From the moment I opened my eyes this morning, I am consumed by two tragedies which are now the dark filters that color my every waking moment. Immediately, before I lift myself out of bed, my thoughts race back five months to the shocking, horrible moments I learned my son, my only child, the love of my life had been gunned down during a mass shooting at Virginia Tech University. Ever since that fateful day, I have experienced severe migraine headaches which this morning forces me out of bed to down four aspirin for some sense of relief. I dress for the day in a pair of black jeans and dark gray, long sleeve, cotton tee shirt, my wardrobe courtesy of the Virginia Department of Corrections.
For now, and the foreseeable future, this motel sized room with a cot-like bed, time-worn, oak chair and 40-year-old matching oak desk serves as my home. I was transported here for my own safety while I await trial. The judge has hidden me, Ann Miller, a 40-year-old woman in a minimum-security prison used to house low risk male prisoners. The judge’s objective with my secret imprisonment is to shield me from the press and vigilantes. No one believes my shooting and killing 13 of my work colleagues with an AK-47 was an accident as I profess. The irony this scenario is I work, or should I say, worked for a gun rights organization, the American Rifle Society.
Settling onto the rock-hard, unforgiving chair you might find at a rummage sale, I read the Washington Post on my laptop which prison officials allow me. Embarking to read the first of four newspapers I consume daily, I make it half way through the business section when a prison guard delivers a tray with lukewarm scrambled eggs, burnt toast and apple juice. Post breakfast, I knock on my door for a guard who escorts me to a hall bathroom and back.
Later in the morning as I consume politics in the New York Times, two FBI agents arrive in a desperate attempt to uncover evidence hoping to prove I planned the slaughter of my workmates. The older detective, Tucker Brown, a sixtyish, crusty, old school FBI agent uses every trick in the interview-a-perp manual to discover a crack in my story. His partner, Richard Smith, an amiable, mild mannered, African American seems somewhat open to the possibility I might be telling the truth.
Like every day since I was moved here, within a minute or two on either side of noon, a triple knock on my door signals my midday repass, prison lunch. Resembling a field trip box lunch from elementary school, today it includes a white bread Turkey sandwich, a tiny apple and a bag of chips. After consuming most of the day’s Wall Street Journal, four FBI agents arrive at my door to escort me down the prison yard. Today, a beautiful fall afternoon I walk for close to an hour with the agents positioned fifty yards from me at all four compass points to assure their secret prisoner doesn’t escape.
My final news rag of the day, the Capital Journal helps me keep up on my childhood community outside Madison, Wisconsin.
As if I am 80 years old living at a nursing home, dinner arrives at 5:30. The chicken breast, mash potatoes and green beans prove enough to sustain me this evening. Post dinner, I record in my journal for a little over an hour. Finally, I peruse a stack of DVD movies I was able to bring along with me to play using the optical drive built into my laptop. The exploits of Andy Dufresne in the Shawshank Redemption gives me courage to fight on another day.
Only Ann Knows
Genre: Crime Fiction
Release: August 2024
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link
A Horrible Accident or Brilliantly Planned Social Statement
Ann Miller still grieves deeply five months after her son and only child was killed during the Virginia Tech mass shooting. A lifelong gun rights advocate, she works passionately as an executive for a gun rights organization, the American Rifle Society.
One morning, Miller opens an anonymous package containing an AK-47 assault rifle sent to her ARS department. Entering an executive boardroom to deliver the assault weapon to her boss during a departmental meeting, she sprays 50 bullets in a matter of seconds killing 13 of her colleagues.
Two FBI agents with vastly different personalities and investigative approaches lead the ultra-high-profile investigation to determine if the mass shooting was a horrible accident as Miller contends or a brilliantly planned and executed mass murder to bring worldwide attention to the destructive capability of automatic and semi-automatic weapons like killed her son. As the FBI’s investigation fails to uncover evidence that Miller pre-planned the shooting, the ARS spins the mass shooting events to characterize Miller as a mentally ill woman hellbent on avenging her son’s death.
Having killed everyone in the boardroom, Miller stands trial for 13 first-degree murders as both the perpetrator and only witness. A surprise piece of evidence surfaces at the end of the trial which renders a verdict but still leaves questions unanswered.
Meet the author
Baird Smart grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. After graduating with a Bachelor of Environmental Design, Baird pursued his love of storytelling and relocated to Los Angeles where he wrote, produced and directed over a hundred television magazine segments, travel specials and a nationally syndicated documentary for KABC-TV. He moved his young family back to Chicago where Baird produced a weekly, half-hour, magazine style program for the ABC affiliate, WLS-TV. He left WLS to start his own company, autumn pictures, where he optioned stories for TV movies and sold the story treatments to network producers in Los Angeles. He has written 5 feature film screenplays. Along with writing and producing, Baird is a licensed real estate broker in Illinois and works with his two daughters at the Smart LeMire Real Estate Group and Compass. He has been happily married for nearly five decades. Only Ann Knows is his first novel.