Page 29 of Head Room

I hit speed dial on my phone.

“Jennifer?”I heard birds in the background.“Where are you?”

She’d been a news aide at KWMT, though that title failed to convey the computer skills that made her so important to the station and essential to our ad hoc investigations.

Now, she was in a special program at Northwestern.Initially, she’d said for a year, but I had the sense it was stretching.

Not because she was taking longer to reach progress markers, but because she and her mentors kept stretching what she would do.

“Walking across campus.Have a presentation in twenty minutes.What’s up?”

I explained about the manuscript without getting deeply into how the colonel’s request and Sergeant Frank Jardos’ probable fate led to my having it.I’d save that for after her presentation.“Think you might be able to do anything with it, so the pages with streaks are readable and to keep from destroying the pages?”

“Sure.Give it to Mike and he’ll bring it to me, far safer than shipping.You know he’s making a day trip to Sherman tomorrow?”I confirmed I did.Like Northwestern’s main campus, Mike’s apartment was in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, so the handoff should be easy.“But just in case, you need to make a copy first.”

“In case what?”I asked morbidly.

“He loses it, the plane crashes, someone steals it from him—”

“Okay, okay.”She’d sated my taste for morbid.

“I’ll make a copy here before I start on it, but you need to have one there to guard against mishaps in transit.”

Like pirates stealing smelly half-burnt first manuscripts by an unknown writer.She hadn’t included that in her list of possible catastrophes.

That wasn’t the objection I raised to her, though.

“This paper wouldn’t make it through the copier.”

She clicked her tongue.“Not the one at KWMT — unless Mike’s gotten a new one?”

“Nope.”

“Then absolutely not.That monster could chew up a block of granite.Take a photo of each page.Send me the files so I can do preliminary assessment.”

Tedious, thy name is clicking a photo page by page of — I checked the number in the last page’s upper right corner — eighty-one.

“Gotta go,” Jennifer informed me cheerily.

Me, too.I entered the KWMT newsroom in search of a news aide to take careful photos of all the pages.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Dale, the newsaide on duty, greeted me as I entered the KWMT-TV newsroom.

Don’t envision what you see on TV for network news or big-city affiliates.Think more of an aging strip mall building divorced from any other structures and plunked down in a dust and tumbleweed landscape.Inside wasn’t much better.

Since buying the station late last year, Mike wisely focused on improving personnel and newsgathering equipment, rather than sprucing up the dingy bullpen.

Although he had turned what had been the relatively spacious office of our now-former anchor into a breakroom — a popular move.

I carried the bag with me to Audrey’s assignment editor desk, which also doubled as the news director’s desk for now, to let her know I was back and she said, “That stinks.”

She meant the bag, not that I was back.

Pretty sure.

Dale followed me to my desk.