A Maidens Grave

with two fingers on an Underwood upright that smelled of oil and ink and the bittersweet scent of eraser shavings clogging the carriage.
    Technology hadn’t changed things for him much and he now pounded away with only his index digits thudding loudly on the large portable Compaq. The orange light of the screen illuminated both him and Ted Biggins, made them look jaundiced and depleted. Silbert supposed that, being almost double Biggins’s age, he looked twice as bad.
    Philip Molto stood his diligent guard, as instructed by nervous Captain Budd.
    “What do you think?” Silbert asked Biggins.
    Biggins looked over his colleague’s shoulder at the dense single-spaced type on the screen and grunted. “Mind if I take over?” He nodded at the screen.
    “Be my guest.”
    Biggins could touch-type like a demon and his fingers moved quietly and invisibly over the keys. “Hey, I’m a fucking natural at this,” he said, his hair perfectly coiffed although he was only an engineer and Silbert was in fact the on-camera reporter.
    “Hey, Officer,” Silbert called to Molto, “our shift’s almost up. We’re just going to leave the computer here for the next team. They’ll pick up the story where we left it off.”
    “You guys do that?”
    “It’s a cooperative thing, you know. You’ll keep an eye on the computer?”
    “Sure thing, yessir. What’s the matter?”
    Silbert was frowning, looking out into the stand of trees and juniper bushes behind the police line. “You hear something?”
    Biggins was standing up, looking around uneasily. “Yeah.”
    Molto cocked his head. There were footsteps. A snap of branch, a shuffle.
    “There’s nobody behind there,” the lieutenant said, half to himself. “I mean, nobody’s supposed to be.”
    Silbert’s face had the cautious look of a man who’d covered combat zones before. Then he broke into a wry grin. “That son of a bitch. Lieutenant, I think we’ve got a trespasser here.”
    The trooper, hand on his pistol, stepped into the bushes. When he returned he was escorting two men in black jogging suits. Press credentials bounced on their chests.
    “Well, look who it is,” Silbert said. “Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley.”
    Biggins said to Molto, “If you’re going to arrest them, forget trespassing. Charge ’em with being first-degree assholes.”
    “You boys know each other?”
    One of the captives grimaced. “Silbert, you’re a son of a bitch. You blow the whistle on us? And don’t even let that little shit with you say a word to me.”
    Silbert said to Molto, “They’re with KLTV. Sam Kellogand Tony Bianco. They seem to’ve forgotten that we’re press-pooling.”
    “Fuck you,” Bianco snapped.
    Silbert spat out, “I gave up an exclusive just like you did, Kellog. You would’ve had your turn.”
    “I’m supposed to arrest you,” Molto said to Kellog and Bianco.
    “Bullshit, you can’t do that.”
    “I’ll think about it on the way back to the press tent. Come on.”
    “Look, Officer,” Kellog said, “as long as we’re here . . .”
    “How’d you get here anyway, Kellog?” Biggins said. “Crawl on your belly?”
    “Fuck you too.”
    Molto led them away. As soon as the squad car vanished Silbert barked to Biggins, “Now. Do it.”
    Biggins unhooked the casing of the computer monitor and pulled it open. From it he took a Nippona LL3R video camera—the subminiature model, which cost one hundred and thirty thousand dollars, weighed fourteen ounces, and was equipped with a folding twelve-inch parabolic antenna and transmitter. It produced a broadcast-quality picture in virtual darkness and had a telescopic lens as smooth as a sniper’s riflescope. It had an effective range of three miles, which would be more than enough to reach the KFAL mobile transmitting center, where Silbert’s colleagues (Tony Bianco and Sam Kellog, as it turned out, not too coincidentally) would soon—if they weren’t actually under arrest—be waiting for the transmission. In case they were in fact sacrifices to the First Amendment other technicians were ready to wade into the breach.
    Silbert opened his attaché case and took out two black nylon running suits—identical to those that Kellog and Bianco had been wearing, except for one difference: on the back were stenciled the words U.S. Marshal. They pulled these on.
    “Wait,” Silbert said. He bent down to the screen and erased the entire file that Biggins had written—which consisted of the