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Sunday, June 3, 2:30 p.m.
The San Joaquin Valley in summer was hotter than Mexico and hell put together, Corina Vasquez's father always said. At that moment she would have settled for either locale, anywhere but the Valley Voice cafeteria, where, thanks to the new manage-ment's cost-saving measures, the heat was almost as stifling indoors as out.
Nothing warm about the way her co-workers were treating her, though. Corina bought a glass of Chai tea, paid the cashier and looked around. If the studied lack of interest of the others in the café were any indication, nobody was going to invite her to share their table. Might as well take the tea back to her desk. At least she could get some work done without Matthew Henderson breathing down her neck.
She'd just started back down the hall when J. T. Malone, the metro editor, dashed out of the elevator.
He put on the brakes when he saw her. "Where the hell's Henderson?" he asked. Dressed down by his standards, in a white shirt and chocolate-brown slacks a shade darker than his skin, J.T. was the only person in the building who looked untouched by the heat. They'd been easy with each other once, almost friends, but that had all stopped when Ivy Dieser, the new managing editor, had promoted Corina to Matthew Henderson's assistant.
"He's off today," she said. "It is Sunday, you know."
"Where'd he go? He's not at home, not answering his phone nor his e-mail."
"He'll be in tomorrow. What's so urgent?"
J.T. hesitated, then said, as if she'd forced it out of him, "Got a lead on something big. A body's been uncovered outside of town. PD source says it's the mayor."
For a moment, Corina was taken aback. Wes Shaw, her Wes, was mayor now, but J.T. wasn't talking about him. Her brain processed the scant information, and in doing so, reminded her that Wes Shaw was no longer hers and hadn't been for almost a year.
"You mean Tina Kellogg?"
"That's what I said. The mayor." Shock gave way to emotion. Tina Kellogg dead. It wasn't right, but it was what everyone suspected after she hadn't returned from a trip to the coast, hadn't made her house payment, hadn't contacted any of her friends. Corina fought the tears that came with the realization. "That's so awful. She was such a decent woman."
"Yeah." J.T. studied her with even more intensity than usual. "If we can't find Henderson, I guess I'm going to have to send you out there."
I guess? "We don't have time to look for him." She began walking as she spoke, heading for the stairs, adrenaline building. "Just tell me where they found her. I'm on my way."
"Wait." J.T. reached for the cell phone on his belt. "Let me try Henderson one more time."
Corina whirled to confront him, seeing it all there in his face: the suspicion, the distrust, the damned, rotten doubt. It was the way all the old-timers looked at her since the promotion, as if she were after their jobs.
"Your call, J.T. You want me to cover this, or you want to stand here talking about it while the TV stations grab the story?"
Moisture glistened on his forehead. He glanced at his watch, then at her, a man without choices, she thought, an editor who knew that, live or die, the only real enemy was time. "Okay," he said. "Get going."
Even as she rushed for the door, she silently cursed him—he, who should know better than anyone—for how she felt trying to prove herself in this world, that regardless of what anyone said or pretended, was still run by white males.
Sunday, June 3, 3:20 p.m.
The smell hit her first. Even across the field, it carried like the stench of the stockyards, only more cloying. Standing outside her car, sun hammering down, Corina fought the reflex to gag. She'd been so intent on getting a decent story and proving herself to Henderson and the rest of the staff that she hadn't stopped to think about how she'd react to the grim reality of murder. And now here it was, in a decomposed heap, just across the yellow tape a few hundred feet ahead.
A company station wagon pulled up beside her car, and Wally Lorenzo, the photographer, stepped out. He nodded to her on his way to unload his equipment, an old guy with a permanent frown that seemed to deepen when he looked at her. Talented photographer, though, in spite of his dandruff-flaked thick glasses that didn't stop him from seeing the story behind a shot. The editors always said you didn't have to crop Lorenzo's photos; he cropped them himself when he took them.
"How'd they get you out here?" she asked.
"Changed my hours a few weeks back. Needed one more person on weekends." He ran his free hand through salt-and-pepper hair that was more salt than pepper these days.
"I'm sorry," she said, then wondered if that were the right response.
"Doesn't matter. A job's a job. Better get to work." He trudged ahead in the direction of the taped-off area, humming softly.
That smell. God, he must be faking his nonchalance. This couldn't be something one learned to tolerate. How many of these scenes had he photographed? How many bodies that used to be human, mutilated and decaying in any number of unsavory locations?
Even the officers beyond the yellow tape wore masks. A group of them scribbled notes and clicked photos of something at the bottom of a dried-out canal. Corina watched them, not sure whether or not she was relieved she couldn't see the body, as she followed in Wally's path through the vacant field.
Who the hell was she trying to kid? She was a business reporter. The closest she'd been to death was fleeting glances at the waxy replicas of her grandparents in the relative safety of a funeral home. She hadn't asked for this promotion, but she had to prove herself, especially with old-timers like J.T., Wally and Henderson, her own supervisor, waiting for her to fail.
She would prove herself, too. She just had to learn the ropes, and the sandy-haired officer guarding the site where Tina's body was being unearthed was as good a place as any to start.
He looked up from his clipboard when Corina approached. His unlined face set his age at thirty, thirty-five maybe. His experienced eyes of appraisal told a different story.
"Hot enough for you?"
It was the usual greeting of two strangers meeting in the middle of a San Joaquin Valley summer, even two strangers meeting over murder.
"I hear tomorrow will be worse," she said.
"We can count on more rolling blackouts, that's for sure." He did not appear bothered by either the weather or the nature of his job. He had the demeanor of a mortician—a smile, a friendly attempt at empathy—then once the pleasantries were exchanged, a voracious return to business. "I'll need to get your name."
"Corina Casares Vasquez," she replied, in a precise voice that just barely hid her distaste of the activity near the freshly dug earth a few hundred feet from where they stood. ""Valley Voice newspaper."
"That's a mouthful." He flashed her a perfunctory smile, then returned to his clipboard and the job at hand. "Corina," he began. "You spell that with a C or a K?"
"C." She walked him through the rest of the drill, explaining that, yes, both names were her last name, no hyphen, thank you very much.
"New to the Voice, are you?"
"Just to this beat."
He glanced at the clipped-on ID that jutted out from her vest. His eyes darted back and forth as he compared the image there to the real thing.
"I guess it's you, all right." He studied her feature by feature, from straight hair to her jeans and vest, both of which suddenly felt too tight.
"Our security supervisor takes new photos once a year," she explained. The solemn, swollen face on the laminated strip of plastic reminded her of how, for weeks after Wes left her, she'd cried every day—to work, from work, sometimes sitting at her desk, staring at her computer while trying to squeeze back tears. She thought she'd hidden it, but looking at her ID, she realized how obvious her pain had been, and how far she'd come. She looked away, vowing to ask Verna to take a new photo at once. "What can you tell me about what happened here?"
"There's not a whole lot to tell. Two kids making out in the vineyard spotted the victim's shoe sticking up from the dirt in the canal. They investigated and discovered the remains."
Corina shuddered silently. "Man's shoe or woman's shoe?"
He swallowed noisily, as if she'd glanced up and caught him chewing gum. "You know I can't talk about that. You guys been hounding me around the damned clock, and we haven't even taken the body to the morgue yet."
To cops, all reporters were guys. She considered pointing out the fact but thought better of challenging him. Forcing the image of the skeletal foot from her mind, she cut to the chase. "We heard it was the former mayor."
"Lots of former mayors in Pleasant View."
"Last I checked, Tina Kellogg was the only one missing for three months. We heard belongings of hers were found at the scene."
"I know what you heard," he said. "That's what happens when officers talk off the record. There's no such thing. You guys don't respect it."
"We do respect it. It's your guys who run their mouths and then try to change the rules on us." His jaw stiffened, and she wished she'd kept quiet.
"I can't tell you anything else right now," he said. "You want any more information, you check with the coroner. Better get out of the sun, too. You ask me, you're not cut out for this beat."
The foul air closed in, threatening to prove him right. "I'll get used to it."
Something akin to sympathy crept into his pale eyes. "Takes a while."
"I guess so. Thanks for your help."
"Sorry I couldn't give you more information. You know how it is."
"I understand, but it would help a lot if you could just tell me why they're withholding her name. Is it because they have to notify family members?"
He nodded. "Part of it. But in the case of a public figure, we have to take more precautions, even when we're sure."
"I didn't mean to hound you," she said, as if the interrogation were over and she were leaving. "It's just that our source told us there'd been an absolute ID."
"It's not absolute until the coroner does it," he said, as if lecturing a criminology class. "We still have to go through the motions, even in a case like this where we find ID on the victim."
She jumped on it. "But if you have personal items of hers, a purse, say, a driver's license—""
"Takes more than that."
"So," she said, as if playing a game of speculation, "who do you think killed her?"
He shrugged. "Pissed-off boyfriend? Who knows? I hear she had a few."
She thanked him again and left. An ornate For Sale sign stood next to the entrance to the main road. The poor farmer who owned this vineyard wouldn't be selling it any time soon. On the road, she passed a Channel 5 van driving in. It didn't matter. She'd learned what she was sent here to find out. She could go back to the paper and tell J.T. his source had been confirmed. The body in the field was their missing former mayor's. But first she needed a shower. And she needed to shampoo the smell of death from her hair.
