Empty and giddy, Catherine felt a pleasant little jolt of lust. She had seen and thought too much of death to deny that positive celebration of life.

“Better?” Randall asked, with a fair assumption of gravity.

“Yes, thank you,” she answered with dignity.

He handed her the beer can. Catherine took a sizeable swallow. Her eyes were on his face-a Slavic peasant face, she thought darkly-as he looked around the room, zeroed in on her arrangement in the bay window. The soft chair with the dent her body had left, the paperback with a bookmark thrust inside, the lamp pulled over close to her chair surrounded by a litter of books: it looked like what it was, the habitual den of a solitary person. From where she was sitting now, Catherine thought, it looked pitiful.

“If you heard so fast,” she said hastily, “then…”

An impatient knock on the back door finished her sentence.

“Tom,” Catherine said simply.

She was regretting the end of a promising moment as she went through the den at the rear of the house to answer the knock.

As she had predicted, it was Tom, her only full-time fellow reporter. His long lean frame bisected the doorway.

“Are you all right” he asked perfunctorily. His mouth had already opened to begin firing questions when Catherine cut him short.

“You might as well come on in the living room, Randall’s in there,” she said.

Tom looked almost comically taken aback.

Catherine, bowled over by giddiness, nearly laughed as she preceded Tom into the living room.

“Hey, Randall,” he said casually, folding his length into an uncomfortable Victorian rosewood chair. Then he forgot to be offhand. “The coroner’s jury said murder, of course. And a Gazette reporter found the body! Jesus, what a story!” He yanked his fearsome Fu Manchu mustache so fiercely that Catherine thought he might pull the hair out.