Silencing Sam Page 8

  “Hey, that story’s mine,” Clay said as I was reciting all the possible, undetermined causes of death.

  “Sorry, Clay, but I stumbled across it while I was checking sources on something else. There’s plenty of room on this story for both of us.”

  “How’d you like it if I honed in on your windmill story?” he said.

  “Give it a shot,” I said encouragingly.

  Certain that I had a lock on the locals, I predicted Clay would fumble in the farm field.

  “Some neighbors have reason to despise the wind farm,” I said. “Maybe you can get them to talk.”

  He seemed surprised I called his bluff, but from the look on his face, he had no interest in taking me up on it. He may have been from Texas, but he didn’t seem the tumbleweed type.

  “You could ride the chopper.” I knew his old station didn’t have a helicopter and new hires are sometimes as eager to get in the air as on the air.

  “No, the ceiling’s too low,” another reporter pointed out. “Can’t see the top of the IDS Center.”

  The rule for flying the chopper was that unless Minneapolis’s tallest building was fog free, it was grounded.

  “And unless it’s breaking news, we can’t justify the expense,” Noreen added.

  “Well, Riley, I say there’s plenty of stories to go around,” Clay said, “and I think you should go round up your own and leave the headless case to me.”

  “Sometimes it helps to get a different perspective on a story,” I said. “I might ferret out things on this murder that slip by you; same with the wind bombings. Let’s trade for a day.”

  We turned toward Noreen to arbitrate this familiar newsroom friction. She sided with Clay.

  “I think mixing up the stories complicates things.” She told me to take Malik and head back to the wind farm for some sleuthing. “Talk to these discontented farmers and see what you can shake loose.”

  I explained there was a chance the authorities might be blocking cell calls again if they were on the scene and that I wouldn’t be able to contact the newsroom until I was on my way back.

  She said I didn’t necessarily need to turn in a story for that night unless something broke. And to make me feel I was getting a special plum, she said, “You can call this a research day.” But then she ruined things by telling Clay that he could have extra time for his headless homicide report.

  CHAPTER 16

  Usually, on long-distance stories, I would drive the van while Malik slept. He had learned to nap on demand during his army days. But I wanted to spend the road time multitasking on my cell phone by grousing to any source who would listen to me about wanting the gun-carry permit data.

  Unhappy with this division of labor, Malik wasn’t speaking to me, but that just made my job easier.

  “I have no way of knowing where envelopes without return addresses come from.”

  I made the same subtle hint in phone conversations with several computer-literate sources in the state law enforcement world. Occasionally the trolling technique would work, and someone would take pity and drop something in the mail to me. More than one had confided during our discussion that they agreed the conceal-and-carry list should be public.

  “I think we have a reasonable chance of scoring.” I gave Malik a little punch in the arm but his attention seemed focused on driving and not me.

  Then I called my dad to get a little more background on Charlie Perkins and Billy Mueller.

  “Take the next left, Malik.” I pointed to a gravel road. “We’re getting close to Charlie’s place.”

  Entrenched deep in the sensibility of farmers who have lived next to the same families for generations is the idea that you can’t tell folks what to do with their land. Whether they want to plant sunflowers when everybody else is planting corn or raise elk when everybody else is raising cattle … that’s their right.

  Same if they want to farm the wind.

  Charlie didn’t have roots to the land going back more than a century like the others. He’d moved in maybe five years earlier, buying the homestead after old man Meyer died. On one level, Charlie had more in common with his neighbors’ ancestors than with them—he picked where he wanted to settle, as opposed to living there because his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had.

  Those family trees had developed a model of Minding Your Own Business that helped them all get along year after year after year. To them, Charlie complaining that he didn’t want to look at wind turbines was about as silly as whining about having to look at sunflowers or elk.

  I understood the locals’ take on things; I’d been raised with that same philosophy. But Malik and I were there to hear Charlie’s logic. He was sitting at a picnic table brushing a collie when we drove in the yard. The dog stood up to bark at us.

  “About time someone gave a damn what I think,” Charlie said when we told him why we’d come.

  We sat and talked, the wind farm about half a mile away in both directions. I would have liked Malik to frame his head shot with a wind turbine in the background, except Charlie refused to let us record his interview. So the camera sat by our feet.

  “Bad enough I have to look at the things, now I’m living in a war zone.”

  I found it surprising Charlie used that term and again wondered if he’d been part of Honeywell’s long-abandoned cluster-bomb division. I decided to throw a few softball questions.

  “What made you decide to retire here?”

  “Wanted to get away from the city,” he said. “Thought this would be God’s country. Instead it’s the devil’s playground.”

  Charlie was full of colorful sound bites. Certainly his reluctance to appear on camera didn’t come from being bashful. I figured he just wanted to make me beg him to change his mind. I tried to coax him by telling him what a good talker he was … what a critical viewpoint he held … and my favorite, that this wasn’t live TV and he could always start over if he stumbled.

  “We can even put your dog in the shot,” I offered.

  “I’m a professional,” Malik added. “I’ll make you look good.”

  “Not interested in all that glamour,” Charlie said, “just want a simple life.”

  He replied with such ease I wondered if perhaps he had worked in Honeywell’s media relations department.

  “I hear you worked for Honeywell, Charlie. So what did you do during your career?”

  “Sales.”

  His answer seemed rehearsed.

  “So what did you sell?”

  “Thermostats.”

  “Sounds like an interesting job.”

  He nodded rather than elaborate.

  I didn’t believe Charlie for one minute. He felt like a man with a secret. But I didn’t want to dig too deep without a camera rolling.

  “Were you always based in Minneapolis?” I asked.

  “Traveled around the world. Met lots of interesting people.” Then he asked Malik what part of the Middle East he was from. And my photographer explained that while his father was from Pakistan, he had been born and raised in the United States.

  “What do you think about the wind turbine bombings?” I wanted to get to the point of our visit.

  “Too late now. The time to send a message was before the spinning started, not after.”

  “Any idea who might be mad enough to go boom?”

  “You must be here because you wonder if it’s me.” He said it nonplussed, as a statement, not a question.

  This time I didn’t answer.

  “I’m an old man. Blowing up wind farms is a young person’s project.”

  Charlie looked like an early retiree to me. Yes, his hair was white, but planting a bomb is not the kind of crime that requires brute strength.

  “I’m following every lead I get,” I said. “That’s why I was hoping you might have some ideas, sitting here in the middle of the action.”

  He shook his head. “I’m as puzzled as the rest of the inhabitants.”

  Then he b
ent over, pulled the hem of his pants up to his knee, and showed us an artificial leg.

  “What’s your story?” I asked.

  “Don’t like to talk about it. But this way you don’t have to waste time with me. As you can see, I’m in no shape to bomb anything.”

  Then he pulled himself out of the chair and told us he had stuff to do. I thanked him, gave him a business card, and asked him to call me if he heard anything.

  Charlie didn’t have to walk far to get inside, but I noticed he moved with less difficulty than my father.

  On the walk to the car, Malik scolded me. “He’s probably a highly decorated war vet, and you practically accused him of being a terrorist.”

  I disputed his interpretation of our encounter and insisted I wasn’t crossing Charlie Perkins off the suspect list just because he was missing a leg. An arm maybe, not a leg. Because as far as I could see, he wasn’t missing a beat.

  I recognized my schoolyard nemesis, Billy Mueller, even though he’d added some weight and lost some hair, but he didn’t seem to remember me at all.

  He told his wife to run get the yearbook. They apparently kept it handy on the coffee table to relive his football glory days, because she was, literally, back in a minute.

  “Oh yeah, you wore the funny glasses,” Billy said.

  Those and the braces on my teeth reminded me why my yearbook is buried in a box in the back of some closet or another.

  “So you’re on TV?” Billy asked. “Can you put me on TV?”

  I hate it when people ask me that. So does Malik. But he grabbed the camera so he could at least get a shot of Billy in case he ended up being important.

  “I can’t make any promises, Billy. I’m doing a story on the turbine bombings and talking to people in the area. If you’re the one who did the blasting, I can for sure put you on TV.”

  I smiled like I’d be doing him a favor; he wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that one.

  “Least I don’t have to worry about explosions in my farm fields,” he laughed.

  “So you’re okay without the wind farm?” I asked.

  “No, I’m good and mad. Just doesn’t seem fair everybody else is getting a wind check but me.”

  “I know what you mean; my folks lost out, too.” I played my you-and-me-against-the-world act.

  “Then you can understand how I’m not feeling too sorry if that wind farm gets blown to pieces.”

  I nodded like Billy and I were both on the same page, then said my good-byes to him and his missus. I didn’t leave a business card because I really didn’t want either of them calling me. And he seemed so eager to appear on the news, I could see that being a continuing problem.

  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 child
ren, 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.