“It’s the price of being a pseudo-celebrity,” she mocked and grabbed the phone. “Okay, the next question, ‘What do you love about being an attorney in Sedona?’”
I sighed. “That sounds like one of those personal inventory questions you do at some corporate retreat or something.”
“Right?” she laughed. “Right before you do the trust fall.”
“The trust fall,” I rolled my eyes. “I never could do that one.”
“Oooh,” she mocked. “Do you have trust issues, Henry?”
“I have trust issues with anything coming from Starbright Media,” I muttered.
“I don’t think I’d blame you there one bit,” she laughed as she read the document. “Why didn’t I become a reporter? It’s so much easier to ask all of the questions than to answer them.”
“It doesn’t pay for shit,” I said.
“That’s true,” she said. “My cousin’s a journalism major. She took out sixty thousand in student loans back in the early 2000s and now she works in the lingerie department at Dillard’s.”
“Lingerie, huh?” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe I got the wrong cousin.”
She smacked me and laughed.
We dressed and headed out to the office, where we found the machinery of our legal firm firmly in motion.
Landon and AJ were already there working on the video. Landon had brought in a large screen monitor and had it set up with his laptop in the conference room. It was a mess of wires and odd gadgets that made it look like serious work was being done. He was running video footage he had of the last few weeks.
“Is this raw?” I asked as I leaned against the door frame.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going through what I have. There’s a lot here. I also shot some stuff at the vortex, and I didn’t get anything of the arraignment, but I might be able to get some news footage.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, there’s plenty of that.”
He laughed. “I saw the interview. Slick, man, slick.”
“We got anything usable here?” I asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “There’s a lot of stuff. A whole lot. Right now, I’m just sifting through everything. I called one of my professors to figure out a starting point, to get an angle.”
I nodded. “Well, we have yet to uncover the government conspiracy.”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Senator Malone? Dude, if you get him under oath, you can get him to crack to like Jack Nicholson.”
I rolled my eyes. I hated every Tom Cruise legal thriller ever made.
“What have you gotten so far?” I asked.
He smiled. “Alright, let me show you.”
I pulled up a chair beside him, and he clicked around on his laptop for a minute and then cued up a video on the monitor. Edgy graphics played against a hardcore theme song, and then a title screen read, “Before the Gavel Falls: A Behind the Scenes Look at the American Legal System.”
I felt my defenses rise at the title’s insinuation of dirty deeds, but I kept watching. After the theme song ended, the camera ran footage of Sedona’s natural parks.
“Sedona Arizona,” Landon’s voiceover said. “It’s a small town in the southwest Arizona desert, known for its natural landscape, thriving arts community, and a town built on openness, exploration, health, and wellness.”
More B-roll footage played of lean, attractive couples meditating in the Red Rocks, and then it jumped to some of our health and alternative wellness shops, and a montage of our arts district.
“But,” the voiceover continued, “even in a picture perfect town, there is a dark side.”
The next shots were footage of the dance performance, with the date of that night.
“That’s about as far as I’ve gotten,” he said. “Now I want to do talking head interviews for the backstory.”
I nodded. “Looks good so far.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll need you to do a couple of talking head shots, if you could.”
Vicki poked her head in the conference room. “We have that interview with Matt Chelmi?”
“Ah,” I said. “Yes. Showtime.”
I rose from the chair and then turned back to Landon. “We’ll have to put a pin in that interview. We’ll get something for you.”
“Right on,” he smiled and stroked his beard.
Vicki and I drove across town to a generic three story office building halfway across town.
“You know I looked at this place when we moved here,” I said.
“I don’t remember that,” she said.
“Of course, you wouldn’t,” I said. “No one would. That’s why I passed on it.”
We walked into the building, and it was all glass and linoleum floors, and it lacked any personality or warmth. We took the elevator to the third floor and found the suite number for The Herald.
A glass wall opened into a hallway leading into a large empty room. Along the hallways were open office doors where people talked on phones or stared into monitors.
In one corner was a Formica counter where a couple of twenty somethings were dressed head to toe in Urban Outfitters and had their legs propped up on chairs, while they pounded away on laptops.
“Those are some of our remote reporters,” Matt’s voice came from behind us.
Matt looked to be in his late thirties, clean shaven, with dark expressive eyes, and a blue button down and brown khakis.
“They look... casual,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Most of our reporting is done by contract reporters, a lot of them are part-time students. They have a login, and they cover stories, and write from home. It works for us. We have an open counter they can use if they want.”
“Not what I expected,” Vicki remarked. “I thought newspapers had a bullpen of reporters in cubicles one upping each other for the best stories.”
Matt laughed. “Not if you want to be successful. Back in Iakova’s
