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want to kill him?”
    “How should I know? Maybe you killed him because he was doing it with someone else.”
    “Probably was. That was his M.O.”
    “I don’t know anything about his M.O.,” I said.
    “Do you really think I killed him?” she asked.
    “I don’t know what to think.”
    “Look, Robert, the reason you should believe me when I say I didn’t kill him is the same reason I believe you. Faith in each other.”
    There was a small silence as I considered what she had said. It was true that there was no particular reason for her to believe me. No more than my reason for wanting to believe her.
    I was starting to feel overwhelmed again.
    “Maybe,” I said, “we should see Oscar another day.”
    Jenna got up, came over, and sat down next to me. She put her arm around me. Rather gently, I thought. “Robert, after you get a grip, I think it will actually help you to meet with Oscar today. We need to get a strategy in place quickly, and that will make you feel better.”
    “What’s the rush? Why don’t we just wait and see what happens?”
    “We can’t wait. The police were already here asking to interview you again. I told them you were sick. So we have to get going on figuring out a strategy.”
    I looked down at my tie. “Okay, but before we go downtown I need to change my tie. There’s a spot of coffee on it.”
    “I can’t see a spot.”
    “It’s there.”
    “Okay, okay. Change it and we’ll go.”
    I got up and headed to the bedroom to get a clean tie. One without a damn spot on it.
     
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    The drive to the office was not as bad as I had feared.
    Jenna pulled her car slowly out of the garage, and the Blob parted, just as she had said it would. Jenna drives a Toyota Land Cruiser. Whatever its political and environmental correctness, it is big and high. High enough that the reporters moving alongside the car as we inched down the driveway had to peer across at me, instead of down at me. Jenna had instructed me to look straight ahead, and I did. The flashes were annoying, but at least they weren’t in my eyes.
    I had expected the Blob to follow us, but it didn’t. I still had a lot to learn about blob behavior. Among other things, I hadn’t yet learned that there was more than one blob. I would learn that later.
    The first few minutes of the drive, neither of us said a thing. We just watched the trees go by as we wound our way down the canyon. It’s not a road you can take at much more than thirty-five. Finally, as Jenna exited the canyon onto city streets and headed to the freeway, I broke the silence.
    “May I ask you something?”
    “Sure.”
    “Where’d you learn how to deal with the media? In the trials we’ve done together, the courtroom has always been empty. Zero press interest. They certainly didn’t teach you that in law school.”
    “You’ve forgotten who my father was.”
    “Senator James. Democrat of Ohio.”
    “Right. Do you remember the scandal?”
    “Not well.”
    “Accused by political enemies of taking bribes when he was on the Cleveland City Council. Accusations leaked two weeks before he stood for election to a second term in the Senate. I was twelve. When the media mob—and Blob really is a great name for it—materialized in front of our house, my mother was terrified by it. My father was enraged by it.
    “And you?”
    “For some reason I found it fascinating. So I became the family blob expert. I took coffee out to them. I chatted them up. As a twelve-year-old girl who hadn’t yet reached puberty, I could go out and do that without becoming a camera target. Today, it might be different. But back then, news directors weren’t about to put images of a guy’s daughter on the news. It would have crossed the line. So I learned what you might call the Way of the Blob without being devoured by it.”
    “That’s how you knew it wouldn’t block our car?”
    “Yes. I even learned when and how to feed it.”
    “Meaning exactly