Media Justice

by Dennis Carstens

  “No, she’s out in the play area with Bob. Probably on the swing set. Look, Mom, I have to go. I’ll call you later,” and she clicked off before her mother could reply.

  The previous Sunday, Brittany recalled, Bob, Brittany and Becky had gone on a picnic at a local park, not far from her apartment. A relatively small two hundred acres, it had a nice picnic area alongside a little lake and plenty of trails, bike paths and a huge playground for children. She had decided this would be a good place to look for them. Still in total denial, she truly believed she was going to find them both. Of course, she had tried his phone again but she was no longer dismayed by the disconnect message she heard.

  Brittany spent the entire day roaming through the park. She hiked every path and bike trail in it. She walked completely around the streets bordering the park and examined every child she saw, even older ones, in a vain search. She stayed at it until early evening then went home for supper. Still calm and relaxed, she simply decided to stop worrying and convinced herself that Becky would be found and no one would be the wiser.

  For the next several days her life took on an odd routine. Brittany would get up like normal, make breakfast, go to work and all the while act as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. Her mother would call, Brittany would fill her with convenient but believable lies and the charade would continue. A couple of evenings she spent parked in the lot of the apartment building she was now sure was the one that Bob lived in. She even stopped a couple of the residents and asked if they knew him, which they did not.

  A huge clue she wanted to pursue was the place he said he worked. The problem was she simply could not remember the name. Brittany did remember it was an investment firm of some kind and he had something to do with bonds but even looking online at a list of all of the investment firms in Minneapolis had not jogged her memory.

  Each day passed but she never lost faith. Somehow Becky would turn up and everything would be back to normal and no one would be any the wiser. At least she convinced herself this was true.

  In the middle of the week, Brittany decided she needed a night out. She met her three friends at a bar with live music and a young, fun crowd. As usual, they all asked about Becky and received the normal answer of “she’s fine”. They also asked about the mysterious phantom boyfriend, Bob, and chided her for not meeting him. She was able to casually brush them off and the four of them had a great time dancing and partying up a storm.

  Around 10:00 Brittany was thinking about calling it a night when her three friends talked her into something she would come to regret. The bar was having a wet T-shirt contest which Brittany would likely win. She went into the women’s restroom, took off her blouse and bra and slipped into a T-shirt the bar had provided.

  Brittany and another six fairly well endowed young women spent the next half hour dancing on the bar while being sprayed with water. Unknown to Brittany, her three friends all took several excellent pictures of her and all three would “jokingly” post them on their Facebook profiles the next day. To make the whole thing a little worse, Brittany did win the contest and was made to stand on the bar and hold a trophy over her head while still wearing the extremely revealing T-shirt. Her friends each took several photos of this for internet viewing.

  By the end of the week, Barbara was growing increasingly impatient. She had never gone more than forty eight hours before without seeing her granddaughter and for some inexplicable reason, Brittany had not allowed her to even speak to the child for almost a week.

  Friday evening, after she got off work, Barbara drove directly to her daughter’s apartment building. Using the key she had, Barbara let herself in and found that no one was home. She walked through the entire apartment and, finding nothing out of place, turned on the TV to wait for Brittany.

  Brittany drove into her building’s parking lot less than ten minutes after her mother. While looking for a spot close to the door, she spotted a familiar Chevy Tahoe parked in the front row. A stab of fear shot up to her chest when she saw the stickers in the back window that spelled out, Becky Ann! There was only one SUV on the planet with that name in the window. Brittany punched the gas pedal and squealed out of the parking lot bouncing over two speed bumps, scraping the rear undercarriage of her car, fleeing as rapidly as she dared.

  She drove to County 42 and went as quickly as she could to the big Target store on 42 and Cedar Avenue. Once parked in the crowded lot, she leaned forward, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, her arms dangling as she tried to normalize her breathing.

  Over the past week she had been living in a fantasy world. Brittany had actually begun to believe she could put off the reality of her baby’s disappearance indefinitely. The lies came easily and she was actually on some subconscious level, starting to believe them herself. Seeing Barbara’s car at her building and knowing her mother was waiting for her was like a slap across the face, knocking her back to the real world.

  Brittany had a serious decision to make that she would do almost anything to avoid. Sooner or later, and probably much sooner, she would have to face up to what happened. Just then, a plan popped into her head that would at least buy her the weekend. She retrieved her phone from her purse and punched the button to dial Barbara.

  “Hi, Mom,” Brittany said when her mother answered.

  “Where are you and where is Becky?” Barbara demanded.

  “We’re on our way to Chicago for the weekend.”

  “Chicago? What for? Let me talk to Becky.”

  “Ah, we, ah, haven’t left yet. I’m on my way to pick her up at the day care. Sorry, I didn’t call sooner. It was a last minute sort of thing.”

  “What are you up to…?”

  “Sorry, Mom. I gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow…”

  “Brittany, goddamnit, I want...” but she was talking to dead air.

  Later that night, well past sundown, Brittany sneaked back to her apartment, packed a bag and left. She would spend the next two days hiding in a motel on the other side of St. Paul, in White Bear Lake. Barbara called more than ten times all of which were ignored by her daughter.

  On Saturday she answered a call from Annie and agreed to meet the girls at Rick’s in Apple Valley. A night out away from her worries was what she needed to take her mind off of Becky and it would also allow her to act normal with her friends.

  Brittany did her best to have a good time but it was too difficult and all three of her friends could see something was bothering her. She managed to dance a few times and Julia took a group selfie of the four of them holding up drinks and mugging for the camera, a nice picture of the gang for posting on Julia’s Facebook page the next day. By 11:00 Brittany had enough, called it a night and drove back to her motel room.

  Monday morning came and Brittany, delighted to have the work week start again, believed she could hide out there as she arrived at 8:00, two hours before the store opened. Starting early, she began an inventory on the sales floor of her department. She was barely half finished when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

  “Where have you been, young lady and where is my granddaughter?”

  Brittany whirled around and, to her horror, found herself staring into the furious face of her mother. The blood drained from her face, she dropped the paperwork and staggered backwards two or three steps before collapsing to her knees.

  Unable to look up at Barbara, Brittany’s shoulders and chest began to heave as she started sobbing uncontrollably. Barbara knelt down on one knee directly in front of her, grabbed her daughter’s shoulders and forced Brittany to look at her.

  “Brittany, for God’s sake, what have you done?”

  Still sobbing, tears streaming down her face, gasping to catch her breath, she quietly said, “She’s gone. Bob took her and I can’t find them.”

  Stunned but still in control of herself, Barbara firmly asked, “What did the police say?”

  “I, I haven’t, uh, called them. I was too afraid. I didn’t want to hurt you
or make you angry.”

  “What have you done? What have you done?” Barbara quietly said while dialing 911 to begin the ordeal.

  SIX

  Melinda Pace watched the video of the final cut of today’s show, The Court Reporter, with a slightly displeased look on her face. She was illegally dragging on the second cigarette she smoked while watching it, impatiently tapping her well-manicured nails on the arm of her chair as the preview finished. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on her desk and picked up her glass of Chardonnay. Turning to the young man patiently waiting on her couch, she said, “It’s fine Robbie. We’ll go with it. I like the story about the judge in New Hampshire giving a child molester probation. Those always get the viewers riled up and will bring in the emails and phone calls.”

  “Yeah, those are always my favorites too, Melinda,” Robbie sarcastically answered her.

  “Look, we…” she began.

  “I know, we just report it, we don’t make the news blah, blah, blah,” he wearily said as he rose to retrieve the tape. “At least we don’t always make the news.”

  “We need something juicy, something really interesting. We haven’t had anything since the Prentiss trial,” she said ignoring his comments.

  Melinda Pace was the host of a local half hour TV show seen daily in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. As its name suggested, The Court Reporter was a show about interesting stories coming from the judicial system, both locally, nationally and on a rare occasion, internationally.

  Melinda had worked hard, received excellent grades, and a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin. The fact that she was a blonde, blue-eyed beauty who slept with just about every professor she had, including the women, didn’t hurt her academic achievements either.

  Upon graduation she spent a little over three years at a local station in Duluth. Through guts, brains and beauty, she worked hard and proved herself to be a natural on-air talent. She sent audition tapes to stations in much larger markets and quickly landed a job in the Twin Cities as their on-scene court reporter.

  Three years later she had transformed herself into a huge asset. Because of this, and the fact she threatened to go to a competitor, the station agreed to send her to law school if she agreed to a five year contract. She earned her J.D. from the University of Minnesota and did the two more years she had agreed to do with the station. Melinda then decided she wanted to give the practice of law a try.

  With the connections she had made working the courts for TV, she easily landed a job with a very prestigious firm in downtown Minneapolis. Determined to give it her best, she stayed for almost two years which, by the time it was over, seemed like ten. In her mind it was the modern equivalent of being a galley slave, rowing the boat for the benefit of the partners. Up to this point, she had only seen the most interesting part of the practice of law. Reporting on trials was fascinating, glamorous and rewarding. Being expected to bill eighty to ninety hours per week to placate greedy partners was not what she had bargained for. Even sleeping with most of them didn’t seem to matter and would not move her up the ladder any faster.

  Finishing her time as little more than a well paid slave at this firm, an exhausted and disillusioned Melinda Pace practically begged her old boss to get her old job back. Her boss agreed and Melinda gratefully threw herself back into her TV work.

  A short while later Melinda made another big mistake. Now in her thirties and never married, she decided to accept the marriage proposal of the law firm partner she had been sleeping with. Instead of the charming, take charge man she dated, he turned out to be to an arrogant, immature ass who could be as pouty and petulant as a teenage girl. Plus, his ex-wife had hired a female shark to eviscerate him in the divorce leaving him just about broke. Six months into the marriage, a quick, somewhat expensive divorce was necessary to resolve this mess.

  It was about this time she came up with the idea for her show. Melinda took it to her boss as a low cost, half-hour show the station could produce and air daily. The station agreed to let her try and Melinda turned it into her baby. The show became an immediate hit. It quickly evolved into a tabloid style, salacious, voyeuristic crime and court show that the viewers ate up.

  Now, several years later Melinda had a second divorce, a mild drinking problem and a reputation that had moved beyond Minnesota. She also had a mid-six figure salary and was well known as a five-star, prima donna bitch.

  “I’d like to go back to doing the show live like we did during the Prentiss trial. It was a little hectic but more interesting and fun.”

  “Yeah, it was,” Robbie agreed. “I’ll see if I can get the mayor to kill his wife. Would that work?”

  “Very funny, smartass.”

  Melinda normally hired and fired producers almost at a whim. Robbie was different. He was sharp, worked hard, was careful not to let anything get on the air that might embarrass her and he had the balls to stand up to her. Plus, she genuinely liked him.

  Robbie Nelson was a graduate of the University of Illinois at Champaign. He had a degree in communication and after graduation had lived in Chicago for three years trying to find a job that would make use of his degree. At the time, he was a reasonably attractive, well-groomed, articulate young man trying to land his first decent job. Fed up with bartending, cab driving and retail sales jobs, he answered an online ad for an entry level position with a TV station in Minneapolis. His initial position was an associate producer for Melinda’s show for a salary barely above the poverty line. But, it was an interesting job in a field he found he enjoyed and he stuck with it.

  Robbie “earned” a promotion to producer when his predecessor made a serious mistake. She had provided Melinda with a wrong picture of a judge accused of his third DWI. Melinda had to make an on-air apology and due to the embarrassment it caused Melinda, an absolute no-no, that producer was gone and Robbie took her place. Along with significantly more responsibility came enough of a raise to allow Robbie to pay his bills on time and an occasional night out. Plus, he quickly discovered Melinda’s bark was far worse than her bite if you were organized, efficient and willing to stand up to her.

  Robbie took the tape to editing to finish putting the final touches to it before their 4:00 P.M. air time. Today’s show was fairly good. The show consisted of the usual tabloid nonsense. The first segment was about a celebrity divorce in California, always a surefire winner for the masses. Then Melinda fed them the juice about a murder trial in Texas of a woman who poisoned her philandering husband then put his body in a freezer for three years. “Who hasn’t wanted to do that”, was Melinda’s on-air quip? The final story of the day was about a judge in Montana who gave a child rapist a meager thirty day jail sentence which was certain to bring about a torrent of emails, tweets and phone calls. Of course, as usual, the highlight of the show was Melinda’s daily ‘Dumbest Criminals’ segment. Today’s episode featured two genius home invaders in Portland, OR. Police were dispatched to a home where these two idiots were still on the scene. The would-be crooks had convinced the home owners to tie them up too so, when the cops came, they would also claim to be victims. The real victims naturally accommodated them and according to the police report, these two geniuses were shocked when the home owners ratted them out to the cops. Robbie believed the viewers loved these stories because no matter how many mistakes they’ve made, at least they could believe they aren’t this stupid.

  Robbie watched the show in Melinda’s opulent corner office then went back to his cramped, windowless cubby hole to begin working on the next day’s show. He was reading over the draft of a story one of the writers had prepared when he heard a soft knock on the door. He swiveled in his chair as it opened and saw Gabriella Shriqui, a reporter with the station standing there.

  “Hey,” Robbie began. “Thanks for coming,” he added as she stepped into his office and plopped down in the armless uncomfortable chair alongside his gray metal desk.

  Gabriella was a couple years older than Robbie and w
as stop traffic gorgeous. The product of Moroccan Christian parents who emigrated to America when her mother was pregnant with her older brother. Gabriella had silky black hair six inches below her shoulders, light caramel colored skin that looked like a perpetual tan and dark, almost black, slightly almond shaped eyes.

  She and Robbie had worked together extensively on a recent, notorious local trial of a judge, Gordon Prentiss, who had been accused of murdering his wife. For the first dozen or so times they were together, Robbie’s knees weakened just at the sight of her. He eventually worked up enough nerve to ask her out but she very kindly shut him down by claiming she didn’t date co-workers. Which, of course, is really code for: “not interested”. She told him she had dated a coworker once at a station in Detroit and, when it ended, she was out of a job. Robbie took it well and they had become pals, even going out for an occasional lunch or beer together.

  “Have anything for me?” he asked.

  “Stop staring at my legs,” she jokingly chided him.

  “I like your legs. If you don’t want me to look at them, don’t wear a dress. Now, do you have anything?”

  Gabriella wasn’t just a reporter for the station. She was the main on the scene personality for all of the local courts throughout the Metro area. As such she was a great source of news, gossip and information about anything of interest that might be happening or in the works around any of the county courthouses.

  “I got nothing,” she replied. “I can’t believe how slow it’s been. A couple of gang bangers pleading out to a two year old drive-by is the news of the week. Other than that, not much. I’m so bored. Want to go for a beer?”

  “Oh, you’re bored so now I’m looking good to you,” he said with feigned anger.

  “Yep,” she said. “I’m bored so you’ll do. What about it?”

  “My fragile male ego is crushed. Sorry, can’t do it. I’ll be here for at least a couple hours.”