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seven-year-old Jane Doe. But he did, almost three months later, in the public graveyard where he had put so many faceless, nameless men.
    Walker was there for the burial. He brought along a photographer from the Trib, and they covered the funeral just as if the little girl had been someone important. They were the only press there. It had long since become Walker’s story, worked in around his other assignments in brief ten-minute snatches of his day. Kanin kept him busy, and Walker on his own had turned up some good stuff. But the little girl was always with him. He had made daily phone checks with the coroner for three months, and now called the man by his Christian name. Walker knew the progress of the case as he knew few other things on this earth. Huge blocks of story, still unwritten but formed whole in his mind, were dammed up just under the surface. They needed only a lead to bring them out. Now Walker had his lead. It was a sad story, a crier, not the kind of thing he had envisioned when he had adopted it three months earlier, but a good tale nonetheless. Anything with that much mystery and pathos had to, as Hiram Byrnes put it, read like a bastard.
    Walker gave it his best shot. The afternoon of the funeral he stayed late in the newsroom, working and reworking the paragraphs for just the right effect. He was writing for one reader only: the lady or man who had brought a kid to see the circus, then disappeared as if the kid had never existed. That person was out there somewhere, watching the paper for his stuff. Walker was sure of that. One day about a week after the fire he had written a short piece, not really worth a byline, but they had given him one anyway. They were so anxious to get his name in the paper that they would have put it on the little girl’s obit if he had written that. As if anyone outside the news business gave a damn. But it served a purpose, got him established in someone’s mind as the guy covering the little girl thing. Late that afternoon a call came in for him through city desk. Kanin transferred it, but when Walker turned on his phone, no one answered. He was about to flip off the switch when he realized that someone was there. He heard breathing, then a squeaking noise like a phone booth door being opened. A car horn blew and the person hung up. He took off his headset and went over to the desk.
    “That caller I just had. Did they say anything?”
    “Just asked for you,” Kanin said.
    “Didn’t give any name?”
    “Just yours.”
    “Was it a man or a woman?”
    Kanin blinked as if, in the heat of a busy day, he was having trouble remembering a call that had come through less than three minutes ago. Finally he said, “Woman.”
    “What’d she sound like? Young or old?”
    “How am I supposed to know?”
    “Was her voice soft or hard?”
    “Jesus, Walker.” Kanin sat back in his swivel chair and studied him. “It was soft, I guess. Sounded young, but how can you tell from just two words? I mean, Christ, that’s all she said to me. Just your name.”
    Late that night, he had gotten another call at home. It was a transfer from the Tribune switchboard, coming in about ten o’clock. This time there was no background noise at all, just a hint that someone was there, like the scent of old perfume on pages of a book. “Is this about the little girl in the fire?” he said. Immediately the phone went dead.
    In all these weeks the caller hadn’t contacted him again, but he knew she was there, watching the paper. He had written two more little girl pieces, each briefer than the one before, each containing fewer facts and less hope. On both pieces, in what must have been taken up front as incredible arrogance and conceit, he had typed in his own byline, removing what was normally the editor’s prerogative. They had let them go through that way, though the last story had quickly become a newsroom joke. Containing a scant six graphs of copy, it looked top-heavy and ridiculous with