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newsroom was its usual charming self. As I walked in from the back staircase past the darkroom I
     heard O’Shaunessey, the world’s loudest sports editor, reaming out one of the photo interns. “I don’t give a goddamn rat’s
     ass if it’s art. I told you to shoot the goddamn fucking football game, not the motherfucking thrill of victory on the quarterback’s
     grandmother’s goddamn fucking face. You didn’t get one single goddamn picture of the goddamn
game
. What am I supposed to run tomorrow?
Shut
your mouth. If you say ‘art’ another son of a bitching time I swear I’m gonna…” It went on like that for some time. I kept
     walking. With O’Shaunessey, it ends as quickly as itstarts. He’d be buying the kid a beer by the end of the night.
    At one end of the city desk, the schools reporter was grilling whatever pour soul was on the other end of the phone. Lillian
     is in her early seventies; she came back to the paper two and a half years ago after retirement nearly killed her with kindness,
     and picked up her old beat when I moved over to politics. I have to admit she’s way better at it than I was; her interviewing
     style is affectionately known as “silent but deadly.” “Now, really, Mr. Superintendent, I understand how you feel. It’s a
     terrible position you’re in. My stars, it certainly is a pickle. But what can we do? The charges have been made… Now, sir,
     really. I don’t want to pry. But you have children in that school yourself. A third- and a fifth-grader, isn’t that right?
     Please put your professional position aside for a moment. As a parent, wouldn’t you want—wouldn’t you
deserve
—some concrete information about what’s going on?” She must be working on the Cub Scout ass-grabbing story. If I knew Lillian,
     she’d break him in under three minutes. Someday I have to get her to give me lessons.
    My desk is one over from hers. We sit in a block of four cityside reporters, schools and politics across from cops and science.
     It may sound odd that at a paper our size we have a full-time science reporter, but academia and research are big business,
     and this is a company town. Benson University is the major employer in the county, and every reporter at the paper covers
     it in some way. Mad does all the high-tech stuff, I do town-gown, the cops guy covers the various schoolboy antics, and so
     on.
    When I got to my digs I found that somebody (or probably everybody) had taped a mock-up of Monday’s frontpage to one of the poles that do their best to hold up the newsroom ceiling. The original headline had been SECOND BODY FOUND IN NEWFIELD with the subhead FIRST VICTIM STILL UNIDENTIFIED; POLICE WIDEN SEARCH . This one read BERNIER FINDS NAKED DEAD CHICK: “WHERE’S THE GUYS AT?” ASKS HORNY NEWSHOUND . I would have been pissed, if whoever did it hadn’t also left me a very large chocolate cupcake.
    I’d just sat down and started peeling the paper off the cupcake when Bill called me into his office. He did this by throwing
     a tennis ball at his Plexiglas window and catching it on the rebound, a habit that new hires tend to find alarming. I brought
     my cupcake with me. “Bernier, you look great.”
    “Is that on the record?”
    “Okay, you look like hell.”
    “Mad’s sentiments exactly.”
    “I was just talking to Junior here about the story.” He jerked his tennis ball toward the kid, who flinched as though he was
     going to get beaned. Junior’s real name is Franklin, and his regular expression is Bambi-in-head-lights. He’s got pinkish
     skin, and freckles, and patches of acne that wax and wane with his deadlines. There’s a newsroom pool going on how long he’ll
     last; my betting slip says September 1.
    “What’s up?”
    “Cops called a press conference for eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
    “Eight? But that’ll blow our deadline. TV’ll get it a whole day earlier.”
    “That’s the idea.”
    “They’re not playing nice? What