her son’s disappearance. If they’d even run her name, they’d have run her in and made her settle up. Instead, they assumed Mrs. Lefevre to be an overly protective little old mama.

And I learned during my college years, from an old journalism professor at the University of St. Thomas, what happens when we assume.

Ass-U-Me. We make an ass out of you and me.

I ducked my head in the newsroom to look for Noreen and tell her we shouldn’t just assume Mrs. Lefevre’s interview tape meant trouble. But I saw her standing near the news control booth, lecturing the anchors and technical staff on avoiding gaffes with wireless microphones.

A CNN anchorwoman had left her wireless mic turned on when she took a bathroom break during a presidential speech that morning. Her ladies-room gossip was broadcast live coast-to-coast before she was alerted that her mic was hot.

I could hear the techies arguing with the talent over whether the debacle was the anchor’s fault for not turning off her mic or the audio guy’s fault for not potting it down after her last read.

Then Noreen started stressing how That Better Never Happen Here. Her monologue sounded like it might go on for a while, so I backed away lest I get drawn into that distraction. I didn’t want to be forced to take sides. Whoever’s position I didn’t pick—anchor or audio—would be mad and just might remember this tiff the next time I had to sit on the news set or go to the bathroom.

hen we meet people, we size them up. Often by their face. Honest or shifty. Attractive or not.

Unlike the famed Helen of Troy my face would not launch a thousand ships. Maybe not even a bass boat. But in my line of work, what I have going for me may be better: my face opens doors.

Physically, I look safe. Sympathetic. Ordinary. On some level, my face inspires trust. For a journalist, that’s a gift.

Often my colleagues and I are knocking on strangers’ doors on the best or worst days of their lives. Maybe they’ve just won the lottery, or recovered a missing child. Or maybe they’ve just learned their daughter was killed in a school shooting, or discovered their son was the shooter. We want their stories. They want to be left alone. Sometimes to celebrate. Sometimes to grieve.

Yet more often than not, when I knock, they open.

We have this saying in the news business: you can’t get the interview if you can’t get inside. The most obvious interpretation means inside their house. But often you have to get inside their mind as well. Sometimes they need empathy. Other times, information about what’s happening with their case or how the media works and what options they have.

If I sense nervousness about appearing on live television, I offer to tape the interview, so they can start again if they stumble. If I sense nervousness about being edited or having their comments taken out of context, I suggest a live interview.

Being the first reporter on the scene can certainly help lock in an exclusive. But not always. Subjects might ignore the buzzer or slam the door in reporters’ faces. They might regret that move, but can’t change their mind without admitting a mistake. So if I come along later, after the media mob has given up, and make a new offer, pitched a different way, they can tell themselves they were smart to wait.

Because that’s what I tell them.

But Madeline clearly wasn’t taken in by my face. So something else must have drawn her to me.

“N
EVER HEARD OF
this face-blind business,” my buddy Nick Garnett said.

We were chatting over the phone while I was curled up in bed, Shep sprawled across my feet. But Garnett was insisting that some people are simply better at reading faces than others. “It’s a talent.”

He told me about a street cop in Detroit, a Legend at the law enforcement shoot/don’t shoot training camps. The cop and his partner watched a man approaching their vehicle on foot. Legend rolled down the window and shot him dead, no questions asked, horrifying his partner, who was riding shotgun. But investigators found the dead man had a flamethrower and was just yards away from turning their squad car into an inferno.

In another episode, the same cop refrained from shooting at a teen waving a gun—a real gun. Later, after he’d disarmed the youth, all he could tell his backup was, “I knew he wasn’t going to fire.”

Both times, Legend explained, he could judge his adversary’s intent by his face.

“How about you, Nick?” I asked. “Can you read truth in a perp’s face?”

“No way. Not something you learn at the academy. That’s why cops like lie detectors. Takes the pressure off. Me, I can’t even tell truth in a woman’s face, much less a perp’s.”

I wished we weren’t on the telephone for that particular exchange. I would have liked to watch his face as he said that last line, because his emphasis suggested he was suggesting something.

I
WAS WALKING
through downtown Minneapolis, just past the statue of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air, when my cell rang. I’d been rethinking my face theory and by the area code could tell that Professor Emmett Vasilis, the prosopagnosia researcher from Harvard, was calling me back.

As journalists, we use our occupation as an excuse to call up just about anybody and ask just about anything and we usually get answers. Especially from scientists who don’t get a lot of public recognition for their work. To them, questions are the ultimate compliments.

“Face blindness is very real, Ms. Spartz.” Professor Vasilis was flattered by my interest and urged me to try an experiment sometime. “Pick up a handful of stones.”

“Wait,” I said, stopping. “I can do that now.” I bent over and grabbed some grayish landscape pebbles from a foliage display on the outdoor pedestrian mall.

“Name each stone,” the professor told me.

“Name them what?”

“Whatever you want.”

Seemed like a crazy experiment, but I leaned against a storefront, followed his instructions, and named the stones after the seven dwarfs.

“Put them in your pocket,” he said. I complied, still not sure where this would lead. “Now take them out. Call them by name.”

I couldn’t tell Dopey from Doc or Sneezy from Sleepy.

“That’s what it’s like to be face blind,” Professor Vasilis said. “Not everybody suffers to that degree, but a surprising number do. Some studies suggest perhaps 2 percent of the population might be impaired to some degree.”

While he was talking about the part of the brain that controls facial recognition I staged an obvious experiment of my own and removed my brainy-girl glasses and walked down the street, gazing at the blurred images approaching. But when I shared my findings with the professor, he disputed my methodology and conclusion.

“That’s not prosopagnosia,” he said. “For them, the faces would be blurry, but the rest of the scene would be in focus.” As another example he explained that the face blind can tell cars apart, just not faces. And they can also discern expressions, like whether a particular face is happy or angry.

“A face is integral to being human,” he said, “that’s why it’s easier to recruit doctors to fix cleft lips in Third World countries than to treat AIDS victims.”

“And that’s why there was so much controversy over the first face transplant,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Then the professor and I talked about how “face” has become a part of our vernacular. Face the facts. Face the truth. Face the music. Face the consequences. Face the voters. Face the jury.

“In some parts of the world, face is even synonymous with honor,” I said. “In Japan, status is all about saving face.”

“Very true,” he replied, “yet it would be a mistake to limit the concept of face to Far East geography. The Cuban Missile Crisis hinged on neither side losing face while the world watched. Understandable. Humiliation requires witnesses.”

Quite understandable, I thought. If Mark had simply called off the wedding, Madeline could have moved on more easily. As it was, three hundred guests witnessed her shame. I decided to weave her case into our discussion.

“Are some faces simply more recognizable than others because of certain characteristics?” I asked. “Like if a person had a facial scar?” I was thinking of Mark and what made his face so special.

“A scar could make someone more memorable,” he said. “As could facial hair, like a beard or mustache.” Mark’s Groucho Marx look seemed obvious. “While long hair isn’t actually part of the face, it might be useful to distinguish individuals. A person of a different race in a homogeneous population could be recognizable to someone suffering from prosopagnosia.”