I turned the key, reached down to the shift to put the car into reverse and back out of the spot. But I couldn’t will my foot to move from the brake to the accelerator. Part of me was not prepared to continue the chase.

The fact was, I’d not been doing a very good job of this. My surveillance skills were rotten. I’d been busted three times. Twice by Angie—the first time at the mall, the second time when she phoned me while I was tailing her. And then, again, at the McDonald’s. By Angie’s friend Cam.

I was not cut out for this kind of work.

It occurred to me that Angie would probably be fine as long as she had Cam with her. The guy was a better bodyguard than I. Maybe it would actually be a good thing if Trevor found Angie. Then he’d have to deal with Cam, whose powers of intimidation might exceed mine.

I pulled the ice away from my face, looked in the mirror. We’re talking horror show.

I decided to swing by the paper on the way home.

I had to find out more about Stan Wannaker. There was this growing sense of connectedness between the events of the last forty-eight hours. Stan was dead. Stan had had a run-in with Bullock at the auction, which Lawrence and I had also attended. Lawrence was in the hospital, victim of a savage attack. There seemed to be these threads connecting one event to another, but I couldn’t quite make them out, couldn’t see how they joined.

The moment I stepped into the newsroom, I could feel the grief. There was none of the usual banter, people calling to one another across the desks asking if they wanted a coffee or to go across the street for an after-shift drink. Even though there were probably forty or more people in the room, it was hushed, only the sounds of computer keys being tapped to break the silence. There were small huddles of people, two over in this corner, three over here, talking in hushed tones.

Some people were crying.

I stopped at my desk, signed in on my computer to see whether I had any important messages, which I did not, then clicked over to the news basket where all the cityside stories were submitted and edited.

I was able to find the story the paper was running on Stan, in the next day’s edition, on the front page above the fold, under the byline of Dick Colby:

Stan Wannaker, the Metropolitan’s award-winning photographer who faced danger in nearly every world hot spot, was found murdered in the newspaper’s parking lot yesterday.

“It is a terrible loss,” said Bertrand Magnuson, the paper’s managing editor. “He was a wonderful, talented individual who embodied everything that the Metropolitan stands for.”