Helena wanted to investigate the death of Jay Jacobs because it didn’t add up, but I wasn’t so sure it was a good approach…I was skeptical. I hadn’t covered crime since back in Los Angeles. I wasn’t sure there was a crime here either, but I kept forgetting that sometimes I had to ignore the fact that I was a reporter. This was only a hunch. We had different information about the clandestine nature of this forming monopoly, which is what Jay Jacobs would corroborate, but he was gone, we were now quintessentially alone. It was a David and Goliath campaign, we were at war against an unfathomable tyrant.
Helena had already won a battle against the developers, yet she claimed they wanted her to be victorious because that was part of the plan. We couldn’t prove anything yet, so I couldn’t write the story, but I could at least piece it together and draft it until the opportunity presented itself to show Franklin. The paper had reported Jay Jacobs had died a natural death, perhaps an accident, but Helena wasn’t buying it, she sold me on the idea to at least examine the autopsy report.
From a broader picture, it made sense he was murdered if someone found out he was going public with information. Implicating a Governor and other high-level public officials in a political scandal warranted murder in corrupted societies. It was foolish for any American to believe the United States government was above corruption. Then I wondered―why do we become so enraged when corruption accusations circulate around mass media?
Well, in my case, I wasn’t disturbed by the corruption, c’mon, my parents are from Argentina and Russia, political scandal is the norm. My concern was with the cover-up process and the blatant disrespect for the ignorant citizenry, as if democratic values were still heralded as virtuous. In today’s society, the corrupt public official is the virtuoso businessmen, modern pirates robbing tax-payers of hard-earned capital―that’s what I was fighting against. I didn’t care about a pseudo-democratic process. That was a romanticized notion exploited by the naïve populace and mass media who loved the abstract ideas of freedom and liberty.
I contacted the reporter at the Austin American-Statesmen based on the tagline. I sent a brief e-mail of flattering emulation followed by a fleeting question of the autopsy report. I wanted to see it with my own eyes because something would leap out and grab my attention. If it was true that Jay Jacobs was on the verge of committing political suicide by coming forth with this clandestine information, then a murderous plot to reprove his openness perhaps cost him his life. It had been too late for him to retract his communiqué.
He had been scheduled to air live on NPR the day following his death, or murder. We wanted to be proactive―if the reporter didn’t have a copy of the autopsy report and he didn’t notice anything unusual, we should contact the Travis County medical examiner’s office to request an autopsy report regardless of the amount of time it would take to receive it, after all, the state of Texas deemed all autopsy reports public information. We requested it through Helena’s law firm, the Houston Chronicle would probably raise a red flag because of investigative purposes, but attorneys usually handled civil affairs after deaths so it wouldn’t be so uncanny. When we met the reporter in Downtown Austin at a coffee shop we were in luck, he still had the autopsy report, but the scene was unprecedented.
A middle-aged, shaggy-looking, sickly, thin and scrawny man wearing thick-framed horn glasses, that looked like a computer geek approached our table and said, “Korsakov?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I stood up to shake his hand, but then he gave me an envelope underneath the table, then he scurried out of the coffee shop without looking back. Helena and I stared at each other in awe. We rushed to open the envelope to cross-examine the report to find any inconsistencies.
For a moment I thought I was getting served. We read through the report sifting through the organs and organ weight section, through the internal and external examination, we assessed the identifying marks and scars paragraph, and nothing seemed unusual about the evidence of injury report. The conclusion and manner of death were what Helena and I had expected, everything seemed up to par, until we arrived at the toxicology results and noticed the prescription drugs that were found in the body.
Helena noticed after a quick skim, “Cardura xl, my father takes this for his prostate cancer.”
“Did you say prostate?” I asked, “Jay Jacobs didn’t have prostate cancer…he had lung cancer. I remember it well because he coughed all over me like the Black Death, remember? I wonder why he had this drug in his system―what kind of repercussion may a different medication cause? We should cross reference the drug to see if it was enough to cause a negative reaction. This could be evidence of foul play.”
“You know Michael, that guy was really odd, was he the reporter you contacted?”
“I’m not sure…I never saw his face. We had only written each other a couple of times via e-mail, but that was so…I don’t know―straight out of a film or something, right? What do you think? Oh…wait a minute, what’s this?”
I turned the envelope over on its back, there was a post-it attached that read…Be careful, you’re being followed.
“Let’s get out of here Helena―fast.”
I glanced all around looking for anything out of the norm…I left a twenty on the counter for the coffee and pastries. We quickly dashed out onto the streets.