Silencing Sam Page 7

  Also true, I thought, but still, Minnesota has tanning booths.

  “I asked her, don’t you love me?” he continued. “But she said, ‘I love the sun more.’”

  Clay’s Texas swagger seemed gone, and he appeared almost humble. I told him to pull up a chair and sit for a minute. And he did. Neither of us said anything right away. But resting there together felt sort of comfortable in an unexpected way. It made me grateful my spouse had been able to stomach the desperate world of TV news without going all crazy on me. If I’d had a glass in hand, I’d have raised it to heaven and Hugh.

  “So I’m here and she’s there.” Clay continued the rundown of his marriage. “Want to know something? She thinks I’m the one who left her. That’s what she’s been telling all our friends.”

  I tried to reassure him. “From the sound of things, maybe she’s not such a loss.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he answered. “I’m plumb wore out throwing myself into this job, trying not to get all worked up over her. I need to prove this move was the right one. That’s why I’m working so hard. Then maybe she’ll come north.”

  I sympathized with Clay yet was still determined to show him my street moxie for breaking news by finding a scoop in the headless murder case that had slipped by him.

  “I’m leaving now,” I said. “You should, too. Don’t sit in the newsroom forever.”

  So for the second night in a row, we walked out of the station together.

  Garnett seemed irked, maybe even envious, that for two nights now I seemed preoccupied with Clay Burrel and guns. Especially since my beau was flying back to Washington late that night. He was printing out his boarding pass at my computer while I whined about how difficult it was going to be getting the handgun carry-permit data.

  Earlier, Garnett had finished up some security consulting at the Mall of America, the state’s most high-value terrorism target. He’d recommended they add a couple of explosives-sniffing dogs to their protection team.

  “You want to go to a shooting range, Riley,” he said, “I’ll take you shooting. You don’t need that Texas twerp. In fact, let’s go now.”

  I was in my frizzy bathrobe, so I quickly slipped on a pair of jeans and opened the closet, debating whether black or pink was sexier in connection with bullets. Black seemed too obvious, so I picked the pink to get my money’s worth out of that new jacket.

  When I was a kid, my dad let us shoot cans from a fence with an old shotgun a few times. But usually, he’d send us into dried rows of corn to flush out pheasants while he pulled the trigger overhead.

  The gun range looked like a bowling alley, except instead of pins at the far end, a paper silhouette of a man hung from a movable chain. We put ear protectors over our heads. Garnett had plenty of bullets and patience.

  “This is a Glock nine-millimeter. Full size.” He loaded the magazine into the weapon and spoke impersonally, like a shooting instructor to a student. “Fires seventeen rounds.” The headphones made it difficult to hear him.

  Garnett demonstrated how to grip the pistol with both hands to steady the shot. Then he showed me how he positioned his feet and body. And he pulled the trigger. Six times. I smelled sulfur.

  He yanked the paper cutout forward, and I counted the bullet holes in the imaginary attacker. Two in the head. Three in the chest. One in the shoulder.

  “Just like in the movies,” I said. “You’re probably hoping I’ll ask you if that’s a gun in your pocket or if you’re just glad to see me.” I made my voice sound sultry, like Mae West’s.

  “Go ahead. Make my day.” He sounded raspy, like Clint Eastwood.

  We both laughed. Him—Dirty Harry; me—a bawdy starlet. He handed me his Glock.

  “Stop stalling,” he said. “Your turn.”

  In the last couple years, I’d been on the wrong end of a gun twice. This was definitely better.

  Garnett positioned the target closer, explaining that I probably wouldn’t ever have to shoot anyone farther than twelve feet away. And if I did, I’d probably miss anyway.

  I fired six shots. While he pulled the target forward, I nursed a gash on one knuckle where the gun had recoiled.

  Four of my shots had missed the paper completely. One hit the paper but missed the human outline. The other hit my pretend assailant squarely in the leg.

  “That’ll slow him down some,” Garnett said.

  “I’m willing to practice,” I answered.

  “Good. ’Cause you need it.”

  On the way out I noticed the range also included a small gun shop. Garnett tried to nudge me past.

  “I just want to browse,” I insisted, walking to the counter.

  A guy named Mack seemed surprised by my interest but calmly showed me a selection of firearms.

  Even though a smaller Sig model fit a little more comfortably in my hand, I was still partial to the Glock for sentimental and practical reasons. Sentimental, because that’s what my husband had used before he died in the line of duty; practical, because that’s what I’d just fired and it felt familiar.

  Garnett reminded me of my lackluster performance minutes earlier behind the trigger of a Glock and discouraged me from locking in on one particular handgun too soon.

  “Someday, when you’re ready to buy, I’ll help you pick out a good model.”

  “Maybe I’m ready right now,” I answered.

  “I think it’s best to wait,” he said, countering.

  Even though nobody asked his opinion, Mack the gun guy sided with Garnett. “I definitely think you should take your time.”

  Remembering the murdered gossip, I felt otherwise and slammed a credit card on the counter. My hunch was one of Sam Pierce’s last regrets was not being armed.

  “Ring me up,” I said. “And throw in some bullets while you’re at it.”

  Mack and Garnett looked at each other. Like they were each waiting for the other to speak.

  Mack finally said, “You know there’s a waiting period and background check on handguns, Ms. Spartz.”

  Clearly he recognized me from television. “That’s fine,” I told him. “I can wait a few days. Let’s do the paperwork.”

  “It’s the background check,” Garnett said. “Not a chance you’re going to get approved right now.”

  Mack nodded in agreement. Even embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

  And suddenly I realized that they were alluding to the fact that a cloud of suspicion hung over me in a murder case. “Homicide by gunshot” was probably what Sam’s death certificate read.

  So I left empty-handed and humiliated.

  Garnett swung by my place to drop me off on his way to the airport. Our lips lingered. His hand reached for my arm as I opened the car door.

  “I might be out of touch for a couple of days,” he said.

  He had my interest, but one thing I’ve learned from years of news interviews is to never interrupt a subject who seems in a mood to confide. The same could be said for lovers.

  Since ours was a long-distance liaison, and since we were both grown-ups, we hadn’t defined our relationship verbally, just physically. Garnett was starting to hint for more of a future, and I suspected what we felt for each other could eventually turn into undying love, but that wasn’t where this conversation was headed.

  “Where are you going?” I finally asked.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Do you need your passport?”

  He didn’t answer. So I didn’t know whether he was staying in the Midwest or heading for the Middle East. I was curious. National security opened a wide range of possibilities. Many of them newsworthy.

  It even had a sexy ring to it. So I kissed him again, enthusiastically, in a manner he wouldn’t forget.

  Later, alone in bed, I thought about my husband, Hugh Boyer. We kept plenty of secrets from each other, too. I routinely left him in the dark on my TV investigations because I didn’t want him caught in the middle if I closed in on a crony of his. And as bodyguard t
o the governor, Hugh kept quiet about the location of certain political skeletons. Maybe that kind of mystery intensified our brief time together before he was killed on the job.

  Then I realized I hadn’t thought about the actual cause of his death for a long time. He died from an improvised bomb. A pickup truck with a full tank of gas and a load of chemical fertilizer, driven by a malcontent with a grudge. These days, he’d be called a domestic terrorist. Back then, he was simply called deranged.

  And my man? Hugh was one of thirteen in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  CHAPTER 14

  I slept poorly that night. It was like I didn’t know where to put my arms. They seemed to be getting in the way of the rest of my body.

  Because I couldn’t get comfortable, my mind started racing. I did everything I could not to think about bloody chickens. Instead I speculated about Garnett’s quest. Might it be dangerous? Whose phone number did he give them in case of an emergency?

  A friend of mine who knew us as a recent item had broached concern about him being a good decade older than me. I never thought about the age issue when we were together, only when we were apart. And we were often apart in those days.

  Life being such a compromise, I tried to clear my head by mentally debating whether it was better to land a man with nerves of steel or abs of steel.

  That was no way to drift off to sleep, so I tried concentrating on work. Not fascinating things like murder and mayhem, but tedious tasks like transcribing interviews or carrying tripods up stairs.

  I thought back on my conversation with Miles about our legal recourse to get the gun-carry permit data. He’d been discouraging.

  This wasn’t a case of a government agency stonewalling by withholding clearly public information—they often do that in hopes newsies will move on in search of an easier story. In this case, the data was plainly deemed private by law. To get formal access, we’d have to get the law changed or get a judge to strike it down.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Miles said. “The NRA will lobby and appeal this issue forever. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  So I needed to find a back door to the gun permit information. But right now, I needed to think of something hypnotic, or I’d never reach REM sleep before morning.

  Unbidden, the image of spinning wind turbines came to mind. Behind the sedative motion I started hearing songs with wind in the lyrics, almost like lullabies.

  The music started with the sweeping prairie melody “They Call the Wind Mariah” from the musical Paint Your Wagon. Then I found myself wondering if Elton John’s observation on living your life like a candle in the wind might be an apt sound track for my own memoir. Before I could come to any conclusion, Bette Midler was advising me to find a hero who could be the wind beneath my wings.

  The last thing I remember is Bob Dylan telling me the answer was blowin’ in the wind.

  But if it was, I fell asleep before I could hear it.

  The next morning, windmills still on my mind, I went into my home library and pulled Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote from the shelf. Written more than four hundred years ago during Spain’s golden age, it’s widely considered one of the most influential novels of all time. I kept a special collection of dusty books—best sellers of yesteryear—because I believed there to be no truly new themes in literature, and I liked to line up breakout books from today next to their kindred noted predecessors.

  By chronicling the chivalric adventures of his man of La Mancha, Cervantes expressed his belief that we all have a mission to try to right the wrongs of our world. Though endearing in his exploits, Don Quixote failed more often than he succeeded.

  While knights have been out of style for centuries, when it comes to fighting injustice (and this is not something I go around telling people, because it sounds pompous), I regard investigative journalists as modern-day white knights. Idealists in a decadent society. Or I used to feel such zeal. Now cost and time have taken titanic hits as news audiences decline and a panic sweeps the industry like the black plague once swept Europe.

  Okay, maybe that comparison is a bit of an exaggeration. Journalists aren’t perishing, they’re merely being laid off. But there’s no doubt the once chivalrous goal of newsrooms—comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable—has changed for those newsies left behind.

  Nowadays, it’s feed the beast.

  I put Cervantes’s classic on a stack by my bed to page through later. I brushed my teeth, primped in the mirror, and left to face an increasingly hungry monster.

  CHAPTER 15

  On my way to the station, I drove by Sam Pierce’s house. I’d never visited him socially—he was more likely to crash a party than host one. And if I had been invited, I’d have suspected a trap and declined.

  I knew where Sam lived from reading the newspaper story about his murder. I wondered how his killer knew.

  The neighborhood was upscale—between Hennepin Avenue and Lake of the Isles—his street a desirable address. More so than my current rental on the other side of the freeway near Lake Nokomis.

  A two-story with stucco and stone, Sam had done better on a newspaper salary than I’d have expected. The garage was detached, as were most in Minneapolis, including mine. That meant he was open to attack during the time it took him to park his car and walk to his house. In his case, twenty yards of vulnerability that proved fatal.

  I parked across the street to take in the general atmosphere. Fog hung in the air. The crime-scene tape was down. A few newspapers lay, unclaimed, by the front door. Besides losing a high-profile columnist, the Minneapolis newspaper had also lost a subscriber.

  Sam hadn’t shown up for work. Hadn’t called in sick. His editor had shrugged off his absence because he wasn’t held to the same nine-to-six shift during which most of the news staff toiled. Gossip happened anytime. Anywhere. Sam set his own hours.

  Police said a friend had found his body in the backyard. That put it out of view of the street.

  I jumped when a hand reached over and tapped on my car window. A woman tapped again. I lowered the window a few inches to see what she wanted. She wanted to know what I wanted.

  “We don’t need gawkers.”

  I waited at a downtown coffee shop, shrouding my face behind a newspaper that seemed thinner each day.

  About a half hour later, Della Sax walked in, ordered her daily cappuccino, and, sipping it, headed across the street to the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office. I’d worked homicides with Della before. She wore ordinary street clothes now, but in the lab, she wore pink scrubs and rhinestone earrings.

  She liked to look nice, even though her clients were dead.

  “Hey, Della.” I wanted to chat with her in person because I feared she might not return my phone calls under the circumstances. “The cops are blaming your office for all the leaks on the last two murders.”

  She paused on the sidewalk, shaking her head.

  “Not us, Riley. So don’t think you’re going to get anything either. Especially not in the Pierce case. And the second you mention his name, I’m walking inside and not looking back.”

  I gave her a much-practiced puzzled look. But she wasn’t buying it.

  “I mean it, Riley. Nothing about his autopsy. This is your only warning.”

  “Della, I get where you’re at, but I’m so tired of telling people that I know nothing about his death. I wish the cops would just arrest his killer so my life could go back to normal.”

  I held the door open for her since both her hands were full, and she thanked me. I used the good deed as a means of following her into the building.

  “How about if we talk about the decapitated woman instead?” I asked. “The cops say her body was dumped. I imagine if they ever find the actual crime scene, it’s bound to be bloody.”

  “Not necessarily,” Della said. “Bodies don’t really bleed after death. You see, bleeding requires a beating heart. If a victim’s head is sawed off while they’re alive, like I
slamic terrorists with American captives, well, that would result in considerable blood.”

  Another image to block from my mind—I had enough nightmares—yet I admired how Della could talk so clinically about the horrible. Must have come from years on the job of looking death in the eye.

  “But if the victim was killed before she was beheaded?” I asked. “What then?”

  “The more time that passes the more the blood congeals,” she explained. “If a head was not amputated until eight hours or so after death, you’d be surprised how little blood might flow.”

  “Really?” Perhaps my chicken dream was out of place in this particular investigation.

  “Well, the carotid and jugular would still empty, but the crime scene would not necessarily be the gruesome mess you’re envisioning.”

  “Not even with Luminol and blue light?” I’d seen plenty of TV forensics shows and knew my jargon.

  She was not impressed and accused me of watching too much CSI. Since crime scenes had gone prime time, viewers were always trying to tell her how to do her job, and juries were always expecting forensic miracles.

  “So the headless woman in Wirth Park,” I asked, “what happened to her?”

  “I don’t have many actual details to share. Not only can’t we identify the victim, we can’t identify a cause of death beyond ‘homicidal violence.’”

  “Why not? Was it some sort of exotic poison?”

  “No, she died from the neck up.”

  “Huh?”

  “She might have been strangled, smothered, beaten, shot, or had her throat slit. Unless we find her head, we’re stumped.”

  This was a new twist. One Clay hadn’t reported. I decided this nugget would make the story mine.

  I smiled. “Thanks, Della.”

  “Hey, it’s nothing special, Riley. I would have told anyone who asked. You just asked first.”

  In this business, first is all that counts.

  The morning news meeting was under way when I walked in with word that the murder of the headless woman was even more mysterious than first thought.