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What’s your name? Why are you calling me?”
    “She’s bleeding.” The voice rose higher. “Outside! The lady is bleeding! You have to help!”
    “A lady is bleeding? Who is she?”
    “The lady! The lady with the phone. I don’t know her name. You have to come now! Now!” The little voice edged toward hysteria.
    Lacey’s stomach did a flip. “Calm down.” She said it for her self as well as for the voice on the phone. “Who are you? Why do you have her phone?”
    “You have to come now! She could die!”
    “All right. I’m coming, but where? You have to tell me where.”
    “Outside! You have to hurry!”
    Lacey grabbed her evening bag, her garment bag, and her tote with one hand, the phone glued to her ear. She opened the ladies’ room door with one elbow.
    “It’ll be all right. Just tell me where you are.” “Outside! The alley. Are you inside?”
    She dashed down the hall to her desk in the newsroom and dropped her baggage. The newsroom was nearly empty, though
     
    there was some lastgasp activity in some of the offices ringing the large room. She saw Mac on the phone in his office. She grabbed the soft chocolate brown mouton coat that had been Aunt Mimi’s and headed for the newsroom door.
    “Are you still there? Stay where you are. Maybe I should call the police.”
    “No! You can’t. You can’t call the police!” the voice screamed. “You have to come.”
    Lacey raced past the notoriously unreliable elevators to the stairway exit. She slipped off her blue velvet high heels, scoop ing them up with one hand, and sped down several flights of stairs and into the lobby of the newspaper. She paused for a mo ment in front of the elaborate Christmas tree, decorated in gold balls and bows and white lights, to put her shoes back on.
    “Are you with Cassandra?” she asked the voice on the phone. “Is that who’s hurt? Where are you now?”
    “I’m with the lady. She came out of the building and got hurt. In the alley. Hurry!”
    Lacey stepped outside the front door of The Eye and took a moment to get her bearings before heading toward the alley. She caught her breath and tugged her jacket on while juggling her phone from hand to hand. Words from angry emails came back to her. “Watch your back, Miss HighandMighty. . . .” She looked around.
    Indian summer had lingered far into the fall. In December, the golden days still were comfortable with the kiss of sun shine. Washington had yet to see a single snowflake, but the nights were chilly and crisp in anticipation of winter. Lacey heard a Salvation Army bell somewhere in the distance. Behind it, sirens near and far were everpresent on the city’s sound track, and the air was thick with diesel exhaust from the city buses, reminding her she was in the busy District of Columbia. There were two main exits from The Eye ’s building, one in the parking garage, which opened to the alley, and the front doors that faced Farragut Square across Eye Street to the north. The Square was a block of neat green park with diagonal walk ways converging on the statue of Admiral David Farragut at its center. Lacey noticed the white Christmas lights twinkling at the entrance of the Army and Navy Club, which faced the park on its east side. Lacey assumed from the stream of formally
     
    dressed couples passing through the Square that the very ele gant club was the scene of a Christmas party that night.
    There was another population in the Square, in striking con trast to the fancydress partygoers. Homeless people began to claim the park benches at dusk to store their meager belongings for a few hours, or for the night. Several of them seemed to live in makeshift leantos attached to the benches. Lacey noticed a middleaged black man with a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows, standing by a bench right across the street from The Eye , wrapped in a quilted sleeping bag. His name was Quentin and he was a regular. He seemed to be gathering his belongings, perhaps