First things first: prepare for work. He had to have a presentation that would appear to preoccupy him, a seemingly rich skein of interwoven subjects that did not touch on this subject matter. His "stealables," he called them.
This divided into subsets such as the Factlet stuff. He had a collection of them:
"The Independence, Missourian reports that fifty-seven percent of Americans surveyed would support a tax-funded government program to shelter and care for the homeless." Flynn could almost do a show around such a fact.
"Did you know that when stamps get stuck together by accident you can put them in the freezer for a few hours and they'll usually come unstuck?" He had tons of that kind of stuff. Some of it was of little value, but he was looking for quantity not quality. He wanted bulk for show. And there was wheat with the chaff.
He had some good topics researched. Barb couldn't steal all of them, surely. He had a slant on the ban of rock concerts, and a series of likely booker-interview subjects that began with the Who concert deaths, and ranged from a local ACLU guy to the spokesman for Guns N' Roses—about an incident at a Missouri concert date.
There was a show on local broadcasting that Flynn, and for that matter Trask himself, would get off doing: a lot of data on the station that was being sued in a libel matter, they were appealing a multimillion-dollar judgment; the anchor at "4" who was celebrating twenty-five years on the air—he had a great slant on why he'd turned L.A. down twice; the scandal with the morning team who had talked their newsman into reporting a fake UFO sighting—all kinds of neat interview possibilities.
Then in with the goodies, he'd salted the notes with stories that he hoped Barb would steal. The KPERS show, about an investigation into the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, an exposé on white-collar crime, an interview with a guy in the Kansas attorney general's office that he knew would semi-suck, a big story on a judge who'd dismissed speeding tickets that was tied to ambiguous outmoded laws and "lost" ordinances, which would be about as much fun to research as gum surgery.
He had a large, graphic presentation that looked so good he thought it would work as a show in spite of having been conceived to be swiped, a thing on the five planes found in formation, wing-to-wing, on the ocean floor, that appeared identical to the famous, missing "Flight 19." All the planes had been Navy Avengers, and one of the numbers on the war planes matched the unit that had lost a squadron in 1945 (a story that hadn't done anything to dispel the "Bermuda Triangle" myth). He'd tied that all into a famous local story about a woman who had proof her husband, an MIA in Vietnam since 1970, had recently been seen. "Missing In Action" had Sean Flynn written all over it—he knew he'd build something with it.
Then there were the pure spikes. Tantalizing show titles he'd simply pulled out of thin air and his imagination:
Fatal Attractions
Up the Academy
So Long, Mr. Farmer
Bounty Hunters—Above the Law?
Closing Costs, the Real Story
High-Tech, Two-Edged Sword of the 21st Century
Closing the Porn Shops
Honorable Men in Politics—Are There Any?
He'd crossed out "Men in Politics" and substituted "Politicians."
Laser Surgery
The New Retirement
Politically Correct, Buzzwords and Censorship
Outsmarting the IRS
Last of the Pioneers
Elvis Imitators—The Dark Side
Back to the Middle East? Post-Victory Questions
Religious Sex
Palimony
The Next Energy Crisis
Payola's Resurgence in the Music Business
Dubious Cures
Dinosaurs
Health Care—"Going Up?"
On and on. He put his stack of "stealables" and related visuals to take to work aside, and concentrated on his real thesis, on American violence. Trask's précis was headed "Causes of Increased Numbers of Violent Crimes." Based on the report prepared in part by the Kansas City Metropolitan Police Department, the Missouri Health Department, and the Department of Justice, its primary elements were listed as follows:
Cause:
Abject poverty, unemployment, lack of hope.
Solution:
Government work programs, communitywide welfare projects targeting the lowest economic strata and the homeless, education about job-finding, education about alcohol, drug, and other substance abuse, more programs for substance abusers.
Cause:
Ghetto slums.
Solution:
Planning of urban housing codes and enlightened federal, state, and city housing authority decision-making, prevention of neighborhood deterioration by stricter enforcement of existing codes, prevention of deterioration by grass-roots citizens groups, formation of neighborhood crime-prevention organizations, more funding for police, more targeting of high-crime areas for patrol by law enforcement agencies, more undercover units in high-crime areas, more crack-house raids, more drug sweeps and streetcorner-dealer-level busts, more gangbanger sweeps, more DEA units.
Cause:
Abuse of children, females, elderly.
Solution:
Education, more enlightened foster parent systems, community programs for abusers and local PSA-campaigns aimed at increasing communication skills among abusers, toll-free "help" hotlines (1-800 numbers), more shelters and shelter guidance, increased funding for counseling.
It looked hopeless when you imagined how much that kind of funding would translate into increased taxes. Perhaps the way to go about it would be to isolate certain areas of vested-interest lobbies—not defense spending, as that was too big a ratings tune-out. But the vested interests now controlled the U.S. Congress. There was an angle there. He wanted the solutions to completely resolve, at least theoretically, the thorny dilemmas which the series of programs on violence would imply if not categorically state.
If Kansas City was under the gun, as he believed, in the midst of a horrible series of homicides orchestrated out of racial hatred, and as retribution against encroachment on a drug mob's territory, what would the white population do? He envisioned a white response, a backlash to the response, and these widening out into all-out racial war. If Trask wasn't very careful about every move he made he could imagine himself touching off a powder keg!
He thought of another swipable note and jotted it down: "The maddening waste, abuse of perqs, and financial mismanagement by the House and Senate—did this earn them each a raise?" Then he decided that wasn't necessarily stealable and put it in a stack of "iffy angles." It had been jarred loose by his thinking on the lobbies, and maybe it belonged in some kind of sidebar to his precis. Trask made another note to go through the "iffy angles" pile and sort out those things that might have some relevance to possible solutions. He made a list of interview subjects: four blacks; an Asian; an Israeli man who was particularly articulate; two whites. He jotted a note for himself to make a "list of suitable Congresspersons worth interv'g."
Trask saw a scrap of note he'd made headed "B.R. Sez Station Bugged." He lifted his phone from the cradle and hit numbers. In a few seconds a young, chirpy woman's voice announced "Z-60" in his ear.