Thirty-six-point type in the
The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real-estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The
She went to her cubicle at nine, took her place in the chair still warm from Ed's dedicated ass. She looked over Ed's entries in the log. Three callers who claimed responsibility, all scrupulously red-tagged. Two were variations on the same idea: now you'll all be sorry (no specifics about what we should all be sorry for), and I'm not finished yet; both were vague on the subject of how they'd survived the explosion and lived to make the call. The third said he was a member of something called the Brigade of Enlightenment and that the terror would continue until the U.S. stopped allowing women to murder their unborn children.
Pete stopped by just after nine, nursing his first cup of hot coffee-flavored, sugar-free liquid candy. "How you doing?" he asked.
"Okay."
"Get some sleep?"
"A little."
He stepped into the cubicle, made so bold as to put his hand on her shoulder. She and Pete had maintained an unspoken no-touching rule since that night three months ago when they were both working late, when they'd been exhausted and discouraged enough to duck into the women's room together. Cat still couldn't say why she'd done it, she wasn't remotely interested, and yet mysteriously, unaccountably, she'd been headed to the ladies' and had nodded to him, and before you knew it she was sitting on the sink with her legs wrapped around his unpretty middle-aged ass, he because she'd allowed it, because they'd seemed at that moment like the only two people in the world, because his wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, and she because… because Pete's wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, because she'd let her own son die and she'd been taking calls for going on twelve hours, because Pete's neck reminded her of her ex-husband's neck, because this place was so ugly and silent and far from everything, because she seemed to have wanted, at that moment, to tear everything apart, to go down, to be as crazy and destructive and irresponsible as the people who called her. She and Pete had never spoken about it. They both knew it would not happen again.
"You sure you feel like working today?" "Entirely sure. Find out anything new?"
"Forensics is saying the kid was thirteen, maybe fourteen, but small for his age. Seems to have been healthy, from what they've found so far."
"I hate this."
"Who doesn't?"
"I don't just mean this. I mean