Silencing Sam (10 page)

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 Islamic 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.

“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.

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 bent 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.