Nic hated coyness. "Look, we need you to tell us whatever you know."
He straightened up. "Okay, for each show Victoria goes in with three or four folders, one for each segment. They have research she wants to have handy, points she wants to make, stuff like that. And as the show goes along, her papers tend to get spread out." He pointed at Victoria's place. "See that Talk button? A couple of times, her folders ended up on top of it. She didn't know it, but I could hear everything she and Jim were saying. And what I heard was them arguing."
Nic looked up from her notes. "What about?"
"Victoria was maybe a little starry-eyed. You know that saying about people not really wanting to know how sausage is made? She didn't really understand how the talk business works. That there's a give-and-take."
"What kind of give-and-take?" Nic asked. "And who's giving and who's taking?"
His mouth twisted, as if he would have been happier to continue winking and nudging. "Okay. Jim had LASIK eye surgery awhile ago. So for a few weeks he talked up the surgery, kept saying how easy it was and how he wished he had done it yeirs ago."
Nic saw the light. "And he got that LASIK surgery for free. In return for talking it up."
Chris nodded. "Exactly. Jim always said one hand washes the other. But Victoria doesn't understand that sometimes you have to do things to keep the sponsors happy. It's not always about news value. You don't do a live remote from the opening of a big chain store because it's news. You do it to help out on the advertising side of things. The wall between advertising and editorial came down a long time ago. It's all just content, and if it gets you listeners and advertisers, then you know it's working. Victoria liked to talk about the freedom of the press, but no one just hands you a microphone and says, 'Go for it.' Nothing is for free."
"So you're saying Victoria didn't understand the business side," Allison said.
Nic knew Allison well enough to know that she sympathized with Victoria.
"Yeah. She was always talking about fairness and transparency." Chris's eyes flicked up to the ceiling. "Like they would have hired her if she wasn't a thirty-one-year-old woman who was easy on the eyes and half Asian. They hired her to get the ratings up and to bring in more young women listeners."
"What will happen now?" Nic asked.
Chris shrugged. "For right now, she's host. And the station might keep her on, if the ratings stay high once everyone has gotten over wanting to talk about Jim's death. She acts like she's just taking the baton from Jim's fallen hand or whatever. But now she gets to take the show in a whole new direction. And that never would have happened if Tim hadn't died."
Chapter 24
KNWS Radio
As a prosecutor, Allison knew never to interview a potential witness by herself. If she did, and the witness said something different on the witness stand, she couldn't take the stand herself to counter him. She couldn't be both prosecutor and witness, which is why she needed Nicole.
More than that, she and Nicole made a good team. Allison was skilled at building connections with people, whether they were victims, witnesses, or even perpetrators. While it wasn't as simple as good cop, bad cop, Nicole brought completely different strengths to an interview. She sat back and listened with all her being, which made some people feel off balance. They could tell they were being put under a microscope.
The next person to be interviewed was the program director, a tall, thin man in his midfifties. "I'm Aaron Elmhurst," he announced when he opened the door. He reached out to shake their hands as Allison and Nicole introduced themselves.
Aaron looked awful--his eyes were shadowed, and it looked like he hadn't shaved since Jim died. "Just let me know what I can do to help," he said. "We need to catch the guy who did this to Jim and string him up. And not the fast way either, where your neck gets broken when you fall. I want him to feel what it's like to strangle to death." He sat down across from them and pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids.
Allison needed answers, not tough talk. A few softball questions might help Aaron calm down and focus, not on revenge, but on facts. And who knew? Every now and then a softball question got hit out of the park.
"I wanted to ask you how KNWS managed to broadcast yesterday when the station was shut down. Did you use one of those live remote trucks you see at events?"
Aaron dropped his hands, and some of the tension in his face smoothed out. "No. A live broadcast comes right back through the studio, so that wouldn't have worked. We've got a transmitter site out in Damascus, and the engineers put something basic together. Greg--that's the guy who runs the equipment--he grabbed a sound board and a couple of microphones before he left."