Cold Fire

state. But after the actress Rebecca Schaeffer had been murdered by an obsessed fan who had tracked her down in that fashion, a new law had imposed restrictions on DMV records.
    If she had been an accomplished computer hacker, steeped in their arcane knowledge, she no doubt could have finessed entrance to the DMV records in spite of their new safeguards, or perhaps she could have pried into credit-agency databanks to search for a file on Ironheart. She had known reporters who honed their computer skills for just that purpose, but she had always sought her sources and information in a strictly legitimate fashion, without deception.
    Which is why you're writing about such thrilling stuff as the Timber Trophy, she thought sourly.
    While she puzzled over a solution to the problem, she hurried to the vending room and got a cup of coffee from the coin-operated brewer. It tasted like yak bile. She drank it anyway, because she was going to need the caffeine before the night was through. She bought another cup and returned with it to the newsroom.
    The laser printer was silent. She grabbed the pages from its tray and sat down at her desk.
    Newsweb had turned up a thick stack of stories from the national press in which the name “Jim” was used within ten words of “rescue” or “saved the life.” She counted them quickly. Twenty-nine.
    The first was a human-interest piece from the Chicago Sun-Times, and Holly read the opening sentence aloud: “Jim Foster, of Oak Park, has rescued over one hundred stranded cats from—”
    She dropped that printout in her wastecan and looked at the next one. It was from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jim Pilsbury, pitching for the Phillies, rescued his club from a humiliating defeat—”
    Throwing that one aside, as well, she looked at the third. It was a movie review, so she didn't bother searching for the mention of Jim. The fourth was a reference to Jim Harrison, the novelist. The fifth was a story about a New Jersey politician who used the Heimlich maneuver to save the life of a Mafia boss in a barroom, where they were having a couple of beers together, when the padrone began to choke to death on a chunk of peppery-hot Slim Jim sausage.
    She was beginning to worry that she would come up empty-handed by the bottom of the stack, but the sixth article, from the Houston Chronicle, opened her eyes wider than the vile coffee had. WOMAN SAVED FROM VENGEFUL HUSBAND. On July 14, after winning both financial and child-custody issues in a bitter divorce suit, Amanda Cutter had nearly been shot by her enraged husband, Cosmo, outside her home in the wealthy River Oaks district of the city. After Cosmo missed her with the first two shots, she had been saved by a man who “appeared out of nowhere,” wrestled her maddened spouse to the ground, and disarmed him. Her savior had identified himself only as “Jim,” and had walked off into the humid Houston afternoon before the police arrived. The thirty-year-old divorcee had clearly been smitten, for she described him as “handsome, sort of muscular, like a superhero right out of a movie, with the dreamiest blue eyes.”
    Holly could still picture Jim Ironheart's intensely blue eyes. She was not the kind of woman who would refer to them as “dreamy,” although they were certainly the clearest and most arresting eyes she'd ever… Oh, hell, yes, they were dreamy. She was reluctant to admit to the adolescent reaction that he had inspired in her, but she was not any better at deceiving herself than she was at deceiving other people. She recalled an initial eerie impression of inhuman coldness, upon first meeting his gaze, but that passed and never returned from the moment he smiled.
    The seventh article was about another modest Jim who had not hung around to accept thanks and praise—or media attention—after rescuing Carmen Diaz, thirty, from a burning apartment house in Miami on the fifth of July. He had blue eyes.
    Poring through the remaining twenty-two articles, Holly found two more about Ironheart, though only his first name was mentioned. On June 21, Thaddeus Johnson, twelve, had almost been pitched off the roof of an eight-story Harlem tenement by four members of a neighborhood youth gang who had not responded well to his disdainful rejection of an invitation to join their drug-peddling fraternity. He was rescued by a blue-eyed man who incapacitated the four thugs with a dazzling series of Tae Kwon Do kicks, chops, thrusts, and throws.