Delivering Death: A Novel (Riley Spartz) (2 page)

Minneapolis–St. Paul is the fifteenth-largest television market in the United States. More people watch local news here than almost anywhere else in the country, which leads to intense competition between stations. Channel 3 was typically battling for the number two spot against Channel 8, having seemingly given up the fight for number one.

Commotion was coming from inside the production studio. When I ducked my head inside, I saw a crowd of my colleagues assembled around news director, Bryce Griffin.

The room was the size of a school gymnasium, formerly used for filming television commercials for automobiles or vacation getaways. I waited in the back. Bryce and the general manager had just commanded the staff to join in a noisy team-building countdown: ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . the chant grew until reaching the apparently magic number of three.

“That’s right,” Bryce shouted. “Let’s hear it for Channel 3!”

Amid some lackluster applause, a spatter of blue confetti fell from the ceiling like an underfunded political rally or overproduced
prom. I didn’t know how to react to the scene and apparently neither did the other employees. So we remained quiet, rather than risk saying the wrong thing and being admonished for not being team players.

“In these difficult economic times,” Bryce said, “television stations need to move forward. To stay static is to stay behind. So, in the name of progress, Channel 3 is getting a new studio set.”

He pointed to his boss, the general manager, who dramatically yanked a piece of cloth from an easel, unveiling a framed sketch that resembled something from a science-fiction movie, perhaps the deck of a spaceship.

“This is the future of Channel 3,” the GM said. “This is what the viewers will see when they tune in to watch our talent bring them the news.”

“Are there any questions?” Bryce asked.

I had plenty of questions, like why not put money into covering actual stories or hiring more street reporters rather than a superficial gesture like changing the look of the anchors’ desk and chairs? Our travel budget had been slashed. Overtime was virtually nil. Yet news executives always seem to feel cosmetic changes like a revamped set or flashy on-air jackets with station logos will create buzz and attract viewers.

But I stayed silent because Bryce and I were going through a phase where we weren’t speaking to each other.

The new boss didn’t like me. I didn’t like him. We each had ample reason to distrust the other. I considered him a lecher and he regarded me as an extortionist. We each had valid reasons for our opinions.

True, I had played a role in blackmailing him. Shortly after arriving on the job, Bryce had used his power, private office, and lewd texts to sexually harass Nicole Wilson, a rookie reporter. I’d taught her the mechanics of hidden cameras to document his misbehavior. While I had urged her to go public with a lawsuit, Nicole had worried that exposing Bryce exposing himself might
mean the end of her TV news career if she were branded a troublemaker. She decided to handle the situation more discreetly, and put him on notice that we were watching—in effect, putting our boss on probationary status.

Rather than blame himself for the tawdry situation, Bryce blamed me. So we confined our conversations to the news huddle, where the day’s story coverage was discussed and debated among managers and staff. As some point, our feud would have to end, but for now, I figured I could outlast this young hotshot. The average tenure for a television news director is only eighteen months, and he’d already been here four.

The producer for the late news—our showcase newscast—broke the dead air to ask a critical question about when the new set would be completed. “Will it ready be in time for the February sweeps?”

“That’s when we’ll debut it,” Bryce replied. “But we’ll promote it ahead of time to build suspense.”

The station had recently hired a new anchor, Scott Ramus, and he beamed enthusiastically at the announcement. “I just want to say how thrilled I am to be the first anchor who’ll deliver the news from the new set, and how proud I am to be part of the Channel 3 family.”

I understood his eagerness. After all, much of his workday would be spent sitting there, on his throne, smiling into the camera while his subjects watched from their living rooms. But personal experience told me that no TV ratings month was ever won on the back of a new set. Anchor desks did not build viewer loyalty. Viewers might click in once to see what all the fuss was about, but exclusive stories and great reporting are what keeps them from switching channels. Not fancy chairs or slick big-screen wall designs, but news content they can’t get anywhere else.

That’s my job. Stories that make a difference.

As Bryce was praising Scott and explaining some of the logistics
of the new set, I kept my mouth shut and my head down as I slipped out the door to the newsroom. The area was empty except for Ozzie, still manning the assignment desk in case a big story broke. He was engaged in an animated conversation on the telephone with an irate viewer, upset that the snow we’d forecasted hadn’t materialized.

He held the phone up toward me so I could hear the yelling on the other end. “First, your station botched Christmas, and now your meteorologist ruined our ski vacation!” I tuned them out, as Ozzie encouraged the caller to “take it up with Mother Nature.” I was thankful that he handled most of the cranks.

Then I remembered I still had the tainted teeth. Rather than taking a risk and showing them off to the entire newsroom, I decided to bring the envelope upstairs to Channel 3’s attorney and get his advice.

Pulling the package from my purse, I shook the envelope. “You have the right to remain silent.” Even though I knew it was childish, I teased the teeth in a dramatic cop-actor voice. “Anything you say can and will be held against you.” Just then, I turned around a blind hallway corner and crashed into Bryce.

“I’ll talk if I want to talk,” he said, “because I’m the boss. Your job description includes listening to me, following orders, and not threatening me to keep silent. That’s a slam dunk for insubordination.”

I tried explaining that I wasn’t actually speaking to him, but he gestured around the empty hallway. “Then who?”

“These.” I gestured to the envelope, and tried to keep my tone neutral. “I was looking for you, Bryce. I have something to show you.”

He seemed suspicious, then curious, then excited. Bryce had an expressive face that made it easy to discern his emotional state. “Will we be able to air them if we blur body parts or add black boxes?” I realized he was hoping the envelope contained compromising photos of a state politician or some other local celebrity.

I was frustrated that our first face-to-face conversation in weeks had turned to smut within thirty seconds. “No, it’s nothing like that.” Not wanting to be alone with him in the dim corridor, I suggested we move to his office. The glass windows of his headquarters looked out on the rest of the newsroom, so I felt comfortable in knowing that witnesses could observe our meeting, but not hear our actual words. The transparent/no-walls look was part of the terms Nicole and I had settled with Bryce.

Once the door was shut, I dumped the teeth on the center of his desk calendar. The stench caught him off guard and he glared at me before wheeling his leather chair backward to escape a pearly white ricochetting toward him.

“They’re teeth.”

Forgetting they might be evidence, I quickly reached out the palm of my hand to block the enamel runaway from falling off the desk. The roots didn’t freak me out so much anymore now that my dentist had explained that they’d had a mysterious life, cut short. I had empathy for their demise, besides curiosity, and wanted to tell their story.

“Oh. Just teeth?” That seemed to calm my boss, but he couldn’t hide the disappointment in his tone.

“Not
just
teeth.
Human
teeth.”

“Why do
you
have human teeth?”

I rolled my eyes. “No matter what you’d like to think, Bryce, I’m not a news robot. I am human.”

“You know what I mean, Riley. We’re not talking about your on-air smile, although you might consider some whitening work right here.” He tapped his finger against his front teeth, but I ignored the put-down, figuring it was his way of trying to remind me who was in charge.

“So where did you get these?” he asked.

“Someone mailed them to me here at the station. Anonymously.”

I pushed the envelope toward him. The postmark was from
across the Mississippi River in St. Paul. My name—
RILEY SPARTZ
—was carefully penciled in block letters.

He wrinkled his nose, but began to perk up. The smell of a ratings spike overrode the odor of decay. I knew the scent of money was also on his mind because Bryce held a degree in business rather than journalism and appreciated stories that were cheap to produce. Under his watch, decreased costs were just as good as increased ratings. No worries about that here. These teeth were definitely past the point of needing root canals or other pricey dental treatments.

Boldly, Bryce reached for a tooth, but I slapped his hand back. “No touching.”

“Fine,” he said. “But what do you think? Are they a threat, or a tip? What’s their message?”

“Sorry, boss. They’re not talking.”

But if they could, they might have warned us of what lay ahead. Then I would have thrown them in the trash instead of going to the police—story be damned.

I
nmate 16780-59 had been settled far from home in a tougher penitentiary in New Jersey, where the name Jack Clemens impressed nobody. With a double razor-wire fence patrolled by armed guards, this was no Camp Cupcake. For the first time since high school, he would have traded brains for muscles, and charm for a scary tattoo.

During intake, he was finally allowed to call his attorney, who warned him that their telephone conversation might be monitored.

“You got to get me out of here.” He tried to make his words sound more like a command than a plea, like the Jack Clemens whom everybody used to take orders from. But no luck: his voice cracked and came across as thin and nervous.

“Nothing I can do, Jack,” his lawyer said. “You belong to the Bureau of Prisons now. You messed with BOP and now they’re messing with you.”

He’d had the misfortune of being housed in a prison bunk room when a cell phone was discovered, hidden behind a toilet. Cell phones were taboo behind bars because of fears they could be used to intimidate witnesses, run drug gangs, or organize escapes.

He wasn’t plotting any of those misdeeds and few people
would have taken his calls, but because the guards couldn’t pin the smuggle on anyone, they blamed everyone. But then a search of his bed revealed a cache of pain pills. No doctor’s prescription appeared under Jack Clemens’s records, so the medicine was considered contraband and confiscated.

The pills, like many bootleg objects in the prison system, were presumed to have come from a corrupt employee or a prisoner with stash to spare. But just as reporters protect their sources, so do inmates. Maybe even more so.

Instead of putting a disciplinary note in Jack Clemens’s file and pushing back his release date, the warden put him on the bus—glad to be rid of the scrutiny that comes from housing a high-profile inmate. Since his incarceration, the local news media remained interested in documenting his downfall and his name had become a punch line in Minnesota comedy clubs.

“This is about them teaching you a lesson, Jack,” his attorney continued. “I can’t change this. I’m sorry.”

Those words rattled him. He had expected deliverance from the current dilemma. After all, the same attorney had made a convincing argument that the court should grant him “self-surrender” status, meaning he could remain free on bail while awaiting his incarceration date. Yet a month later, when he was dropped off outside the federal penitentiary in Duluth to be processed into the prison population, his identity formally changed to inmate number 16780-59.

“Remember, Jack, I warned you that the two most important things you could do after you turned yourself in was to be smart and behave. You screwed up and you’re on your own.”

He figured his banishment had less to do with rule-breaking than with the feds’ determination to break him down. He knew better than to raise that theory just then, but he was convinced the whole brutal transfer business was a ruse to make him talk and spill secrets about money . . . and more.

Truth was, he was sitting on a whopper.

The lawyer was blind to that fact. His final remark was to inform his client that their legal relationship was over. So when his connection to the outside ended with a click and a dial tone, Inmate 16780-59 began to seriously sweat.

T
he as-yet unidentified teeth were now in the hands of Minneapolis Police detective John Delmonico. He was more puzzled than repulsed as he peered at the contents inside my envelope, unlike the others I’d confided in about the grisly delivery. After all, the teeth were tame by most crime-scene standards.

We sat in a conference room down the hall from his office because he didn’t like visitors—especially journalists—near his desk. He once mentioned worrying we’d use reporter tricks like reading documents upside down to gain confidential information. His fear was not unfounded; I’d used that technique occasionally to gain exclusives. If you could see it, you could confirm it. If you could confirm it, you could report it. The first media outlet to break any big story won bragging rights—and hopefully, a growing audience of viewers or readers.

From my experience, sources sometimes leave paperwork in plain sight because they want to leak something, but don’t want to be held responsible. But whenever gleaning such a lead, I always double-check to make sure my scoop wasn’t really a red herring.

Still, I contemplated informing Delmonico that desk spying was passé and had been replaced by hacking email accounts, but he kept our discussion focused on the teeth.

“You got these in the mail?” He went over my story with me again, this time making notes. “Any idea who sent them?”