Without Warning (2 page)

I was there within ten minutes, and as I pulled into the parking lot I saw three cars parked, one of which I recognized as Katie’s. I got out and tiptoed through a still muddy area to where she was. I recognized one of her reporters, Matt Higgins, and the paper’s photographer, Jimmy Osborne, standing with her. There were two other people there as well, wearing mud-stained work clothes. I’d seen them around town, but didn’t know their names.

The group was standing near a hole in the ground, which I assumed was where the capsule was buried. It seemed freshly dug, which explained the two shovels lying on the ground nearby.

When I walked up, nobody bothered to say hello. Katie merely pointed in the hole and said, “Look in there.”

So I did, and immediately saw the bones. They were skeletal remains, though they were broken up somewhat, possibly as a result of the flood waters. The skull seemed relatively intact, and left no doubt that they were human bones. “Shit,” I said, because I am at my most eloquent in a crisis.

“Tell me that’s an animal,” Katie said, knowing full well that it wasn’t.

“Wish I could. Everybody needs to clear this area, and then we have to talk.”

We went back to where the cars were parked. I decided to wait to start questioning anyone until the forensics people showed up, because I didn’t want to be interrupted. Katie, of course, had been right to say we’d need them.

While we waited I called the department’s lead detective, Hank Mickelson, and told him to come out right away. Basic math said that two people conducting the interrogations would cut the time in half, and since Hank would be very involved in the upcoming investigation, he needed to be there at the beginning. After I hung up with Hank I changed my mind and decided that we would do the questioning at the station house, but I wanted Hank to get a feel for the crime scene, so I didn’t bother calling him back.

The forensics people arrived first, led by Danny Martinez. Danny is sixty-eight years old, three years past retirement age, but in those three years no one has had the guts to point it out to him. The list of cowards includes, among others, the mayor and me, and everyone else Danny knows.

Danny is six foot four, two hundred and seventy pounds, which makes him more suitable to defensive tackle than forensic scientist. But that’s not what intimidates us. Rather it’s the fact that he’s been doing it for forty-five years, keeping up with every new advance along the way, and is better than any three people we could get to replace him.

And he knows it.

“Talk to me, Chief,” he said when he arrived. It’s the first thing he always said.

“Human bones in that hole, sitting on the capsule.” We were walking toward it as we talked, stopping about twenty feet from the hole.

“Entry and exit?” He was asking me how we had approached the site. Our footprints could have damaged evidence along the way, so he would want to approach and exit the same way, thereby reducing the contaminated area.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, and pointed to Katie and the others near the cars. “A group meeting preceded me.”

He frowned and nodded. “Okay. I’m on it.”

He was in effect dismissing me, his boss. He was telling me that I could go do whatever it was I do, because the site was now his domain.

“Okay, keep me posted,” I said, feebly asserting my authority. “And Danny … nothing else matters.”

We went back to the station to conduct the questioning and get the statements. I had Katie, Jimmy Osborne, and one of the workmen go with Hank, while I took Matt and the other workman with me. We’d reverse it when we got back; I would question the people in his car, and he’d debrief those in mine.

Neither of us would talk about the situation while we were in the car, since each person on the scene would be isolated from the others when the interviews began. I expected that the only ones who’d provide any significant information would be Katie and Matt, perhaps Jimmy, but one never knows.

One thing was certain; this was not shaping up to be just another day at the office.

“If not for the storm, we never would have dug it up,” Katie said. “We thought it might be damaged from the water.”

“So it hasn’t been touched since it was buried?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not by us. But we didn’t bury it with a body on top. Those were human remains, right?”

I needed to be careful; this was not a typical cop-witness interrogation. Katie was a member of the media.

“Are we off the record?”

She smiled, and looked at the small taping device I had planted on the desk, which I had alerted her to. “Are we?”

“We’re on my record, not yours.”

“If you want things you tell me to be off the record, I’ll honor that, Jake. You know that. But you also know that what happened out there today is going in the paper. Page one.”

I nodded. There was no way she wasn’t going to publish it; I had no doubt about that going in to this conversation. “They were human remains, and you’re free to say so.”

“Thank you.”

“Who owns the capsule? The city?”

She shook her head. “We do. Bought and paid for. Been that way since the beginning.”

“We’re going to need to open it.”

“I want to be there.”

“It will be off the record,” I said, and when I saw her start shaking her head, I continued. “It’s evidence in a murder investigation; you have no authority over it, ownership or not.”

Even Katie couldn’t argue with that. “Okay.”

“Do you have a list of what is supposed to be in the capsule?”

“I’m sure we must, but I’ll have to locate it.”

“I’ll need the original as soon as possible. You can make a copy. Were you there when the capsule was originally buried?”

“You mean physically at the scene?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to remember. I think we had a small ceremony, which I attended. If I am recalling correctly, the capsule was lowered into the hole, but not covered over until after I left. I think the other spectators left when I did.”

“You would have printed a story about it, right?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“With pictures?”

“I’m sure we must have had a photographer there.”

The next question needed to be asked, but I was uncomfortable with asking it. “Was Roger there?”

Katie tensed noticeably, but then seemed to understand. The capsule was buried a year before her husband, Roger Hagel, murdered Jenny. My wondering whether he was at the scene of another murder made perfect sense.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s possible, but unlikely, since he was on the business side of the paper. Maybe the photographs can tell us one way or the other.”

“Okay. I’ll need whatever you have, including the names of the people involved, especially whoever was assigned to close up the hole.”

She nodded. “Of course. Are we almost done here? This day has gone on so long, I’m almost ready to confess.”

I had been questioning her for almost ninety minutes and had learned everything she knew about the situation, which wasn’t much. I smiled. “We are. Please call me as soon as you find the list.”

She nodded. “I will. And you’ll call me when you’re going to open the capsule?”

“Yes.”

She left after signing a statement, and I reflected briefly on the longest conversation she and I had had in almost four years, and one of the very few times we had been alone together during that time. It was professional and cordial, and we discussed the situation concerning the capsule and nothing else.

It was what I expected; neither of us had any inclination to wax nostalgic about her husband having an affair with my wife, and then murdering her, and then himself getting killed in prison.

But even besides that, there was something about being with Katie that was different. Maybe it was just that she was an ex-girlfriend; we had shared things, we had made love. Whatever the connection was, Katie was never lost in any room I was in with her. I always knew exactly where she was.

When she left, I called in the photographer, Jimmy Osborne. He was in his fifties, easily the oldest of the group, but he was pretty shaken up by his experience. I’m not sure where he’d worked before he came to Wilton, but this was clearly not a guy who learned his craft in Iraq or Bosnia. The roughest of his assignments to date was probably a contentious Easter egg hunt in the park.

“Yeah, I was definitely there that day,” Osborne said when I asked him about the capsule ceremony. “It was one of the first things I covered for the paper.”

“Do you remember anything unusual about it?”

“Nah, I mean everybody seemed pretty bored, and I was just taking pictures of all the bored people.”

“Do you remember the person who dug the hole?”

He thought for a moment. “I think I do. Probably about my age. I hung around pretty late, and I talked to the guy. But I couldn’t tell you anything special about him. He was just doing a job, you know?”

I told Jimmy to call me if he remembered anything else, and to look and see if he had any photos that the paper didn’t have. He said that he was fairly sure he didn’t, but that he’d check in the files. “If I have any, they’ll be in the attic.”

Hank was finishing up just as I was, and after Jimmy left, he came into my office so we could compare notes. “You get a confession?” I asked.

He laughed. “Almost.”

He went on to tell me what he learned in his interviews, which unfortunately mirrored mine. Matt was the only one who knew anything about the capsule itself, and said that he was also at the ceremony.

“Does he know who did the digging?”

Hank shook his head. “No idea. But he said they should have a record of it.”

Hank and I would each read all the witness statements, but I was pretty sure there was no revelation to be found. The two things that we would have to rely on were the forensic reports and locating the person who buried the capsule.

Of course, there was certainly the possibility that we had already located him, or at least what was left of him.

Katie Sanford called a special meeting at eight
PM
. Invited were Matt Higgins, Jimmy Osborne, and two other senior reporters, Patti Everett and Rich Nathan. Katie was going to manage this story personally, and she wanted to set the ground rules right from the beginning.

The first thing she did was bring Patti and Rich up to date on what had happened out at the burial site that afternoon. When she was finished, she asked Matt if he had anything to add, but he did not.

“The people in this room are the only ones that are going to have any involvement in this story,” Katie said. “And starting now, everything must go through me.”

She realized that Matt could see it as a demotion of sorts, a diminution of his normal autonomy, so she explained. “I came to a deal with Jake Robbins. We’re going to be granted substantial access to their investigation, but everything we learn as a result of that access is off the record unless he says otherwise. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize this arrangement.”

“It’s our capsule,” Matt said.

She shook her head. “It’s evidence in a murder case. That takes precedence. He pointed that out very clearly, and he’s right.”

“What about information we develop on our own?” Patti asked.

“That’s fair game. But the line can be fuzzy, so that’s why I want to be kept one hundred percent in the loop. Especially since I’ll likely be the one Jake talks to.”

Katie could see that Matt was not happy with the situation, and the truth was that she wasn’t completely thrilled herself. As a journalist, she felt uncomfortable having such a close relationship with the police, and she certainly disliked the prospect of sitting on information that they had.

“It’ll work, Matt,” she said. “It’s a win-win. We can’t use only some of what comes from our special access. Without that access, there would be no information to sit on, let alone print.”

“We’re reporters, Katie. And we are on the inside of this. It was our capsule; we gathered what is contained in it, and we buried it.”

She nodded. “Exactly. Which is why we will do whatever we would have done anyway. My deal with Jake is just an added advantage.”

“I don’t like it,” Matt said.

Katie was instantly annoyed. “So I should have told him to take his deal and shove it? It’s better not to be in the room when the capsule is opened than to be there? It’s better not to be updated on details of the investigation as they develop? Come on, Matt.”

He nodded. “You’re right … sorry.”

“No problem. Now the first thing we have to do is go through the files and piece together anything and everything that we can find about that capsule. Who handled it, who contributed to it, when it was buried, who was at the ceremony, who dug the hole, and who filled it in. Everything.”

By the time they left her office, the group had a plan in place for how they would gather the information, and how they would set about investigating the story. Matt would be in charge of the other two reporters, but eventually he seemed comfortable with the fact that he would have to report in to Katie on everything.

Katie, for her part, was feeling a mix of emotions. On the one hand, she was excited for the opportunity that had presented itself. This could be a big story for the paper, on the heels of the huge story that the hurricane had become. In an era of decreasing relevance for the newspaper industry in general, the
Wilton Journal
was experiencing its own minirevival.

But this situation would be tougher to navigate, and none of them, not Katie, not Matt, not the others, had gone through anything like it. They would break the story, and then it was possible that other media outlets, with far more experience, would enter the picture. Their level of interest would depend on how the story developed. But she wanted her team to be ready, and she wasn’t sure that they were. She wasn’t sure that
she
was.

And then there was Jake. She had felt intense guilt from the moment she learned about Roger and Jenny’s affair, which only worsened after Roger was convicted of the murder. It wasn’t logical; she knew that. She was a victim of the affair as much as Jake was, and she certainly had had no role in the murder of Jake’s wife.