"I…" He hesitated and continued. "I knew."

"How did you know she was dead?"

"I… I clapped."

Nikki couldn't help herself. The laugh shot out of her with a mind all its own. She was angry at herself for it, but the thing about a laugh like that was you couldn't take it back. You could only work to suppress the next one. "You… you clapped?"

"Uh huh. Loud, you know… to see. Hey, don't laugh, maybe she was asleep, or drunk, I didn't know." He waited while Heat composed herself. And then a chuckle of his own fought its way out. "It wasn't like applause. Just…"

"A clap." She watched the way the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and she started to thaw in a way she didn't like, so she threw the switch. "How did you know the victim?" she said to her notepad.

"I've been working with her the past few weeks."

"You're becoming a gossip columnist now?"

"Oh, hell, no. I sold First Press on the idea of doing my next piece for them on Cassidy Towne. Not so much the titillating gossip thing but profiling a powerful woman in a historically male-dominated business, our love-hate relationship with secrets, you get the idea. Anyway, I've been shadowing Cassidy for the past few weeks."

"Shadowing. You mean like…" She let it fall off. This took Nikki down an all-too-uncomfortable road.

"Like the ride-along you and I had, yes. Exactly. Without the sex." He paused to read her reaction, and Nikki did her best not to let it show. "The editors got such a good response to my piece on you, they wanted to follow up with another like it, maybe turn it into an occasional series on kick-ass women." He studied her again, got nothing, then added, "It was a nice article, Nik, wasn't it?"

She tapped the tip of the ballpoint twice on the pad. "Were you here to do that today? Shadow her?"

"Yeah, she got an early start every day, or maybe just continued from the night before, I could never tell. Some mornings I'd show up and she'd be at her desk in the same clothes as the day before, like she'd been working there all night. She'd want to stretch her legs so we'd walk up to H amp;H for some bagels and then next door to Zabar's for the salmon and cream cheese, and then come back here."