“So give me the ball,” Neal said to Anne.

Jim coughed rhetorically. “Anne, these are the detectives.”

Anne Kelley blushed. “Oh, shit. Shit! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I thought you were writers, pitching a project!”

Something the cat dragged in.

“I’m Anne Kelley,” she repeated. “Cody’s mother.”

“And head of Creative,” Neal said.

“You’re the guys that Ethan Kitteredge sent,” she continued. “You’re going to find Cody.”

“We’re going to try,” Graham said.

“Ethan said that you’re very, very good.”

“Probably just very good,” Neal said as Graham gave him a dirty look, “but maybe not very, very good.”

“I’m really sorry,” Anne said. “I didn’t mean to mistake you for writers.”

“That’s all right,” Graham said charitably.

“So where do we start?” Anne asked.

Jim started to write.

“Hold on, Boswell,” Neal said. “No notes.”

“Jim memorializes all my meetings.”

Memorializes? Neal thought. “That’s nice,” he said, “but notes have a funny way of showing up in funny places, like newspapers.”

Anne stiffened. “I trust Jim implicitly.”

Neal looked over at Jim. “No offense. I’m sure you’d never deliberately betray the queen here-”

“Neal, shut up,” Graham said.

“-but unless you have a shredder, or unless you take your notes on single pages on a hard surface, it’s better not to take them. I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve made-unfortunately-going through someone’s trash, or sneaking into someone’s office to look at the impressions left on a notepad or a desk blotter-”

“Neal…” Graham warned.

“Well, you taught me all this stuff, Graham,” Neal answered. He turned back to Jim. “Besides, you don’t need notes. I need the notes, and I keep them in my head. You want anything ‘memorialized,’ give me a call and I’ll recite it to you, okay?”