Before hopping out of her Jeep, Tommy St. James stuck her big cardboard “Press” sign in her windshield and grabbed her camera case and cell phone.
Parked behind a line of squad cars, the yellow crime scene tape was about 100 yards up a steep hill. Her three-inch-high St. Tropez espadrilles weren’t really cutting it, but Tommy hurried. Cameron Parker, the police reporter from her paper, waited at the crime scene tape.
“Glad you could make it, Snap,” Parker said with his trademark smirk.
“Sorry. I was asleep. Unlike you, I go to bed early.”
“Going to sleep at ten o’clock only tells me that you need something better to do in your bed than sleeping.”
He ruffled her long red hair playfully, but she swatted his hand away.
“Nice try, Romeo. Remember, we tried that? I don’t date players. Or sleep with them.”
“Aw, come on, T.J., don’t be sore. Besides, you’re the one who ditched me as soon as you met Mr. Hot Detective.”
Deciding not to dignify that remark with an answer, Tommy got out her heavy-duty flash and screwed it onto the top of her digital camera. She peered up at the dark, starless sky.
“Geez, even a sliver of moon would help. It’s going to be impossible to get a good shot.”
“Nice to see the bottom feeders made it,” a voice said.
Tommy turned to see Sgt. Matt Laughlin sneering at her from thin lips that poked out from under his gray walrus moustache. He grunted and pushed by, shoving his bulk against Tommy hard enough to cause her lens to whack her cheek. Ducking under the crime scene tape, he didn’t bother to turn around and apologize. She glared as he conferred with other officers on the scene.
Even Tommy’s cop boyfriend, Detective Patrick Kelly, couldn’t stand the guy. But the chief seemed to ignore the complaints of excessive force that had come in about the sergeant. Kelly said he figured it was because Laughlin’s solve rate was seventy percent, twenty percent higher than the detective bureau’s overall clearance rate.
“He’s a jerk. Ignore him,” Parker said, grasping Tommy’s shoulders and gently maneuvering her in front of him, against the crime scene tape.
As he positioned her, he leaned down and whispered in her ear, sending an unwanted shiver down her spine. “Right there. Look. That’s where they’re going to bring the body out. Coroner’s just went down there with the body bag.”
Tommy peered over at the opening in the dense brush. The cops had used a hacksaw to clear a path into the undergrowth.
“So, what’s the skinny, Parker?” Tommy said over her shoulder in a low voice.
“Woman taking her usual lunchtime walk, talking on the phone to hubby, when WHAM, husband hears her scream, line goes dead. He calls cops. It takes them ten hours to find the body. All they knew was that she normally walked this two-mile loop up Sunset Hill and around the two cemeteries. At first, they thought someone had snatched her and driven away with her in a car. But then the husband brought a shirt wife wears to bed. One of the search-and-rescue dogs scented on it and instead of leading them onto the freeway or up some other road, he led them deep down in the ravine at the bottom of this woodsy area.”
The woods were so dense that it didn’t surprise Tommy that the woman’s body had been hard to find. What surprised her was that someone was fearless enough to attack a woman on a popular walking path in the middle of the day.
This woman was out on a sidewalk that was usually filled with people and cars driving by, and yet someone had been brazen enough to grab her and then kill her, leaving her body in the bushes.
The audaciousness of the murderer was what was most disturbing.
Tommy’s thoughts were interrupted by a commotion as the coroner’s officials emerged from the woods lugging a blue body bag in a less than graceful manner. There was no way a gurney was going down the steep, rocky and brushy hillside, so the deputies had to carry the lumpy body bag on their shoulders. From the looks on their faces, they weren’t happy about it either.
Tommy snapped off a few photos even though she knew the Metro Editor would probably veto a body bag shot. But she didn’t know what else to shoot. She looked around, but besides a bunch of cops, there wasn’t much that would make a good photo. Then, she spotted him.
A man sat on the curb in front of a squad car with his head in his hands. When he looked up and saw the body bag, he started to get up, saying an anguished, “No,” but a uniformed officer nearby gently took his arm and seemed to calm him down.
Hubby.
The man had longish gray hair that swept back in a wave and a big beard. He wore a cowboy-cut black shirt and cowboy boots. He looked like a country western star, Tommy thought as she studied him through the lens of her camera.
She snapped some poignant shots of the grieving husband with the comforting police officer laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. Looking at the digital frame after she took about a dozen shots, Tommy found one that she liked and nodded her head. “Got it.”
The shot was surreal—the palpable grief on the man’s face lit up by red and blue police strobe lights. In the foreground of the photo was a bright yellow strip of crime scene tape and the police officer’s solemn look added to the emotion of the shot.
The picture said it all. There was nothing glamorous or pretty about murder. There was always someone left ravaged behind. Maybe her photo, combined with Parker’s story, would provoke some witnesses to come forward.
Tommy St. James quickly learned after becoming a photojournalist with the Twin Cities News that when a photo and story made people care, the outcry prompting police to solve the case worked like a stampede of voters to the polls.
Her job as a photojournalist was to make people care. Even if it was a gang member executed for betraying his homeboy, that kid still had a mother and grandmother and little brother who would forever be haunted by his death. Maybe the gang member was a punk rat to his homies, but made sure to bring his grandmother flowers every Sunday. Or maybe he took an hour out of his busy life every day to read his six-year-old brother a bedtime story. You just never knew. Except for a few sociopathic monsters out there, every human life was valuable, in Tommy’s opinion.
That’s why she didn’t feel guilty snapping the husband’s photo without his knowledge. It could be the reason a witness came forward or people started to care enough about the slaying to put pressure on the cops.
But Tommy had a feeling this story would take on a life of its own. Anytime, there was a murder like this — an average person minding their own business, living an upright, good citizen’s life like this woman probably did — it sent fear racing into hearts around the city.