The first was maybe the thinnest woman she’d ever seen short of Ethiopian famine pictures on TV; the woman almost redefined the term “tiny.” Maybe five feet tall, weighing less than some people’s birth weights, dressed in jeans and a matching denim jacket, she was perhaps in her mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell for sure, with a creamy brown complexion and one of those Afro-American hairstyles that looked like the hair was exploding around the head.

The other was a tall, lanky man in jeans and cowboy boots with disheveled sandy brown hair and a ruddy complexion who needed only a stalk of wheat in his hand to be the perfect picture of somebody who’d just stepped off the farm.

“So, anyway, I told George—” the thin woman was saying in one of those big, too-full voices small people seemed to have or develop, when she saw the stranger and paused. “Oh! Hi! You must be Doctor Sutton!”

“Uh—yes. I—1 was beginning to think I was forgotten.”

The tiny woman sank into a chair. “Sorry about that. When stories happen this fast it’s always a mess, and this won’t be the last of it. I’m Theresa Perez—‘Terry’ to all— and this is, believe it or not, Gustav Olafsson, always ‘Gus.’ I’m what they euphemistically call a ‘producer,’ which means I’m supposed to make sure everything’s there that needs to be there and that the story gets done and gets back. It sounds important, but in the news biz it’s a glorified executive secretary to the reporter. Gus is that peculiar breed of creature—we’re not sure if they’re human or not— known as the ‘news photographer.’ The kind of fanatic who’ll insist on taping his own execution if it’ll get a good picture.”

“ ’Lo,” said the taciturn photographer. “They tell us it’ll be five or ten minutes and then we’ll board, taxi out, and wait two hours to get out of this damned mess,” Perez continued. “The traffic in this place is abominable. You know the saying, ‘A wicked man died, and the devil came and took him straight to hell—after, of course, changing in Atlanta.’ ”