Your ego dictated that your story and your skill in telling it would make the ladder of editors who read it realize it was too good to be anything less than what you had turned in, no matter what edition it was written for.

The first edit I made was to take my name off the byline.

“Why, Jack?” Angela protested. “We reported this together.”

“Yeah, but you wrote it. You get the byline.”

She reached over to the keyboard and put her hand on top of my right hand.

“Please, I would like to have a byline with you. It would mean a lot to me.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Angela, this is a twelve-inch story they’re probably going to cut to eight and bury inside. It’s just another murder story and it doesn’t need a double byline.”

“But it’s my first murder story here at the Times and I want your name on it.”

She still had her hand on mine. I shrugged and nodded.

“Suit yourself.”

She let go of my hand and I typed my name back into the byline. She then reached over again and held my right hand once more.

“Is this the one that got hurt?”

“Uh…”

“Can I see?”

I turned my hand over, exposing the starburst scar in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. It was the place the bullet had passed through before hitting the killer they called the Poet in the face.

“I saw that you don’t use your thumb when you type,” she said.

“The bullet severed a tendon and I had surgery to reattach it but my thumb’s never really worked right.”

“What’s it feel like?”

“It feels normal. It just doesn’t do what I want it to do.”

She laughed politely.

“What?”

“I meant, what’s it feel like to kill somebody like that?”

The conversation was getting weird. What was the fascination this woman—this girl—had with killing?

“Uh, I don’t really like to talk about that, Angela. It was a long time ago and it wasn’t like I killed the guy. He kind of brought it on himself. He wanted to die, I think. He fired the gun.”

“I love serial killer stories but I had never heard about the Poet until some people said something about it today at lunch and then I Googled it. I’m going to get the book you wrote. I heard it was a bestseller.”

“Good luck. It was a bestseller ten years ago. It’s now been out of print at least five years.”

I realized that if she had heard about the book at lunch, then people were talking about me. Talking about the former bestseller, now overpaid cop shop reporter, getting the pink slip.

“Well, I bet you have a copy I could borrow,” Angela said.

She gave me a pouting look. I studied her for a long moment before responding. In that moment I knew she was some sort of death freak. She wanted to write murder stories because she wanted the details they don’t put in the articles and the TV reports.