In Plain View (3 page)

“Camera Press over there,” somebody whispered.

“No shit,” he said. “Get me the cardiac monitor. We should record asystole before we bag him.”

“Not here.” The sheriff stepped in, all puckered up because the press was on site. “I want this body in the ambulance and en route—now.”

“Yes, sir. I’m on it.”

“Then quit staring at that woman.
Move.
”

1:06:49 p.m.

The sheriff’s men weren’t happy to see us either. A big bouncer type who stood guarding the perimeter backed us off before I even had a chance to make our case. We hung out for a few minutes trying to get someone to talk to us without any luck.

“What now?” Ainsley asked as we retreated to the roadside.

“We’re on a bear hunt, College.” I scanned the perimeter and started toward the shrub line. “Can’t go through ’em. Can’t go over ’em. Got to go around ’em.”

I walked along the road to where the fence line ended, then turned up a small side road that seemed to follow the boundary of the property.

Ainsley matched my pace, breathing heavily with the camera case in tow. “Where are we going?”

“Don’t know. I’m looking.”

Not far from the turn, I cut back following a line of scraggily shrubs and small trees up a slight incline toward the farmhouse we had seen from the road. Every so often I popped through the bushes and held up my camera to check for a decent line of sight.

The college boy threw questions at my back the entire way. “Do you think we’re trespassing? What if someone lives here? Is this legal?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Follow me.”

“Wish you’d stop saying that.”

Near the crest of a small rise, through the heavy barberry branches, I found a spot where the perspective on the action by the tree was perfect. Firefighters and police were milling around. The ladder was coming down. Some of the men were fascinated by a spill of cardboard boxes and paper where the body dropped.

“Okay, College Boy, this is it. Let’s get a hand-held shot. We’re too far away for anything but the in-camera mic, but record it anyway. We may want to use the ambient sound—wind, leaves rustling, birds. See if you can get tight enough for a couple steady, close-up head-shots of these guys. I want facial expression if you can get it.”

Ainsley set the camera case down with a thud. His face glowed with a faint sheen of sweat from the effort of getting it there. He took a few minutes to organize himself. We’d prepped in the van, so it didn’t take long. Once he had the camera rolling, I stepped back to give him some room. Behind me, I heard the rustle-crack of a scramble in the hedge, the sound of an animal trying to escape.

With two hands, I spread the leafy whippets of overgrown barberry. My camera bumped against my chest, swinging heavily from the neck strap. It took a second for my eyes to adjust.

At first, all I saw was her face and her fear. The white of the young woman’s skin reflected light where her dark clothes disappeared into the shadow. Bits of contrast jumped out at me. She was wearing a hat, a black Amish bonnet to be exact, but she had a cell phone pressed to her ear.

“What the hell is going on here?” a man’s voice rose behind me.

I admit, I jumped. The branches I’d been holding snapped back into place as I spun around. Ainsley jumped too, but he kept the camera up and running. The guy shouting was obviously The Man. From what I could see, he was the only one wearing a decent suit and all the men around the tree stopped everything to watch.

“I thought I said
no
cameras!”

“The officer told us to stay as far back as the road, but no one said anything about no cameras.” I smiled. Behind me, there was absolute silence in the bush. “I’m Maddy O’Hara, WWST. You’re the man in charge, I presume?”

He was a fairly large guy, enough so I’d notice. Not a whole lot older than me. Sandy-dark hair with a thread or two of silver, maybe. Good sharp bones beneath the cheek and brow. He’d be a dream to photograph monochrome, except you’d lose the eye color—the pale green of a cloudy agate.

“Give me the camera,” he said to Ainsley, ignoring me in the extreme.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I pressed. “I didn’t get your name.”

“
Sheriff
Curzon.”

Boy, I hadn’t cheesed-off a local public servant this fast in years. Good to know I hadn’t lost my touch.

Ainsley appeared mesmerized. He lowered the camera off his shoulder and shot me a quick, panicked look.

“It’s all right,” I soothed with a snicker. “You don’t have to give him anything.”

While I was busy being amused at the sheriff’s bravado, Curzon reached over and grabbed the television camera, scanned the side quickly and pressed eject. He plucked the card right out of its slot. Ainsley stood there, face frozen.

“I am the man in charge here,” Curzon announced. “And I said,
no cameras.
” He looked at me and the 35mm hanging from my neck.

I wrapped a hand around my Nikon lens and dared him to try.

He jabbed the little black rectangle of digital recording at me like a pointed finger. “Give me that card or I will arrest you. You can tell your story to the judge—tomorrow morning.”

It felt like being clocked upside the head. Six months ago, I’d have gone to jail for my card with no hesitation.

My fingers opened the camera and handed him the memory card.

Of course, the fact that I had a roll of exposed 35mm tucked in my pocket made it a little easier. “We heard there might be a story worth covering here, Sheriff.”

“I don’t think so, Ms. O’Hara. A man’s dead. Sad, but nothing important enough to rate the television news.”

I couldn’t help it. This time, I did laugh.

“Something funny about that?”

I was thinking,
then why bother?
But I said, “Just between you and me, Sheriff, around here, it’s news when somebody’s dog dies.”

“Not from around here, are you?” he deadpanned. Was that a sense of humor? It didn’t last. “There’s nothing to see here, Ms. O’Hara. My office will provide a written statement to the press as soon as possible.”

“Ah.” I nodded, all understanding. “And when do you think that might be?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“Look, I’m just trying to do my job, Sheriff. Performing a public service, you know?”

His gaze dropped abruptly, taking in my leather pants. He hesitated for half a second before he added, “Funny. That’s what they used to say about prostitution.”

I flashed the man a smile and winked. “And I’ll bet people like you still do,
Sheriff.
”

Ainsley’s eyes popped and he did a panic check—look left, look right, look down.

Now I’ll admit, I was overdressed for fieldwork. Compared to the girl in the bushes in the long dress and hat, I was looking more Saturday night on Rush Street than Monday morning on Michigan Avenue. But no way did Sheriff Curzon, in his fine suit, hold to an Amish dress code standard. He was trying to annoy me.

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.