Blessed Are Those Who Weep Read Online Free Page B

words under the footage of me holding the baby—­“Gabriella Giovanni, reporter with the Bay Herald .”
    It explains the stack of missed message slips waiting for me on my desk. The news clerk adds two more to the pile as I slide into my chair.
    â€œThank God you’re here,” she says. ­“People have lost their fucking minds this morning calling for you.” She rolls her eyes and stalks off as only a five-­foot-­tall, eighty-­pound woman can.
    â€œNot my fault,” I say to her back. Flipping through the stack of messages, I roll my eyes, too.
    One message is blunt: What’s your alibi? Pretty convenient you were the one to find them.
    Another is kinder: . . . is a psychic. Wants to meet with you to tell you who the Mission Massacre killer is.
    Sometime since last night, the hive mentality dubbed the slayings “the Mission Massacre”—­probably based on the Tribune ’s headline.
    After the third message —­Baby is possessed and killed family telepathically—­ I stop reading .
    But my phone doesn’t stop ringing. Unfortunately, the publisher insists we answer calls to our desk, even if they are wack jobs. He says you never know. Every once in a while, he’s right, too.
    In between answering calls, I wade through the voice mails waiting for me and nibble on a packet of cracker-­and-­cheese sandwiches from the vending machine. One call is from a radio announcer. He actually sounds pretty nice. And normal.
    â€œDave Schrader here. Darkness Radio. I heard about your . . . experience . . . with the Mission Massacre. I was wondering, with all that you’ve seen and done in your job, if you’d be my guest on True Crime Tuesdays . If so, can you please give me a call?”
    Chris Lopez, my good friend and favorite photographer at our newspaper, is always trying to get me to listen to Darkness Radio, says I’d dig it. I hit save and go to the next message. I delete most without listening to them in their entirety, but one makes me pause. I listen to it twice, taking notes the second time.
    The woman doesn’t leave her name, but she has a lot to say:
    â€œIsn’t that poor woman’s husband military? Good luck with him getting any support on dealing with that tragedy. The military is trying to hide it, but my sister’s husband is stationed in Kentucky, and there’s at least one soldier she knows who killed himself after he found out his wife had been in a car accident. She was in a coma and died before he even got leave to come back home to see her and say good-­bye. And I know at least one other soldier who killed himself and his wife in front of their two kids only a week after he got back from Iraq. They are seeing some horrific things over there, and our military is doing nothing to help.”
    I start jotting down notes on what she is saying, sensing a story in here somewhere. It has been nearly a year since the invasion of Iraq and somehow none of this has been reported yet. Or if it has been, it’s only been on a small-­scale level.
    â€œAnd there’s more,” she continues. “Not just suicides. There have been at least three soldiers who come home from Iraq and beat the living daylights out of their wives. They are seeing things over there that we don’t know about and that they can’t handle once they get back here. The worst part is the military isn’t doing anything about it. My sister said that her husband suffers from depression and he’s afraid to go to the doctor on base because he’s worried they will pooh-­pooh his disease and might not even cover the cost of his meds.”
    I wish this woman had left her phone number. It sounds like a good story. I’m sure Maria Martin’s husband will need a lot of support after what happened to his family, and if this woman is right, it doesn’t sound like the military will be the