“Anything happening today that you know of?”

“Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”

“I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”

“Good.”

A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.

“Where’d you come from, Angela?”

“ Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”

“Good school. Journalism?”

“I got my master’s there, yeah.”

“Have you done any cop shop reporting?”

“Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a year on cops.”

I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.

“ St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a year?”

“If we were lucky.”

She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.

“Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year. Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you want to work crime. If you want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat comes up, you’re probably not going to like it.”

She shook her head.