“I’ll make it worth your while,” she breathed into the phone.

“Before lunch,” he said.

Kelli Googled Stone Barrington and found only a few dozen references, mostly dealing with legal cases he had worked on, and there was an announcement from a year ago that he had been made a partner of Woodman & Weld. She was surprised to learn that he had been involved in the investigation of the murder of the movie star Vance Calder, fifteen years before. Kelli, being in her twenties, knew of Calder only from his old films on various cable channels. She had never watched one. She looked up the actor on Wikipedia and was surprised at the length of his entry, his filmography of seventy-five and his five Oscars. There was little about his personal life, only that he had married in his late sixties and fathered a child.

She looked up from her screen and found the day editor staring down at her. “What?” she asked.

“What are you working on?”

“Something really interesting,” she said.

“How interesting?”

“Interesting enough for me to devote a few days to the story and not be pecked to death by lesser assignments.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You have a way of cutting me off at the knees whenever I come to you with interesting information, so I’m not going to tell you about this one until I have it fully sourced and sewn up.” He stared at her for a long moment, and she realized he was looking at her cleavage. “What else can I do for you?” she asked, leaning forward to give him a better view of her unfettered breasts. He turned around and walked back to his desk, and Kelli breathed a sigh of relief.

She checked her e-mail and found one from her contact in the mayor’s office. She opened it, then the attachment, printed it and saved it under a new file name, then she took the sheet of paper out of the printer and examined it.

Stone Malon Barrington had been granted a license, dated December 22, to marry Christine A. Carter. His address sounded like Turtle Bay, and hers was the same. She Googled Carter and learned that she was a freelance writer and had had many magazine articles published, including, some years before, a profile for the New Yorker of Vance Calder. There was no article newer than that and nothing newer in her Google search, either. So the only nexus of Carter and Barrington was Vance Calder, fifteen years before. Odd, she thought, since they were both New Yorkers and Calder had lived in Los Angeles.

She went back to her Google search of Calder and looked for a biography. Two had been written, both more than twenty years ago, so they were of no use. She called a young man in the Arts section, with whom she had had a dalliance.

“Jess.”

“Kelli, how you doing?”

“Okay. You’re a film buff, right?”

“Gee, how’d you guess? Could it be because I review them for the paper?”