Silencing Sam

SILENCING SAM

ALSO BY JULIE KRAMER

Missing Mark
Stalking Susan

A NOVEL

JULIE KRAMER

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Julie Kramer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Atria Books hardcover edition June 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kramer, Julie.

Silencing Sam : a novel / by Julie Kramer.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.

   p. cm.

1. Women television journalists—Fiction. 2. Gossip columnists—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Minneapolis (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.R355S55 2010

813'.6-dc22                                         2010015091

ISBN 978-1-4391-7799-0

ISBN 978-1-4391-7803-4 (ebook)

To my agent Elaine Koster,
who's helped me navigate from news to novels

SILENCING SAM

It felt satisfying to leave a funeral with dry eyes.

I wasn't mourning a young life taken too soon. I wasn't mourning a tragic loss to senseless violence.

He died old. In his sleep. In his own bed. Just the way we'd all like to go.

For the last decade, he'd been a reliable source of scoops around city hall, so I'd paid my respects. I didn't stay for the ham-sandwich-and-potato-salad lunch in the church basement; I needed to get back to the station before my boss realized I was gone.

As I reached the parking lot, I heard my name. I'm Riley Spartz, an investigative reporter for Channel 3 in Minneapolis. People recognize me frequently. Sometimes that's good. But not this time.

I turned and saw a short man with perfect hair and stylish clothes, waving at me from behind the hearse.

“We have nothing to talk about,” I said, continuing to walk—but faster—to my car.

“How can you be so sure?” He ran to catch up to me, his cologne getting stronger as he got closer.

As a policy I didn't speak to Sam Pierce, the local newspaper
gossip writer, but I shouldn't have been surprised to see him lurking outside the church. He liked sneaking into funerals and later listing in his column who cried and who didn't. Who wore black and who didn't.

“Let's talk about what's going on in your newsroom,” he said. “I hear that new reporter from Texas started today.”

Sam liked to hit fresh TV blood with some cruel observation in print soon after they arrived. Maybe something mortifying they did at their old company Christmas party—like sitting on a supervisor's lap. Maybe something embarrassing that happened the first day on their new job—like mispronouncing a local suburb, perhaps Edina—during a live shot. Sam adored branding newcomers as outsiders.

“I heard some interesting things about his marriage,” he continued.

I ignored him. Sam Pierce was a verbal terrorist.

A lot of what he wrote simply wasn't true. When pressed, he'd admit it, justifying publication with the explanation that, unlike me, he was
not
a reporter and didn't
have
to prove anything was true. He just had to prove people were gossiping about it.

Often he purposely refrained from calling the subject for confirmation or reaction. Otherwise, he might officially learn the morsel was false and have to kill the item. That would create more work, hunting down last-minute trash to fill his gossip column, “Piercing Eyes.”

Sam's newspaper photo was cropped tight around a pair of intense eyes. The design achieved a striking graphic look for his column, plus it gave him the anonymity that allowed him to show up in places he'd normally have been unwelcome if recognized.

Sam had adopted a media technique used by the newspaper food critic to help keep her face incognito while dining. He appeared as a frequent radio talk-show guest but avoided television interviews like birds avoid cats.

Because I was part of the local press corps, I could pick Sam Pierce out of a crowd but was always surprised how few public figures recognized him. Until it was too late.

“It might be in your best interest to cooperate,” Sam hinted to me. “Think of it as buying goodwill to keep your
own
transgressions out of the newspaper.”

“You've got nothing on me.” I climbed into my car.

“Don't be too sure. I have my sources.”

“Not only do you have nothing on me,” I said, “you have no sources.”

Then I slammed my car door, drove away, and hoped it was true.

The new reporter Sam was planning to blindside was staring at a giant map of the Twin Cities hanging over the newsroom assignment desk. Tomorrow, he'd be thrown on the street to bring back a story. But today, he was getting to know the anchors, producers, and other behind-the-scenes players at Channel 3.

He'd apparently offered to listen to the police scanner and that pleased the bosses, because for most of us, the constant cop chatter was just more newsroom white noise.

Clay Burrel had been working at a TV station in Corpus Christi along the Gulf of Mexico when our news director, Noreen Banks, saw something special in his résumé tape and brought him north. A nice career move for him. Market size 129 to market size 15. I figured Noreen got him cheap.

He walked like a man who's good-looking and knows it, not unusual in television newsrooms. More unusual was his footwear, cowboy boots of an exotic gray and white reptile skin.

“Glad to be working together, Clay,” I said, trying to live up to our Minnesota Nice reputation. “I just want to give you a little heads-up …” I started to warn him about the gossip writer when he suddenly went, “Hush, little lady.”

“There it goes again,” he said. “Most definitely 10-89. Homicide.”
He pointed to the 10-codes taped on the wall next to the scanner box.

And because his ears heard news gold in a homicide call, within minutes he was on his way to get crime scene video with a station photographer and was soon leading the evening newscast with the EXCLUSIVE story of a decapitated woman—her nude body dumped in Theodore Wirth Park, about ten minutes from the station.

Wirth Park has a bird sanctuary, a wildflower garden, and a woodsy lake and creek framed by lush fall colors this time of year. But it also has a reputation for danger that's stuck with it for the last decade or so after two prostitutes were found murdered there. In all fairness, their bodies were dumped. So they could have been killed anywhere, even the suburbs. And frankly, unless you count unleashed dogs and occasional complaints about sodomy in the bushes, the crime there isn't any worse than in any other Minneapolis park.

Yet, when the news hit that another dead body had been found in Wirth, all across town, folks nodded knowingly.

Minneapolis Park Police had been waiting for this day to come and had installed a surveillance camera in the parking lot to record any future criminal suspect's vehicle. But there was apparently a problem that night and the machine malfunctioned. So authorities had no video leads in the grisly slaying.

I was impressed—okay, I'll admit it, jealous—as Clay Burrel broke one scoop after another regarding the homicide, starting with the fact that the woman's head was missing.

((CLAY, LIVE))

WITHOUT THE VICTIM'S

HEAD … IDENTIFICATION IS

DIFFICULT UNLESS HER DNA

OR FINGERPRINTS ARE ON

FILE … AND SO FAR,

AUTHORITIES ARE COMING UP

EMPTY ON THAT END.

Besides making it problematic for the police, I've often found that without the victim's name, face, or history, it's difficult to get viewers to care about a specific murder amid so much crime.

So at first, it didn't bother me that I was missing out on the missing-head case. The way news assignments generally work, if you claim a story, it's yours. You eat what you kill. Clay found the story; Clay owned it.

But interest in the murder continued to escalate as our new reporter explained that the victim had a nice manicure and pedicure, thus eliminating homeless women and making the deceased seem a whole lot like all the other women sitting home watching the news, doing their nails.

Or maybe it was simply curiosity about Clay Burrel that made them click their remotes in our direction.

With his Texas background, he was a little more flamboyant than the rest of the Channel 3 news team. Though he didn't wear a cliché ten-gallon hat, he had several pairs of distinctive cowboy boots. (I suspected he wore them to appear taller. With the six-foot-five-inch exception of NBC's David Gregory, many TV news guys, like Clay, tend to be on the short side—and self-conscious about it.) But viewers seemed instantly enamored with Burrel's faint drawl and Texas colloquialisms as he chatted with the anchors about the status of the mystery.

((CLAY/ANCHOR/SPLIT BOX))

SERIOUSLY, SOPHIE, WITHOUT

THE WOMAN'S HEAD, POLICE

STAND ABOUT AS MUCH

CHANCE OF SOLVING THIS

MURDER AS A GNAT IN A

HAILSTORM.

I could see him becoming as popular as Dan Rather once was on election nights.

Noreen was thrilled with her young and hungry new hire because for the first time since she had taken over the newsroom four years ago, her job was on the line.

Channel 3's market share was tanking after Nielsen installed a new ratings-measuring system in the Twin Cities—electronic people meters. The media-monitoring company claimed the devices were more accurate than the former handwritten diary system and could reveal ratings year-round instead of just in designated sweeps months.

This was supposed to take the drama out of February, May, and November, when television stations artificially stacked their newscasts with sensational stories of sin and scandal. In reality, newsrooms were now finding every month becoming a sweeps month.