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you.”
    “I’ll check into that as well.”
    She raised her eyebrows and smiled thinly; the expression bordered on insulting.
    “Anything else, Mr. Justice?”
    “Did the detectives check the boy’s hands for powder traces?”
    The muscles tightened in her graceful neck, and her eyelids fluttered rapidly. She may have been a good reporter, well educated, smart, ambitious; but she was twenty-five, and she was still green.
    “I’m referring to gunpowder,” I said.
    “Yes, I know what you’re referring to.” Then: “I…I didn’t ask them that.”
    “Well, it’s an easy question to overlook,” I said, as smoothly as I could. “Especially given the confession.”
    She sat forward and placed her hands firmly on Harry’s big desk.
    “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Justice. If I make a mistake, I’ll live with it.”
    The remark might have had a double meaning, aimed right at me; or maybe not.
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll be more careful. On one condition.”
    “Which is?”
    “That you promise not to call me Mr. Justice.”
    She looked at me quizzically, as only someone so young would. “It makes me feel Harry’s age,” I explained. “And I’m not quite there yet.”
    I expected at least a smile; she wouldn’t give me even that.
    We agreed to address each other by our last names, then spent another twenty minutes discussing the murder of Billy Lusk, choosing our words and tone of voice carefully.
    I conceded that Gonzalo Albundo clearly looked guilty, but reminded her that it never hurt to poke around with off-target questions, what Harry liked to call “fishing.”
    “But if Gonzalo Albundo didn’t do it,” she asked, “why would he confess?”
    “Why is always the most interesting question, isn’t it? And always the most difficult to answer.”
    She considered that in silence for a moment; I could almost see the finely tuned machinery turning behind her lively, intelligent eyes.
    Then she told me she was working on other assignments, including one that was just breaking, which meant at least one urgent deadline. She’d already asked Harry to give her an extra day or two before filing a follow-up story on the Billy Lusk murder.
    “What about the arraignment tomorrow?”
    “We’ll handle it as a news brief in Friday’s paper,” she said. “Then go deeper a day or two after that.”
    We decided that I’d begin gathering background from various sources, so she could put together the perspective piece Harry wanted as soon as she cleared some time.
    When it seemed there was nothing more to discuss, I stood up to go. She stood with me, but stayed behind Harry’s desk.
    “If it were anyone but you,” she said, “I wouldn’t accept this arrangement.”
    “I’m not sure I understand.”
    Her voice and manner, which had been merely cool, dropped toward the arctic zone.
    “When I was a freshman in J-school seven years ago, we thought you were hot stuff, Justice. I’m not saying you were the only reporter we admired, or studied. But you got information other reporters just didn’t get. You wrote with such authority and commitment. Real passion. In a way, I felt I knew you.”
    She paused, and for a moment I thought I saw in her eyes an emotion softer than resentment.
    “I clipped every major piece you filed for the L.A. Times ,” she said. “Including the AIDS series.”
    The AIDS series. Sooner or later, it had to come up.
    A chronicle of two men, lovers; one dying, the other caring for him in his final days. A saga not just of the disease and its impact on a particular generation of young men, but A Story of Love and Loyalty and Loss , as Harry had summarized it in the deck that he’d inserted just beneath the headline.
    “It was the best writing you’d done,” Templeton said. “It took readers beyond the statistics, humanized the issues. I was only eighteen, but that series reminded me why I wanted to be a reporter. I clipped it and taped it above my desk in my dormitory room,