Back out on the street, the media gang was peeling away. But the camera guys were still there. And two remote television news trucks were still on the sidewalk. That meant the body was also still there and hadn't been moved and nothing with more violence or potential for blood had hit the police scanners in South Florida this morning. They were all waiting for the shot of the body bag being loaded into the medical examiner's black SUV, the shot that would inevitably lead the local news.

Nick made two stops on his way back to the newsroom. First to the coffee shop on the ground floor of his building, where he picked up a large with cream and sugar and then stood in the lobby letting the caffeine hit the back of his brain for a few minutes. When half the coffee was gone, he rode the elevator up and went the back way to the library and talked quietly to Lori.

"I shipped a bunch of stuff to your queue, Nick," she said. "Was it him?"

"They're not letting it loose officially yet," he said. "But I think my source is good. What I want to do now is get some kind of an M.O. thing going. Can you do a search first locally and then nationwide on shootings, homicides that involved rifles and that might have been described as sniper-type shootings?"

Lori was writing on a pad. "Pretty broad, but yeah, we can do all the South Florida media. National is going to take some time. We can do most of the online newspaper archives and the Associated Press stuff. How far back do you want to go?"

"Two, three years," Nick said. "No, make it four."

She looked up from her pad over the top of her frameless reading glasses. "You've got an editor's approval on this, don't you, Nick?"

In the corporate world of news gathering, computer search time was money. Somebody had to be held responsible for every dime spent. Nick knew that. Lori knew that.

"Yeah," he said. "Deirdre."

Lori was still looking over her lenses. "My ass," she said.