Shunning Sarah

by Julie Kramer

  POLICE HAVE RELEASED A

  FORENSIC SKETCH OF A MURDER

  VICTIM WHOSE BODY WAS

  DISCOVERED IN A SINKHOLE IN

  SOUTHEASTERN MINNESOTA.

  ((TWOSHOT ANCHOR))

  RILEY SPARTZ NOW JOINS US WITH

  A FOLLOW TO HER EXCLUSIVE LAST

  NIGHT ABOUT THIS MOST UNUSUAL

  HOMICIDE.

  ((RILEY CU))

  DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN?

  IF SO, THE POLICE WANT

  TO HEAR FROM YOU.

  I tagged off the story with the law enforcement phone number. Then, all we and the cops could do was wait. Someone, besides the killer, had to know the victim. Some murders—like those involving robbery or rape—hold little mystery concerning motive. In this case, someone took time to stash her body, rather than simply leaving her where she died or dumping her by the side of the road. Sure, some killers hide the evidence. Others don’t want to risk being caught transporting it. This felt like one of those cases where understanding the victim’s life might help make better sense of her death.

  Later, I checked in with the sheriff. Still no answers. While my parents were confident the killer was an outsider, he told me citizens of Harmony were dismissing the victim as an outsider, too. I’d seen that type of denial in other slayings because people in small towns feel safer if the prey was not one of them.

  That night, I dreamed I wasn’t alone. The eyes of the woman in the drawing seemed to hover over my bed. Jane Doe didn’t blink. She just waited, like she needed company and had no one else. An uncomfortable image, but not quite a nightmare. I wondered if Josh also saw her in his dreams.

  When I woke, I woke tired. Even with concealer under my eyes, and airbrush makeup across my face, I hoped not to have to broadcast a live shot.

  CHAPTER 16

  All news employees were summoned via the loudspeaker for a station meeting the next morning. We stood in the center of the newsroom—apprehensive—because the announcements that came out of such gatherings were typically unpleasant, relating to staff layoffs and budget cuts.

  Our old general manager and our new news director stood side by side on the assignment desk’s elevated platform so we all had a clear view. A broad Cheshire-Cat grin stretched across Bryce’s face, and I braced myself for what was about to be said.

  But when the GM started to speak, his words made me think that perhaps the pattern of doom was breaking. “We all know these are tough times for the news business, but Channel 3 is through trying to wait out this cursed economy. We’re going to be proactive.”

  His stump speech had our interest. “Now you’ve all had some time to get to know Bryce, and I want to tell you that together we have developed a strategy that will increase station revenue and allow us to devote our news resources in more creative ways to better compete with our rivals.”

  The elocution now had the sound of a snake-oil scam, but if Bryce knew some management secret to make Channel 3 the news leader of the market, I could get over my fear of snakes.

  “I’m going to let our news director fill you in on this exciting next step for the station.” Then he turned the floor over to Bryce, who thanked him for his enthusiasm and support.

  “We’re here to discuss three little words that will transform how Channel 3 covers news. Can anyone guess what they are?”

  No one spoke. After all, we already had “high-definition cameras.”

  We already were network “owned and operated.”

  And we’d had “Doppler weather radar” for years.

  Bryce waited to build suspense before yelling out the answer with an animated fist pump to emphasize each word. “ONE. MAN. BANDS.”

  If he was expecting cheers, he was disappointed. We were speechless.

  One-man bands are the mark of small-market stations because they’re cheap. The term is used for reporters who have to shoot their own stories. Normally rookies, not veteran journalists. And certainly not in a major market like the Twin Cities where news employees specialize, whether their skill be anchoring, reporting, videotaping, or producing. We each like to think we excel at our particular jobs.

  I’d seen one-man bands toil in the field when news events took me to small markets like Mankato or Duluth. And I’d always felt sorry for them.

  “Come now, you must have questions,” he said. “Think of it as Multi. Media. Journalism. Hey, that’s three words, too.”

  I figured the whole session must be a trap to weed out those of us who weren’t team players. I bit down on my lip, warning myself to keep quiet. The photographers looked nervous because they sensed job security at stake. If reporters were shooting their own video, what were they going to do?

  “If the reporters will be working as photographers,” cameraman Dave Chaney asked, “will photographers be going on the air?”

  “An excellent question,” Bryce said. “We will be deciding that on a case-by-case basis. Some of you may end up on camera, others will function as field producers conducting interviews as well as videotaping stories. I realize this can’t happen overnight. Staff will require training.”

  One of the more recent hires, a reporter named Nicole Wilson, looked nervous, and I understood why. Carrying a camera and tripod is hard—especially in high heels. This was her first reporting job in a large market; she was probably still a probationary employee and had to do as ordered. But she was also young and blond, so I figured she’d wind up fine. I gave her a smile of encouragement, even though I myself wasn’t encouraged. Nicole responded with a flash of gratitude, and I made a mental note to do a better job of welcoming her to Channel 3 and teaching her TV chick tricks.

  I was old enough to know better than to run around in heels all day. High heels are not worth the pain in your feet. Your legs may look good, but your legs do not show on the air. I’d take Nicole shopping for pants and sensible shoes.

  Shooting your own video meant static reporter standups, which are boring, to say the least. I waited for one of my colleagues to mention the obvious question, but no one stepped up.

  So I did. “We’re a major-market station, Bryce. How do you expect one-man bands, which typically result in poor-quality video, to increase ratings?”

  Bryce seemed surprised by my question. “Who said anything about increasing ratings? Ratings are the least of our worries.”

  His answer stunned me. Almost every boss I ever worked for was so obsessed with ratings that the newsroom had a toxic vibe during the sweeps months of November, February, and May. Maybe Bryce would introduce a healthier atmosphere by taking the focus off ratings. Could this be a good thing?

  But then he outlined how he had crunched the numbers and the station could be more profitable by settling for second or even third place rather than fighting to be first, and I got it.

  “It’s a numbers game,” he said. “And for too long, Channel 3 has been focused on the wrong numbers.”

  It was clear our new boss was going to run us into the ground until we were dirt last among viewers. We would be the laughingstock among our news peers. The station would never land another Emmy again.

  Bryce pulled a poster from behind the assignment desk with a pie chart labeled with topics like Salaries, Overtime, Equipment, Travel. “It doesn’t matter if our viewership goes down as long as our costs go down more. Simple economics.”

  That’s when we learned Bryce had graduated with a BA in business, not journalism.

  Cost is definitely a factor in weighing which stories get covered. But to hear it embraced as a primary business strategy was sacrilege to our civic mission to seek truth and report objectively. Newsrooms should not be run the same as hardware stores.

  Bryce concluded his lecture by insisting that the implementation of one-man bands would allow Channel 3 to actually cover more news by being in more places at the same time. I wanted to point out a flaw in that reasoning: the station would have to buy twice as many cameras. But in the interests of job preservation, I zipped my lip.r />
  “Channel 3 is paving the way for a new brand of TV journalism,” he said. “Working smart by doing more with less.”

  He and the GM high-fived each other, which sent a loud smack reverberating through the silent newsroom. And then Bryce moved among the employees handing out buttons that read WORK SMART. Unprompted, one reporter pinned the slogan to his jacket to demonstrate he was a team player.

  Hypocrite.

  Kiss-ass.

  Suck-up.

  Slowly I stepped back, away from Bryce.

  But he headed toward me, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. “Riley, I think you’re worried because you’ve been doing your job a certain way for a long time.” He emphasized the word long. “You’re filled with trepidation. That happens with change, but rest assured, I have confidence you can learn new tricks.”

  Then he called everyone else over. “I’ve decided Riley will be the first to kick off our one-man-band coverage. Today, you’ll be trained on how to work a television camera. Tomorrow you’ll shoot your first story.”

  Bryce started a round of applause that made me nauseous.

  “I thought you said this wouldn’t happen overnight,” I said.

  He leaned over and whispered in my ear. “A subpar job won’t end this. What you shoot goes on the air, no matter what. Screw up and you’ll be the one who looks bad—on air and on paper. You better cooperate. I wouldn’t want to write up insubordination for your personnel file.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Bryce sure meant what he said.

  The next morning I was assigned to cover a news conference solo on the front steps of the State Capitol. The training he had promised consisted of showing me how to turn the camera on, and explaining the concept of point-and-shoot.

  As I hauled a tripod and camera up the steps of the Capitol with my oversize purse slung over my shoulder, I longed for the golden days of television—just yesterday—when all I had to carry to a story was a pen and notebook.

  I had been hoping for a less public arena where my competitors couldn’t witness my inaugural shoot. Instead, Jenny Turrentine from Channel 8, clutching only a reporter’s notebook, passed me effortlessly.

  “What’s going on?” She turned a couple of times to see if anyone was behind or in front of me. “Where’s your photographer? Why are you lugging all that stuff?”

  I mumbled something about us experimenting with shooting our own video.

  “You mean one-man bands?” She rushed to tell the other stations the news. “Hey, everybody, Channel 3 is running one-man bands. Look at Riley Spartz.”

  They all looked at me, torn between savoring my disgrace and fearing their own newsrooms might emulate the move. But one of the other cameramen gave me a reassuring smile and helped me center the camera on my tripod head.

  I was spared more razzing when a woman with gray braided hair arrived on the scene, shaking something yellow and pink in front of the cameras.

  “Can everybody see this? Who can’t see this?” she called.

  We stayed silent and let her rant a couple minutes, waiting to learn where this was leading. I kept my eye glued to the viewfinder, afraid she would walk out of frame and I’d miss something essential.

  We’d been called there for a news conference about protecting black bears.

  Turns out, like Noreen, Bryce believed animal stories attracted the most viewers. Apparently, a news director manifesto. Unlike my previous boss, Bryce had no pets of his own and no personal love for furry creatures. To him, they were business tools, good for audience share and ratings numbers. And generally, animal features were cheap to produce. So when the assignment desk mentioned a possible bear story, Bryce ordered me out the door.

  “My name is Teresa Neuzil.” The woman worked for a nonprofit center for black bear research in northern Minnesota. “Do we want people who can’t see well enough to see this to be shooting guns?” She waved the colorful streamer again.

  “What is that thing you’re holding?” I finally asked. I felt more normal asking questions than aiming the lens. The rest of the media pack seemed relieved to cut to the chase.

  She walked over to me and held the item in front of my camera lens. The other photographers shifted their gear so they could also get the shot. “This is a bear radio collar. We use it to track research animals.”

  Teresa drew our attention to the pink and yellow ribbons attached to the leather collar. “Even from a distance, these ribbons are quite noticeable.” Then she pointed out a dark stain on the collar. “Can anyone tell what this is?”

  None of us answered. So she told us. “Blood.”

  The word startled me. I found myself hoping news was near, even if an actual bear wasn’t.

  Teresa waved a large photo of a black bear in one hand, the collar in the other. Her voice sounded choked up. “This was Ginny. The bear who wore this collar. Now presumed dead by a hunter’s bullet.”

  The collar had been left in a mailbox outside the research station. No note. “This creature was one of our windows into the bear world.”

  This wasn’t the first time such a misfortune had happened in her line of work. She’d lost five research bears to hunters over the last several years. Yet state wildlife officials refused her pleas to make hunting radio-collared bears illegal.

  “That’s why I’ve driven hundreds of miles south to St. Paul to bring this recurring travesty to the attention of our state lawmakers,” Teresa said. “These research bears are not mere trophies. Their worth is more than a bearskin rug. They provide valuable knowledge to schools as well as scientists. Such a death sets our study back years.”

  The North American Bear Center was familiar to me. Last year, a live online camera was placed in a den, letting viewers watch a hibernating bear give birth. The website had gone viral with Internet hits and the cub had become a cyberdarling.

  “Is it possible that it’s hard to see the ribbons in dim light or deep brush?” the newspaper outdoors reporter asked. “Do we need to give hunters some slack here?”

  The woman shook her head. “By law, deer hunters in the southern part of the state are required to count the points on a buck’s antlers before firing. This is much simpler.”

  She shook the ribbons again. Close up, I could see they were made of fluorescent duct tape, well suited to survive north woods winters.

  “Also,” Teresa continued, “most bear-hunting parties use bait to attract their prey, giving them ample opportunity to see the bears before pulling a trigger or releasing an arrow.”

  She described how the bear center was dedicated to clearing up misconceptions regarding scientific facts about bears.

  “People are the number one cause of death of black bears, yet our bear center is not opposed to hunting. In fact, our work helps manage bear populations. And hunters benefit from that data. But there are more than twenty thousand black bears in Minnesota. Surely we can spare a dozen.”

  The closest I’d ever been to hunting animals was flushing pheasants out of cornfields as a child so my dad could shoot them. So while I’m not opposed to the sport, it made sense that the killing of these tagged bears should end.

  “What is your next move?” I asked. “What do you hope to accomplish here today?”

  “We’ve asked state wildlife officials for their support, but failed to get it,” Teresa said. “Now I’m asking the citizens of Minnesota to implore their lawmakers to make killing research bears illegal.”

  All in all, her speech seemed like fine campaign rhetoric. I wondered why state wildlife officials rejected her proposal. So after the news conference ended, I drove about a mile to the Department of Natural Resources headquarters to find out.

  I’m not a particularly outdoorsy news type, so the last time I’d spoken with the DNR was a year earlier after a burglary in one of their storage buildings. The break-in wouldn’t have attracted any attention except the thieves stole twenty animal head mounts from a traveling Wall of Shame display designed to encourage the public
to report poachers. The haul included trophy bucks, a large walleye, turkey tail feathers, even a bear head.

  Their communications director, Zach Loecher, was miffed when he heard about the crusade at the Capitol minutes earlier. “This is an issue with a lot of public emotion behind it. Not nearly as clear cut as the bear center is making it seem.” Then he wondered out loud why no other media were pressing him for answers.

  “My guess is Channel 3 must be the only one that cares about getting both sides of the story,” I said.

  But it actually crossed my mind that the other reporters might be dismissing the event as nonnews. The dead-bear tale fell into the category of discretionary news. It certainly wasn’t mandatory for coverage, except on a real slow news day. So the other newsrooms in town could be passing, simply phoning the DNR for a comment to include in the story tag, or have a much better story Channel 3 was missing.

  But hunting research bears certainly could be made into an interesting issue story. That’s what I was hoping for, so I wanted to interview Loecher on camera before it occurred to him that keeping quiet might make his problem go away.

  He got back to the matter concerning the bear center. “It isn’t that they love bears and we hate them. Our agency has to deal with a bigger picture.”

  “I have no doubt Mother Nature can be complicated,” I said. “Let’s put you on camera to make sure we get it right.”

  Loecher’s office had nice natural light, so all I had to do was clip a microphone onto his shirt. I considered starting out smart alecky and asking what he had against black bears, but decided to simply play it straight so I could leave promptly with a usable sound bite.

  “What’s the downside of making it illegal to hunt research bears?” I asked.

  He knew his material and made his argument. “While we believe such research to be popular and interesting, we do not believe it essential to managing bear populations.”

  He pointed out that the DNR also uses radio collars to study bears and also loses some of those animals each year to what he called “legal harvest” by hunters.