Edited for Death Read Free Page B

talked to him for better than 50 years.”
    “OK, this is giving some meat to Calvert. You know, this may even give some meat to the town. A haunted hotel? We can probably get a couple of Sunday packages from this.”
    Clarice nods. She isn’t gung-ho for the project but she’s a pro. She’ll follow my lead until it leads her to a wall or she gets bored with too little drama.
    She turns back to her desk, ready to start writing from her notes. I jot notes about follow-up stories—a package on the Calvert family, a package on Marshalltown and its mining history, a couple of stories on what keeps the town alive now—and stick them in a tickler file.
    I’m deep in reading the daily stories when Clarice looms in my door waving a fax.
    “Oh my God, this is from the Sheriff up there, Jim Dodson,” she hisses.
    “So now you’re calling him Jim?”
    “Whatever. They found a body.”
    “And?”
    “Amy, they found a body this morning in the hotel. A guy. It was at the end of the big bar. They’ve identified him as a local who’s had problems. Maybe I should go back up there....”

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Clarice has the bit of a possible murder in her teeth and is running with it.
    I can see the excitement of the chase in her eyes and I’m missing that adrenaline I used to feel when there was breaking news about a found body.
    “Hey, hey, hey, wait a minute,” I cut in. “What’s the deal? How did he die? When did he die? Who found him? I won’t authorize any travel or overtime for you to drop stuff here and run off because they found a body. Call the Sheriff’s office; get as much detail as you can. Write it as a brief.”
    Clarice’s eyes open wide and she starts making fish faces.
    Before she actually gets words strung together I say, “Think about this for a second. Does the fax say anything about a cause of death? He could have had a stroke or heart attack. He may have been drunk and hit his head. Just make the phone calls and ask the questions.
    “But for tonight, it’s a brief on the inside local page.”
    It’s hard to dump on Clarice’s energy, but now I need to balance a lot of balls in order to get out the paper and help keep it solvent. The story stays as a brief even after the dead guy, Joe Baldwin, is identified and his death ruled a homicide. He’d been hit several times with the proverbial blunt object and was dead for about six hours when a kitchen worker came in to get a bottle of wine.
    Even though he’d been murdered, he was a known drunk and panhandler. He’d been allowed to occasionally sleep in the hotel lobby, coming in late and leaving early so guests didn’t run into him. It wasn’t a spectacular murder. The victim wasn’t well-known. It’s unfortunate that in today’s news climate the random killing of a homeless guy doesn’t make much news.
    But the next one does.
    Janice Boxer’s body is found in her car. She’d been missing for three days according to the San Juan Sheriff’s Department.
    This really hits home because Janice was the Marshalltown real estate agent I knew. We met when I thought I might sell my Monroe house and buy a mountain cabin. I threw the idea out with the first snowfall.
    Clarice spends an hour or so on the phone piecing together the story. Boxer made an appointment to show a cabin to a buyer from the Bay Area. She left her office in the early afternoon to drive to it and that was the last anyone knew. The next morning it became apparent something was wrong. The last message on the office voice mail was Janice’s client, irate as hell for being stood up.
    Co-workers called her house and cell phone. One of them drove to the cabin. It was locked, no sign of Janice. She checked Boxer’s house in town. No one. Her next call was to the San Juan Sheriff’s office. Janice Boxer was well known in the small foothill community and her usual movements were traceable.
    Dodson said he checked her house, the post office, the garage where she had her