“Not one, as far as I could tell. I think by the time we had finished, she thought of me as one.” Barker shook his head. “But no, as well as I got to know her, she never opened up to me. I took my cues as much from what she didn’t say as what she said. There was a sort of invisible, one-way barrier between that young woman and the rest of the world; everything passed through it to her, but very little passed out.”

“Do you think she was a possible suicide?”

“Not for a moment. Sasha was one tough cookie; she had goals, and she was achieving them. Christ, I mean, she was on the verge of the biggest career any woman ever had in television news. Bigger than Barbara Walters. That sort of person commits suicide only in trashy novels.”

“All right,” Stone said, “let’s assume murder.”

Barker grinned. “Let’s.”

“Who?”

Barker crossed his legs, clasped his hands behind his neck, and stared out at the sweep of the East River. “Two kinds of people might have murdered Sasha Nijinsky,” he said. “First, people she hurt on the way up—you know, the secretary she tyrannized, the people she displaced when she got promotions—there was no shortage of those. But you’d have to be a raving lunatic to kill such a famous woman just for revenge. The chances are too good of getting caught and sent away.”

“What’s the other kind of person?” Stone asked.

Barker grinned again, still looking at the river. “Whoever had the most to lose from Sasha’s future success,” he said.

“That’s an interesting notion,” Stone said, and he meant it. “Who did you have in mind?”

“I’ll tell you,” Barker said, turning to face him, “but if you ever quote me, I’ll call you a liar.”

Stone nodded. “It’ll be just between us.”

“Well,” Barker said, drawing it out. “There’s only one person in the world I can think of who would suffer from Sasha Nijinsky’s future success.”

“Go on,” Stone said.

“Her new co-anchor, who else? The estimable Mr. Barron Harkness, prizewinning television journalist, squarejawed, credible, terribly vulnerable Barron Harkness.”

“I take it you don’t like Mr. Harkness.”