Packer pointed the remote control with authority. The volume went up, the ubiquitous Webb staring at the camera in a way that Packer knew meant trouble.

“Shit,” Packer said, hitting a lever on his chair, cranking himself up.

“In a rare, if not shocking, moment of candor today,” Webb said with his sincere expression, “Mayor Charles Search said that because of the Black Widow serial killings, hotel and restaurant business has dropped more than twenty percent, and he himself would not feel safe driving downtown at night. Mayor Search implored Charlotte’s citizens to help police catch a killer who has ruthlessly murdered five . . .”

Packer was already dialing the phone, bag of potato chips falling out of his lap, scattering over the rug.

“. . . an individual the FBI has profiled as a sexual psychopath, a serial killer who will not stop . . .” Webb went on.

“Are you listening to this?” Packer exclaimed when Panesa picked up his phone.

“I’m taping it,” he said in a homicidal tone Packer rarely heard. “This has got to stop.”

TWENTY

Brazil never watched television because his mother monopolized the one at home, and he did not frequent Charlotte’s many sports bars, where there were big screens in every corner. He knew nothing about what had been on the eleven o’clock news this Thursday night, and no one paged him or bothered to find him. All was peaceful as he ran on the Davidson track in complete darkness, close to midnight, no sound but the rhythm of his breathing and falling feet. As pleased as he was about his amazing nonstop journalistic home runs, he could not say that he was happy.

Other people were getting a lot of the same stuff. Webb was, for example, and no matter how informative or compassionate the story, the bottom line was the scoop. Brazil, of late, was scooping no one, if the truth be told. It just seemed he was because what he wrote routinely ended up on the front page and changed public opinion and seemed to rattle a lot of cages. Brazil would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his days writing pieces that did just this and nothing else. Prizes didn’t matter much, really. But he was realistic. If he didn’t beat everybody to the quote, the revelation, or the crime scene, one of these days he might not get paid anymore to write.

At which point he could become a cop, he supposed, and this turned his mind to West again, sailing him off firm ground into a dark, tangled, painful thicket that hurt and frustrated him the more he tried to fight his way out of it. He ran harder, bending around goal posts, passing empty bleachers filled with the memories of games, mostly lost, during fall nights when he had usually been studying or walking the frosty campus beneath stars he tried to describe as no one ever had. He would tuck his chin into his hooded sweatshirt, heading to the library or a hidden corner of the student lounge, to work on a term paper or poetry, not wanting couples he passed to notice him.