So I threw a bit of stuff from the Net into the story, put a “-30-” on the end, and sent it on to the cityside basket with a note that there were photos with it. I felt someone behind me, but I was sure this time that it was not Dick Colby. Especially when a pair of hands fell softly onto my shoulders.

“I tried to call you,” Sarah said.

“I must have been in a bad zone,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she whispered. “I’m sorry about this morning.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m still finding this hard, being the person who you most often have to report to.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“Listen, if I get the foreign editor thing, we won’t have these kinds of problems, unless you get posted to Beijing or Baghdad or something.”

“If you could get me sent there now, maybe it wouldn’t be as urgent to become the foreign editor.”

I felt her hands lightly squeeze my neck. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”

I waited a moment, and then said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

Sarah’s hands stopped moving. I could sense her wariness. “What?”

“Can you name two German political parties?”

Her fingers tensed. “Okay, hang on. There’s a couple that sound very much alike. There’s the Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democratic Party.”

“Correct. Now, a bonus question. Can you name a third German political party?”

Sarah was hunting in some inner recess of her brain. “Well, there’s the Green Party, right?”

“That’s correct. You’ve won what’s behind Zipper Number One.” I reached up and touched one of her hands. Sarah laced her fingers into mine.

“We okay?” she asked. I nodded. Then, “Did you see Trixie?”

“Yeah. She had a problem I couldn’t help her with.”

“What was it?”

“I can tell you all about it later, but I can say that it involved a violation of journalistic ethics. I think she was pissed.”

“So she didn’t ask you to run away with her?”

“I suspect she was working up to it, but when I turned her down on the other thing, I think she abandoned the idea.”

Sarah had things to do. I was pretty much done for the day, but there were some things niggling at me that I wanted to look into before I left the building.

I knew I couldn’t do what Trixie’d asked of me, to try to scare another reporter off his story, but I was feeling uncomfortable with the way we’d left things. Trixie, who’d never worked in journalism and probably didn’t fully understand how impossible her request was, had left our meeting feeling betrayed. She’d thought we were friends, and no doubt believed I’d let her down.

It’s not that I was unsympathetic. I could understand why Trixie wouldn’t want any publicity for her business. She was probably getting all she needed now. Word of mouth, as they say, is everything. When you’re the best dominatrix in the burbs, your reputation gets out there. You hardly need your picture in the local paper telling the world how you make your living.

But Trixie’s concerns about her picture running in the paper seemed to go beyond how it might disrupt her livelihood. She seemed terrified by the repercussions of Martin Benson running, as Trixie called it, her “mug shot” in the Suburban.

Was Trixie on the run from the authorities? Had she been on some episode of America’s Most Wanted that I’d missed? And what was to account for her skittishness when that biker came into the Starbucks?

I typed “Trixie Snelling” on the Google page. The only thing that came back was a reference to a woman by that name who, at the beginning of the last century, married a man who wrote a cantata for a church in England. I didn’t think that was my Trixie. Next I tried a Yahoo “people search” and came up with a big fat zero. I tried Google and Yahoo again, this time with the name “Trixie Snell,” who, I learned, was a character in the 1933 movie called Sensation Hunters that featured a young Walter Brennan as a stuttering waiter. But I didn’t learn anything more useful than that.

I went into the paper’s library and checked our own database. It would find any story the Metropolitan, or any other major North American newspaper, had run with the name Trixie Snelling. I figured, if police were looking for her, her name could have been mentioned at some point.

But I came up with nothing. Which seemed, on the face of it, to be a good thing.

I returned to the newsroom, found an Oakwood phone book on the shelf where we kept directories from all over the country-even though more and more of them were online-and looked up Snelling. Nothing. I guess all that proved was that Trixie had an unlisted number.

Of course, if the police were looking for Trixie, and given her line of work it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they might be, chances were pretty good she was not using the same name today that she was using when she’d originally come to their attention.

If she’d come to their attention at all.

Maybe she’d come to the attention of someone other than the police.

Whoever might be looking for her was going to have a hard time finding her, at least if they looked for her under the name I’d always known her by. Because, using the most conventional resources at my disposal, it appeared that no one by the name of Trixie Snelling had ever actually existed.

I was home before Sarah and started throwing something together for dinner. I concluded, from the presence of the backpack full of books by the front door and the absence of Paul, that he had preceded me home and gone back out again. Clearly, not to the library to work on an assignment.

I had some pasta on the counter and was looking in the fridge for a half-full jar of spaghetti sauce when Angie came into the kitchen. I felt the same thing I always felt when I saw her-that I had the most beautiful daughter in the world, and I’d be a fool to think I could take any of the credit.

“Hey, stranger,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you.” She hugged me and I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You here for dinner?”

“What are we having?”

I love this question, the one that says, Hey, there’s nothing like getting together with family, so long as you’re serving something decent.

“Spaghetti,” I said.

“Don’t worry about me,” Angie said. “I’ll grab something somewhere. I’ve got to go back downtown tonight for a lecture anyway.”

She blew threw the kitchen like a twister, there one moment, up the stairs the next. I heard the front door open, a new storm system approaching.

“Well, I hope you’re happy now,” Paul said, forcing me out of the way as he reached into the fridge for a can of Coke.

“Happy about what?” I asked.

“I got a job. Just like you and Mom wanted. I won’t have to be bugging you for money anymore.”

“That’s fantastic!” I said. “About the job, not the money thing. When did this happen?”

“This afternoon. After school. I went by this place, they needed help, they had, like, this sign in the window, I applied, I got it. You want to hear how the interview went? I go, ‘I’d like to inquire about your job?’And they go, ‘You start tomorrow.’” He scowled.

“Where’s the job?”

“That place over on Welk? Burger Crisp?”

“Burger Crisp? What do they serve, burnt burgers?”

“I know, it’s a fucking stupid name. The ‘Crisp’ is supposed to refer to the fries, but I guess they didn’t want to call it Burger and Crispy Fries, so they called it Burger Crisp. These are the people I’m going to be working for, who can’t even come up with a non-sucking name for their establishment.”

“Well,” I said, putting on my positive face, “this is clearly a cause for celebration, then.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “This is my new life, flipping burgers, scraping grease, and I have to wear a frickin’ paper hat over my hair that makes me look like some guy who couldn’t make it into the retard academy. And the woman who runs this place, she’s like Greek or Russian or Turkish or something and looks like if she stood in front of a moving tank she’d total it. And she’s got these two twin daughters who help her run the place, look like they could be playing for the NFL. If they fell over, they wouldn’t be any shorter.”