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professional in their duties, like it was just another day at the office for them, but at the same time, they were respectful of the body and determined to find all the details they needed. I made note of how exclusive this situation had been, how members of the media were never invited into a crime scene tent, but answered the reader’s logical next question by using Whitford’s comments about how he wanted the victim to have a face, not just to be dismissed by the general public as another dead body.
    There were a number of things I didn’t include, like Whitford’s name—I called him “an EPS member who wished not to be identified”—my personal feelings about seeing another dead body, information about the weather, and any of the comments from the Mountie. That was nothing new, just normal journalistic operating procedure. It’s not necessary to tell the whole story; some details can be and are left out. It’s mostly due to time and space issues, but also it’s not necessary to provide all the details or to give the whole story because in truth doing that may detract from the tone one wants the story to have. And with any story, there’s always the possibility that it may develop legs, and those other details may fit better in follow-up articles.
    Before I put the story through, I asked Anderson for his input. A rare request but I wanted the opinion of a writer that I respected. He agreed, but on one condition. “Tell me about Larry when he said he would put your right hand into the press so you could never write again,” he asked.
    “Why?”
    “He uses that line all the time and I was hoping to respond with his own words the next time he uses it on me. Make him think, you know?”
    Anderson was taking a chance considering such a move, but since he was a solid performer in the newsroom, he might get away with it, although probably only once.
    “Okay, let me set up the story a bit before I tell you. First off, the paper in Olds was a really good paper, been around since 1899 or something like that, with its own press in the back that was constantly printing papers for the rest of the weeklies in the area. That fucker was huge, loud, and it would shake the entire building when it was running. And on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays it ran nonstop, and there was no wall separating it from the front room where the reporters, typesetters, and ad sales folks worked, so I had to write my stories with this monster constantly roaring in my ears. And I never could do a phoner interview because there was no way you could hear anyone, so it forced you to go out and actually interview people in person, which was good.
    “The people who were publishing the paper when I was there, were the grandkids of the guy who founded it in the first place, before the town was actually a town. The publisher at the time was this old dude named Neil, who had married into the family. He looked like a big, old farmer, kind of like Jed Clampett’s bigger brother. He always had this roll of bills in his pocket, mostly fifties and hundreds. Once I had to go to some event and there was a five-dollar admission charge, even for the media, so I asked Neil if the paper could pay. It took him almost twenty minutes to flip through all those bills to find something as small as a five.
    “And every time you said something to him, he grunted ‘Huh,’ so if you didn’t know him, you thought he couldn’t hear you, but it was just a fixed-action pattern, a tic that he had. He had heard you, and if you tried to repeat what you said, he would bark at you.
    “So this was an old-timey weekly, the kind you really don’t see anymore, and it was here that I hired our fearless leader Larry Maurizo.”
    “You gave Larry his first job in the business?” he asked incredulously. “Don’t let that get around much because there are a lot of people here who would kill you for it.”
    “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said, waving his comment away because a