It sounded like a good quote but it came from the wrong voice. The reality was that Treacher was an opportunistic weasel. I never bought that he was standing up for the community. I thought he was usually just standing up for himself, getting on TV and in the papers to further serve his celebrity and the benefits it brought. I had once suggested to an editor that we do an investigation of Treacher but was immediately shot down. The editor said, “No, Jack, we need him.”

And that was true. The paper needed people like Treacher to voice the contrarian view, to give the incendiary remark and get the fire burning.

“Sounds good,” I said to Angela. “I’ll let you get back to it and I’ll go up and write up a budget line for the other story.”

“Here,” she said.

She slid the short stack of papers across the table to me.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing, really, but it might save you some time. Last night before I went home I was thinking about the story after you told me what you were working on. I almost called you to talk more about it and suggest we work together. But I chickened out and went on Google instead. I checked out ‘trunk murder’ and found there is a long history of people ending up in the trunks of cars. A lot of women, Jack. And a lot of mob guys, too.”

I turned the pages over and looked at the top sheet. It was a printout of a Las Vegas Review-Journal story from almost a year earlier. The first paragraph told me it was about the conviction of a man charged with murdering his ex-wife, putting her body into the trunk of his car, and then parking it in his own garage.

“That’s just a story that sounded a little like yours,” she said. “There’s some others in there about historical cases. There’s a local one from the nineties where this movie guy was found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, which was parked on the hill above the Hollywood Bowl. And I even found a website called trunk murder dot com, but it’s still under construction.”

I nodded hesitantly.

“Uh, thanks. I’m not sure where all this might fit in but it’s good to be thorough, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

She pushed her chair back and picked up her empty cup.

“Well, okay, then. I’ll e-mail you a copy of today’s story as soon as I have it ready to send in.”

“You don’t have to do that. It’s your story now.”

“No, your name is going on it, too. You asked the questions that gave it good ol’ B and D.”