I promised Glenn I'd call if anything developed and hung up. I paced around the room for a while and I have to ,-Idmit I was thinking about the possibilities, too. I was -hinking about the profile this story could give me. It could definitely get me out of Denver if I wanted it to. Maybe to )ne of the big three. L.A., New York, Washington. To Chicago or Miami, at the least. Then beyond that, I even began to think about a publishing deal. True crime was a major market. I shook it off, embarrassed. It's lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We'd all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

I needed to get out of the room but couldn't leave because of the phone. I turned on the TV and it was just a bunch of competing talk shows serving up the usual daily selection of white trash stories. Children of strippers on one channel, porno stars whose spouses were jealous on another and men who thought women should be kept in line with occasional beatings on a third. I turned it off and thought of an idea. All I had to do was leave the room, I decided. it would guarantee that Warren would call because I wouldn't be there to take the call. It worked every time. I just hoped he would leave a message.

The hotel was on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle. I walked toward the circle and stopped into Mystery Books to buy a book called Multiple Wounds by Alan Russell. I'd read a good review of it somewhere and figured reading would take my mind off things.

Before going back into the Hilton I spent a few minutes walking around the outside of the hotel looking for the spot where Hinckley had waited with a gun for Reagan. I remembered the pictures of the chaos vividly but I couldn't find the spot. It made me think the hotel had made some renovations, maybe so that the spot didn't become a tourist destination.

As a police reporter I was a tourist of the macabre. I moved from murder to murder, horror to horror without blinking an eye. Supposedly. As I walked back in through the lobby toward the bank of elevators I thought about what this said about me. Maybe something was wrong with me.

Why was the spot where Hinckley waited important to me?

"Jack?"

I turned around at the elevators. It was Michael Warren.

"Hey.

"I called your room . . . I thought you might be around."

"I was just taking a walk. I was beginning to give up on you.19 I said it with a smile and a lot of hope. This moment would determine a lot of things for me. He was no longer in the suit he had on at his office. It was blue jeans and a Sweater. He had a long tweed coat over his arm. He was following the pattern of a confidential source, coming in person rather than leaving a possible phone record.