As the Wicked Watch(6)
“Hi . . . yes . . . we’re about to do a live shot. Do you mind . . . excuse me, do you mind moving back over this way?” Scott asked the gatherers.
Getting out of the van, I realized we were parked a few steps from a Masey missing poster tacked to a tree. For the first time, I looked beyond her striking features, noticing her perfect posture. The poise anyone who had ever taken a school picture understood. It was unnatural and regal at the same time. The photographer hired by the school accepted nothing less than pinpoint precision. Chin up, shoulders back. Smile.
Scott had managed to escape the enquiring minds. Without thinking, I said, “She borrowed that top.”
“How do you know that?” Scott asked.
“Her mother told me,” I said, my eyes still glued to Masey’s smile.
What a beautiful child.
“Really? When did she tell you that?” he asked.
“It’s cathartic, I think,” I said, avoiding Scott’s question. “You know, for her to describe mundane details like that to someone about her daughter. Anything to keep from going totally nuts.”
“So, you’ve spent some time with her?” Scott asked, rephrasing the question.
I wasn’t sure if Scott was probing because he was concerned or if he was just being nosy.
In either case, his questions began to feel like an interrogation. I’m to blame for my paranoia, for letting a potential victim’s relative become a tad too familiar with the lady from the news. How else was I supposed to cover this story if not intimately? With genuine concern?
“Oh, a couple times,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders.
It had been four, in fact, most recently two days ago. The first time was the day after Pamela reported Masey missing. She left a voice-mail message on the station’s tips hotline the morning after her daughter failed to come home. Everybody at the station knows that if it involves missing children, “send them to Jordan.”
My last two years of undergrad at Columbia College in Missouri, I chose a minor in forensic science. Later in graduate school, I wrote my thesis on “Covering Violent Crime: What the Media Misses” to earn my master’s. Though I’m not a native of Chicago, my prior experience on the crime beat in Texas, combined with my forensic education, gave me the street cred to design my own beat.
“I know my baby wouldn’t stay out overnight. I checked every place she could possibly be, and no one has seen her,” Pamela explained in a breathless voice on the tips hotline. “Something’s wrong, and the police won’t help me.”
I realized police were simply following protocol, not to take a missing person’s report until the individual had been unaccounted for for a full forty-eight hours. I called Pam, who told me the police suspected Masey had run off.
“That’s in most cases, they said,” Pam said. “The child has run away and usually comes home or turns up at a relative’s house in a few days. Masey wouldn’t do that. No way!”
Pamela declared emphatically: “Jordan, if the police think I’m not gonna be out here looking for my child, they’re crazy as hell!”
She and I met at a coffee shop not far from the television station by the train tracks on Lake Street. It would become our spot. She shared with me Masey’s excitement over Picture Day and told me that her daughter chose a blouse from her closet. “She’s always in my stuff,” Pam said.
Pamela pulled a wallet size of the image from her billfold. The blouse was a very feminine-looking dark blue and white gingham plaid, with a ruffle down the middle. Masey’s thick, shoulder-length hair spilled over the collar, slightly open at the neck, which revealed a heart-shaped pendant embossed with a rose that fit tightly across her neck. Her bang made a wide left turn like a canopy swooping across her perfectly arched eyebrows. Her hands weren’t visible in the image, but her nails that day were painted a bright pink, aqua green, and periwinkle blue, alternating fingers, Pam told me.
“She loves to make herself up,” said Pam, sitting across from me in the booth during our second meeting at the coffee shop. I hated making her come all the way downtown and felt even worse that she’d ordered and paid for my coffee before I arrived.
“I remembered how you like it,” she said. “Heavy on the cream.”
“Pam, you mustn’t do that,” I admonished her, then caught myself, realizing Pam had no clue about the journalism ethics that disallowed me from accepting anything more than a breath mint or a stick of gum from a source, an ironclad but necessary rule to defend against any accusations of impropriety or compromised objectivity. What Pam and I had been doing could be viewed as somewhat unconventional by some journalists’ standards. Unlike print reporters, broadcast journalists rarely spend a significant amount of time with their interview subjects without a camera present, which is why Scott wanted to know why he hadn’t been invited, I suspect.
Scott is my guy but I don’t tell him everything. Obviously, he was feeling a bit left out. After all, we had been together for hours, and this was the first he was hearing of my growing relationship with Pamela. Unlike the Buford girls, who were White, missing Black children don’t typically receive the same amount of ink and airtime that missing White kids do. I’m convinced that one of the reasons Pam had shared so many mundane details with me about Masey is to make me care about her daughter. She didn’t want me to lose interest in the story. I must admit, that was brilliant on her part.