Not Idle Hands

When I shook his beefy palm, I could feel the hard callouses, like nobs on a bicycle tire.  After a vice grip shake, he pulled back his gritty fist.  That, and his other hand are both darkened after years of being splashed, and submerged in oil, lubricants, and gasoline.  Those thick stubby fingers, are now permanently tattooed with his past projects.  The solvents have seeped deep into the cuts, and heavily lined mitts.  I Imagine, Sam, preparing for a wedding or a funeral scrubbing hose hands with a brush, only to pull back two deeply sanitized appendages, highlighted with dark lines, as if a mapmaker had sketched a series of dirt roads onto a weathered, peach colored map.

 Sam Pittman works, and works hard for a blasting and vacuum company, and everything about him tells you that is true.  His red, hooded sweatshirt is sprinkled with a sandy material, perhaps wood shavings.  He looks as if he's been coated with a tasty cinnamon dusting.

He's talking to me today because his son Nathan, who had just been sentenced to 22 days in juvenile detention, was left, over night, for 16 hours in a holding cell at the Carbon County Courthouse.  Nathan didn't have any food, water, or access to a bathroom.

Nathan, in a typical teenager costume, tells his story of inconvenience with a sly smirk on his face.  "So," I ask him, "what did you do to get in trouble?"  His smirk turns into a frown, as if he'd just been told to put away his book, and get ready for a pop quiz.  Nathan was originally charged with disorderly conduct, and destruction of property, but that isn't why he was sentenced to those 22 days.  Apparently his parents caught him smoking Spice, a synthetic form of marijuana, and guzzling cough syrup.  Sam, essentially turned his son in, knowing that it would mean the 17 year old would be locked up for some amount of time, and that Sam himself, would likely have to put in some extra hours, to come up with the money to pay his son's fines or restitution.

Sam is articulate, as he digs his fingers deep into his tired knuckles and asks, "what if the building had burned down, or my son had a medical emergency?"

After Nathan tells me his tale, he adds that there is a silver lining.  The courts have told him he doesn't have to serve the 22 days in DT because of the holding cell snafu.  Nathan, was talking about a concert he was hoping to go to, now that he doesn't have to go to jail.  Sam was talking about how he needed to go, because he had to return to work.

As I shook Sam's hand once again, and said goodbye, I remember being envious of those paws.  My guess is, Sam can replace the transmission on his truck, put up dry wall, and construct a wooden fence  in an afternoon.  I sadly can do none of those things.  I mean I've assembled a TV stand from IKEA, but that doesn't exactly qualify as manual labor.   I am, I suppose, my father's son.  Bill Jones was not the "handy," type.  His thought was, "if you can pay someone to do it, then pay someone."

I thought about Sam, this morning when my wife Amanda suggested we take a wood working class, to which I enthusiastically agreed.  I can imagine the two of us, surrounded by other Yuppies, drinking espresso, and Oolong tea, fumbling with a lathe, or trying clumsily to push a wood saw through a 2X4, attempting  to learn the kind of skills in an afternoon, that guys like Sam have been acquiring their whole lives.

Tell Me A Story

Don is a sound engineer in the movies, he worked in Hollywood for 3 decades before coming back to Utah 2 years ago.   Russ use to run Salt Lake City International Airport.  As the seasons change, he and his partner Steven hang beautifully crafted wooden ornaments from the light posts on his street to signify the changing of the seasons and the holidays.  Jack-o-lanterns in November, Snow flakes in December. His neighbors love it.  Russ gets irked when Steven leaves him out of the loop.  "I didn't know anything about that," he says annoyed, as I explain the story we are working on, and the fact that Steven, who is on the community council, may have heard about it, "he never tells me anything," Russ frowns with subtle consternation.

Maggie is the neighborhood spy,  Steven only moved in 2 weeks ago, and  Sarah's pipes broke after she'd only lived in her home for a couple of months.  These are just a few of the gentle story lines we uncovered accidentally this day.

On Monday, photographer Patrick Fitzgibbon and I spent 2 hours bobbing up and down several SugarHouse blocks, in search of a ghost.  Literally.  Along the way, we casually tucked our heads into the ongoing story lines of more than a dozen people, getting to know them, if only for a minute or two.

Salt Lake City Police have been circulating a picture captured from an in-home surveillance camera.  It is of a man burglarizing a SugarHouse home, but it isn't so much what the crook stole, but how he looked when he did the crime.  The night vision lens on the security camera captured a bizarre image of the crook.  He is awash in a white ghostly sheen.  His face appears to be skeletal, and the shadows and light, give the illusion that he might be floating.  The otherworldly apparition is getting quite a bit of attention, so I went looking for the home in which the picture was captured.  The bad news is, police won't release the name of the person who was burglarized, and officers gave us a VERY general address of about 2600 South 1500 East.  "It's around there," Police said.

So...We knock, and we knock, and we knock.   Along the way we gathering tidbits of information about people's homes, "Well," says one friendly woman, rubbing her chin, and staring into her eyebrows for answers, "this neighbor used to have a security system, but they just sold the house two weeks ago." She says casually answering my question about neighbors with cameras.

We also glean tiny story lines about the people who live here.  "I couldn't believe it," says Russ during a causal exchange with me, "she actually wanted to know every paint color we used on our house," he says of a neighbor across the street, "she was going to match her home to ours exactly!"  

As we bounce from house to house, we pick up clues that get us closer to the poltergeist.  "I think it was on Kensington," says one man.  "I thought I heard it was a brick house," says another.

"You know," says Patrick, after a woman tells us she doesn't have any cameras in her home, "it's a good thing these people recognize you from TV, because it kind of looks like you are casing the neighborhood."

Patrick is right.  During our stroll down 1500 South, I have asked the following questions:

1) Who has a security system on this street?
2) Which person is the most likely to have information on other neighbors?
3) Who has been burglarized recently?

All typical questions a seasoned burglar might ask when deciding which home to break into, but also the same kinds of questions a reporter might toss out when trying to find the family who captured that haunted image.

Just before 6 PM, Maggie, whom I spoke to a few minutes prior, tracks me down a block away, "I think I know what house you're looking for," she says with excitement.  "It's on Dearborn, I saw something about it on Facebook." she says pointing Southwest, "talk to Connie, she has a rod iron fence and green siding.

"Oh yes, I saw the picture myself," Connie chirps excitedly, "Creepy!" She exclaims, "You're looking for Don Malouf, he lives right there.  He's such a nice man," Connie point across the street, at a stately Tudor home. "You know I was burglarized recently, I think it might be the same suspect," she whispers and shrugs with her index finger still extended.

 Don is happy to talk to us, and tell us about his scary surveillance image.  As Patrick adjusts the lights, and moves the furniture preparing for the interview, Don tells me he worked for Disney for 15 year and won an award for his sound engineering on "The Fox and the Hound."  He laments about friends who have been laid off recently from the iconic studio.  As his wife prepares chicken sauteed in garlic, and a fresh kale salad, he wonders aloud, "How are you supposed to do all that work?" he stares into his palm, with his brow furrowed, "with just a handful of people."

After 2 hours, nearly 2 dozen doors, and conversations with almost 20 people, we finally found the one story for which we were looking today, but along the way, we heard a dozen more, all of them part of the tapestry that tells the tale of this neighborhood, each stitched together, one conversation at a time.  

ON Your Front Porch

"I'm too old for this," I say as I shake my head and attempt to step onto the fraying Astroturf splayed carelessly over a drooping wooden porch.  "Don't be a wimp, just get up there," says my photographer Randy as he stands at a safe distance.  "That's easy for you to say, you aren't entering the Temple of Doom." I dart him a look, as I balance, surrounded by hundreds of empty, brow beer bottles, half-filled pesticide containers, and a bail of insulation, bleached white by the sun, and melted into a brittle pile by the rain.

During an ambitious moment, the former tenants of this drab, sagging trailer home, intended to make this place livable by finally installing some insulation, but as evidenced by the filthy chaos on the collapsing porch, they gave up once again.

I rap my fist on the faux-marble, peeling mercilessly from the cheap plywood it hides underneath, as if the textured linoleum is trying to escape this weathered trailer as much as I want to.  There is no answer, and as I tip-toe over an old construction helmet and an empty utility bucket, I say with exasperation, "I'm done."

I'm in Eureka.  A tough little Utah town, once famous, and financially thriving thanks to the mining of gold and silver at the center of the Tintic Mining Distict.  During it's heyday, Eureka was home to mining barons, a bustling Main Street, and the second ever JC Penney's in the country.

Those days have since passed Eureka by.  In 1920, nearly 4,000 people called the mining town home.  In the 30's and 40's the gold and silver started to dry up, and the mining operations shutdown. By 1957 the last major mine shuttered it's door and in 2000, the EPA found alarming levels of lead throughout the town, and began a massive clean up effort, helping to drive the population down even lower. Now about 800 people remain in Eureka, scratching to make a living.

As we coast down Main Street, passing weathered, shuttered store fronts, I think about the place I was just a day ago.

Just 24 hours earlier I sat silently, adjusting my tie, and earpiece in a studio in downtown Salt Lake City, waiting to be interviewed by Carol Costello of CNN.  This after a story we aired in which Senator Mike Lee said, dispassionately, that he had every intention of taking his sizable paycheck, despite the fact that nearly 800,000 federal employees had been furloughed.

 "I'm working, I'll continue to get paid," he told me dispassionately over the phone.  The next morning all hell breaks lose as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post pick up the story, and Senator Lee's press team finds itself in damage control mode, unfortunately for the senator, their damage control steps only created more damage.  Brian Phillips, Lee's director of communications, tells our managing editor, that the senator had made some "muddy," comments and that he had intended all along, to "donate," his salary to charity for each day of the lockout.  No big deal, he implies, and asks us to update that part of the story which we do.  Here's where they fumble: Phillips then contacts BuzzFeed and tells them that we had gotten the story "wrong," and he had asked us for a correction.

The problem is, we had taped the entire interview, and we released the raw that afternoon, that's when CNN and MSNBC began to make an issue of Lee's back and forth on the pay issue.  I remember watching is shock as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, hammered the senator on the issue, playing long cuts of our interview, and thinking I wonder what I'll be working on tomorrow.

That's when Mistie Carlson enters the picture, I found her name while searching some court documents.  She could be a candidate for worst grandmother of the year.  Police say Carlson, was drunk, and went to her drug dealers house, with her 2 year old granddaughter in tow, after she scored some meth, police say she smoked it with the toddler strapped into the back seat of her car, and for good measure, cops say Carlson also had a handgun in the center console.  It was obtained illegally we are told.  That shabby shack in Eureka, was where her family may have lived according to people who knew her.

Senator Mike Lee, and Mistie Carlson, seem a million miles away from one another in almost every conceivable way, but this week, thanks to some clumsy moves by them, I found myself, figuratively and literally, on both of their messy doorsteps.

Hello, No One's Home

"Hello, this is Jason," the words leave his mouth, bouncing off the majestic marble of the US Capitol walls.  I was caught off guard.  It was him.

"Congressman," I say, expecting to be greeted by a pleasant but automated voice mail system filtering phone call after phone call into a digital cloud to be sorted and lazily logged to by a bored congressional page in a blue and red stripped tie, dreaming of his first senate race.

I had forgotten that Congressman Jason Chaffetz had casually given me his personal cell phone number 2 years ago while wild fires consumed cheat grass and quaking aspens in his congressional district.  "If you have any questions, just call me," he said after he read off each digit.  As I tapped the numbers into my phone, I joked without looking at him, "you just made the biggest mistake of your life."  We laughed, and he turned and marched towards a podium surrounded by reporters in search of a sound bite.

Chaffetz was the third of three legislators from Utah's congressional delegation, I would talk to on the phone today about the shutdown of the federal government.

We wanted to know which lawmakers would decide to forgo, defer or donate their salaries during the lockout of federal employees.  Dozens, of legislators across the country have vowed not to take a paycheck during the messy battle.  None of the lawmakers are required to turn down the check.  In fact the 27th amendment says congressional pay cannot be increased or decreased unitl the next term of office for representatives.  None-the-less, Chaffetz will defer his check until the mess is cleared up.  Rep. Jim Matheson will do the same. 

As Congressman Matheson waited patiently for me to power up a telephone recorder, he attempted to do an equipment survey, "well, it looks like the phone lines work here in Washington," "Well at least something works there," I joked, and he laughed knowingly.

Both men were friendly and enthusiastic while chatting with me on the phone.  That's probably pretty easy when you are telling a reporter of your voter friendly plans to give up a pay check during the shutdown fiasco.  

My conversation with Senator Mike Lee was a bit more thorny.  Lee is in the thick of the shutdown logjam.  He and Senator Ted Cruz are seen as the guys who turned out the lights on the government last night.

I asked the senator if he intended to give up his pay check like the others in the congressional delegations. "I'm working I'll continue to be paid," he confessed curtly, 

"You know, you could almost take one for the team," I said pressing the senator, explaining to him, that giving up a payday might endear him to the 800,000 federal employees with mortgages and car payments, who don't know if those bills will be paid in the weeks to come.  "when lawmakers are in session," the senator recited with a certain level of matter-of-factness,  "When lawmakers are working they are considered essential they aren't considered expendable " 

I will let you dissect that last statement however you like.

It was difficult to get in touch with others in  Utah's Congressional leadership tonight, many of their offices have been shuttered and their employees told to "stay home."   

If this shutdown continues for too long, Utah senators and congressmen, might have to take a page out of Jason's book, and start answering their own phones, among other things.

  

Taps

It seemed like a strange place for an alfalfa field.  Acres and acres of it, for as far as I could see.  The clover was dark green, and dotted carelessly with purple flowers, as tiny bugs scrounged and foraged and bees flew in precise, yet seemingly clumsy loops as they hunted meticulously for sweets to take back to their hive.  Life is active, careless, and humming in this vast expanse.

Across a simple asphalt path, there is another field.  This one teeming with somber humanity, this one rigid in it's organization, as columns of tombstones sprawl across a neatly manicured tarp of grass.  Grass that is likely sprayed regularly to keep pests and weeds away.

At attention are hundreds of police officers, sweating under the hot Utah sun.  Some are in their dress blues, motorcycle helmets fastened to their chins, hands extended above their right eyebrow, as they try, most in vain, to choke back tears.

Organizers had asked the media to station their cameras in the alfalfa field, a request we all accepted in an effort to give the family a respectful distance.  As the coffin gently sailed, towards its plot, with uniformed officers manning each corner of it, honey bees zipped past my ears, and a thousand American flags rubbed and flapped, tossed and pushed by a brisk, hot wind.

Sgt. Derek Johnson, rolled up to a grey Volvo parked awkwardly on quiet, residential Draper, Utah street.  According to investigators, before he could even unbuckle his seat belt, the officer was met with a hail of bullets, his SUV then sped chaotically away, hitting a nearby tree at a high rate of speed.   Johnson died later that night at a hospital.  Troy Walker is accused of shooting Johnson, his girlfriend then turning the gun on himself.  Walker survived, his mugshot shows him, with a crooked frown, and his head and jaw, trapped inside a metal contraption, reminiscent of a Terry Gilliam film.

Funerals for police officers and fallen soldiers have familiar story lines, a plane or helicopter flyover, taps, bagpipes, a 21 gun salute, and the folding of the American flag followed by one of the most difficult moments you will ever see, that flag presented to the fallen officers wife, or husband.

In my career, I would guess I've covered more than 50 funerals, every one of them for strangers whom, I've met only in grainy pictures, pulled from a dusty frame, or carefully plucked off a hallway wall.

When families allow me into their homes to discuss their worst tragedy, they will often also oblige me by allowing me to take pictures of their loved ones.  I've seen hundreds of grieving mothers and fathers thumb through picture albums, glassy eyed, grinning at captured, tender moments at Disney world, a wedding, or in the hospital, after the birth of a child.

I'm pretty good at keeping my emotions in check at funerals, I have trained my mind to understand the gravity of the pain being felt by the families without being consumed by them.

I have only been to three funerals in my life, that involved someone I was intimately associated.
My grandmother and grandfather whom the grand kids called MaMa and PaPa.  It's endearing to think about those nicknames, and to recall grown adults, in their 30's and 40's referring to another adults as MaMa.

The third was my father's, who died two months ago.  By his own design his was a decidedly low key affair.  Bill Jones, would never allow for a bagpipe, a singer, or a slide show at his funeral.  He even paid most of the burial expenses to reduce the "drama," for his kids.

Although he was the greatest man I'd ever known, I didn't cry at his funeral.  Maybe it was because of the utilitarian design of the affair.  Perhaps it was because I was named co-executor of his estate, and I had busied myself with dealing with Dad's apartment, his accounts, and finding a storage facility for his things, that I didn't allow myself to mourn.

As the bagpipes breathed in and out at Sgt. Johnson's funeral, I thought about his family, but, as I stood, in the spongy alfalfa field, across from the cemetery, I thought mostly about my dad.  The bees went about their business, Sgt. Johnson was laid to rest, and for the first time in months, I cried for my father.

I don't know you, but I hate you.

Although the setting sun was to his back, the eyes of the middle aged man were squeezed into narrow, angry slits.  His lip curled at the right edge, and the snarl was powered by some latent hatred, that seemed to radiate from a place, if questioned, even he could not pinpoint.  It was the kind of hatred, that comes from his DNA, perhaps from generations ago, attributable to his wronged and abused forefathers.  The nastiness was palpable.  To punctuate the smoldering animosity, was his right, middle finger raised in a proud, yet profane salute to me.

Photographer Patrick Fitzgibbon and I had just made a right hand turn onto Broadway, out of the 2News parking facility located in the Wells Fargo building in downtown Salt Lake City.  Moments earlier we had just 

Commented on how sharp the news truck looked, after a sign company had recently wrapped the vehicle in sharp, crisp graphics.  "I think it looks pretty cool," I commented as I slapped my satchel in back of the truck, and perched myself proudly in the passenger seat.

Patrick was building his argument for how he thinks the show, Breaking Bad, of which we are both fans, will end in a few episodes, when I saw the salute, and the hateful face that eventually morphed into a gleeful grin the moment the saluter was certain that I had seen his insult.  

His satisfaction was an oozing, slippery smile that crept onto his face like that of a movie villain, when he blows up a building, or triggers a trap door that sends the hero into a cavernous dungeon filled with cobwebs and Gila Monsters.

I lost connection with Patrick's theories for several minutes as I pondered the anonymous insult, hurled at me for likely no other reason than, I worked in media.  "I'm just shocked," I crooked my head and shut my eyes, searching for the logic, "that a perfect stranger thinks it's ok to insult us for no other reason than he sees us in this truck."  

The man appeared to be a functioning member of our society and by that I mean, he wasn't a wild haired maniac kicking around the streets of Salt Lake City, wearing a pair of ski pants for the third month in a row and screaming randomly at passersby about flying saucers.  

He seemed to be someone who understands social cues and norms.  He was dressed smartly in a green, pressed button up shirt and a pair of creased khakis.  He likely says "yes sir," and "No sir," has a firm handshake, and opens the door for his wife. He could have been on his way to a business meeting, or to pay his mortgage at the bank branch located in the building in which I work.  Oddly, the sight this gaudy news van, made him go "caveman."  His docile, casual thoughts about his next vacation, how he would pay his kids tuition, or what he might eat for dinner, were interrupted kinetically, by a visceral, prehistoric tool box, from which he pulled out "the bird" to insult some anonymous stranger, who was passing the time of a 20 minutes ride to Centerville, Utah, by chatting about a program on basic cable.

Sadly this kind of thing happens pretty regularly.  Several months ago, as I stood outside a downtown tattoo parlor, as police swarmed a neighborhood, looking for a man who had recently fired a gun at two people, a pleasant fellow sat calmly on the crumbling stairs outside an aging, brick apartment building sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon and taking short drags off of quickly shrinking cigarette butt.  He nodded his head, and smiled enthusiastically at me as I waited for a public information officer from the Salt Lake City Police to round up reporters and give us an update on the search.  I looked at the man, smiled broadly and chimed, "hey, how's it going?"  To which he cocked his head, grinned and said with sugary venom, "why don't you go f*#k yourself."  I just stood there, stunned, as he geared up for a frothing diatribe, "go get a real job!" he groused, "stop perpetrating hatred, do something productive with your life you jackel."  To which I said, "you mean productive like you, guzzling cheap booze on the steps at three in the afternoon."  Admittedly, the prudent choice would have been to say nothing, and I realized that as he thrust his filter less cigarette towards the pavement and barreled, headlong at me before being intercepted by a nearby officer, who seemed unaffected by the man's rolling rant.  The guy circled back to his PBR and his concrete step with the parting salutation, "f*#k you!"

I suppose you get used to it.  Check that, you don't get used to it, you accept that you are a simply an empty vessel in which people deposit all their frustration about what politicians call, the "lamestream media."

Before my dad passed away he used to call me up and complain about something he'd read in the Wall Street Journal, or something he'd seen on the CBS Evening News, "why do you guys do that," he would demand.  "I don't know dad, " I would joke, "I'll chat with the president of CBS News when I get to work."

I suppose when people, "flip me off," tell me to 'go to hell,' or call me names, it's less about me, and more about the vast, billowing media world that angers them, from Mylie Cyrus, to the New York Times, to Fox News, to Twitter, to Facebook, to layoffs, to Syria you name it.

I guess, that polite man in the clean shirt, on his way to a lunch meeting is just sick of it all, and I suppose I'm the guy in the news van, who gets to hear about.  I don't accept it, but I suppose, I get it.

  

   

The Hard Way

My dad, who passed away in July, used to say, "you're just like me, you have to do everything the hard way."  Bill Jones was right, again, about himself, and about his third son.  During his life, the old man, cycled from wild success to miserable failure during his 89 year adventure ride, in which he quit his secure job at age 27, and went into business for himself, never working for another person as long as he lived.

It was a boom or bust existence, I recall one Christmas with a towering, 9 foot tall Spruce, a flood of presents, bicycles, and hockey sticks, surrounded by gaudy decorations, and soaked in catered food. That year a Mariachi band atop a flatbed truck was waiting to haul our family around our streets to sing carols to our weary and confused neighbors standing in there bathrobes, pink slippers, with coffee in hand.  They would wipe the sand from their eyes wondering, "why the hell is their a Mariachi band playing at this hour?  Strike that, "why is there a Mariachi band playing at ANY hour?"

I also recall a Christmas with a tree no taller than a fern, and 2 small, wrapped presents, one for me, and one for my sister, placed gently on a white towel, hastily snatched from the bathroom on Christmas Eve.

My dad ultimately sweat and bled his way to financial stability, founding a chain of discount dry cleaners, that eventually added up to about 200 stores, but he, as he had mentioned to me ad nausium, " "had done it the hard way."

While thumbing through his meticulous files in the days after he died, I came across a letter he had written to a friend and investor 30 years ago.  It read:  "Fred, as you know I have recently filed for bankruptcy, and I promise you will soon be paid the $5000 I owe you, but in the meantime, I want to tell you about a great opportunity in which I think you might want to invest."  He was always working, and always raising money, sometimes in the hardest ways possible.

He did pay back Fred with interest, and Fred, my uncle, did invest with my dad again.  Even though he was as he would say "busted." my dad never stopped working or hustling, he had to, because he did everything the hard way.

As I sat in our news van, perched outside the home of Cheri Walker, the mother of a man believed to have gunned down a Draper, Utah police officer last week.  I was thinking about my dad.

Just two days earlier, Sgt. Derek Johnson coasted up next to a grey, late model Volvo parked awkwardly on Fort Street in Draper.  The tires on the squad car of the decorated officer likely didn't even stop turning, when police think Walker open fire, hitting and killing Johnson.  Walker is then thought to have turned the gun on his long time girlfriend, Traci Vaillancourt, shooting her in the back before rotating the pistol into his mouth, and squeezing the trigger.  Miraculously both survived, and, as is so often the case, that's where I come in.

Outside the home of Cheri Walker, I was pondering some of my dad's old sayings and watching as a woman pulled up next to three reporters from competing stations.  "Do you want to go see what she is saying?"  photographer Patrick Fitzgibbon asked as I propped my feet on the dash, and adjusted my sunglasses, "Nah," I said, with a nervous pit in my stomach, "I hate globbing onto other reporters work."
After 15 minutes, the woman sauntered off, and, my pride wouldn't allow me to chase her down to see what she had told my competitors .

After more than an hour of waiting for the return of Troy Walker's mother, I decided we needed to do SOMETHING, so I Googled and searched and eventually stumbled upon an address that Vaillancourt had lived at years ago in Murray, Utah.  "No, I don't know her," chimed the sing-song voiced mom, who had just purchased the home a week ago, "The name sounds familiar, but I don't know her," she said eagerly, bouncing a small toddler in her arms, as he munched down a soggy fist full of Cheerios.

It was 7 PM, and for television news, that is the bewitching hour.  If you haven't nailed down your story by then, you are in jeopardy of not making the 10 PM news cast.

"Ok, ok, ok," I sighed heavily as I vigorously ran my hand across the top of my head  as if, the friction would make my brain conjure a brilliant idea, "I have one more address," I bleated with discouragement, "but she hasn't lived in this place for years."

"Who is it?!"  a woman shrieked from inside the non-descript suburban rambler.  "I'm Chris Jones, from Channel 2."  The metal, brown door swept open, "I know why you are here."  

The middle aged woman with smiling eyes, had purchased the home from Vaillancourt's parents several years ago, but knew everything about the family.  She knew Vaillancourt and her boyfriend had a child, that Vaillancourt had a rare blood disorder, and that Walker had guns, but she was unwilling to share any of it on camera, which, of course in the TV business, is what it is all about.  "I'm so sorry," she would shake her head with real sympathy, like a mom, forced by an overbearing husband to carry out a overly-strict punishment on a teenager.

As I peer at my watch, 7:30, I begin to accept the defeat that is looming in the air, "You guys have a nice day," she says pluckily as I turn the door knob, "I wonder if Traci's sister could help you, I know where she lives," she says nonchalantly, burying the lead.

"Yes Traci is my sister," says Vicki King, teeth clinched, brow furrowed,  "In fact she was here the day before the shooting," she announced, eager to tell the story of how her sister went from beauty queen to a woman living in a car and addicted to pain pills.

As I flip on the mic, I am satisfied that we will be the only station to tell this part of the story, until I see two reporters, with their photographers in tow, approaching the front stoop and prepping their camera's for the interview.

As the reporters step back to their vehicles, "how did you find her?" I ask with amazement, "oh," says one of them, "remember that woman we were talking to outside the Walker home?  She told us where Vicku lived."

As I searched my briefcase for my glasses, I could only think of my father, and his words, that rang more true on this day, than they had in sometime, "you always have to do things the hard way."