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Wendy sang with a grin. “Wanted to see if you were paying attention.”
    “Barely. I’m on autopilot. Would you leave the numbers on my desk? I’ll give it a shot—nothing to lose.”
    “By the way, did you know that a few of our competition are so desperate on this one that they called here to get a statement from
you,
since you actually talked with the man this morning. Wanted your reaction, et cetera. We respectfully declined on your behalf.”
    “Thank you,” Maxi deadpanned. Then, as an afterthought, she turned from the edit-room monitors and looked squarely at Wendy. “
We
would never resort to something that shabby, would we?”
    “Sure we would,” her producer tossed off. “If we had nothing else to go with.”
    “What a business,” Maxi muttered with an edge of distaste.
    “You
love
it.”
    “Ya, but … jeeesh, what a business.”
    Wendy went out into the newsroom, and Maxi turned her attention back to Jack Worth, her editor. She planned to cut a version of her Carter Rose story for the Four, another version for the Five, and run the entire piece on her Six O’clock News. Then go home, feed Yukon, do her forty-five minutes on the treadmill, and collapse.
    The phone rang; Worth snatched it up. “For you, Max,” the editor said, handing over the receiver. “It’s Wendy.”
    “Hey girl, you don’t get enough of me?” Maxi quipped.
    “You’re not gonna freaking
believe
this,” Wendy said. “Carter Rose has called a news conference for tomorrow—it just moved on the wires. And you’re on it—Capra put out the assignment sheet himself.”
    “So the mountain is coming to Mohammed,” Maxi said.

7
    I n the news at the top of the hour—”
    “Oh,
shut up,
” Maxi groaned at the clock-radio. After her sixteen-hour workday yesterday, 7 A.M. came much too early.
    “. . . three people killed in a head-on collision on the Santa Ana Freeway in the city of Norwalk—”
    Maxi put a pillow over her head and held it there with one hand while groping for the snooze bar with the other. Couldn’t find the damn thing. She gave up, dropping her hand over the side of the bed. Until somebody started licking it.
    “No, Yukon,
puh-leeeze,
give me a break. Five more minutes . . .”
    No way. The boy wanted breakfast. Heaving a big sigh, she dropped the pillow on the floor, then dropped her feet to the carpet and sat up.
    “. . . business news: On the big board, stock in Rose International, the giant health-products company based in Los Angeles, took a big hit this morning, opening at eighty-seven at the bell, now down to seventy-nine, and the trading day is still young … Wall Street reacting to the death yesterday of its co-founder and co-CEO, thirty-seven-year-old Gillian Rose, the wife of—
    Maxi stared at the clock-radio. Whoa, a normal business reaction? she wondered. It wouldn’t seem so, certainly not if the company was healthy. Maybe Carter Rose would have something to say about the company’s stock dive at his news conference this morning; the press would be all over him about that. Rose had to have taken a hit in his own personal fortune, she considered. Then again, he no longer had a wife he had to split that fortune with.
    Somebody was licking her ankle now. “Okay, Yuke, I give up.” She hauled herself off the bed. Had to take the guy for a walk. Then breakfast, then suit up, race to the office, check the wires, see what’s doing, then team up with her crew and drive back over to the Westside for the Carter Rose news conference.
    Odd, she mused, that the man had called a major press conference at his Beverly Hills home instead of at the company headquarters downtown. Even if he was in a state of devastation over his wife’s death, she couldn’t imagine why he would want to let a gang of rowdy newspeople invade his personal space and trample all over his petunias. Oh, well, she’d find out soon enough—this morning’s parley was set for ten-thirty. Meantime, she would surf the Net