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Authors: Neely Tucker
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they, they’re the people least interested in the murder story that, you know, is horrifying the rest of the nation’s capital.”
Melissa, beaming, smiling, leaning back on the desk, holding up her hands. “Perfect! That’s just golden. Never mind a lead for the five o’clock, but go ahead and write in a public basket so we can peek in, okay? Helps the headline guys. Move a final by seven?”
Sully nodded, sure sure, yeah.
Melissa popped her hands together and got off the desk, starting to back away, pep talk done. “That bit about the people there being the least interested in the murder that’s fascinating the rest of the city? Perfect. But you can make it the rest of the country. Slow weekend. This thing is all over the networks, the cable channels. The Beeb just did eight minutes.”
She nodded, as if that were information he really needed right now, turned and walked away, everything but a spring in her step. He put his pen in his mouth and typed in a slug for the story—PRINCETONPLACE—and not twenty seconds later felt the bulbs of sweat start pushing through the pores in the small of his back, under his arms, on his palms. Why couldn’t you drink in the newsroom anymore? What was wrong with that?
• • •
Someone dumped the body of Sarah Emily Reese into a garbage dumpster less than 200 feet from the intersection of Georgia Avenue Northwest and Princeton Place NW in this scruffy corner of the District on Friday evening, a crime that has fascinated, if not horrified, the nation. But there were no memorials of teddy bears, flowers and hand-scrawled posters at the scene yesterday, the typical signs of neighborhood mourning in this part of the city.
Instead, neighbors and residents here may be the people in America least interested in the brutal slaying of the child of a prominent D.C. jurist in their midst. Neighborhood bars kept their televisions tuned to sports stations yesterday, not the blanket coverage of the killing carried by cable news channels. Pedestrians sidestepped the yellow police tape around Doyle’s Market and ducked into the Hunger Stopper restaurant for breakfasts of waffles and fried chicken. Speculation wasn’t on the menu. The Show Bar, a strip club two blocks from the murder scene, did a brisk afternoon trade in the regular bump and grind . . .
Sully had this in the system and heard Melissa hoot from across the room. “Sullivan
Carter
! ‘Speculation was not on the menu.’ You’re killing me here!”
“Un-hunh,” he called back, without looking up.
The dwindling clock, the fact that half a dozen editors were looking at his copy as he was writing, that the copy desk was already composing a headline, that any mistake in spelling or a mistyped digit in an address or a failure of memory about facts would result in a credibility-dinging correction and sour faces from the brass . . .
He stopped to look up a few clips of old crime stories and did a database search for Lana and Noel. That led to a few perfunctory grafs of background about the Honorable Judge Reese and the probability of his future with the Supreme Court. Then onto Regina Blocker’s dance studio, the neighborhood demographics, what the traffic was like in that segment of Georgia on a Friday night. The keyboard strokes came in bursts:
The Park View neighborhood has fast-food chicken places and two liquor stores and a couple of corner stores and a Chinese carryout and a used-car lot. The people who live on Princeton Place and adjacent streets tend to be bus drivers and nurses and Metro mechanics and check-out clerks and employees in the city’s parks and recreation department and secretaries in other city agencies. Some people still own. Most rent. Violence, drug deals and prostitution are not unusual.
Lana Escobar, 25, was found dead in outfield grass at the Park View Recreation Center’s baseball field last July 14. She had been strangled. Her slaying remains unsolved, but police say
Melissa, beaming, smiling, leaning back on the desk, holding up her hands. “Perfect! That’s just golden. Never mind a lead for the five o’clock, but go ahead and write in a public basket so we can peek in, okay? Helps the headline guys. Move a final by seven?”
Sully nodded, sure sure, yeah.
Melissa popped her hands together and got off the desk, starting to back away, pep talk done. “That bit about the people there being the least interested in the murder that’s fascinating the rest of the city? Perfect. But you can make it the rest of the country. Slow weekend. This thing is all over the networks, the cable channels. The Beeb just did eight minutes.”
She nodded, as if that were information he really needed right now, turned and walked away, everything but a spring in her step. He put his pen in his mouth and typed in a slug for the story—PRINCETONPLACE—and not twenty seconds later felt the bulbs of sweat start pushing through the pores in the small of his back, under his arms, on his palms. Why couldn’t you drink in the newsroom anymore? What was wrong with that?
• • •
Someone dumped the body of Sarah Emily Reese into a garbage dumpster less than 200 feet from the intersection of Georgia Avenue Northwest and Princeton Place NW in this scruffy corner of the District on Friday evening, a crime that has fascinated, if not horrified, the nation. But there were no memorials of teddy bears, flowers and hand-scrawled posters at the scene yesterday, the typical signs of neighborhood mourning in this part of the city.
Instead, neighbors and residents here may be the people in America least interested in the brutal slaying of the child of a prominent D.C. jurist in their midst. Neighborhood bars kept their televisions tuned to sports stations yesterday, not the blanket coverage of the killing carried by cable news channels. Pedestrians sidestepped the yellow police tape around Doyle’s Market and ducked into the Hunger Stopper restaurant for breakfasts of waffles and fried chicken. Speculation wasn’t on the menu. The Show Bar, a strip club two blocks from the murder scene, did a brisk afternoon trade in the regular bump and grind . . .
Sully had this in the system and heard Melissa hoot from across the room. “Sullivan
Carter
! ‘Speculation was not on the menu.’ You’re killing me here!”
“Un-hunh,” he called back, without looking up.
The dwindling clock, the fact that half a dozen editors were looking at his copy as he was writing, that the copy desk was already composing a headline, that any mistake in spelling or a mistyped digit in an address or a failure of memory about facts would result in a credibility-dinging correction and sour faces from the brass . . .
He stopped to look up a few clips of old crime stories and did a database search for Lana and Noel. That led to a few perfunctory grafs of background about the Honorable Judge Reese and the probability of his future with the Supreme Court. Then onto Regina Blocker’s dance studio, the neighborhood demographics, what the traffic was like in that segment of Georgia on a Friday night. The keyboard strokes came in bursts:
The Park View neighborhood has fast-food chicken places and two liquor stores and a couple of corner stores and a Chinese carryout and a used-car lot. The people who live on Princeton Place and adjacent streets tend to be bus drivers and nurses and Metro mechanics and check-out clerks and employees in the city’s parks and recreation department and secretaries in other city agencies. Some people still own. Most rent. Violence, drug deals and prostitution are not unusual.
Lana Escobar, 25, was found dead in outfield grass at the Park View Recreation Center’s baseball field last July 14. She had been strangled. Her slaying remains unsolved, but police say
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