"You miss it?"

I had to ask him, just to be polite.

"Not yet. Every now and then a good story comes along and I wish I was in there with everybody else, looking for the odd angle. But it can run you ragged."

He was lying and I think he knew I knew it. He wanted to go back.

"Yeah, I'm beginning to feel it some myself" I returned the lie, just to make him feel better, if that was possible.

"So what about police suicides? What's your angle'?"

He looked at his watch.

"Well, it wasn't a breaking story until a couple days ago.

Now it is. I know you only have a few minutes but I can explain it pretty quickly. I just ... I don't want to be insulting but I'd like for you to promise me what I say here is in confidence. It's my story and when it's ready, I'm going to break it."

He nodded.

"Don't worry, I understand completely. I won't discuss whatever it is you are going to tell me with any other journalist unless that other journalist specifically asks about the same thing. I may have to talk about it with other people here at the foundation or in law enforcement, for that matter. I can't make any promise in that regard until I know what we are talking about."

"That's fair."

I felt myself trusting him. Maybe because it is always easy to trust somebody who has done what you have done.

I also think I liked telling what I'd learned to somebody who would know its value as a story. It was a form of bragging ana I wasn't above it. I started.

"At the start of this week I began working on a story about police suicide. I know, it's been done before. But I had a new angle. My brother was a cop and a month ago he supposedly committed suicide. "Oh, Jesus, I am sorry."

"thank you, but I didn't bring it up for that reason. I decided to write about it because I wanted to understand what he had done, what the police in Denver said he had done. I went through the routine, pulled clips on a Nexis search I and, naturally, I came up with a couple references to the foundation's study."

He tried to surreptitiously look at his watch and I decided to get his attention.

"To make a long story short, in trying to find out why he killed himself I found out he didn't."

I looked at him. I had his attention.

"What do you mean, he didn't?"

"My investigation has so far determined that my brother's suicide was a carefully disguised murder. Someone killed him. The case has been reopened. I have also linked it to a supposed cop suicide last year in Chicago. That one also has been reopened. I just came in from there this morning. The cops in Chicago and Denver and I think that somebody might be moving around the country killing cops and making it look like suicide. The key to finding the other cases may be in the information collected for the foundation's study. Don't you have all the records on cop suicides for the whole country over the last five years?"