I blinked.

“Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The Suburban, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.”

Oh God.

“We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr. Walker, what it might have been about?”

Sarah turned to look at me.

“Yes,” I said as evenly as I could. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“What is it, Zack?” Sarah asked.

“Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Walker.”

I cleared my throat. “I was out to Oakwood for lunch—well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.”

“Zack.”

“I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the Suburban. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.”

Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.

“Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.”

“She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.”

“That’s what journalists do,” Magnuson said. “We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.”

“That’s who called you, isn’t it?” Sarah said. “There was no call about a Star Trek convention.”

Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no, there was no call about a Star Trek convention.” I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything as newsworthy as a Star Trek convention in the future.

“It’s one thing to try to outsmart the competition when we’re trying to get a story that we want just as much as they do,” Magnuson said. “One time, when I was based in Washington, there was this little runt-nosed jackass from the paper out on the coast, doesn’t matter which one, kept shadowing me, figuring he had a better chance snooping on me and my sources than trying to cultivate any of his own. So I’m on a pay phone, and I know he’s just around the corner, but he doesn’t know that I know, and I ask for Rewrite, tell them I got a hell of a story about a particular congressman who was found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, and off he dashed. Then I told Rewrite we had to start again. Our paper didn’t have a story about a congressman found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, but his did.” He sniffed. “Never followed me around again after that.”