Midnight Rambler

by James Swain

  “Ken Linderman called and said you had a lead in the Midnight Rambler case,” Saunders said when we were in his office, a tidy second-floor room with two chairs, a metal desk, and a spectacular view of the bay. “I was assigned to Skell when he lived here. I'll do whatever I can to help you.”

  “What do you know about Neil Bash?” I asked.

  “The shock jock?”

  “Yes. What can you tell me about him?”

  Saunders was animated and didn't appear to enjoy sitting down. I recognized the trait and followed him to the window. We both stared out at the bay's choppy water.

  “Bash was a twisted guy,” Saunders said. “He seemed to get his kicks out of making his listeners uncomfortable. One time he had a hog castrated on his show. The station got fined two hundred grand by the FCC.”

  “Was he arrested?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not, he didn't break any laws. The hog was to be castrated anyway. Bash just played it on the air.”

  A team of rowers with a coxswain passed by the building. When they were gone, Saunders said, “Okay, so how are Bash and Skell connected?”

  “They lived in Tampa at the same time, and now Bash is promoting Skell on his radio show in Fort Lauderdale while attacking me.”

  Saunders's eyebrows went up. “Sounds like you're onto something.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I heard Bash got run out of Tampa a while back. Something to do with an nderage girl. Is he a pedophile?”

  “He never showed up on our radar.”

  “Do you remember what the deal with the girl was?”

  Saunders crossed his arms and gave it some thought.

  “No, but I know someone who probably does,” he said.

  Saunders picked up the phone on his desk and called a feature writer at the Tampa Tribune named Gary Haber. They exchanged pleasantries, and Saunders put the call on speakerphone and introduced us. Haber had a watered-down New York accent and sounded like a decent sort, and I asked him about Neil Bash being run out of town.

  “That was about three years ago,” Haber said. “If I remember correctly, one of the newscasters over at Fox broke the story.”

  “What happened?” Saunders asked.

  “A sixteen-year-old cheerleader at Plant High School accused her history teacher of having an affair with her,” Haber said. “Somehow, Bash got the girl to call his show, then tricked her into saying that she'd initiated the relationship and that the teacher wasn't to blame.”

  “How did Bash do that?” I asked.

  There was a pause as Haber dredged his memory.

  “It had something to do with the equipment Bash had in his studio,” the reporter finally said. “I don't remember how, but he used a piece of equipment to get the girl to say things that she really didn't mean to say.”

  “You're saying he manipulated her answers,” I said.

  “That's right,” Haber replied.

  “Wouldn't the girl have known what Bash was doing?”

  “Somehow she didn't know. From what I remember, Bash did something that was really clever.”

  “Was this a live show?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it was live,” Haber said.

  I thought back to Melinda's call-in performance to Bash's show the day before. Her answers had sounded strained, and there had been pregnant pauses between them. I wondered if this played into what Haber had just described.

  “Who was the reporter over at Fox?” Saunders asked.

  “Kathy Fountain,” Haber said.

  Saunders glanced at me. “I know Kathy. Want to take a ride over to the station and have a chat with her?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “We need to run,” Saunders told Haber. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Anytime,” Haber said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I followed Saunders to the Fox News station on bustling Kennedy Boulevard. The building was sleek and ultramodern, with large tinted windows that faced the street and a hundred-foot-tall white tower with the station's number, 13, printed on its side. My impression of Tampa as a sleepy burg was changing, one piece of architecture at a time.

  I parked in the shaded Visitors parking area. Buster was still put out, and he refused to make eye contact with me.

  Saunders and I went through a revolving door into the building's main reception area. The receptionist was a white-haired guard with an engaging smile. A small sign on his desk said Director of First Impressions. Saunders asked to see Kathy Fountain while displaying his badge and laminated ID. The guard pointed at the flat-screen TV hanging over our heads.

  “She's in the studio doing her show. I'll tell her assistant you're here. Please have a seat.”

  We sat on a leather couch and watched Kathy Fountain interview two guests in her studio. An attractive woman in her early forties, she was blond and fair skinned, and had the sympathetic manner of someone who'd raised kids.

  At one o'clock her show ended. Sixty seconds later she was standing in front of us, out of breath.

  “Hello, Scott,” Fountain said. “Is something wrong?”

  “We need your help with an investigation,” Saunders said.

  “Certainly,” she said.

  “This is Jack Carpenter,” Saunders said. “He's working with me.”

  A flicker of recognition registered in Fountain's face, and I was glad that I was with Saunders, and not by myself.

  “I'd like to talk to you about Neil Bash,” I said.

  Fountain rolled her eyes. “Neil was one sick, sick man.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Has he done something wrong? It wouldn't surprise me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Is there someplace we can talk in private?”

  “My office. Follow me.”

  Fountain took us to her office on the other side of the large mazelike building. The shades were drawn, and the air-conditioning was turned down low. A family photo sat on her desk, confirming my earlier suspicions. Saunders and I remained standing, as did she.

  “Gary Haber at the Tampa Tribune told us you broke the story that sent Bash packing,” I said. “Can you tell me what Bash did that got him in so much trouble?”

  Fountain crossed her arms in front of her chest, and her pleasant demeanor vanished. “A local high school girl had an affair with her history teacher. One day the affair became public, and the history teacher was arrested. Somehow, Bash got the girl to call his show. Although the show was broadcast live, there was a fifteen-second time delay on the broadcast, which let Bash bleep out crank calls and obscenities. Bash used that delay to manipulate the girl's answers. He asked questions like ‘You asked your history teacher to sleep with you, didn't you?’ The girl said no, and Bash said, ‘So you didn't ask him to sleep with you?’ The girl said yes, and Bash would bleep out the first answer and substitute the second. It made listeners think the girl had said yes to the first question, when she really hadn't.”

  “Wouldn't the girl know she was being manipulated?” Saunders asked.

  “That was the clever part,” Fountain said. “Bash made her turn off her radio to prevent feedback. She didn't hear the interview until after it was broadcast.”

  “How did you figure out what Bash was doing?” I asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I didn't,” Fountain said. “There's a magician in town who's been on my show a few times. He heard the interview and called me. He said Bash was using a trick invented by a mind reader named the Amazing Dunninger. Dunninger did a radio program, where he used the trick to ‘read the minds’ of listeners who called in.”

  “Did you expose Bash on your show?” I asked.

  “You bet I did,” Fountain said, nodding vigorously.

  “What happened?”

  “At first he denied it and threatened to take us to court,” she said. “Then the girl went to the newspapers and said she'd been tricked. Bash recanted and said some of her answers were edited. That's when the excrement hit the air-conditioning.”r />
  Saunders and I both smiled.

  “What happened to the history teacher?” I asked.

  “There was a trial, and he was found guilty and sent to jail,” Fountain said. “If I remember correctly, Bash showed up at the courthouse to support him. Right after that, Bash's show was cancelled, and he left Tampa.”

  “Did your station cover the trial?”

  “Of course. It was big news.”

  “Is there any available footage that I could see?”

  Fountain offered to check and left us standing in her office. Saunders had a spark in his eyes and was nodding, a sign that he agreed Bash needed to be investigated. In criminal investigations there was no such thing as coincidence or happenstance. Saunders and I both knew that Bash was connected to Simon Skell. The trick would be proving it.

  Fountain reappeared a few minutes later, wearing a smile.

  “You gentlemen are in luck,” she said. “Follow me.”

  The station was like a small factory, with shows about cooking, the weather, and raising children being recorded in different sound studios. Fountain led us to the back of the building to the station's video library and introduced us to a lanky young guy with curly dark hair named Kevin Ford. Fountain told Kevin what we were looking for, and Kevin searched his computer's database for footage of the history teacher's trial.

  “This might take a while,” Kevin said.

  Kevin's desk was loaded with work, and I offered to buy him lunch.

  “You're on,” he said.

  Fountain and Saunders also took me up on my offer, and I left the station and drove to a deli a few blocks from where Rose worked. I hadn't stopped thinking about her, and I was thrilled to see her picking up a lunch order when I walked in. Edging up behind her, I lowered my voice.

  “Excuse me, miss. Aren't you Jennifer Lopez?”

  “Get lost,” she said without turning around.

  “You sound just like my wife.”

  She stiffened, then turned around. I kissed her on the lips.

  “Hey, Rose,” an aproned woman working the register said.

  My wife would not take her eyes off me.

  “Yes, Cynthia,” she said.

  “That your husband?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “About fricking time he showed up.”

  I ordered four Cuban sandwiches to go. While my order was being prepared we took a table, and I told Rose everything that had happened since we'd parted. My wife believed that God talked to us through signs. If we chose to believe in Him, those signs would become apparent to us. To her, my seeing the defaced billboard with Neil Bash's picture was a sign, and she nodded approvingly when I was done.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” she said.

  “You really believe that, don't you?” I said.

  “Yes, Jack, I do.”

  My food came, and I paid up. I kissed her again at the front door. There was a coldness that hadn't been there before. I thought I understood. Rose wasn't going to invest any more emotion in me until I committed myself to her and to our marriage.

  I told myself I could live with that.

  The sandwiches were met with smiles at the station. Kevin had found a week's worth of footage from the history teacher's trial, and Fountain, Saunders, and I ate in Fountain's office while watching a plasma monitor mounted to the wall.

  “Because the girl was a minor, the judge didn't allow TV cameras inside the courtroom,” Fountain explained as the first clip ran. “As a result, we used a courthouse artist to capture renditions of the different witnesses who testified during the trial.”

  I ate my sandwich while trying to hide my disappointment. My reason for wanting to watch the trial was to see if Simon Skell had attended and sat in the spectator gallery. Without a camera inside the courtroom, there was no way for me to know.

  Instead, I decided to focus on the film taken outside the court room each day after the trial, when both the prosecuting attorney and the defense attorney made statements to the media. If I was lucky, Skell's face might show up here.

  On the fourth clip I got a hit. This was the day Bash came and the cameras caught him leaving the courthouse. Bash wore a flowing black garment that made him look downright evil. When a reporter asked him a question, he shoved his palm into the camera and said, “No comment, asshole!”

  As Bash came down the steps I spotted a man walking beside him.

  “Can I see this clip again?” I asked.

  Fountain rewound the tape and started it over. I had her freeze the picture as Bash appeared at the top of the steps, then play it in slow motion. As Bash descended, another man also came down, walking to his right. We leaned in to stare.

  “Any idea who that is?” Saunders asked.

  “He looks familiar, but I'm not sure,” I said.

  “Think it might be Skell?”

  “It could be.”

  We watched the clip again. The second man's face never became visible to the camera. I felt as if I were watching a Hitchcock film, and the master was taunting me.

  “You had contact with Skell, didn't you?” Saunders asked.

  “That's one way to put it,” I said.

  “Judging by the guy's size, do you think that might be him?”

  I hesitated. Body parts were hard to distinguish, and I couldn't really be certain. The guy looked about six foot and one-eighty, which matched Skell's proportions. He also had a bounce to his step, and Skell was athletic. But there was no way of knowing for sure. Fountain rewound the tape, and we watched it again.

  “I just don't know,” I said.

  The air had been let out of the room. We finished eating in silence. A tapping on the door lifted our heads. Kevin stood in the doorway, looking pleased with himself.

  “Guess what I just found,” he said, holding a Beta tape in his hand.

  Kevin came into Fountain's office and handed her the tape with a flourish.

  “I decided to search the video archives to see what we had on Bash,” Kevin said. “Guess what turned up? The clip when he castrated the hog.”

  Fountain let out a sickening groan.

  “Oh, please, Kevin, I just ate lunch,” she said.

  “The station filmed it,” Kevin said, “but it was so gross it never aired.”

  I looked across the desk at Fountain. “Do you mind if we watch it?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Do you mind if I leave the room?”

  “Not at all.”

  Fountain left her office. When she was gone, Kevin inserted the tape into the deck attached to the TV and hit Play.

  “You want it with or without audio?” he asked.

  “With,” Saunders said.

  The screen flickered to life. Dressed in black, Bash stood in a grassy field clutching a cordless mike. Beside him stood a gap-toothed farmer wearing dirty coveralls. Behind the farmer was a large squealing hog tied to a stake in the ground.

  Bash and the farmer bantered back and forth like a couple of frat house buddies. Then the farmer drew a curved knife from a sheath in his belt, and knelt down beside the hog. The castration took place with the farmer's back to the camera. There was nothing to see, but the sounds were gruesome.

  “Enough of that,” Saunders said.

  Kevin muted the clip with the remote. Soon the segment ended, and the camera pulled back. I could see Bash standing beneath the shade of an enormous oak tree off to the side. With him were four men, their faces masked by shadows.

  “Freeze it,” I said.

  Kevin froze the clip. I stared at the four faces, as did Saunders.

  “Any of them look familiar?” Saunders asked.

  I stared hard. Then I shook my head. The resolution on the clip was poor, and the faces were indistinguishable.

  “I need this blown up and lightened,” I said.

  “Your wish is my command,” Kevin said, popping the cassette out.

  We followed him down a long hallway to an editing room, which was win
dowless and quite chilly. A black male technician was on duty, and Kevin explained what we needed. The tech inserted the tape into a deck, then had us go into the next room, a brightly lit soundstage with a giant video monitor hanging on the wall.

  “I'd like to watch football on that baby,” Saunders said.

  The frame we'd just been watching appeared on the monitor. Now, Bash and the four men looked larger than life.

  “Would you look at that,” Saunders said.

  Standing next to Bash was the history professor who'd molested his student. The teacher wore a baseball cap pulled down low, but it didn't hide enough of his face. It was definitely him.

  “Do you recognize any of the others?” Saunders asked.

  I stared at the other three men. They were smiling and looked like a bunch of guys having a barbecue in someone's backyard.

  “Can you make the faces lighter?” I asked the tech.

  “Sure,” the tech said from the other room.

  The faces turned a few shades lighter. The guy to Bash's left wore shades and a leather bombardier jacket and was trying to look cool. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Skell, and I looked at his hands. Fingers were missing on both.

  “That's Skell,” I said.

  “Jesus, are you sure?” Saunders said.

  “I'd bet my life on it.”

  “What about the other two?”

  The third man's face was partially turned. Hispanic, broad-shouldered, with an ugly facial scar. It was the guy who'd pumped three bullets into my car on 595.

  “This guy tried to kill me the other day,” I said, pointing.

  Saunders shouldered up beside me.

  “What about the fourth one? Do you know who he is?”

  The fourth man in the photograph was ten years older than the rest. He had meticulously styled blond hair and a beach-ball stomach. A thick gold necklace hung around his neck, and his watch looked like a Rolex.

  “Never seen him before,” I said.

  Saunders looked at Kevin.

  “How hard would it be for us to get prints of this?” he asked.