October 11, 2007
Scott and I drove up and down Martin Luther King Jr. Drive searching for the perfect spot to set up for the live broadcast. Numerous posters of Masey James’ dimpled face become the morbid bread crumbs leading us to where we want to be. She’d been missing for nearly three weeks, and the posters were a sign of time moving forward with no answers. Some were melted into a blob of ink, her face no longer decipherable or the hotline number half missing, erased by time and weather. The worn posters paled in comparison to the signs of time gone by as we looked around the historic Bronzeville community for a place to park. In the 1930s and ’40s, this community was known as the Black Metropolis, an enclave of upper-middle-class artists and entertainers, business owners and numbers runners. It possessed the same sentimental notes as Harlem in New York, Baldwin Hills in L.A., or Detroit’s Paradise Valley. They were all landmark communities built on black wealth, but the ups and downs of an economy not built on fairness had taken its toll. Today, under a slow boil appreciation, it was slowly gentrifying into something new but remained a crown jewel of a broader South Side community.
Earlier, Scott and I grabbed breakfast downtown before heading south to police headquarters. We didn’t want to be late for my one-on-one interview with Detective Mitch Fawcett. This interview was the talk of the newsroom, and the pressure was on for me to hold his feet to the fire. He had been adamant about not sitting down with me to talk about what he called “the case of a potential runaway.” It was a surprise to everyone on the crime beat that he had his comms team reach out with the stipulation that he wanted to talk with me. Was it because I was the most visible Black woman at the station? I viewed his offer with suspicion. I refuse to be his middleman to get out some generic message to tamp down the anger. The ol’ “We take this seriously and we are working so hard . . . harder than you could even imagine” spiel. Ellen told me I was overreacting.
“Oh, just go for it. Build the relationship. He knows you don’t suffer fools, Jordan.”
“Look, I know Mitch Fawcett. Either he has an agenda or his boss is making him do it. Let’s hope I don’t have to call him out.”
In contrast, his boss, police superintendent Donald Bartlett, was a pure softy, with a mild-mannered demeanor and a strong resemblance to Santa Claus. I struggled to take him seriously and often wondered how he got the job. This was a tough town. Under all that fluff must be a guy you didn’t want to meet in an alley.
Scott and I arrived at Chicago police headquarters a few minutes early. Walking up to the front desk, I felt dwarfed by the massive flags framing the entrance, leading to a well-worn desk. As I approached, it hit me that I hadn’t followed instructions. I was supposed to call Fawcett first to let him know we were parked out front.
Strike one! Great. Now this guy has an opening to scold me before we even get started.
I pulled my phone from my bag and called, realizing that since every camera in the lobby was recording my every move, he probably already knew I was in the building.
“This is Fawcett.”
“Hello, Detective Fawcett. It’s Jordan Manning. We’re here. I mean, we’re in the lobby.”
“Jordan, I told you to call from the parking lot.”
“Sir, I got distracted,” I said, trying to sound apologetic, but the snark came out anyway. “We are here. Should I go back out to the lot and call again?”
And here we go, Jordan!
“Just have a seat in the lobby,” he said. I sensed he was attempting to maintain control.
I can’t seem to get off his shit list. I guess I can expect a few extra parking tickets for the next year.
A uniformed officer who introduced himself as Ramirez met us at the security checkpoint. I felt like the kid picked up last from school after her parents admitted they forgot. Ramirez escorted us past the beat-up front desk to a fortified door leading to a series of cubicles, the detectives’ wing. I caught a few glances on the way to an elevator bank in the middle of the building. As we waited, I glanced at the many photos of officers recognized for outstanding performance on one side, those killed in the line of duty on the other.
“Ma’am, go ahead,” said Officer Ramirez, regaining my attention from the rabbit hole of reading every plaque and framed article on the wall.
“Where are we going?’’ I asked.
“Lockup,” he said with a smirk, proud of himself for injecting humor in what he must have processed as an awkward situation.
“Good,” I replied. “I should feel right at home. I’m sure it’s just like my newsroom.”
Ramirez remained silent after his cop humor fell a tad flat. Scott never said a word.
We got off on the third floor and were directed into a room with double doors already propped open.
“Ma’am. Sir,” Ramirez said, motioning for us to go into a conference room with a long rectangular table and a display of the American flag in one corner and the four-star flag of Chicago in another.
Scott surveyed the room to establish the best camera angle. “Can we dim the fluorescent lights?” Scott asked the officer.
Ramirez was looking up at the lights like he’d never noticed them before when Fawcett entered the room, clutching a notepad against his chest like it was Kevlar body armor.
“Hi, Jordan, thank you for coming,” Fawcett said a little too enthusiastically.
Phony does not suit this guy well. “Sure, Detective. I was surprised to hear from you.”
“Sit down.” He motioned me to the head of the table.
“Have a seat, Jordan,” would have been more appropriate.
The top of his pointy bald head glistened under the lights.
“Actually, Detective, if you could sit there instead, with the four-star flag at your back, and Jordan, you sit here.” Scott pointed. “If we face the other way, we’ll catch shadow from those blinds over there.”
“Sure,” Fawcett said.
“Detective, before we begin, I’d like to establish the focus of this interview,” I said half matter-of-factly, half “don’t try and play me, mister.”
“All right then,” he said. “Shoot.”
“Police have consistently called the disappearance of Masey James a runaway case. Is that changing?”
“We haven’t ruled it out,” he said. “Teens who run away from home can avoid detection for months.”
“But something’s changed. What?” I asked.
“Nothing’s changed, Jordan,” said Fawcett, his fake smile now transformed into a grimace of exasperation. “The young lady doesn’t fit the profile.”
I smile while thinking, You idiot. And you’re just now figuring that out?
From what Masey’s mother, Pamela Alonzo, had shared with me about her daughter, I was confident she was no teenage runaway. She reminded me too much of myself at fifteen—a girlie girl who took pride in her appearance, someone ambitious and sure of herself.
The interview began and ended in a flash. Fawcett’s admission off-camera that Masey didn’t fit the profile of a runaway wouldn’t come so easy on-camera. Typical.
“This is an ongoing investigation, but we’re adding personnel and considering some other potential scenarios,” Fawcett said.
“Can you elaborate?” I asked.
“I’d rather not, but I want to assure the community and all of Chicago that we will exhaust all resources to find Masey,” he said.
So that’s it? You called me here for this? Is this guy kidding me? I can’t take this back to the newsroom.
“Sir, with all due respect, did you lose valuable time dismissing this as a runaway case?” I asked.
“Not at all. We have a protocol and we followed it. But again, let me stress, this is a priority, and we want to assure Masey’s family and all of Chicago we are laser focused on this case and on finding Masey. We are working with the family to trace her every move.”
And there you have it—that’s the agenda. “We are working on it.”
I glared at him with the “That’s it?” look I’d mastered after years of interviewing cops, but he didn’t take the bait and ejected himself from the chair like a fighter pilot getting the hell out of the hot seat.
He didn’t even bother to walk us to the elevator. Where was Ramirez? Were we just supposed to pack up and leave on our own?
Scott looked at me shaking his head, his signature move when he had nothing to say or nothing he thought I wanted to hear. As he packed up his gear, I texted Ellen. What a bust!
She sent a quick reply. What happened?
But I just texted back Talk soon, because frankly reliving any part of what had just taken place was a waste of my time.
As Scott and I exited police headquarters, a familiar face stopped me in my tracks. It was Masey James smiling at me, her image captioned with MISSING in bold black letters tacked to a utility pole.
Perhaps Fawcett should pay more attention to what’s in his own backyard. It says MISSING, not HELP FIND A RUNAWAY.
Someone was sending a message, but it wasn’t getting through. I felt like grabbing the poster and running back inside and slapping it on Fawcett’s desk.
Masey’s mother had publicly rejected police assertions that her daughter had run away from home. But there still hadn’t been an Amber Alert issued by law enforcement, which was what the alert was meant for. This kid was looking at a future where she could write her own ticket. If it wasn’t used in a case involving a teenager any parent would be proud of, then when?
The missing posters were the community’s way of issuing an alert for one of its own. Fawcett might have tricked his mind into believing that police were doing their job, just following protocol. But I couldn’t ignore what I recognized as a plea for help, for the police to care, for attention from the media, and for answers.
Back in the news van, Scott and I headed toward King Drive, and I rolled down the window and tilted my head out and up toward the sky. The sunlight filtered through the trees that stood guard outside of the stately two- and three-flat brownstones—walk-ups, some people call them—that lined both sides of the boulevard. These houses were unlike any I had seen back in Austin, Texas, and portlier than the brownstones in Harlem. I was impressed with the architecture, though, the kind of regal, ornate design work most builders had abandoned years ago for sameness and simplicity.
The tree limbs, heavy with leaves changing into their fall brilliance, cast a shadow like an archipelago upon the ground below. If I was going to do my broadcast from here, the lighting had to be right.
Scott easily found parking on the street. I jumped out of the van and surveyed the sidewalk for rocks and cracks, anything that could trigger a misstep or snag the heel of my pumps during my walk and talk.
“It’s hard to look at these, isn’t it,” Scott said.
“What?” I asked.
“These posters. I mean, what a nightmare for a parent,” Scott said. I couldn’t pretend to completely understand what it was like for Scott, the father of a five-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter he sees every other weekend and twice during the week since his divorce. “I mean, there’s been no sign of her in three weeks. What are the chances she’s still alive?”
I fought to hold back the answer, forcing the air down required to articulate what I was thinking.
Fawcett’s pronouncements spun around in my head. Finally, police no longer viewed Masey as a potential runaway. Five more detectives had been put on the case. His mission was accomplished. His effortless PR stunt playing out, leaving me feeling like a useful idiot. My mic and camera the tools he needed to make people think it was all okay.
Scott asked again, “Do you think she’s alive? What are the odds, Jordan?”
“Probably not good,” I responded. “Most missing persons cases don’t have happy endings. You heard what Fawcett said. This is a different investigation now. And they’re probably afraid they’re going to catch heat for misclassifying Masey as a runaway for damned near three weeks if she turns up dead.”
While I couldn’t fully wrap my head around what Scott was thinking as a dad, especially the dad of a young girl, I could fully understand the loss and helplessness Masey’s family must be feeling.
Jordan, don’t go there. Get out of your own head.
“Scott, look, Masey had just started attending this awesome STEM school. She dotes on her little brother and her cousin’s baby girl. She shops in her mother’s closet and redoes her nails every other day,” I said, bragging on Masey, a girl I’d never met, like I’d heard her mother do, a feeling of kinship that gave my words a tone of protectiveness.
My best friend in Austin, Lisette Holmes, and I had talked about this.
“Masey sounds like a loving, happy child,” Lisette said. “Not a girl that would just take off like that. Something’s not right.”
I ignored my own warning and went deeper into the dark recesses of my mind. While Scott set up, I told him about a case I’d covered while working at a Dallas station that haunts me to this day.
“Two sisters, six and eight years old, who lived in a small town about an hour from the city were reported missing by their mother, Luella Buford. She told police she last saw them playing in the backyard, which backed up to a wooded area. When I interviewed Luella one-on-one, she told me she’d seen a Black man in a black van circling the area, even driving past her house a couple times the day the girls went missing.”
A Black man in a black van. The color of fear. The descriptor of evil. Was it possible? Of course. Did I doubt her story? Yes, from the very start. The mental gamble it took to look at a presumed victim and see them as the villain was a hard place to be as a reporter. The urge to look them in the eye and flat out call them a liar was a disorienting circumstance to fight.
But the fact she went overboard with black—Black guy, black car, wearing dark clothing—it was something that even now, when I tell people the story, some get it right away. Others, like Scott, struggled to connect the signs and the red flags. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him.
“After about two weeks, their bodies were found in a well on an abandoned property,” I said. “They’d been sexually assaulted.”
“Let me guess. It wasn’t a Black guy,” Scott said, his tone indicating he knew where my story was going.
“Exactly!” I said, pointing my finger like a game show host when a contestant guessed the right answer. “But the mother wasn’t innocent. Luella had a boyfriend named Jerry Branahan. Jerry was well known around the area. A lot of people felt sorry for him because he’d had his struggles, and he was mentally disabled. He wasn’t the girls’ father. Luella met Jerry at a laundromat a year after her breakup with her baby daddy. His $568-a-month disability check was a big help to her. She was a piece of work. She manipulated him to the point that he knew to hand over that check before he could close the mailbox.”
All these years later, I still remember a mundane detail such as the amount of Jerry Branahan’s monthly disability paycheck, but not my own checking account number.
By now, Scott and I, but more important, the news truck had attracted attention, like it was an open invitation for someone to come over and ask, ‘‘What’s going on?’’
“To make a long story short,” I said, “it turned out Jerry had the girls at an abandoned house that was one of his former foster homes. Luella thought she could play on the townspeople’s and her family’s sympathy to extort money. But Jerry, high on glue, ended up raping the girls.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Scott said. “I didn’t know glue sniffing was still a thing.”
“It is in rural Texas,” I said. “Oh, oh. We’ve got company.”
The few people who’d gathered moved in closer. I was in no mood for random questions. I was here for answers, but I knew I’d have to help Scott escape the growing crew of folks around him.
“Hi . . . yes . . . we’re about to do a live shot. Do you mind . . . excuse me, do you mind moving back over this way?” Scott asked the gatherers.
Getting out of the van, I realized we were parked a few steps from a Masey missing poster tacked to a tree. For the first time, I looked beyond her striking features, noticing her perfect posture. The poise anyone who had ever taken a school picture understood. It was unnatural and regal at the same time. The photographer hired by the school accepted nothing less than pinpoint precision. Chin up, shoulders back. Smile.
Scott had managed to escape the enquiring minds. Without thinking, I said, “She borrowed that top.”
“How do you know that?” Scott asked.
“Her mother told me,” I said, my eyes still glued to Masey’s smile.
What a beautiful child.
“Really? When did she tell you that?” he asked.
“It’s cathartic, I think,” I said, avoiding Scott’s question. “You know, for her to describe mundane details like that to someone about her daughter. Anything to keep from going totally nuts.”
“So, you’ve spent some time with her?” Scott asked, rephrasing the question.
I wasn’t sure if Scott was probing because he was concerned or if he was just being nosy.
In either case, his questions began to feel like an interrogation. I’m to blame for my paranoia, for letting a potential victim’s relative become a tad too familiar with the lady from the news. How else was I supposed to cover this story if not intimately? With genuine concern?
“Oh, a couple times,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders.
It had been four, in fact, most recently two days ago. The first time was the day after Pamela reported Masey missing. She left a voice-mail message on the station’s tips hotline the morning after her daughter failed to come home. Everybody at the station knows that if it involves missing children, “send them to Jordan.”
My last two years of undergrad at Columbia College in Missouri, I chose a minor in forensic science. Later in graduate school, I wrote my thesis on “Covering Violent Crime: What the Media Misses” to earn my master’s. Though I’m not a native of Chicago, my prior experience on the crime beat in Texas, combined with my forensic education, gave me the street cred to design my own beat.
“I know my baby wouldn’t stay out overnight. I checked every place she could possibly be, and no one has seen her,” Pamela explained in a breathless voice on the tips hotline. “Something’s wrong, and the police won’t help me.”
I realized police were simply following protocol, not to take a missing person’s report until the individual had been unaccounted for for a full forty-eight hours. I called Pam, who told me the police suspected Masey had run off.
“That’s in most cases, they said,” Pam said. “The child has run away and usually comes home or turns up at a relative’s house in a few days. Masey wouldn’t do that. No way!”
Pamela declared emphatically: “Jordan, if the police think I’m not gonna be out here looking for my child, they’re crazy as hell!”
She and I met at a coffee shop not far from the television station by the train tracks on Lake Street. It would become our spot. She shared with me Masey’s excitement over Picture Day and told me that her daughter chose a blouse from her closet. “She’s always in my stuff,” Pam said.
Pamela pulled a wallet size of the image from her billfold. The blouse was a very feminine-looking dark blue and white gingham plaid, with a ruffle down the middle. Masey’s thick, shoulder-length hair spilled over the collar, slightly open at the neck, which revealed a heart-shaped pendant embossed with a rose that fit tightly across her neck. Her bang made a wide left turn like a canopy swooping across her perfectly arched eyebrows. Her hands weren’t visible in the image, but her nails that day were painted a bright pink, aqua green, and periwinkle blue, alternating fingers, Pam told me.
“She loves to make herself up,” said Pam, sitting across from me in the booth during our second meeting at the coffee shop. I hated making her come all the way downtown and felt even worse that she’d ordered and paid for my coffee before I arrived.
“I remembered how you like it,” she said. “Heavy on the cream.”
“Pam, you mustn’t do that,” I admonished her, then caught myself, realizing Pam had no clue about the journalism ethics that disallowed me from accepting anything more than a breath mint or a stick of gum from a source, an ironclad but necessary rule to defend against any accusations of impropriety or compromised objectivity. What Pam and I had been doing could be viewed as somewhat unconventional by some journalists’ standards. Unlike print reporters, broadcast journalists rarely spend a significant amount of time with their interview subjects without a camera present, which is why Scott wanted to know why he hadn’t been invited, I suspect.
Scott is my guy but I don’t tell him everything. Obviously, he was feeling a bit left out. After all, we had been together for hours, and this was the first he was hearing of my growing relationship with Pamela. Unlike the Buford girls, who were White, missing Black children don’t typically receive the same amount of ink and airtime that missing White kids do. I’m convinced that one of the reasons Pam had shared so many mundane details with me about Masey is to make me care about her daughter. She didn’t want me to lose interest in the story. I must admit, that was brilliant on her part.
I got a text from Tracy. Jordan, how long before you guys set up the shot?
As Pam’s words played over in my head, I turned away from Masey’s ninth-grade picture to focus on Scott and the rush of urgency now snapping me back into the present.
“Jordan, let me grab at least one light,” Scott said.
The next text raised the stakes. Jordan, we need to see the shot as soon as possible.
“Jordan, get over here”—a rare command coming from Scott. “I need to set this shot.”
Where did the morning go? I have no time to write a script. I will just have to wing it.
I texted Tracy. Micing now. I don’t have a roll cue. When I pause, that’s when you will know to play the sound from Fawcett. I’ll wing it, but it will be obvious.
My words would likely send Tracy into a meltdown. An absence of control was not in a producer’s DNA. Not the good ones, anyway.
I took a deep breath to try to avoid the habitual scrunching of my eyebrows. I looked around to make sure there weren’t any cracks or rocks that could cause me to wipe out while walking and talking through this report.
“Five, four, three, two, action!”
“Diana, I’m at 35th and King Drive in historic Bronzeville. As you can see there are missing posters with Masey James’s school picture tacked up on just about every tree. There’s a similar scene a couple blocks west of here outside Chicago police headquarters. I spoke a little while ago with lead detective Mitch Fawcett, who shared that police no longer believe Masey is a potential runaway. The girl’s been missing three weeks, and investigators are starting to feel the heat from a community that is demanding answers.”
Video of my earlier interview with Fawcett played. He didn’t share any new information. But, as Ellen had reasoned, “just go and build the relationship.” I’m pretty sure, though, that by the time I had left, nothing between me and the pointy-headed detective had changed.
* * *
The next morning . . .
I took two sips of coffee and was about to make a mad dash out the door to the gym when my cell phone rang. I was going to let it go to voice mail until I saw who it was. My good buddy Justin Smierciak, a freelance photographer whose best friend was a police scanner. I came in second.
“Hey, sis, I’ve got something for you,” Justin said. He always got right down to the point. I liked that about him.
“Is it juicy? ’Cause I’m headed out the door,” I said.
“Oh yeah, babe, you’re going to want to hear this before you make any plans today,” he said. Justin was not prone to exaggeration. If he said it was big, then it was big.
Justin thinks he is so cool. He wanted to be a cop, but that didn’t work out. The thing that struck me when I first met him was his physicality. At five-five, Justin was small and scrappy but stereotypically cocky for a guy of his stature, not willing to back down to anyone. He would get right up in a guy’s face twice his size, and he was dogged, too. We were at a crime scene on a story once and I witnessed Justin climb a tree in under a minute to get a shot above the other photographers.
“I just heard that human remains have been found in a vacant field east of the Ryan. One of the officers mentioned the name Ida B. Wells. I checked Google maps and found an Ida B. Wells-Barnett playground on the Chicago Park District website at 45th and Calumet. Looks like the ‘L’ passes right over it.”
“Did they describe the body? Male or female?” I asked.
“Only that they found human remains. You know what that means,” he said.
“Yeah, the body must be in bad shape,” I said. “Are you headed there?”
“I’m here now! I’m waiting on you,” he said.
I hung up and immediately called Ellen.
“Dead body on Park District land? Damn, you just said a mouthful!” Ellen said, clearly now on ten. “Okay, get over there.”
“Yep, Scott is my next call,” I said.
I should’ve known Justin was already at the scene. Freelance photographers eat what they kill. But Justin seemed to enjoy the hunt. He was nothing like his brother, Jake, whom I met in college.
The Smierciak boys grew up in Calumet City, an industrialized suburb just south of Chicago. Jake was a buttoned-down wannabe newspaper editor. He would overly enunciate words to try to mask his Chicago accent. I used to tease him that he would do better if he adopted a British accent. It would make him less of a wannabe and more interesting. Justin by contrast was the missing member of the Beastie Boys who never got the call. Aside from journalism and their parents, the two brothers had nothing in common.
Jake got married about three years after graduating from J-school and started a family with a real estate broker. When he heard I’d landed a television gig in Chicago, he reached out and told me to look up his baby brother. Justin and I are as unlikely a pair as can be. But Baby Smierciak has proved to be quite useful to me on the crime beat.
I thought about Masey. Human remains. Badly decomposed body. Three weeks missing. I didn’t like the way that this series was adding up. My heart raced. I wanted so badly for it not to be Masey, but right now I just wanted to be the first reporter on the scene. Justin wasn’t the only photographer who slept curled up next to a police scanner. I’d seen a few others. They were easy to spot, especially in bars packed with journalists. They’re the guys having all their drinks bought for them but not actually drinking.
We lucked out, and Scott and I were the first television people to arrive. Barricades were already up, creating a restricted zone. Scott got as close as a conspicuous white van emblazoned with the station logo and a satellite on top could take us. We climbed out of the van. Scott was locked and loaded, ready to aim and shoot.
“Okay, let’s go. Keep on walking until somebody tells us to stop,” I said.
At the quickstep, Scott and I moved toward the intersection. As we rounded the corner, an ambulance came into view. The next thing I noticed was how unkempt the property was, with towering weeds and trash strewn about. I was so fixated on the heap of green gore, I almost didn’t notice the cop rushing toward us, both palms facing outward gesturing for us to go back.
“This is a crime scene, and you are not allowed to cross the barricades at the top of the block!” he screamed. “You are going to have to go back!” he said as he continued to wave his arms in a “go on, get out of here” gesture.
“Officer, sir, I’m Jordan Manning with News Channel 8. I have to get closer. Here is my press pass.”
“I said back up!”
One minute the cops need us; the next they are ordering us around like children. Scott and I did an about-face and in defiance moved into a slow retreat. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my cell phone. “I’m calling Joey,” I said.
Joseph Samuels was a Chicago police detective I’d grown close to, my “get out of jail free” card or in this case, my “get out of my way” card. We met one day at the courthouse at 26th and California and struck up a conversation outside chambers while awaiting a verdict. It’s crazy how the stress of crime can bring people together. The verdict that day was a hung jury. The guy had killed his wife, and it set me off. How could the jury ignore the evidence? Joey invited me out for a drink at one of the grimiest bars I’d ever been to. And it was an awesomely delicious night of tequila shots and beer. It was a much-needed Band-Aid to cover the wound after the foreman announced that a verdict couldn’t be reached. I considered Joey a work friend. I enjoyed our talks as much as he seemed to, and I appreciated when he praised me for my investigative instincts.
I was surprised when Joey picked up on the first ring.
“Good morning, Jordan,” he said in a tone signaling he was aware this was a favor call, not a dinner invite for later. “How are you this morning?”
“I’m good, Joey. It’s nice to hear your voice,” I said. “Listen, I’m over at a crime scene at 45th and Calumet. Police have the area barricaded about a block in each direction. But I know something’s going on.”
“You want to know if I’ve heard anything?” he asked.
“Yeah, what do you know about human remains found in a vacant lot at 45th and Calumet?” I asked.
“Hell, Jordan, you know more than I do! I just got off a double shift. I guess that’s why nobody called and told me about it yet,” he said. “Do you think it’s that missing kid?”
“I don’t know if it’s her. I got barked at by one of Chicago’s finest for getting too close to the scene. I will say that based on the tension, they think it’s her. I’m the only reporter here right now, Joey. I want to break this story. Can you confirm? Or at least find out whether it’s a man or a woman?” I asked as politely as I could, adding a lilt in my voice to try and sound less bossy.
“Anything else, your highness?” he asked.
It hadn’t worked. Or maybe it had. In either case, he didn’t say no.
“You’re funny,” I said, allowing myself to lean into the familiarity of the exchange, something I’d promised myself I’d get better at.
“Let me get on it,” Joey said. “I can’t get you up close, but I can find out more about the body.”