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lens.
    Couples in shorts and T-shirts, holding hands the way they did when on their own in a strange place, took in the sights. Locals in casual or business attire entered and exited Bank of Soledad, First American Title, State Farm Insurance, Redwood Cleaners, and Tuttle Drugs. Children, on some sort of field trip from grade school, walked in line behind their teacher, clutching at a colorful braided rope like a litter of puppies on a lead. Old men lounged on a bench in a park by a stone-walled well—presumably one of the seven that had been poisoned over a century before. Several women in flowered dresses sipped cappuccino at a wrought-iron table in front of the Wells Mercantile. At the post office, newspaper racks were lined up on the sidewalk: everything from the
New York Times
to the
Soledad Spectrum.
    He bought a copy of the local paper and, at the Mercantile, an area map. Then he walked over to the park and sat down on a bench by the well to study both. The front section of the
Spectrum
was devoted to county news; national and world items off the wire services and syndicated material filled the second; the third covered the arts. Nowhere was Ardis Coleman’s byline. He turned to the op-ed page, and immediately his eye was drawn to a boxed ad at its bottom.
    Wanted: General assignment photographer for
Soledad Spectrum.
Small paper experience, references required. See C. McGuire, 1101 Main Street.
    Sheer coincidence? Fate? He didn’t believe in either, yet a chill was on his spine.
    Photographer? Yes.
    Small-paper experience, references? No.
    But those he could acquire.
    After half an hour on the phone to Port Regis, making explanations to Millie Bertram that were at best half-truths and giving instructions that she carefully wrote down and repeated, Matt stepped through the door of the
Soledad Spectrum.
An unmanned reception desk confronted him, flanked on its left by a gated railing barring access to the area behind. Four computer workstations, three of them unoccupied, filled the rest of the room, and a trio of closed doors led to the rear of the building. When Matt came in, a slender, dark-haired man who was pounding on a keyboard at the station farthest from the reception desk glanced up and snapped, “Help you?”
    “I’m looking for C. McGuire.”
    “You’re the only one, buddy. Carly’s on a tear, and everybody but me has taken off early for a long lunch. I’d’ve gone to earth, too, if I didn’t have to finish this goddamn story on the new logging regs.” He lifted his hands from the keyboard, flopped them beside it in an exaggerated gesture of helplessness. “But my manners—where are they?”
    “You tell me.”
    The man smiled and got up, came over to the rail, and extended a hand. “Severin Quill, police/political reporter. Don’t laugh at the name. It’s ridiculous, but few people forget it.”
    “John Crowe, wanna-be general assignment photographer.”
    “All right!” Severin Quill’s mouth quirked up. He was no more than twenty-five, with a puckish face and, apparently, a sense of humor to match. “You just may be our salvation, Mr. Crowe. One—though by no means all—of the reasons for Carly’s bearish mood is the defection of our former photographer. He took off last week without a word of notice. Not that I blame him.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Because on her best of days Carly McGuire is a pain in the ass to work for. I feel duty-bound to warn you of that before you go back there”—he jerked his thumb at one of the closed doors—“into the harpy’s nest.”
    “So why are you here?”
    “Because to any newspaper person worth his or her salt, Carly’s standards and expectations are challenges others only dream of.”
    “Then maybe I’ll take my chances.”
    The first word Matt heard out of Carly McGuire’s mouth was
“What!”
    Loud, even through the closed door, and very irritated. But also low-timbred and sultry—the kind they used to call a “whiskey