Soon After (8 page)

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Authors: Sherryle Kiser Jackson

BOOK: Soon After
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Chapter 7
Three White Lies and a Gag Order
At ten o'clock Friday morning, Alexis was given the green light for another
Inside 7
exposé in her series, the Easter Church Inferno. The viewers' response had been tremendous, and she left the conference room with the viewers' emails printed and piled in a folder. She was amazed at the sentiments and generosity expressed toward Pastor Abe Townsend. Apparently a churchless congregation plucked a few heartstrings. Even a few people mailed in a love offering, hoping the station would be able to deliver to a church that presently had no address.
She dipped inside a private editing room to process it all and to begin structuring her next story. She had not been in there more than twenty minutes before Martie Hamilton escorted an official looking gentleman into the room wearing a bomber jacket that bore the shield of the Maryland State Fire Marshal's office. He was introduced as Chief Herbert Rich, assigned to investigate the Harvest Baptist Church fire case.
Alexis didn't have a good feeling about this visit. No sooner had he gotten into the room before the production manager, Mark Shaw, was calling him back into the hallway, leaving Alexis alone with Martie. She could see Mark handing a bulging padded envelope to the man through the vinyl vertical blinds.
“What's the deal with this guy?” Alexis asked.
“He wants to see everything that you have done on the Harvest story,” Martie said.
“He'll have to wait on part two,” Alexis said cockily.
“He says he can get a subpoena, Alexis. Mark said for us to just give him whatever he asks for. He says he doesn't need the headache.” He continued in hushed tones as if the man could hear through the cinderblock walls. “Mark is probably giving him a copy of your report from Easter to see if it will produce still markers of the scene and the crowd watching. He also wants the unedited version of your
Inside 7
piece too, as well as your notes. I have a feeling he'll be here for a while, but first he wants to interview you.”
“I'm not handing over my notes to this guy. I'm working on another—” Alexis said, ending her sentence abruptly when the investigator reentered the room.
He was a stocky, hard-nose looking man with an unrelenting unibrow that made her question her last statement. Martie took that as his cue to leave, signaling to Alexis with his eyes that she had been warned. Alexis extended her hand to the empty swivel chair across the room for him to sit.
“Alexis Montgomery, I'm Chief Herbert Rich. I've seen your report. You're direct and to the point. I like that. You should work for us,” he said. His brow relaxed into a sagging clothes line, which softened his face a bit.
“Thank you, but I think I'll pass. My job is stressful enough. What can I do for you?” Alexis crossed her legs at the knee to provide a perch for her arms to rest.
“I just have a few questions for you. I know you're busy.” He took out a small memo pad, flipped over a few pages, and then placed it on his lap as if he might have to reference it later. “Since you were one of the first ones on the scene, I need for you to paint a picture for me of what was going on before you went on air.”
“I just remember it being very chaotic. People were everywhere.”
“I talked to Danny, your cameraman, before he had to run out. I tell you, real caveman there. He talked a bit about staging the story. I take it you were prohibited from getting too close, but I couldn't understand much else this guy was trying to say. I don't think those guys take their eyes away from the eyepiece enough to really see. He's like, ‘talk to pretty reporter lady, she knows the details,'” Chief Rich said, amusing himself at Danny's expense. He pointed to the editing monitor before saying, “So, pretty reporter lady, you know how to fire up one of these puppies so you can walk me through this footage?”
Alexis knew Danny all too well, and knew he would never refer to her like that. This was a man that thought compliments were the currency to buy her favor, she surmised. He pulled his chair up close to hers at the monitor. She got up and called out into the hallway under the premise of getting a technician to press play, pause, and rewind footage at the discretion of the Chief because she didn't know how to do so, but really, she didn't want to be alone with him. He went from being menacing to creepy to her in another way.
The tape started at a distance as Danny tried to set up a clear shot of the damage. He had at least ten minutes of footage of them setting up markers. Alexis pointed at the monitor once she sat down again to illustrate how everyone sort of converged on the scene at the same time. It was deafening because the church members broke out into a jubilant praise. Luckily, the mobile van was able to get a space at the corner as the group led by Pastor Willie Green began pulling up in their individual cars right at the curb past the police tape and walking over. The guys in blue hadn't taped the entire perimeter and were manually pushing the crowd farther back for everyone's safety because the building was still smoldering.
She noticed the chief making notes and couldn't help making an inquiry of her own. “You found something?”
“Just noting what the fire looked like in its final stages. The blaze is sending out its last will and testament, but the smoke color and positioning lines up with the physical evidence we've collected there.”
The chief fired off more questions as they watched. Alexis found it difficult to be on the other end of the question mark and hoped that the phone would ring or Martie would come and rescue her with another story scene to rush to. Chief Rich wanted her to ID as many people as she could in the crowd and rationalize why they interviewed who they did that day as opposed to others. More often than not, she simply did not know the answer, and there was no way she knew all the people standing around. Thank God he didn't want to view the
Inside 7
piece too, she thought. He did ask where she planned to go next with the series.
Alexis played her hand close. She didn't know how much he had been told already. He could have talked to her producers sometime before or after the production meeting just like he caught Danny, the cameraman, before a run. She thought about her Harvest file in her bag that contained shorthand notes from her conversation with Willie Green and Abe Townsend. There were also leads from her initial report to follow up on in her spiral notebook.
The technician ejected the tape and turned off the monitor after satisfying the chief's curiosity. Alexis nodded her appreciation before she left.
“There is more to this story,” Alexis said, “and I plan to tell it.”
“You bet your pretty little head there is, and I guess it is both our jobs to uncover it. Hopefully we can work together. In fact, it will be my pleasure,” he said, running his hand through his beard as he inched the wheels on his chair a little closer. “Here's the deal. I am going to need your notes.”
“Notes?”
“Yeah, I have transcripts from the show, but I need your handwritten notes on each story unless you used a voice recorder, then I need that also. It will be returned when the case is solved.”
“What am I suppose to do without my notes until then?”
“That's the thing,” Chief Rich said. He stood as if preparing to bring this interview to a close. “The pastors are hot, which means they are live witnesses of the bureau, which means they are off limits.”
Alexis laughed at the absurdity and looked at him closely to see if he made that last comment in jest.
“I have a job to do, Chief. Taking my notes and my witnesses is not allowing me to do my job. There is such a thing as The First Amendment,” Alexis said, thinking back to her undergraduate days. Cops weren't the only ones that could lean on their shield; journalists had their support as well. She was not going to allow herself to be intimidated.
“Look,” he started.
She was waiting for ‘toots' or ‘dollface' to follow. She raised her hand to silence him. There would be no more attempts at flattery. She got it. He had come to silence any further reports. “The Federal Shield law protects anyone who helps disseminate news to the public. It says that you have to do more than claim a subpoena before I should feel compelled to give you anything.”
“I have been a fire marshal almost as long as you've been born. I get arsonists off the street so people like you don't wake up like a human torch, or at the very least, keep your personal effects at home and your degree-laden walls of your offices from being an open barbeque pit. If you think I'd let anything come between me and that responsibility, you've got another thing coming.” He was not shouting. His mob boss swagger was helping him prove his point. “Everyone cooperates with Herbert Rich. So yes, I know about your law, just like I know the law that protects the medical community from breach of confidentiality and letting us look at their oh-so private medical records. Let me tell you that doesn't stop me from dragging one of those non-complying doctors through court for infringement either.”
You can't bully me
, which was exactly what he was doing. She couldn't believe this was happening. What would this mean for her story? She was given the go-ahead just a few hours ago. She had to keep the momentum going on her story.
“The way I see it, the law says I need probable cause that your sworn testimony and documents are necessary for the completion of my case. Sounds subjective to me. There are so many ways around it. I am telling you if you try me and sneeze in the direction of the church and its members while I'm conducting my investigation, you will catch some kind of charge. Now, tell me, darling, do you have time to go through the legal system?”
“But, but . . .” That left her sputtering.
“Now, where are the notes, and I'll be on my way.”
Alexis pushed over the voice recorder already on the desktop that she prepared to review for brainstorming. She walked over to her satchel like a kid asked to show a parent a bad report card. It wouldn't do any good to protest. Martie had already shared the station's position. She was on her own. When she looked inside the bag, she almost smiled remembering her initial notes tucked inside her spiral notebook. She handed him the folder.
“Is this it?”
“Yes, Captain. That's it.”
At one o'clock, Abe was playing solitaire on a late model computer when two people entered the pawn shop. One was a possible consigner and the other was a burly investigator from the Fire Marshal's office. Chief Rich wasted no time getting down to business after scanning the display cases, waiting for Abe to finish with his customer.
“I think this is so cool, really, a man of Christ like yourself who has time to provide a decent service for the commoners in these tough economic times.” Chief Rich nodded his approval.
“Yeah, it's sort of a family business,” Abe said.
“You don't say,” Chief Rich said, staring at a pair of binoculars through the glass. “You got much family running the church with you too?”
Abe bit his lip. “No.”
“I hope you don't mind me asking a few questions. I'm sort of on a tight schedule.” He didn't wait for a response. “Who opens the church on Sundays?”
Abe hesitated, not because he wasn't used to investigators, like reporters, coming out of left field by now. He couldn't think of his Uncle Charley without thinking about what he had witnessed earlier in the week. “That would be Deacon Charley Thompson.” He couldn't bring himself to call him uncle.
“Give me a timeframe of a typical Sunday schedule from the time you get to church in the mornings until you lock up.”
“Since we've stopped sunrise service, which was really at seven
A.M.
, we are usually in by 9:30 preparing for eleven o'clock service. Service usually runs a little over an hour and a half and we lock up after that and go home.”
“What was unusual about Easter Sunday?”
“Nothing, other than arriving before Deacon Thompson, and since I don't have any keys, I waited.”
Abe was taken back to that day. He remembered waiting on the front step of the church like a kid locked out of his own house. He thought about walking away for good at that moment. He remembered he kept timing himself by thinking,
If Uncle Charley is not there within the next five minutes.
His plan was to get back in his car and go hide out at the pawn shop until the day was over, no explanation or anything. That's when members of the congregation started showing up one by one. They all had the same question, and Abe anticipated that the chief had the same inquiry.

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