family where they’d sent him? I’m running now-hot interview with local chief’s third wife’s oldest son. Fill you in later.)

I was a little miffed at being treated like a free research station. I’d never thought of Morrell as an adrenaline junkie-one of those journalists who lives on the high of being in the middle of disaster-but I sent him a snappish e-mail asking him what he was trying to prove.

“Over a dozen Western journalists have been murdered since the war began,” I wrote at one point. “Every time I turn on the television, I brace myself for the worst.”

His e-response zipped back within minutes: “Victoria, my beloved detective, if I come home tomorrow, will you faithfully promise to withdraw from every investigation where I worry about your safety?”

A message which made me angrier because I knew he was right-I was being manipulative, not playing fair. I needed to see him, though, touch him, hear him-live, not in cyberspace.

I took to wearing myself out running. I certainly wore out the two dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor: they started retreating to Mr. Contreras’s bedroom when they saw me arrive in my sweats.

Despite my long runs-I’d go ten miles most days, instead of my usual five or six-I couldn’t wear myself out enough to sleep. I lost ten pounds in the six months after the Trade Center, which worried my downstairs neighbor: Mr. Contreras took to frying up French toast and bacon when I came in from my runs, and finally bullied me into going to Lotty Herschel for a complete physical. Lotty said I was fine physically, just suffering as so many were from exhaustion of the spirit.

Whatever name you gave it, I only had half a mind for my work these days. I specialize in financial and industrial crime. It used to be that I spent a lot of time on foot, going to government buildings to look at records, doing physical surveillance and so on. But in the days of the Internet, you traipse from website to website. You need to be able to concentrate in front of a computer for long hours, and concentration wasn’t something I was good at right now.