Silencing Sam (11 page)

Just then a young girl came out of the henhouse, carrying a basket of eggs and handing it to her mother. I wondered if they were for eats or ammunition.

Her father's final instructions to me: “If you put me on TV, be sure and call me Bill, not Billy.” I guaranteed it with a thumbs-up, and Malik and I climbed into the van.

“Where to now?” he asked.

Neither stop had netted a reportable development. “I'm not sure, Malik. While we're here, let's shoot a generic standup to plug in a future story.”

He parked at a spot where three turbines were lined up artistically over my shoulder.

((RILEY, STANDUP))

WIND IS BECOMING

THE STATE'S FASTEST-

GROWING CASH CROP AND

CHANGING THE LANDSCAPE

OF RURAL MINNESOTA.

I figured that line should fit in almost any wind farm news story, whether it centered on the ecology or the economy. As we did a couple of takes, a pickup truck with two men stopped to watch. One of them owned the land where we were standing, the other worked at the gas station in town.

“Anything new happening with the bomber?” the farmer said.

“You tell me,” I answered. “What do you hear?”

I expected more ranting about Islamic extremists but only got shrugs.

“Any strangers in the area?” I asked.

They both shook their heads, but then the farmer paused and said, “Just those environmentalists.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We've started catching them collecting dead bats around the turbines.”

“Dead bats?” I asked. “Sure you don't mean birds?”

“Come take a look.”

Malik and I climbed in the back of the truck and sat on a pile of rocks covered with fresh dirt, just picked out of a cultivated field. A routine farm chore. The man drove through harvested soybean rows toward a turbine a mile away, then stopped.

“Follow us,” he said.

The other man kicked at the mangled plants and upturned soil, telling me, “Keep your eyes open.”

I wasn't sure what we were looking for, but Malik followed behind, getting video of the casual search, until the man called out, “Here's one.”

I looked where he was pointing and saw a furry brown body. I turned it over with my foot. It reminded me of a worn leather glove. Because I grew up on a farm, I'm less queasy around dead animals than most women, so I picked it up in order for Malik to capture the scale on camera.

About the size of the palm of my hand, the creature definitely had the wings of a bat. Its eyes were open and glassy, but it didn't seem to have any external injuries—mysterious if it had flown into the turbine blades.

“You find dead bats often?” I asked.

“Not 'til the turbines started up,” he answered. “If there's one there's usually more.”

In the next few minutes, we found two more.

“Did you tell this to the investigators?” I asked.

“They weren't interested,” he answered.

Holding up the dead bat, I recorded a short standup—this
one not generic. Insurance in case the bat angle developed into a news element. Malik started the shot tight on the frizzy corpse, then pulled wide to me with a turbine spinning in the background.

((RILEY STANDUP))

FARMERS TELL US IT'S

NOT UNUSUAL TO FIND DEAD

BATS ON THE GROUND

AROUND THE TURBINES … BUT

THE REAL MYSTERY IS … WHY

DON'T THEY HAVE ANY

VISIBLE INJURIES?

I would have liked to wrap the bat in some notebook paper or something, but I'd left my shoulder bag in the truck. So I simply stuffed the bat in my coat pocket to show to Noreen, figuring the animal-in-jeopardy angle would certainly make her more enthusiastic about the wind story.

“So you've seen people collecting the dead bats?” I asked the men.

“They say it's for a study,” one said.

“As long as they don't cause trouble we don't care,” the other added. “Do you think they might have something to do with the explosions?”

I didn't know, but I thanked them for the bat tour and promised to let them know if I learned anything. Then Malik and I headed for my parents' place.

“Come in and have something to eat,” my mom said.

“Sit awhile,” Dad suggested.

I lied and said we were on deadline and could only stay long enough to ice the bat, but Malik accepted a sloppy joe sandwich. So we were stuck there for as long as it took him to chew and swallow.

My generation came of age when the bottom was falling out of the cattle market. When it cost more to feed steers than they sold for. I remember a stretch during my youth when it seemed like beef was all we ate for a year because we had cattle on the hoof but no money in the bank. Whenever I tell that story, my mom always insists I'm exaggerating and that we also had green beans and sweet corn.

In fact, she offered a scoop of corn just then to Malik, who smiled and held up his plate.

None of my siblings became farmers, nor did I. Each time one of us left the homestead made it easier for those left behind. Seems kind of brutal to call it the One Less Mouth to Feed philosophy of raising children, but it was no exaggeration to call it a hard-knock life.

A shrink friend once speculated that's why I put in so many hours at work: I'm afraid if this TV thing doesn't work out, I'll have to go back to the farm.

Now my parents rent out the land and feedlot, watching other people sweat. Not a bad way to spend retirement while they wait to die in their sleep on the home farm. They have their funerals planned, all the way down to buying plots in the same country cemetery where their forefathers and foremothers were buried. They even have a headstone mounted on their gravesite with the dates of death left blank.

“We know how busy you get,” they had responded to my earlier questions about whether it was creepy to scheme so much about one's own passing, “especially during ratings months.” So to make me feel involved in their pending demise, they handed me a list of their favorite hymns.

While Malik cleaned his plate of the last kernel of corn, I looked for a small cooler for the dead bat, settling for a shoe box with ice cubes. I asked my parents if they'd heard anything about either the bats or the environmentalists.

News to them. “Quite the puzzle,” Dad said without too much
interest. Dead animals in rural Minnesota don't attract much attention unless a trophy buck is poached.

But since we were on the subject of death, Mom started quizzing me about the gossip homicide. And I regretted stopping in to see them.

“Riley, we hear all sorts of things in the news that have us worried about you.”

“Very worried,” Dad interjected.

They were the kind of couple who finished each other's sentences. Since he was a baritone and she a soprano, their conversations often had a melodic tune.

I didn't care for the topic at hand: Sam's murder. Times like this made me sorry I helped them get satellite TV—just more channels to get them riled up over stuff they can't do anything about.

“Don't worry, either of you,” I said. “The media's just going crazy. This will all blow over soon.”

Dad tried asking other questions about the gossip columnist homicide, but I told him my lawyer had expressly forbidden me to discuss the case, even with family. My answer seemed to make him even more nervous. And that agitated my mom.

“How can we help you if you won't tell us what's going on?” she asked.

“Listen, Mom, Dad. I don't need your help, and even if I did, there's nothing you can do.”

Then I insisted Malik and I really needed to hurry. We didn't do hugs or kisses because we're not a touchy-feely family, but Mom gave Malik a plate of peanut butter bars with chocolate frosting to eat in the car.

On the drive back, Ozzie, from the assignment desk, called to ask us to detour off our route to shoot a jackknifed semi and the ensuing traffic jam. Malik groaned.

I turned on news radio and heard heavy promotion for what was being billed as Clay Burrel's exclusive about how—minus
her head—authorities were helpless in determining a cause of death in the Wirth Park homicide.

Of course I was ticked; it should have been my story. “Jerk,” I said as I switched channels. Drive-time radio promotion is effective in driving viewers to their TV sets the minute they get home, so I expected Clay's numbers would be high.

When we reached the station, Noreen was busy and brushed me off when I tried to tell her about the dead bat. So rather than press its leathery wings against the glass walls of her office in a vampirish bid for attention, I wrapped it in a piece of newspaper and stuck it in the station's freezer.

I fumbled with the trash when I got home. Garbage day always reminded me I was a widow. Some days I could forget my loss, but never on garbage day. The weekly walk to the curb was the antithesis of my walk down the aisle. Instead of carrying a bridal bouquet, I carried smelly rubbish.

Some papers fell out as I dumped one wastebasket into another. One was Garnett's boarding pass to MSP airport.

How romantic, I thought, pressing it against my heart. The minute Garnett heard Sam Pierce was dead, he sensed my trouble and rushed for a seat on the next plane.

But then I noticed the arrival date was the day
before
Sam was killed. Why would Garnett have lied? And what reason would he have had to come to town without telling me?

I'm ashamed to say the first thought that came to mind was not that he was cheating on me but that he owned a gun and was in the correct geographic region to have killed Sam.

It would have been a relief to laugh together at the zany idea. Him slaying Sam to protect my reputation. A very outdated motive. Something an obsessed Don Quixote might do for his Lady Dulcinea. But Garnett's love for me couldn't have been strong
enough to kill in cold blood. Though if it was, would that make me an accomplice?

The truth was, Garnett was one of the good guys in life, so him killing Sam didn't compute. But what was he doing in town that he needed to keep secret?

Some couples are doomed unless they agree on all the big issues in life, like politics, religion, and where to call home.

Garnett and I clashed in all those areas and more. But even though we had our share of squabbles—many of them my fault—I still believed we had a chance at happy-ever-after because we agreed on something pretty specific: that the film
Saving Private Ryan
contains the best movie dialogue ever written.

There are lots of lines that stand out, but we give the prize to the scene where Tom Hanks tells his platoon that, in real life, he's only a small-town English teacher. “I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel.”

Is that enough to build a relationship on?

To prove my confidence in him, I considered crumpling up the boarding pass, throwing it in the trash, and never speaking of it again. Instead, I stuck it in a desk drawer.

The trash can was behind the house, out of view of company. As I went out the back door to wheel it to the front curb, I saw a shadow moving along the side of the garage. I stopped, then heard the crunching of feet on gravel.

Instantly, I remembered that Sam Pierce had been killed in his own backyard. I went back inside, locked the door, and decided to wait until morning to put out the garbage.

I turned on all the lights in the house before finally falling asleep on the couch. In the morning, I didn't wake up until I heard the garbage truck driving past.

Sam Pierce was buried.

I wasn't there, but Clay was. I'd been advised by my boss, my attorney, and my own common sense to stay far away from the service. Because killers sometimes attend their victim's funeral, I figured the cops would use my presence at the ceremony as further evidence of my guilt.

But I remained curious about the service. So I hovered by the edit booth where cameraman Luis Fernandez was loading the funeral scenes into the station server. Videotape is a thing of the past in most newsrooms; now stories are shot on digital cards. Normally photographers screen the best shots and edit out the extraneous. Reporters and producers view the remaining video later on their computers.

“Luis, I'll babysit the booth if you'll let everything load,” I said. A shot he considered slop I might consider significant.

“But this isn't even your story,” he pointed out.

“But I want to watch it anyway.”

He agreed, leaving me and my notebook alone in a room the size of a small closet.

The funeral ceremony took place at a cemetery chapel, not a church, so I figured Sam must not have been the religious type,
which probably made it easier for him to commit the sin of gossiping guilt free.

I noted, with some satisfaction, very few flowers and only a dozen or so mourners. None of them seemed teary eyed, either. Then I felt ashamed of myself and wondered if I was really any better than the deceased.

Plenty of folks insist there is only a fine line between news and gossip. Especially since the tanking economy has made all media organizations a bit desperate for audiences. Technically news is supposed to be the truth, while gossip only contains a grain of truth. No doubt, newsrooms will debate the coverage of pop king Michael Jackson's death for years to come as one of those irresistible overkill situations.

I quickly shifted from philosophical to embarrassed when Clay caught me looking at his funeral video and banged on the edit door window. The video on-screen was a zoom shot of a large photo of a flamboyant Sam on an easel next to a closed casket.

“Hey, you weasel.” He opened the edit room door. “I should have guessed you'd be in here.”

“Can't we watch together? Please?” I asked. “You got my headless lead.”

He weighed my request. “Okay, little lady, but you owe me like banks owe taxpayers. A debt you'll probably never repay.”