He tried to tune out for the confession. To shut off. Ignore the graphic images she tried to paint for him. He just watched her. She was very beautiful. And if he could manage to stop himself from hearing her, he could enjoy this part. He could enjoy the excuse to just sit and look at a beautiful woman. But he had to be careful when he did. That his eyes didn’t slip from her face, didn’t slide down her neck to her collarbone or breasts.

She knew, of course. She knew everything.

“Are you listening?” she asked, a smile flirting on her lips.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled the pillbox out of his pocket and set it back on the table. “I’m listening.”

Susan rolled off Ian and onto her back. She had called him as soon as she’d gotten home and he’d come over within the hour. She’d had him in her mouth before she even said hello. Susan found that sex was an excellent reliever of stress, and if Gretchen Lowell had anything to say about that, she could go fuck herself.

Ian picked his glasses up off the bedside table and put them on. “How’d it go?” he asked.

Susan did not consider for a moment telling Ian about Reston, or how Gretchen had emotionally filleted her without even looking like she was trying. “It could have gone better,” she said. She rifled around on her bedside table until she found a half-smoked joint on a saucer on top of a paperback volume of William Stafford poetry. She lit it and inhaled. She liked smoking pot naked. It made her feel bohemian.

“Ever think you smoke too much dope?” Ian asked.

“We’re in Oregon,” Susan said. “It’s our main agricultural export.” She smiled. “I’m supporting local farmers.”

“You’re not in college anymore, Susan.”

“Exactly,” Susan said, annoyed. “Everyone smokes pot in college. It’s totally average. Smoking dope after college, now that takes a certain level of commitment. Besides, my mother still smokes pot.”

“You have a mother?”

Susan smiled to herself. “I’d introduce you, but she distrusts men who don’t have beards.”

Ian found his boxers on the floor beside the bed and pulled them on. He didn’t seem that disappointed about not getting to meet Bliss. “Did you learn anything from the serial killer beauty queen?”

Susan felt a wave of nausea at the thought of her run-in with Gretchen and pushed it aside. “It took you long enough to ask.”

“I was playing it cool,” Ian said. “As if I might be more interested in your body than one of the biggest stories I’ve ever edited.”

Susan delighted in the double compliment, striking a cheesecake pose, arching her back and placing one hand on her nude hip. “As if.”

“So what did you learn?”

Her stomach clenched again. She rolled onto her belly, stretched out diagonally across the bed, and pulled a loose blanket over her naked body. “That I’m a bad reporter. I totally let her get to me.”

“You’ve still got a story, though, right? Facing the cold stare of death and all that.”

She was up on her elbows, the joint held over the edge of the bed. A tiny chunk of ash drifted to the floor and landed on one of the Great Writer’s Persian eBay carpets. Susan watched it fall without even the faintest thought of picking it up. “Oh yeah. She gave up another body. Some college girl in Nebraska.” Susan remembered the smiling girl. The peace sign. The arm around her shoulder that belonged to some left-behind friend who had been cropped out of the photograph. She gave herself a mental shake and took another hit off the joint. “They found her buried on top of an old grave in a cemetery off the highway.” The pot was smoothing all the hard edges, and she felt the stress of the day start to bleed from her body. With it went the need for her companion. “Shouldn’t you be getting home?” she asked, raising an eyebrow purposefully at Ian.

He had settled back onto the bed in his boxers, feet crossed at the ankles. “ Sharon ’s at the coast. I can’t spend the night?”

“I’ve got to get up early tomorrow. Claire Masland is picking me up.”

“She’s a dyke, you know.”

“Why? Because she has short hair?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Go home, Ian.”

Ian swung his feet on the floor and found the rest of his clothes. He pulled on one of his black socks. “I thought I told you to leave the Molly Palmer thing alone,” he said, pulling on the other sock, not looking at her.

Susan was taken aback. Molly Palmer? “Okay,” she said, raising her hands in mock defensiveness. “You got me. I left a few messages for Ethan Poole.”

“I’m talking about Justin Johnson,” he said, an irritated edge to his voice.

It took a minute for Susan to process this. Justin Johnson? And then the confusion lifted and she thought, Holy shit. All this time, she’d thought that Justin had something to do with the After School Strangler case. She had connected him to the wrong story. Justin Johnson had nothing to do with Lee Robinson, nothing to do with Cleveland. “What does Justin have to do with Molly Palmer?” she asked.

Ian laughed. “You don’t know?”

She felt stupid, and stupid for feeling stupid. “What’s going on, Ian?”

He stood and pulled on his black jeans. “Ethan gave Molly your messages. She called the senator’s lawyer. He called Howard Jenkins.” He zipped and buttoned the jeans, then bent and picked his black belt up off the floor and began to thread it through the belt loops. “Jenkins called me. I told him that you weren’t working the story anymore. But apparently little Justin’s mother hired a PI to watch him.” He finished buckling the belt and sat on the edge of the bed. “She thinks he’s dealing pot, see. And who shows up at school to talk to him but Susan Ward from the Oregon Herald. They recognized the pink hair.” He pulled on a black Converse. Tied it. “So now everyone thinks you’re on the story. That it’s all going to break wide open.” Pulled the other Converse on. Tied it. “So the lawyer gets the bright idea of slipping you a note with the kid’s juvie record file number on it. With the thought that if you know he has a record, you might not trust the little bastard’s story.”

“Seriously?” Susan said, trying not to smile. “That guy really was a lawyer?”

Ian stood up, half-dressed, and faced her. “You’re going to get us both fired. You know that, right?”

Susan scrambled into a seated position, forgetting about the blanket, letting it fall around her waist. “What does Justin know about Molly Palmer?”

“He was the senator’s son’s best friend. When they were kids. Inseparable. Molly Palmer used to baby-sit them both. So I’m suspecting he saw or heard something he shouldn’t. You might recognize Justin’s mother’s maiden name. Overlook?”

Susan’s heart sank. “As in the family who owns the Herald?”

“She’s a cousin.”

“Castle really did it, didn’t he?”

“Oh he did it. It’s just not a story that will ever run in this town.” He reached into the pocket of his gray wool jacket and withdrew something and tossed it on the bed.

“What’s that?” Susan asked.

“It’s your nine-one-one tape. If I were you, I’d get back on the story we’ll actually run, and dance with the fella who brung ya.”

Susan picked up the cassette and turned it over in her hands. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Derek. He spent all day tracking it down for you.” Ian gave his Columbia Journalism School T-shirt a shake, the way he always did, to get out the wrinkles. “I think he likes you.”

Susan took another drag off the joint. “Well, if I ever want to fuck a frat boy ex-football star,” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs, “I’ll know who to call.”

“Whom,” said Ian.

After Ian was gone, Susan sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. The worst of it was that the Molly Palmer story actually mattered. It wasn’t exploitation. It wasn’t advertising. It wasn’t another disposable feature. It could make a difference. A teenager had been wronged, and the man responsible was going to enormous lengths to cover it up. A man with power. A man elected by a public who had a right to know that he was the kind of man who would take advantage of that power to screw a fourteen-year-old. So okay, yes, maybe she had something personal at stake. And now Susan had somehow both landed the Molly Palmer story and lost it at exactly the same time. Justin was in Palm Springs, or wherever. Molly wasn’t talking. Ethan wasn’t even returning her calls. She wanted to nail Senator Castle. More than Ian even knew. She didn’t care if it got her fired. She was going to get someone, somewhere, to go on the record. She looked down at the cassette tape in her hands. Gretchen’s 911 tape. And that’s when Susan Ward was filled with a sudden desire that was entirely foreign to her. She didn’t care about prizes or prose or voice. She didn’t care about a book deal. She didn’t care about impressing Ian.