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"Chaz, I'm sorry," she typed, "but the story is already laid out, people have already commented online, and the paper version is in production. I can't stop the presses. And I can't rewrite history."

"No, but you can reap what you sow," he replied.

Part One: Baby Doe ended there. Here is Part 2, in response to

Day 489: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: hustle

"Junie Unash!"

came the voice of her boss, Tammy Bauersox. "What are you wasting your time on now? Cold Cases don't mean you chill out and sit on your ass. Today we have new news to deliver, and you need to hustle!"

Junie blinked. "I'm not sitting here doing nothing. I'm moderating the comments coming in on yesterday's 25-Year-Anniversary post on the mother who killed her baby." Karen Pike.

Her boss's frown did not ease.

"I think we could get two stories out of it," Junie said. "First, this minister is asking how killing a baby after it leaves the mother’s body is different from killing it while it’s still inside her. I know there’s a difference, but we need to find the science to back that up. Second, a lot of our readers are all riled up now over the governor's proposal to make it legal to abort, or rather terminate, a baby that has just been born. You know, the same guy who was found in a college yearbook photo wearing black-face."

"Apples and oranges." Tammy's nostrils flared. "These vermin who try to control women’s bodies make me sick."

Junie was more than a little intimidated by her boss's flashing eyes and rising voice, but she couldn't stop. "I mean, Karen Pike probably did kill her baby and try to pass it off as a kidnapping and murder. Yes, it’s sick, and she could have pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, but she pleaded innocent. Now she just wants to be left alone, and her son, who was completely innocent, is sick of these people torment him for being the only child his mother didn't kill. Every time we reprint these cold case anniversaries, he says, the harassment starts up again. He said it's very hurtful. And If Karen Pike was suffering a medical condition, post-partum depression, there are laws protecting patients and their privacy."

"The woman is sick and evil and is free only because she had money for a crooked lawyer," Tammy said. "And I don't give a rat's ass about Chaz Pike's privacy. He's trying to protect his mother from suffering the only punishment society has left to inflict on her. Shame and humiliation which cannot compare with the magnitude of her crime."

Junie reached for the aspirin in her desk drawer. This cold case stuff was seriously getting to her. Was she psychotic herself if she felt for Chaz and his murderous but maybe "just" mentally ill mother?

"We got some tips in on the guy whose girlfriend did him in," Tammy said. "You can start interviewing the tipsters instead of worrying about poor Chaz."

She stalked off to her office while Junie tackled source material on the boyfriend found dead in a bathtub by a girlfriend who called neighbors, not an ambulance, to the scene.

Junie wasn't a private eye or a cop. She could collect statements but she couldn't publish just anything someone said about someone else. The police had to approve what got released to the public. Deadlines loomed and she had to wait for feedback from case investigators before finishing the story.

A primal scream came from Tammy's office. Out she came, nostrils flaring again. "Give me Chazz's phone number NOW."

Junie blinked. "I don't have it." Look it up yourself, Tammy, she wanted to say.

"There are laws against this! He's going down!"

Laws against what?

Tammy rampaged back to her desk and launched some phone calls. Junie's screen filled with pop-ups.

A hacker had gotten into an abortion clinic's records and exposed the names of local patients who'd terminated an unwanted or 'inconvenient" pregnancy, and at the top of the list was “TAMMY BAUERSOX, Baby Killer.”

Wow. Tammy, at sixteen, had aborted a baby. And it was four months along. Did her readers need to know that?

"Hypocrisy! Inconsistency!" the pop-ups shouted.

A notification that Chaz was messaging her came up. Junie raced to read it.

"It wasn't me,"

he rushed to say. "I mean, yeah, I know this minister, and I've talked to him about this stuff, but I never asked him to find some hacker to expose every woman in the state whose arborted a baby."

Who's, not whose, she mentally corrected him.

The list was growing. A surprising number of names popped up under the "Baby Killer" banner.

"The abortion clinic is being surrounded," Tammi shouted from her office door. "Get down there and cover this craziness." She was looking at Junie.

"Chaz just messaged me that he had nothing to do with this."

"So find out who did. Some Baptist minister with a megaphone is out there in the street reading names. Patient privacy laws are being violated. There's sure to be an arrest any minute now. Go! Hustle!"

Junie grabbed her phone and purse.

What was that thing Chaz said?"You can reap what you sow." Tammy had been busy sowing. She preached objective journalism yet knew how to create lasting impressions on a reader. In one case gone cold, her word choices made it clear that she “knew” a 21-year-old named Wayne got away with murder. He spent a year in jail awaiting trial, no money for bail. Alfred Churchill got him off with "reasonable doubt,” but wayne had paid with a year of his life and a ruined reputation. He was shunned and harassed and guilty no matter what the jurors said. After the trial, some guy punched him out in a tavern saying "You'll never hurt anyone in my family again"--and he got five years for assault and battery, while Wayne Weston walked free after allegedly killing the guy's sister.

Junie was just an intern, but she could see how Tammy could spin a story with “just the facts” and lead readers to see what Tammy wanted them to see. Did Wayne kill that girl, or did someone else? Who knew the truth? Not the jurors, and certainly not Junie Unash.

She hustled to the clinic, phone in hand, collecting her thoughts via voice-to-text.

That minister would end up in jail, for sure. Violating privacy laws like he was doing. There was another story brewing here. A lot of stories. One newspaper couldn’t contain it. “All the news that’s fit to print” was the motto, but there was so much that was unfit and most readers didn’t want to hear it anyway.

Sowing words. Reaping consequences.

Hustle.

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