“No, wait!” I said.
But she had already clicked off.
I raced downstairs and managed to catch Courtnee as she was buttoning her coat.
“Wait, wait, wait. Where are you going? It’s only eight-fifteen. There’s no one else here.”
“My mom called. I have to go. Her stylist had a cancellation. He can do her balayage if she gets there right away. He needs to see mine, because she wants the same color.”
“No, Courtnee. You can’t go. Miguel is at a Chamber meeting. Troy has a dentist appointment, and my mother is helping Father Lindstrom at St. Stephen’s. There’s no one here. You can’t leave the office empty this morning. You have to stay.”
“Beh!” The sound she emitted conveyed both frustration at my unfairness and amazement at my stupidity.
“That’s why I called you,” she said slowly, as though to make sure I could follow along. “You can stay here, while I go. The office is covered then. See? I’ll only be gone a half hour or so.”
Courtnee doesn’t have enough brains to be an arch enemy, but she has enough self-entitlement to be an arch irritant. She’d been fired by the former publisher, but returned, against my better judgment, after Miller and I bought the paper. Miguel had persuaded me. He has a soft spot for her. I do, too, apparently, but it’s in my head not my heart.
“Do we really need this talk again, Courtnee? Your work hours are eight to five. You cannot take off on a whim. And you most especially cannot leave when you’re the only one in the office, just to watch your mother get her hair done. Furthermore, I am not your personal backup. I’m your boss. Are we clear?”
She pouted for a second and blinked her large blue eyes rapidly to hold back tears of frustration at my meanness, but with a flip of her long blonde hair she began walking back to her desk.
“Fine. If that’s how you want to be,” she said as she unbuttoned her coat.
“It’s exactly how I want to be, Courtnee.”
As I left, the phone on her desk rang. I heard her pick it up and I felt relieved that the crisis had been averted for another day. I’d fire her if I had to, but my mother, who is our underpaid office manager, assures me she is working on her version of Kaizen with Courtnee. Kaizen being the Japanese practice of making small changes that lead to major improvements. To date, any changes have been so small as to be imperceptible.
However, even though there’s no doubt there are better receptionists than Courtnee, there aren’t many willing to work for as little as we can afford to pay. I was inclined to stick, as my mother advised, with the devil we knew for the present.
Before I went back up to my place, I stopped in the newsroom to grab a Diet Coke from the machine—my own supply had run out. While there, I used Miguel’s computer to do a quick check of the general email account. Lots of people still call or stop in the office to drop off anniversary pictures, press releases, and special event information, but an even larger number now go the email route.
We use a catchall newsroom address that Maggie monitors. But Miguel, Troy, and I have the password, too, to make sure someone can always check it. That way we don’t miss anything time-sensitive. As I scrolled through the routine stuff, I saw an email from the sheriff’s office. A press release. It had come in the night before. When I finished reading, I texted Miguel immediately.
8
“Chica, why did you text me, ‘The shoes! The shoes! Get to the paper now!?’ ”
Miguel had come flying into the newsroom less than ten minutes after I had texted him.
“Because, Miguel, this!” I said, getting off his chair and directing him to the press release open on his monitor.
He scanned it quickly.
“The dead woman they found, she was murdered,” he said, skimming through the paragraphs, reading some key points out loud. “Strangled … no wallet, no identification with the body … no phone … they can’t find next of kin … no one reported her missing … she was killed four to seven days before her body was found … the sheriff’s office wants help making the identification.”
“Yes, yes, but you’re skipping over the really important part. Here, let me,” I said, turning the screen around. I read aloud the paragraph I wanted him to focus on.
“The victim is a female in her late teens to early twenties. Height, five feet, two inches, weight one hundred ten pounds, long blonde hair, blue eyes. She has a small tattoo of a fairy on her left shoulder. When discovered, she was wearing a short, red, sequined, halter-top cocktail dress, and no shoes.”
The emphasis on the last two words was mine.
Our eyes met.
“The shoes, the red sparkly ones from the farmer’s cornfield. You think they’re hers?” he asked.
“I do. First of all, they’re just the kind of shoes to go with that sort of outfit—glittery red high heels. Second, when you found them, they were dusty, but not stained or damp, like they would’ve been if they’d been lying out there for weeks. Those shoes had to have been left in the field after the ground finally dried up. That didn’t happen until a week or so ago. That fits the time-of-death estimate. Those shoes belong to our murder victim. Trust me.”
“But the body, they found it in the woods off Holmby Road. The red shoes, they were fifteen miles away on the other side of the county.”
“I know, but seriously? How many women do you think there were roaming the countryside losing their fancy shoes last week? This woman, our woman, she might have been killed where you found the shoes, and then her body was taken away. Or, she could have been running from someone who caught her, lost her shoes, and the killer drove her elsewhere to murder her.”
“Okay, but why was she even way out in the country, all dressed up for a party? How did she end up in a cornfield?”
“I don’t know. But I think it’s a question we should ask your farmer friend, Dwight Pearson.”
“We? But the body, it’s Troy’s story. He caught the lead.”
“Yes, he did. Barely. GO News had it first. And Troy doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. He should be all over this. He—and the paper—shouldn’t be waiting to be spoon-fed by Lamey with only what he wants us to know. I’ll bet Andrea Novak hasn’t been waiting. Oh, hell!”
“What?”
I didn’t answer as I scanned the home page of the GO News site, which I’d pulled up as I talked. The headline Police Seek Identity of Murdered Woman was followed by a story under Andrea Novak’s byline. It included quotes from Lamey, and additional details from the medical examiner that weren’t in the press release.
“Listen, Miguel, it says the soles of her feet were lacerated and bruised ‘consistent with running over rough or rocky terrain.’ That fits. The cornfield is full of rocks and stones. Beyond that is the woods. The ground there would be full of sticks and poky branches and pinecones just waiting to tear bare feet to pieces.
“Our Cinderella was there, all right, but she didn’t lose her shoes running away from the prince at the end of the ball. She lost them running away from her killer at the end of the line—for her. Maybe Farmer Pearson had something to do with that. Maybe that’s why he said he was ‘too busy’ to have you take his picture in the cornfield. He didn’t want to return to the scene of the crime.”