“Not a fun thing to put her through,” Berger said. “Not fun for either of you, really. I imagine you’re not used to it. Professional discussions are your dinner conversations. They’re your dialogues on weekends, holidays. They’re even the source of fights, perhaps.” Her eyes on his. “Nothing off-limits unless you’re expert witnesses for opposing counsel in the same court case, and that almost never happens. Quite the team, the two of you. No secrets. Always professionally inseparable. And now, personally inseparable. I hope it’s going well.”

“No, this isn’t fun.” He didn’t like her personal references. “It would be easier if Oscar’s charged with killing his girlfriend. That’s a terrible thing to hope.”

“We hope a lot of things we don’t want to admit,” she said. “But fact is, if he murdered Terri Bridges, we’re not looking for someone else.”

She remembered snow that stung like nettles, and she needed a pound of Breakfast Blend coffee, but she didn’t feel like going out. Overall, there was nothing good she could say about that day.

She’d had a harder time than usual with a column she was supposed to post, an especially mean-spirited one titled “The Ex-File,” which was a list of celebrities whose fans had turned on them and why. Certainly Shrew had to leave out that part as she wrote the scene for Investigator Marino. There was a lot she had to leave out. For example, she couldn’t tell him her horror when her doorbell rang, and she let Terri in, not realizing the Gotham Gotcha website programming was as big as life on her twenty-four- inch computer screen.

Terri set the basket on the coffee table and walked right over to the desk, which was forward of her, now that Shrew thought about it as she wrote the scene on her pad of paper, leaving out what she was remembering right this minute.

Terri looked at what was on the screen, and Shrew tried to figure out how to explain what was clearly a Gotham Gotcha column, formatted and embedded in actual programming language.

What’s this? Terri was so short, she was eye level with the computer screen on top of the desk.

I confess I read Gotham Gotcha.

Why does it look like that? Are you a computer programmer? I didn’t know you worked.

I have display codes on because I’m such a ninny. Please sit down. Shrew almost bumped her out of the way so she could exit the program. No, I certainly don’t work. She was quick to clear that up.