“I won’t be around for dinner,” Angie said. “Late lecture, then I’m hanging out with some friends.”

“Me neither,” said Paul. “After school, a bunch of us are going to this thing, and then we’re getting something to eat, and then we’re doing this other thing. So like, I could use a bit of cash. ’Cause I don’t have a job anymore, you know.”

The kids vanished. Sarah and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, glanced at the headlines in the Metropolitan. I didn’t even read Dick Colby’s story about me and Trixie and her arrest in Martin Benson’s death. Instead, I went to the comics page and read Sherman’s Lagoon.

We were alone, together, and things just seemed so right. That morning seemed like the dawn of something much more than another day. It had the aura of a new beginning. Handcuffed in a basement with a corpse, duct-taped in a barn in Kelton, tossed about by cops in a dead-of-night raid—all these things seemed like distant memories.

Things were good.

I should have savored the moment even more. It wasn’t going to last.

CHAPTER 32

32

ONCE I’D SEEN SARAH off to work and was dressed, I hopped into Trixie’s car (I had to sort out this business of getting my car back from Kelton, maybe on the weekend) and drove to Bayside Park. I pulled into the same spot I’d been in three days earlier. I didn’t feel the need, this time, to put Lawrence on alert. The first time, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Brian Sandler, but felt confident now that he posed no personal risk to me.

I looked out over the lake, switched on the radio. It was a phone-in show, where everyday nincompoops got to sound off on important political matters because it was considerably cheaper to produce a radio show that relied on nincompoops rather than people who actually knew what they were talking about.

We’d agreed to meet at nine, and I’d arrived five minutes early. I’d brought along a notebook to take down more information from him, as well as the scrap of paper on which I’d jotted down his various phone numbers.

I wondered what the hell I was doing.

I was on suspension. I wasn’t even sure I was going back. Yet here I was, waiting to meet with a man who had a hell of a story to tell, a story that couldn’t help but end up getting splashed across page one. Provided, of course, Bertrand Magnuson allowed me to write it.

My original thinking had been that I could use this story as leverage to get my job back. And not just any job, but my feature-writing job in the newsroom.