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a very average-looking woman with brown hair, a wide face, and wearing a predictable blue suit. “Did you notice all that makeup? I mean, it was caked on so thick it was falling off. At first I thought it was another one of them, another one of those drag queens. It wasn’t, was it?”
    A large man in the peak of condition, Lyle continued to scan the throng of people. To be sure, there was something odd about the woman, but it wasn’t her sex, of that he was confident.
    “No, it was a woman.”
    “God, then she looked like death warmed over.”
    Lyle, not a man of many words, nodded. That was what had caught his attention in the first place, her frail demeanor as well as the strange tone of her skin. And after the trouble that Clariton had had on the West coast—some AIDS activists had doused the congressman with a bucket of blood, which fortunately turned out to have been sterilized—Lyle was being especially alert. That, after all, was why Clariton’s publisher had decided to bring in someone like Lyle, just in case something like that happened again. As far as Lyle knew, though, there hadn’t been any threats here in Minneapolis.
    “Well, be alert.” Carol laughed, then kept her voice low as she said, “But you know, a lot of our people—the congressman’s strategists and so on—are hoping something else will happen. After those guys threw that crap on Congressman Clariton in San Francisco, his popularity soared. Do you realize he gained fifteen points in the polls overnight? Fifteen points! Christ, the publicity we got out of it was utterly phenomenal! You can’t buy coverage like that, believe me.”
    “No,” said Lyle, his eyes once again searching the crowd and hoping that nothing happened while he was in charge, “I suppose you can’t.”
    “It just goes to show,” continued Carol, glancing over at her hero as he signed book after book, “that Congressman Clariton is right: Good Americans are fed up with gays and their agenda, and the more shenanigans they pull, the more they prove him right. Wouldn’t you agree?”
    Spying two well-dressed men with short hair move oddly through the crowd—men he assumed were queer—Lyle said, “Excuse me.”
    As he stepped into the swarm of people he put his hand inside his sport coat, resting his fingers gently on the pistol that sat snugly in his shoulder holster. Did he agree with Clariton’s position on gays?
    If the congressman and his aide only knew.

4
     
    With all that had happened in the last year, Todd had wondered every now and then if he had lost it, his thirst for broadcast journalism. It used to be that he’d be up and going any time of day to scoop a story, particularly as the lead investigative reporter on WTCN’s CrimeEye report. Hoping to catch a crime of any kind on videotape, he and a photographer had chased around the city, following lead after lead, more often than not finding nothing, but sometimes hitting a bull’s-eye. He recalled the rush of capturing that guy as he broke into the jewelry store—his jaded girlfriend had called to tip off Todd—and the charge of filming the suspects in a cop killing as they got together to brag about their murderous caper. Oh, yes, and there’d been almost a dozen cats in trees, a few of which had proved to be interesting adventures.
    Then after Michael’s death there’d been the long, empty spell where nothing seemed to make a difference.
    No, what he’d lost professionally, Todd realized as he steered his dark-green Jeep Grand Cherokee to the studios of WLAK TV, wasn’t his thirst for broadcast journalism, but something else: his arrogance. Or at least more than he could afford. To be in this business you had to be controlled, you had to be supremely confident even if you sensed you were doomed for failure. You had to boast that you were going to get a shot of a judge buying cocaine when everyone thought it was sheer stupidity, then sit there in a van for three, four, five days, until