On my way to the station, I drove by Sam Pierce’s house. I’d never visited him socially—he was more likely to crash a party than host one. And if I had been invited, I’d have suspected a trap and declined.
I knew where Sam lived from reading the newspaper story about his murder. I wondered how his killer knew.
The neighborhood was upscale—between Hennepin Avenue and Lake of the Isles—his street a desirable address. More so than my current rental on the other side of the freeway near Lake Nokomis.
A two-story with stucco and stone, Sam had done better on a newspaper salary than I’d have expected. The garage was detached, as were most in Minneapolis, including mine. That meant he was open to attack during the time it took him to park his car and walk to his house. In his case, twenty yards of vulnerability that proved fatal.
I parked across the street to take in the general atmosphere. Fog hung in the air. The crime-scene tape was down. A few newspapers lay, unclaimed, by the front door. Besides losing a high-profile columnist, the Minneapolis newspaper had also lost a subscriber.
Sam hadn’t shown up for work. Hadn’t called in sick. His editor had shrugged off his absence because he wasn’t held to the same nine-to-six shift during which most of the news staff toiled. Gossip happened anytime. Anywhere. Sam set his own hours.
Police said a friend had found his body in the backyard. That put it out of view of the street.
I jumped when a hand reached over and tapped on my car window. A woman tapped again. I lowered the window a few inches to see what she wanted. She wanted to know what I wanted.
“We don’t need gawkers.”
I waited at a downtown coffee shop, shrouding my face behind a newspaper that seemed thinner each day.
About a half hour later, Della Sax walked in, ordered her daily cappuccino, and, sipping it, headed across the street to the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office. I’d worked homicides with Della before. She wore ordinary street clothes now, but in the lab, she wore pink scrubs and rhinestone earrings.
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.