Read Online Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson - Free Book Online

police could not release the identity of a person killed as a result of criminal activity or a car accident or any similar event to the media until the family (or some family surrogate such as a guardian and so forth) was officially told of the death. That was to prevent somebody from reading in the paper that one of their immediate family members was dead. And even if a media outlet discovered or knew the name of the victim, it was also unethical and illegal for them to print or mention the name until they got official ID confirmation from the police.
    So, based on the location of the victim’s body, her race, and the way she was dressed, I assumed that she was a street prostitute and it would take at least a couple of days until I received any ID information so that I could investigate her life. The question was then what to do with my time until such information was made public.
    I could have sat back and taken it easy for a day or so, but there was something about a busy newsroom that discouraged this kind of behavior. I could have asked for another assignment, a one-off quickie for the next issue, and I would have received one. But if the identity of the girl in the field came through much sooner than expected, I would have to drop that story into the hands of another busy reporter to focus on my more important assignment.
    I decided to forgo another assignment, but in order to keep myself somewhat busy I ran a morgue check using the paper’s Infomart archive system. Infomart allowed any reporter to read any story in the paper’s morgue, the archive of past issues. It worked like any search engine. All you had to do was type a name, a phrase, whatever, and it would give you a listing.
    Like with most search engines, you could get a lot of irrelevant responses if you weren’t specific enough or if you typed in a popular name, like Wayne Gretzky. It also went back only as far as 1985, but it was way better than searching through back issues yourself, or asking some overworked and overprotective librarian to do the search for you.
    Of course, most of the librarians had been laid off in a cost-cutting measure a couple of years ago, and though one of the “concessions” the paper made in order to end the strike was to look into the possibility of hiring back a librarian or two, no move had been made in that direction. And probably never would.
    I typed in “dead body in field,” making sure to use the quotation marks because I didn’t want to include all stories with the words dead, body, and field . Enough people had died in this city over the past twenty years, and since two of the major economic engines in and around Edmonton were agriculture and petroleum products, I shuddered to think how many times the word field was used, not just in a single issue, but in the past couple of decades.
    Even so, I got a large number of hits, sixty-seven of them, to be exact. Apparently there were a lot of dead bodies found in the fields around the city in the past. But in reality most of them weren’t as serious as expected. The biggest listing had nothing to do with dead bodies but with a local play from a decade ago called Over My Dead Body produced by a group called Out of Left Field Players.
    The rest were all true dead bodies although most turned out to be suicides—nowadays most newspapers don’t run stories on suicides unless it was someone famous or an extremely public suicide—or stories about farmers or oilfield workers being killed in industrial accidents.
    In fact, there were only six stories about female bodies being found in a field, and when I delved deeper into them, looking for follow-up articles relating the identity of the person or the circumstances of the death, only three were similar to the story I was working on. So only four such deaths in Edmonton for the past twenty years wasn’t that big a deal. If you looked at any other Canadian city, you’d probably find the same number.
    I was about to get