Chapter 9. Killing Time #2
In an episode titled “Thy Will Be Undone,” Tyler exposed a state senator for challenging his late father’s million-dollar bequest to the St. Gianna Beretta Molla Children’s Hospital, commonly called St. G’s.
Senator Kingsley Atkinson had refused to be interviewed for the podcast, but his brother Randolph pulled no punches, claiming Kingsley was an insolent, indolent, and entitled narcissist and thief, who’d stolen funds intended to benefit sick children.
The podcast had been released a year earlier, prior to the November elections.
A quick internet search led me to a photo of Kingsley Atkinson in a navy-blue suit.
I zoomed in to take a closer look. He was a clean-cut white man with a closed-lipped smile and stylish plastic-rimmed eyeglasses.
His brown hair had subtle blond highlights, probably intended to make him look younger than he actually was.
His eyes were pale blue, bordering on gray.
The American and Tennessee flag pins on his lapel told me the photo was one he’d used for official government business purposes.
A shiny clip held his tie in place. It appeared to be platinum and was partially obscured by his jacket.
I zoomed in farther, and could see that the visible part of the tie clip read MED in a script font.
Is he a doctor? If so, it seemed odd he would challenge his father’s bequest to the children’s hospital.
I read the associated article, which was written by another reporter, not Tyler Yee.
The piece noted that Kingsley Atkinson lost his race for reelection last fall, and had since filed a defamation suit against both his brother and Tyler Yee.
I found nothing online to indicate how the lawsuit had been resolved.
I made a note in the journal to determine the status of the lawsuit.
In an episode released six months ago titled “Saviors, Social Climbers, or Swindlers?,” Tyler dug into a local church known as the Redemption Fellowship.
The church was purportedly Christian, though unaffiliated with any denomination, operating independent of oversight.
Founded by Devin Carmichael, a former timeshare salesman turned pastor, the church boasted a congregation that had increased a thousandfold in the eight years since its inception and a large, meticulously landscaped campus in the Nashville suburb of Antioch.
In the podcast, Tyler explored the church’s nontraditional fundraising tactics, as well as the relationship between Pastor Carmichael, who was not ordained and had never attended divinity school, and the singing duo known as the Grace Notes that included Carmichael’s wife, Bess, and her twin sister, Tess.
Tyler had interviewed all three, as well as former members who insisted the church was a cult and current members who assured him the church was a legitimate, though unique, spiritual organization.
The podcast also included a scathing conversation with the church’s former bookkeeper, who’d feared the church’s financial activities ran afoul of the laws governing non-profit corporations.
He likened the precious metal pins the church issued to large donors to the mark of the beast foretold in the Bible.
Though Tyler’s podcasts seemed fair and unbiased, he wasn’t afraid to ask hard questions. Had one of those hard questions gotten him killed?
Through the rain-spotted window, I saw the medical examiner’s van come slowly up the long, muddy drive.
No doubt Tyler Yee’s body rested in the back, zipped up inside a body bag.
I wondered if they’d had difficulty pulling the pitchfork out of his back.
A ripple of nausea went through me at the thought, and I forced my mind back to the podcasts.
A more recent episode called “Power to the People” had been put out only three months earlier.
In the podcast, Tyler explored the electric cooperative system in the Tennessee Valley.
Tyler gave listeners a brief history of the electrification of the region.
Prior to Congress establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, in 1933, most folks living in the region’s rural areas had no access to electricity.
As a result, many lived in abject poverty.
At that time, electric companies were primarily investor-owned for-profit entities that considered it cost-prohibitive to expand service into sparsely populated areas.
If customers in those regions wanted service, they had to pay the cost of building the lines themselves.
Few could afford to do so. The TVA made service possible by issuing loans to farmer co-ops for construction of rural power lines.
Thus, member-owned electric co-ops arose in the region.
The subsequent Rural Electrification Act put in place a system of low-cost loans that for-profit companies could obtain to fund expansion into rural areas.
While the loans were intended to further increase access to power, some companies used the loans to build “spite lines,” a second set of lines into areas already served by cooperatives in an effort to force the co-ops into failure.
While the history was informative, the focus of Tyler’s podcast was on recent issues with co-ops, including scandals in South Carolina and Texas in which co-op board members milked the companies for their own benefit by paying themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses.
These boards also failed to pay capital credits, a dividend of sorts, to the member owners.
Tyler’s podcast addressed the issue of whether electric service should be public or private, profit or nonprofit.
While he didn’t hold back from revealing the dirty side of some of the industry’s players, he primarily presented facts and data, leaving it up to the listeners to form their own opinions.
My mind went back to the bucket truck I’d seen earlier.
The local co-op here must not have seen any scandals or Tyler would have included them in his podcast. Still, he’d included sound bites from several MTE co-op board members and executives.
Could there be some malfeasance that had yet to come to light?
Might he have asked one of them a question that made them think he was on to them?
With the storm outages, it would be easy for someone from MTE to explain their presence in the area today.
All of these thoughts were wild speculation, of course, but that didn’t stop me from running another search on my phone to see if the minutes of the co-op’s board meetings were available online. They were. I started with the most recent minutes and worked my way back, month by month.
The minutes were dry and brief. In the most recent meeting, the board voted to hire a particular accounting firm to perform its annual audit.
They also discussed a proposed rate hike, but tabled a vote on the matter.
A month earlier, they’d addressed complaints about a sector of their service area that had experienced excessive outages.
Customers were pressing for the fifty-year-old lines to be replaced, but the board insisted the lines were fine and attributed the outages to the negligence of a cable company expanding into the area.
Other minutes noted that they’d voted to send three board members to an energy expo in Fort Lauderdale, with the mission of gathering information about the latest high-tech meters.
The minutes from a meeting a year prior indicated that the board had gone into something called executive session.
A quick Google search told me that the purpose of these private sessions was for the board to discuss sensitive matters such as personnel issues, legal matters, contract negotiations, and internal investigations.
Because the matters were sensitive, the subject of such discussions was not listed in the minutes.
Hmm. The website indicated that MTE board meetings were open to the public.
The next meeting was scheduled for a Thursday three weeks from now.
If Detective Alonzo hadn’t figured out who had killed Tyler Yee by then, I’d attend the meeting and try to talk to the board members Tyler had interviewed for his podcast.
I was sucking down the gritty dregs from the bottom of my cup when the crime scene van rolled slowly past. My phone jiggled on the table to announce an incoming text.
Although I didn’t recognize the phone number, the sender was clear from the context: The scene has been processed.
You may retrieve your car and belongings.
What clues had they found? Did they have a suspect in mind? I rounded up my umbrella, waved goodbye to the barista, and headed back out into the dark, dreary day to find out.