J. Wachowski - In Plain View

Oh, there was definitely something going on around here.

“What’s in the bushes?” Curzon asked, stone-faced and heavy on the green-eyed death glare.

“What?” I asked him back.

“You had your head in the bushes. You drop something?”

“No.” I felt the silent shadow-presence of the girl behind me. A little louder I answered, “No. Thought I heard a rabbit or something.” I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged. “You know us city girls, we’ll do anything for a glimpse of wildlife.”

He wasn’t wholly convinced, but one of the other men down near the tree called out. “Time to go,” Curzon announced.

“See you.” I waved.

I caught the flavor of a grin quickly suppressed, before he grabbed Ainsley’s silver camera case with one hand and the boy’s elbow with the other.

“Walk,” Curzon ordered Ainsley.

It irritated me he never bothered to look back and see if I followed.

Curzon did not lead us into the area near the action; he edged the crowd and handed us off to a couple of junior dogs whose job was to shoo us back to our truck. As we crossed the road, I noticed a skinny guy in worn corduroy pants ahead of us. He stumbled toward an old Civic, head bent over a spiral notepad, pen flashing. A comrade in arms.

“Hey!” I jogged after him.

Ainsley followed slightly behind, camera case clunking with his long-legged strides.

“Excuse me?” I called. “You with the Trib? ”

Mr. Skinny Guy looked back our way, his shoulders hunched. Beat reporters were kind of like B-movie undead; they always looked uncomfortable in the bright light of day.

“What?”

I jerked my thumb toward the truck and held out a hand. “I’m Maddy O’Hara, special assignment to WWST. We heard there was something going on here, but the cops won’t let us near the place. Did you get anything?”

“Melton Shotter. I’m with the local daily-the Clarion. ” He seemed a little disconcerted by my directness. “Did you say Maddy O’Hara?”

“In the flesh.”

“I’ve heard of you.” He shook his head in a wonders-never-cease kind of way.

Although Average Joes wouldn’t know me from Adam, there were plenty of papers that ran my photos on occasion. Ainsley seemed to get a little thrill off my sort-of celebrity status.

“There wasn’t much to get.” Melton shrugged. “Suicide. What kind of story would WWST be doing?”

“Local human interest.” I glanced across the road at the broken stalks of a stripped corn field. “But you probably get a lot of suicides out here.”

“There’s definitely more to it-” He sounded like a kid with a secret. All I had to do was be patient. Reporters live to tell secrets. “But I couldn’t get any kind of ID on the guy. They’ll never let me run the story without more detail.”

“What did you see?”

“The body was covered by the time I got close. Everybody had gathered round in a huddle.” He leaned toward me and his voice dropped. “I did see porno mags on the ground. Spread out all over the place, like the guy’d been reading them before he jumped.”

“No way.”

“I kid you not.”

“What?” Ainsley ambled into the conversation in confusion.

“Maybe it wasn’t suicide.” I felt that prickly tingle of discovery, the journalist’s drug. “Ever heard of autoerotic asphyxiation?”

The reporter snapped his fingers and flapped his notebook open. “That’s what I missed! I heard the sheriff mumble something before they chased me off.”

“Really?” I grinned back at the scene of the action. “Now why would Sheriff Curzon tell us there was no story here? I may be from out of town, but I’d say when an Amish-”

“I don’t think he could be Amish,” Ainsley corrected me. “Maybe Mennonite-”

“Whatever. When a man of serious religious conviction offs himself publicly, in more ways than one, that’s news.”

Ainsley’s face scrunched again-grossed out, sure, but also trying not to laugh.

Of course, when a sheriff steals your pictures, that’s a pretty good indicator as well.

“Why do you think he was Amish?” Melton asked.

“The clothes.” I pictured the girl in the bush wearing that dark bonnet, even before I thought of the man from the tree.

“She got some pictures with a long lens before we got out of the van,” Ainsley clarified. “But that guy couldn’t have been Amish. He looked too old to shave, and I heard one of the cops say the Honda over there must be his. Amish don’t own cars.”

“No cars at all?” I asked.

“Too old to shave?” Melton said, at the same time.

“Grown men wear beards,” Ainsley told him. “It’s a sign of maturity.”

We experienced one of those awkward pauses in which I got caught staring at Ainsley’s baby-smooth cheek.

“About those pictures?” Melton jumped in. “Could I get a look at those? The paper’d pay, of course. They’d run the story if I had a picture. Nothing too gruesome, though.”

I thought about it for a minute, glancing back toward Sheriff Curzon. I didn’t have a lot of time here. Autoerotic asphyxiation was the kind of pseudo-serious sex topic they would love at network, a definite ratings grabber. The sleaze factor was high, but if I scored on ratings I’d definitely stay employed. Compromises like that guaranteed I’d be dining on antacids and acetaminophen for the foreseeable future. Yum, yum.

There was certainly more to this than a simple suicide. I could feel it, the way I’d felt the girl behind me in the bushes.

What was she doing there?

I needed to flush this story out into the open where it was fair game. It’s not like my story would be competing with nightly news for a scoop. By releasing one of my photos to Melton, I could make the story public and re-direct Curzon’s fire toward the print media. Without heating up attention for the story, the sheriff would continue to stonewall me and chances were good, I’d end up stuck doing something on the network’s latest local promotional tie-in.

Time to take a gamble.

“I might be able to help you out with a photo, Melton. Let me take a look at what I’ve got. What’s your deadline?”

“Eight o’clock.” Melton passed me a card.

All of a sudden, I thought to look at my watch. It was past two already. “Damn. How long will it take to get back to the station?” I asked Ainsley.

“As long as it took us to get here, I guess.”

Double that damn. I’d never get back to the station for my bike and home again by three o’clock. “We need to go.”

“Back to the station?”

“No. I need you to take me straight…to my appointment.”

3:11:17 p.m.

Maddy O’Hara was going to be a problem.

“This is township ambulance number five, currently en-route with a twenty-eight-year-old male, apparent suicide.”

“This is County ER. Can you repeat?”

He twisted the cell phone away from his mouth and shouted to the man driving the ambulance. “Siren? Can’t hear a fucking thing back here.”

The sheriff had sent a car to escort them to the hospital. With both vehicles blaring full lights and sirens, even the dead couldn’t hear himself think.

What was she doing there?

He flipped the blanket back and tugged the zipper down. Some genius had decided to start making body bags white instead of black lately, because everybody knew what a black bag meant. Like it made a difference-black or white. What nobody could change was the sound of that big, thick zipper sealing everything up inside. Forever.

He peeled open the sides of the bag and forced himself to think in the impersonal terms of work. “Male patient…mottled skin…obvious lividity.” Painting the picture for the dispatcher in the ER gave him time to reach down inside, open the rough, buttonless shirt and attach the cardiac monitor electrodes.