Stalking Susan Read online

  I easily pick Chuck’s voice out of the din, louder than the others, because he’s closest to the microphone. “You people, clear out.” Somehow he manages to keep the camera rolling.

  Boyer pushes the governor into the hall. “Move it.” His deep command echoes through the pandemonium. Barber Bill is carrying his young customer. The little boy’s face is bleeding, his haircut half finished. “Everyone, keep moving.” Boyer’s voice grows urgent. My heart starts to beat faster.

  They are about fifteen yards away from the door and their escape when a wall caves in. More dust. More screams. High-pitched and frantic. The camera swings wildly. Under a pile of debris I see Poppy Jones’s shapely ass, but not much else of the press secretary.

  “Back.” Boyer coughs. I can’t see him because of the heavy dust.

  The governor knocks the old veteran down as he tries to move farther from the rubble.

  “My hip!” the old man cries.

  The camera follows Governor Johnson around a corner. A young woman is surrounded by children—none looks older than five. She’s holding two kids in her arms and more are pressed against her legs.

  “The day care’s on fire!” Her face is streaked with dirt and tears. The children, wide-eyed, tremble.

  Boyer, still broad and strong from his days as a high school line-backer, heaves the old veteran over his shoulders. He motions for everyone to head in the other direction to the senior center. As they move down the hall, sunlight from a picture window shines through smoke.

  “Stop,” the day care woman cries. “Becky’s missing. There’s supposed to be nine kids. We’ve got to go back.”

  “Which way?” Boyer asks.

  The governor shoves him. “We can’t go back, we have to get out.”

  “You get them out. I’ll find the little girl.” I note the nonnegotiable tone in his voice. Gently, Boyer sets the old vet down and makes a promise. “I’ll come back for you.”

  “No! You have to stick with me.” The governor thrashes his arms. His speech turns shrill and desperate, almost on the verge of a tantrum. “It’s your job to get me out. So go do your job.”

  Boyer pushes him against the wall and a rifle from a Civil War display about the First Minnesota Volunteers falls down. “You want out. I’ll get you out.” He picks up the antique firearm and smashes the window, then knocks Governor Johnson backward through the broken glass. The ground is about twenty feet below.

  He instructs barber Bill and the day care lady to lower the kids out the window. My throat tightens as Boyer disappears back into the smoke.

  “Hurry.” The woman sobs. “She’s only two.”

  The tape continues to roll on chaos and confusion as the kids are dropped outside. “Run,” the grown-ups tell them. “Get away from the building.”

  “Him next.” Chuck puts his camera on the floor to help lower the old vet down. They don’t realize he’s already in cardiac arrest. For the next ten seconds, all I see are feet.

  Another explosion. Then all I see is black.

  A few seconds later the tape goes to snow. That’s what TV journalists call it when the pictures suddenly stop and all that shows on the monitor is white-and-gray static. I reach for my purse and pull out, no, not a tissue—I have no tears left.

  What I pull out is a wallet-sized wedding photo of Hugh Boyer and me.

  THE NEXT DAY searchers found my husband’s body in the rubble, a dead toddler clutched in his arms.

  Perhaps now you understand why I have what amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Minnesota State Patrol.

  They also found the bodies of the day care lady, barber Bill, and Chuck Hudella. His crumpled camera lay nearby, the videotape inside.

  Now you understand why Governor Johnson got what amounts to a get-the-hell-out-of-office card from Minnesota voters.

  Minnesota has a national reputation for the highest voter turnout. It’s a matter of state pride. While the rest of the country struggles to get 40 percent to the polls, Minnesota can count on at least 75 percent of its voters to do their patriotic duty. On the Iron Range, the figure is closer to 90 percent.

  This election set two state records: highest turnout and lowest showing by a major-party gubernatorial candidate. Governor Johnson finished the night with just 17 percent of the vote.

  Voters might have been able to forgive him for acting like a coward while campaigning as a war hero. But they could never forgive him for being a big fat liar.

  You see, a few hours after the building collapsed, the governor figured the only surviving witnesses to his meltdown were all under the age of five and would probably remain traumatized through grade school. With his press secretary dead, he held a news conference that was carried live by every TV and radio station in the state, as well as by CNN, FOX, and MSNBC.

  Tape of that news conference was in the box, too. But I didn’t bother looking at it. I remembered the sound bites, which played over and over on the news. The governor had worn a sling on his arm and tears on his cheek. He had sobbed about his own survivor’s guilt.

  “I should have perished inside with them. But my close personal friend, Hugh Boyer, forced me out. He told me, ‘Governor, my job is to keep you safe.’ And he literally pushed me out the window to keep me from helping evacuate the children.”

  That scenario meshed with what witnesses saw from the parking lot; so that scenario led the newscasts—until Channel 3 got Chuck’s camera back.

  LIFE WOULD HAVE been easier for Governor Johnson if the firebomb had been an assassination attempt. Then he might have landed some public sympathy. After all, it wasn’t his fault the Iron Range Regional Center collapsed—at least not directly. The person most responsible was Roger Meyerhofer. But he was dead, and folks needed someone alive and kicking to blame.

  At the same moment the governor was high-fiving the little boy in the barber chair, Roger Meyerhofer drove his ’83 Ford Ranger pickup through the Licensing Bureau wall on the other side of the building. He had a full tank of gas, plus a full load of chemical fertilizer. Kaboom.

  Meyerhofer was fed up with the bureaucrats inside because they wouldn’t give him a hunting license. They told him there was no point in him having a hunting license because, being a convicted felon, under state law he couldn’t carry a gun until ten years after his probation was up. That wasn’t going to happen until 2011. Meyerhofer had been ticketed for poaching deer that season and was supposed to serve a month in the county jail, starting the next day. Authorities had already confiscated his rifle, otherwise he probably would have shot the place up instead of blowing it up. He died instantly along with three government employees and a pregnant teenage couple who were there getting a marriage license.

  There were twenty-three other people in the Iron Range Regional Center that day. They might all have got out alive, except for the person second most responsible for the tragedy: Frank Skaw.

  His role didn’t come out until months later when authorities concluded the investigation. Skaw was the beer-bellied Iron Ranger in charge of the construction project. Turns out, he had skimmed part of the grant money and used steel beams that didn’t meet code.

  And in a classic what-goes-around-comes-around twist, the investigation also uncovered that Frank Skaw won the bid in the first place because he was a big campaign contributor to Governor Johnson.

  So when Roger Meyerhofer crashed his truck, he started a chain reaction through the entire building that ended thirteen lives, one political career, and my marriage.

  The person next most responsible was me.

  I was the reporter who broke the story about gun-wielding felons and hunting licenses the year before. I’d had our newsroom computer genius cross the state criminal database with the state hunting license database, popping hundreds of names, including Meyerhofer’s. My report clued state law enforcement officials that some dangerous dudes were packing heat, and put political heat on them to stop it.

  So in a way, crazy old Roger Meyerhofer was my f
ault. Of course, I was the only one who blamed me; but anyone would understand why I’ve been messed up for the last year or so and why the Susan story might be just the thing I needed to rescue myself from the emotional disorder of my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  One quick glance in the mirror the next morning and a quick step on the scale confirmed the status quo: I’d let myself go in the personal grooming department. I wasn’t used to looking like the “before” picture. Sallow complexion. Shapeless hair. Drab brown. No highlights. I definitely needed a trip to the salon. But cosmetic fixes are easier than making over damaged psyches. I practiced smiling, closemouthed as well as with teeth.

  Knowing the right break could turn today from a research day into an on-camera day, I added powder, blush, and my favorite rust-colored lipstick to my reflection. Mascara around my brown eyes, a dab of foundation over a small scar at the corner of my left eyebrow, and I was ready for air.

  Surveying my closet, I selected a loose-fitting vintage jacket made of black wool to hide the fact I was still down fifteen pounds. The loss didn’t bother me, but I tire of people telling me I look too thin. Don’t they know the camera adds ten?

  Most days, television reporters need to look good only from the waist up, so I slipped on a pair of jeans and headed out the door.

  BEING A GEEK is better than being a nerd. Nerd suggests uncool while geek implies shy genius. Lee Xiong wasn’t just any geek. He was an alpha geek.

  “I got a job for you,” I told him that morning in the newsroom. He was hunched over one of his computers and didn’t look up.

  “I already have a job, Riley.”

  Geek isn’t really a job description. Technically Xiong was a news producer, but the bulk of his workload consisted in keeping the newsroom computers running. Just as magicians love pulling rabbits out of hats, he loved pulling clues out of computers.

  My trip to the tape morgue the night before had yielded nothing but heartbreak. As I had predicted, the only tape saved from the Susan slayings was what had aired the day after the murders. The camera never got close enough to capture any actual evidence. Just police and police tape. Thirty-five seconds total. Shot from a distance. If I was going to break any new ground, I’d have to look in places the cops hadn’t. I thought I’d start with a kazillion gigabytes of death records.

  Like thousands of other Hmong, Xiong had come to St. Paul as a child from a refugee camp in Thailand after the Vietnam War. His parents kept their old country ways, but Xiong was young enough to grow up on Saturday-morning cartoons and American video games. He excelled at computer training and landed a job at Channel 3, where he developed a knack for crunching obscure numbers into meaningful stories.

  His most vivid coup occurred a few months back when the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour and fell into the Mississippi River. While most journalists chased heroes and victims, Xiong analyzed bridge inspection data and produced an unsettling, widely copied story about the safety of America’s bridges.

  Reclusive, like most geeks, he dressed more like Mr. Rogers than a recent college graduate. His only fashion flair was his funky wire rim glasses. On his desk sat a souvenir photo of him and Eeyore taken at Disney World several winters ago during spring break. He preferred e-mail over face-to-face communication, but since I hadn’t bothered him for several months, and since I didn’t feel like typing up a ten-page memo, I simply pulled up a chair and gave him the verbal backstory on the Susans.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “I want to look for others.”

  “Others?”

  “Other victims,” I told him. “Other Susans. I want to look for a pattern. If I find more murders, it’ll be harder to dismiss these two cases as coincidence and it may become easier to connect the dots.”

  “Well, we still have the death certificate database,” he said.

  A few years back we had used that information to match death certificates with voting records for a story on voter fraud. We called it “Dead Man Voting.” We found cases of people casting ballots from the grave in tight local races. While Minnesota allows more flexibility than most states when it comes to registering on Election Day and absentee balloting, election law does insist that each voter have a pulse.

  “I bought even more,” Xiong said. “So we can check thirty years of records starting in 1976. It won’t take any longer than running the last decade.”

  Besides name and date of death, the computer records contained other useful fields: date of birth, cause of death, zip code, race, and marital status. In all, more than a million deaths.

  “Let’s check the death date of November 19 without a year, so we can be open to whatever comes up,” I suggested.

  “All homicides? All Susans? What are we looking for?”

  “Let’s do a run of all Susans who died on that date, in case a murder fell through the cracks. Then let’s do another run of all homicides that day in case the Susan name is a fluke.”

  “National or just Minnesota?”

  I hesitated. If we searched too narrowly, we might miss the big picture. If we searched too wide, we might be overwhelmed by unrelated cases. It’s much easier to find a needle in a pin cushion than in a haystack.

  “Take Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas,” I decided. “If we find any leads, we can always expand our search.”

  “I’ll split the name field into two new fields,” Xiong explained. “First and last names. That way we can do a unique breakdown on the Susan theory. I need to write a program and let the computer run. Then clean the data. Might be done sometime tomorrow, but that does not mean we will come up with anything. Also, did you run this by Noreen?”

  Noreen Banks, our news director, had a talent for spotting talent. She could look at an anchor audition tape and predict which blonde with the earnest eyes and sparkling smile would click with viewers in which market. Corporate bigwigs in the television news business highly value that particular skill. But when it came to deciding what story should lead the ten o’clock news, Banks untraditionally favored warm and fuzzy tales of small children and cute animals over the lurid lore of crime and punishment.

  “Did Noreen approve?” Xiong repeated.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m waiting to flesh out the story more before I pitch it. I hate to get her hopes up if I can’t deliver.”

  Actually, I was waiting to see if Noreen might possibly win the lottery and move to Polynesia, or if her appendix might suddenly rupture, or if she might even meet Mr. Right and become a stay-at-home trophy wife. I didn’t care which as long as she didn’t let the door hit her on her way out.

  Noreen Banks surrounded herself with a team of news managers who had no clue as to why the term “totally destroyed” is redundant. I suspected she handpicked her staff to make herself feel smarter. The average tenure for a television news director is just over eighteen months. Live by the ratings; die by the ratings. Banks had two years under her belt at Channel 3, and so far the ratings were on her side. Turns out Twin Cities viewers embraced warm and fuzzy, and under Noreen, Channel 3 moved from a solid third place in the market to a close second. The only way she’d likely leave the newsroom was a promotion to general manager. The big office upstairs.

  “Don’t wait too long.” Xiong nodded. “She makes me justify everything I do.”

  He dismissed me by leaning over his screen to write computer code, which might as well have been Latin for all it meant to me. I felt a flash of geek envy, and then I left him to the solitary click-click of his keyboard.

  CHAPTER 5

  Susan Chenowith’s parents had an unlisted telephone number. That gave me a good excuse for not calling them before knocking on their door. Trial and error had taught me it’s usually better to just show up. Calling first gives them a chance to hang up, or a reason not to answer the door, or maybe time to change their mind. But since Ken and Tina Chenowith didn’t know I was knocking with questions about their dead waitress daughter, they didn’
t hesitate to open the door.

  “You’re here about Susan? Ken,” she called out, “a reporter’s here about Susan.”

  If I can get someone to open the door, I can usually get invited inside. If they offer me coffee, that usually means they’ll eventually go on camera. That last part is crucial. No video, no story. Newspaper reporters have it easy, they can land a story without leaving their desk.

  Things went well on the Chenowith doorstep and five minutes later, Ken and Tina and I were having coffee at their kitchen table. They hoped I had found their daughter’s killer and were clearly disappointed that I was asking the same questions the police had asked fifteen years earlier.

  “If they had any leads, they never told us,” Ken said.

  “I hope it was a stranger,” Tina said. “I hate to think it’s someone we know. That would make it worse, if it was somebody we had ever shaken hands with or smiled at. I couldn’t bear that.”

  I heard sound bites as she spoke. Sound bites are the magic part of an interview. The words that make it on the air. A good sound bite can make pain real. It can leave a viewer breathless. An interview can stretch an hour without ten seconds of magic, but Tina spoke magic fluently.

  “Sometimes I watch men on the street and wonder, was it him? Or was it him?”

  “I’d kill the guy if I knew,” Ken said.

  I didn’t doubt him. A former construction worker, he still had burly shoulders, strong hands, and a lot of body hair. His bulk made his wife’s petite frame seem feeble. But while her voice was strong, his was low and slow, that of a broken man.

  She handed me a picture of Susan. “She was wearing this exact raincoat that night.”

  I recalled the raincoat from the crime scene photos. It was knee length and tan. “May I make a copy of this?”

  “Take whatever you want,” she said. “Maybe someone will see the story and come forward.”