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newspaper, he doesn’t immediately order me off the property.
    “You want to talk about Kelli.” It’s not a question, but I answer anyhow.
    “It’s been eighteen months,” I say, stating the obvious, “and we thought we ought to check back, see how you’re handling it and all.”
    He takes off his ball cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. He’s going bald on top, and when he takes off his sunglasses, his eyes are those of a man who isn’t sleeping anything like the full eight hours. He looks like somebody who went from fifty years old to sixty in about a week.
    “ ‘Handling it,’ ” he says, and lets out something that sounds like a laugh, only without the humor. “Man, you don’t handle this. My wife will never get over this. I will never get over this. I come inside sometimes and Cathy will be sitting in Kelli’s room, going through her stuff, like she can figure this all out somehow, like she can find something there that will make it stop hurting.
    “She was our only child. We are childless now. And they can’t even catch the bastard.”
    Mr. Jonas says the police do check by once in a while, but nothing they tell him makes him think they’re anywhere close to catching his daughter’s killer.
    “They might as well have just broken into our house and killed us all,” he says. “And your paper just moves on to somebody else’s nightmare.”
    There really isn’t anything else he can tell me that the cops and our readers don’t already know. When I ask if I can take a picture of him or him and his wife with my nifty new iPhone camera, he finally tells me to get off the property.
    Back in the car, I think about Andi. I almost told the grieving father I had a daughter about Kelli’s age but then realized how truly hurtful and stupid that would be.
    It would be beyond trite to tell Mr. Jonas I can feel his pain. But in a small way, I can. I want Mr. Tweety Bird drawn and fucking quartered, with all the parents of the dead girls present. Still if I put my pinkie toe into one of the Jonases’s shoes, I know it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good.
    I’d like to do it, though. Some people just need to die.

CHAPTER FOUR
    X
     
    M y phone rings as I’m pulling back on the street. I have been conned into buying an iPhone, and it’s about three times as worthless as my old fliptop, which spent its last year held together by duct tape. The iPhone’s great for getting e-mail and texting and taking pictures and looking up the halftime score to the Virginia-Carolina game. As a phone, it’s worthless as tits on a bull. I have to swerve to the curb in order to achieve the manual dexterity to answer the damn thing.
    “Where are you?”
    Wheelie sounds somewhat frantic. I tell him what I’m doing.
    “Well, you need to get your ass back here. Wat Chenault’s in my office.”
    Shit.
    “Do we want to talk to him?”
    “We want to not get sued, I’m pretty sure about that.”
    I tell Wheelie I’ll be there in ten minutes. It’s probably fifteen, but Wheelie can wait, and fuck Wat Chenault.
    “Don’t do anything to make this worse,” our editor warns me.
    I tell him I won’t, but my fingers are crossed.
    Poor Wheelie. He came down here from Providence full of hope and promise, aiming to win us a Pulitzer. With his staff shrunk considerably by the Great Recession and some incredibly bad business decisions by the Suits Who Never Suffer, he’s had a hard time just keeping our nose above water. The bleeding has gone from ruptured aorta status to a slow drip, but it can’t be any fun being Wheelie these days. And now, with Grubby gone and no plans to hire a new publisher, he’s farther into the heart of corporate darkness than he ever thought he’d have to venture. But, hey, he didn’t turn down the extra money.
    When I get to the newsroom, one Camel later, I go up to the fourth floor, where Wheelie hangs his coat these days, only wandering down to the newsroom on most days for the ten A.M. and three