Roxie interjected, “Yeah, but they and, more importantly, their board members and benefactors aren’t so sure that Hines stole anything. The buzz is you jumped the gun on this story.”
I held back my temper. Dare had told me the same thing when we published the news story. I didn’t have time for this mutiny.
“The audit backed up our reporting,” I said. “The state attorney charged him, and Hines will be convicted.”
“If there is ever a trial,” Roxie said as she took a long sip from her water bottle. She didn’t drink coffee. Mal snickered.
“We push ahead,” I said. “We did the right thing reporting on Hines. We all discussed the possible fallout. There will be a trial and it will validate everything we wrote.”
I sounded more confident than I felt and continued, “It would help if we could locate Pandora Childs. As the Arts Council director, she knows better than anyone what Hines did. Even if she had some part in the embezzlement, the state attorney would cut her a deal in exchange for her testimony. Anyone got any leads about where to find her?”
I asked this question every week.
Roxie and Jeremy shook their heads.
Teddy said, “I asked around again. She dated a bartender at Seville Quarter for a couple months when she first moved to Pensacola but hasn’t been seen for a while.”
“She was friends with one of our freelancers,” said Mal. “But all Tish would tell me was Childs liked to smoke pot and had started hanging out with some older man, but she didn’t know who.”
Doug Yoste finally woke up. He had been in a daze drinking coffee and staring out the conference room window. He needed three cups of coffee before he could form words into sentences. Wearing a vintage NBA Denver Nuggets T-shirt over jeans that looked like they had been worn five days in a row, Doug hadn’t shaved and needed to run a brush through his mop of brown hair.
He said, “I’ve had several people tell me her family had a condo in Destin. I’ve called her parents several times, as have the state attorney’s investigators. Childs didn’t have the best relationship with her parents. They had stopped talking with her since she moved to Pensacola. They didn’t text or email each other.”
“Keep asking,” I said. “I’ve got Harden working on it, too.”
Mal left the room and brought back the coffee carafe. She refilled everyone’s mugs.
“What can you tell us about Sue Hines’ death?” she asked me as she settled down and drank from her pink Hello Kitty mug.
I filled them in on the details Harden had shared without telling them about the confrontation with Wittman. Then we moved into the editorial portion of the meeting.
The cover story for next week was on Escambia County Sheriff Ron Frost’s request for more funds from the county commission for pay raises for his employees. Since it involved Frost, I took lead on the investigation, but I needed the sheriff’s office to release a few more public records.
“Do we need a backup plan if you don’t get the records?” asked Mal.
“If I don’t hear back by this afternoon, I’ll get the state attorney’s office involved,” I said. “Plan on thirty-five hundred words and two charts. Teddy, find us a current photo of Frost and his deputies working some crime scene.”
Teddy jotted down a few notes. He said, “We will have the online database ready to go live once we get the salary spreadsheets.”
Teddy and Mal had a friend who offered to design a searchable online database that would allow our readers to hunt for the salaries of all the sheriff’s employees. We would launch the database the same day the issue hit the newsstands.
I had taken Yoste off cover stories for two weeks because I wanted him to focus on a feature on Wittman’s maritime park petition drive. However, he still needed to do a couple of news stories.
Yoste walked the staff through the story ideas that he and I had discussed: gang violence in the middle schools, a county commissioner getting contracts for an aide’s husband, city staff sharing photos of nude women using government email accounts, and Sheriff Ron Frost’s last hunting trip.
Unimpressed, Mal said, “That’s nice, but which one can you deliver by Friday?”
“Gang violence,” said Yoste, more than a little offended that she had called him out again.
I kept the meeting moving. “Doug, send me a progress report on the petition story. You may have a difficult time interviewing Wittman. I’m not one of his favorite people.”
“I’ve already gotten him to answer a few questions,” he said, “and, yes, he hates you.”
Smiling, he added, “He likes me, though.”
Two years out of the journalism school at the University of Florida, Yoste missed his hometown and the fishing it offered. Though he had worked for the Tampa Tribune for eighteen months, the Herald showed no interest in hiring him, but Doug filled an important hole in our paper. An investigative publication without investigative reporters doesn’t last long.
“Will you make deadline on that story, too?” asked Mal. She was more of a managing editor than a production manager. She made sure we published an issue every week.
Her tattooed and pierced husband Teddy laid out all the articles, designed the covers, and did most of the photography. Mal handled the design of the ads, determined the space for the editorial and ads, and sent it all to the printer by 6 p.m. on Tuesday—that is if Doug turned in his copy on time.
Though weird and dramatic, Jeremy never gave Mal problems on Tuesdays. Any holdup would be Doug’s fault. He was a good reporter and could weave facts together well, but he was slow. I had no idea why he never improved. Mal and Roxie beat him up every time he missed a deadline. Still, at five thirty on a print night, he would be found staring at his computer
